Frank Engledow

Sir Frank Leonard Engledow CMG FRS (20 August 1890 – 3 July 1985) was a British agricultural botanist who carried out research at the Plant Breeding Institute at the University of Cambridge from 1919 onwards.

Frank was educated at Dartford Grammar School, from where he went to University College London to study pure and applied mathematics and physics on a one-year scholarship.

He was, however, allowed to change to study botany, zoology and geology and earned a First in Part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1912, the award of a Slater Studentship of the College and, later, a Research Scholarship of the Ministry of Agriculture.

He had been accepted as assistant by R.H. Biffen,[4] who had been appointed in 1908 as the first Professor of Agricultural Botany and became the first Director of the newly founded Plant Breeding Institute in 1912.

Biffen's discovery that characteristics such as resistance to disease and grain quality were inheritable was the basis by which Engledow, by introducing quantitative analysis and statistics, was able to improve these crops.

Engledows breeding activities resulted in new varieties of wheat by selection (Rampton Rivet cultivated 1939–57, Squareheads Master 13/4, 1940–60), and by hybridisation (Holdfast, 1936–58 and Steadfast, 1941–53).

These activities culminated in him attending the United Nations conference on Food and Agriculture in 1943 in Hot Springs, VA, USA as a deputy of the Ministry.

[7] He was, as Chairman of a special committee responsible for the study and the publication of "Principles for British Agricultural Policy" that had been initiated in 1945 and was completed in the late fifties.

Well aware of the changing expectations in the post-war world of the role of agricultural science and of the alumni of the School, he was concerned with the balance between specialisation and breadth, as his papers of 1968 and 1970 show.