Cambridge, Philip., 1918-1933

Born on 2nd June 1918 in Cheddar Philip Cambridge grew up in Cardiff. He was a boyhood fossil collector and he quickly acquired an impressive collection. He started work as a window dresser in a womens clothes shop after some short-lived positions after leaving elementary school.

He then entered the RAF as an apprentice and served as a filter-armourer, maintaining nuclear missiles at secret sites in East Anglia. Whilst inactive he spent time reading widely pursuing his correspondence and cataloguing his collection of fossils and producing a unique card index of descriptions and figures of Crag fossils.

He moved around frequently but spent some time in Canada which rekindled his enthusiasm for geology and palaentology. In 1946 he was posted to RAF Wattisham in Suffolk and it was here that his interest in Coralline and Crags really developed. His post-RAF career (after over 30 years) as chief technician and research assistant in the school of environmental sciences, University of East Anglia was entirely appropriate.

In 1965 Philip Cambridge spent a year in Aden, studying the living shells of the area. He was an enthusiastic collector and dedicated conchologist, Palaeontologist and geologist with a particular and life-long commitment to the East Anglian Crags and their equivalents in Belgium and the Netherlands. He was able to undertake excavations mainly into Coraline Crag at Ramsholt (1974), Sutton (1989, 1993) and Gedgrave Broome Pit (1992) with sponsorship from the Geologists Association.

Philip was a member of the Conchological Society from 1961 and the Geologists Association from 1943, serving on the laters council for two years and receiving their Foulterton Award in 1970. He was a founder member of the Geological Society of Norfolk and later treasurer, editor/assistant editor of their Bulletin.

Philip Cambridge died of a heart attack in his sleep 29th May 1993. His ashes were scattered near the Coraline and Red Crag pits at Sutton, near Woodbridge.

He had married Mildred (date unknown) and left behind a daughter Rilla and a granddaughter. A son Terrence Clive Cambridge was born in 1963.

From the guide to the The Papers of Philip Cambridge, 1943-1993, (Cambridge University: Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences)