Sir Charles Maurice Yonge, 1899-1986

Yonge was born in Wakefield and educated at Edinburgh University, where he graduated with distinction in zoology in 1922. He was awarded the Baxter Natural Science Scholarship and he remained at Edinburgh for two years for Ph.D. research on the comparative physiology of digestion in marine invertebrates. He was subsequently awarded a Carnegie Research Studentship at Edinburgh but held this for only three months before taking up the post of temporary Assistant Naturalist at the Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association, where his classic work on the digestive diverticula of the lamellibranchia quickly established an international reputation. At the 1927 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Yonge was appointed leader of an expedition to the Great Barrier Reef, 1928-1929, which was the first major study of the ecology of coral reefs. He was accompanied by his first wife (who died in 1945), and other members of the party from Britain were F.S. Russell, S.M. Manton and S.M. Marshall. He returned to Plymouth to publish the scientific results of the expedition and wrote a successful popular account, A Year on the Great Barrier Reef (1930).

In 1933 Yonge became Bristol University's first Professor of Zoology, and initiated a series of observations on the biology of the Bristol Channel. In 1944 he moved to Glasgow University as Regius Professor of Zoology in succession to E. Hindle. While at Glasgow he played a major role in the development of marine science nationally and internationally, taking a keen interest, for example, in the development of the Millport Laboratory of the Scottish Marine Biological Association, of which he was President for over twenty years. In 1964 he resigned from his Chair to resume full-time research first at Glasgow and then from 1970 at Edinburgh; his final paper (on Mesodesmatacea) appeared only a few days before his death in 1986. He was elected FRS in 1946 (Darwin Medal 1968) and was knighted in 1967.