[1] In 1927-28 Michael Graham was dispatched by the fisheries laboratory and spent a year surveying fish populations in Lake Victoria.

He published several highly influential and thought-provoking books during this time, most notably The Fish Gate in 1943, Human Needs in 1951 and Sea Fisheries: Their Investigation in the United Kingdom in 1956.

As Director of Fisheries to HM Government he was made CMG (Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George) in January 1954, he was also responsible for recruiting Ray Beverton and Sidney Holt whose treatise On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations (1957) is dedicated to Graham and is widely regarded as the cornerstone of modern fisheries science.

[4] During the Second World War, Michael Graham was engaged on operational research in the RAF, for which he was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire).

[1] He retired in 1958 to devote himself to reclaiming derelict land in south Lancashire, and successfully demonstrated a practical and economic way of 'greening over' post-industrial slag heaps.

[5] The original hand-written 'Naturalists Logbooks' from this survey have recently been re-discovered in the archive of the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), these are now being digitized and made available to researchers seeking a 'baseline' against which subsequent changes can be compared.

At the time Graham wrote "The introduction of a large predatory species from another area would be attended with the upmost danger, unless preceded by extensive research into the probable effects of this operation".

He continued, with breaks for field studies in Africa and Canada, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, describing the cod's life cycle and spawning grounds, and showing the age composition of the fishery through a laborious process of scale-reading.

[8] His classic book, The Fish Gate[9] reminds us that by 1939 the North Sea was exhausted and many fishermen were unemployed – the inevitable result of unrestrained over-fishing.

Graham distilled the observations of 20 years at sea into his Great Law of Fishing, a simple declarative statement such that "Fisheries that are unlimited become unprofitable".

In 1974, staff at the Lowestoft laboratory created an endowment called The Michael Graham Prize, funded through royalties received from sale of the book Sea Fisheries Research.