After returning from a holiday in Rùm he found that one of the boys above him had dropped out, and he was now applicable for a scholarship of £60 a year to attend King's College, Newcastle, which he did in October 1938 to study chemistry, zoology and botany.
[3] The city suffered irregular bombing raids during World War II, one of which happened during one of his final examination papers, forcing them to stop and go to the service tunnels they used as an air-raid shelter.
[4] He was trained to operate radio equipment in relation to radar and geolocation, and towards the end of the course also got to handle the then-new cavity magnetron.
In March 1945 he was posted to 21 Army Group Headquarters in Brussels, where he was tasked with retrieving a sample of the fungus Eremothecium ashbyi from the Dutch National Mycological Collection at Baarn; it had proved useful in synthesising vitamin B, something in demand in post-war Europe.
[8] After VE day he was again reposted, this time to join T-force, teams tasked to retrieve technological data from German research facilities as they were discovered.
After completion of his reports he was discharged from the army to work for Glaxo in penicillin production, but soon left to become a junior lecturer at King's College.
[9] He acted as a guide at the 1949 International Phytogeographic Excursion where he met W. H. Pearsall, who before leaving offered him a place as a lecturer at University College London, with the understanding that he would be shortly made a Reader should everything work out.
[10] It was here he began spelling his name as Heslop-Harrison; with a colleague of his called Douglas Harrison letters were regularly delivered to the wrong person.
[12] In 1967 he was awarded the Trail-Crisp Medal by the Linnean Society of London,[12] and the same year became the first Chairman of the Institute of Plant Development at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
[15] In 1982 he was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society jointly with his wife, and the same year was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.