Kenneth Robert Sporne (23 December 1915 – 12 April 1989) was a British botanist and plant morphologist who lectured at Cambridge University.
[1][2] He was born in Towcester, moving to Morecambe where his father, Robert William Sporne, was a headmaster.
He attended The Royal Grammar School, Lancaster where, unable to study biology, he pursued an interest in collecting plants and animals, going on to win the Sanderson Herbarium Prize.
[3] He studied biology at Downing College, Cambridge, where his interest was in ecology, especially the salt marshes of the river Lune.
He completed his Natural Sciences Tripos[4] in 1939 and went on to study floral evolution under Dr H. Hamshaw Thomas.
He joined a collecting expedition to Jamaica for three months with Dr Val J.
[2][5] As an undergraduate, he had been a member of the Signals branch of the Cambridge University Officers' Training Corps.
During the Second World War he volunteered for service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals,[6] being commissioned and taking part in D-Day on D-Day+3.
[2] He was awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre with palm and a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold II.
[7] Eventually he was promoted to major,[8] and his last task was to set up an automatic telephone exchange connecting the main military headquarters in West Germany.
[2] Back at Downing College after the war he was a temporary demonstrator (1946), appointed to a demonstratorship in 1948 and lecturer in Botany (1955).
[10] In 1980 he published his 'advancement index' for 291 dicotyledonous angiosperm families using 30 correlated characters.
[11] He published three major text books on plant morphology.
Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany, Lucknow, India.
1976 Character correlations among angiosperms and the importance of fossil evidence in assessing their significance.
Flowering Plants Evolution and Classification of Higher Categories: 33-51.