Alexis P. Vlasto

[1] Alexis Peter Vlasto was born at Toxteth Park,[2] at that time a prosperous quarter in Liverpool, a major port city in northwest England.

[4] As the veil of secrecy lifted, it became known that in 1939 Vlasto was one of those headhunted to work at the British code breaking establishment at Bletchley in central England.

Someone else with whom he renewed an acquaintance at Bletchley Park was the young musicologist, Hilda Joan "Jill" Medway, like him seconded from Cambridge University to undertake "war work".

[9] Alexis Vlasto was one of those who participated, as part of a small but eminent group of scholars gathered together by the remarkable Elizabeth Hill, in the establishment of the Cambridge University Department of Slavonic Studies[5] which opened in 1948.

The Master of the college was Owen Chadwick, who would later remember Vlasto as "a man who combined the ability to be infuriatingly impractical at times with a warm and generous heart in friendship".

In 1968 he collected seeds from a Silene viscariopsis, an unusual plant he had found in what was then Yugoslavia, and donated them to the University Botanic Garden.