Ernest Entwistle Cheesman

Ernest Entwistle Cheesman (21 September 1898 Wood Green - 9 January 1983 Weybridge), was an English botanist noted for his work on the family Musaceae.

He became interested in the cultivation of cocoa while in Trinidad and wrote a number of papers on the subject - Returning to England he worked on the taxonomy of Musaceae at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew during the 1940s.

[5] Cheesman noted in 1948 of bananas "Some botanists have regarded the seedless forms as ranking with the fertile species and have bestowed Latin binomials upon them.

Giving a seed-bearing wild species the status of subspecies to a seedless cultivar is a good example of the stultifying effect formal nomenclature has had on crop taxonomy.

Simmonds was a 1950s research worker on Musaceae at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, Cheesman's 1930s place of work.