John Treherne, who died on 23rd September 1989, was one of the most brilliant and invigorating zoologists of his generation. In his multifaceted career as a scientist, writer, teacher, administrator, and college fellow, he made an enormous number of contacts throughout the world, and it is a measure of the warmth and outgoing nature of his personality that very many of these people became his friends and felt his death as a personal loss.
John was born on 15th May 1929 in a small village near Swindon. He studied Zoology at Bristol University and did a PhD there on ionic regulation in mosquito larvae. In 1953, John was called up for National Service and was later commissioned as an officer in the RAMC. In 1955, Vincent Wigglesworth invited him to join the ARC Unit of Insect Physiology at Cambridge. He was appointed a Lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge in 1968 and became Reader in Invertebrate Physiology three years later. After Wigglesworth retired in 1967, John became the new Director of the new ARC Unit of Invertebrate Chemistry and Physiology: over the years he built up an impressive team of research workers who maintained and enhanced the Unit’s immense international reputation. He was a brilliant Research Director: by his vision, imagination, and hard work, he created an atmosphere in which the scientists, and the collaborators they attracted from all over the world, could flourish and develop their research to the highest possible level.
John’s international scientific reputation rests on the many discoveries he made about how glial cells produce the blood-brain barrier of insects. But his scientific publications cover an extensive field. He worked widely within the area of insect neurobiology, but he published also on insect gut physiology; circadian rhythms; hormones and cuticle permeability; and osmoregulation in insects, molluscs, and annelids. Throughout his life he maintained an interest in the study of insects in the field and became an authority on the biology of marine insects, publishing papers on saltmarsh aphids, mites and beetles, and on the behaviour of the only truly oceanic insect, Halobates.
John was an inspirational supervisor of graduate students. The nineteen students he supervised were packed into a relatively short time, between 1968 and 1979. He always found time for them and was unfailingly encouraging and full of ideas. Indeed, he was unstinting in providing practical help and advice for a number of young people. If things went wrong, you knew that if you went to see him you would emerge feeling terrifically cheered up.
Although John was in the main a laboratory worker, he was also extremely effective in the field. He was never one to let data moulder in a note-book and had almost magic powers in conjuring clear graphs and figures from rather messy situations in the field. He was not downcast for long if nature failed to behave as predicted, but – after discussion over a bowl of porridge or several cups of tea – he would bounce back with another theory to try out. This constructive resilience was probably the most important lesson that his research students were able to learn from him.
But field-work was always packed with activity. Eating seemed to take up most of the time. When he took his students and children to stay on Scolt Head Island in Norfolk, this involved him in making early morning tea, porridge, and full English breakfast, followed by morning coffee, hot lunch, lardy cakes for tea, chicken marengo for supper, and cocoa into the night. In between, there would be elaborate games to entertain his children and their friends: Pope – an exhausting version of hide-and-seek passed on via John Kennedy from Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter; marsh golf; assault courses and infiltration of the enemy lines over the sand dunes; and in the evening, long hours of cribbage, spit, and the book game. It is a miracle that we ever did any work at all. In the Galapagos, he organised the crew of the Alpha Helix into a complex cribbage tournament that was still going on a year later.
It was the work on Halobates that led indirectly to his first non-scientific book, The Galapagos Affair. Whilst staying on Floreana, we heard about the mysterious murders and disappearances that had occurred on the island, and John decided that this would make a gripping story. And so it proved. John brought his own zest and eloquence to the description of the madly overacting historical characters, who included a whip-brandishing blonde baroness and a Nietzchean philosopher-superman, equipped with stainless steel dentures of his own design. This book marked the beginning of what John called his change of life, and he embarked as an author of novels and non-fiction, producing a book a year, from 1983 to 1989.*
John packed so much into his life that it is almost impossible to give an adequate picture of it. He was for fifteen years a highly successful editor of The Journal of Experimental Biology and he also edited the University Reviews of Biology, Advances in Insect Physiology, and the Key Environment Series. He was President of Downing College from 1985 to 1988 and developed major initiatives there, including links with Keio University in Japan and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
But it is for his warmth and humanity that we shall chiefly remember him. He always had time to stop and chat, and people instinctively offered him their trust. When John was travelling abroad, the aeroplane would hardly be off the runway before he had discovered whether the flight attendant liked Marmite and what she thought of her boyfriend’s mother. On a visit to the head-quarters of the AFRC, improbably sited in a shopping centre in Swindon, he at once made friends with the security officer and found out that this nerve-centre of British science was guarded by an American moonlighting from the nearby U.S. Air Force base. It did not take John long to find out that one of the nurses attending him after his first heart attack was a Texan who had fixed Bonnie Parker’s hair in 1932. How we shall miss these stories. We shall miss, too, his steadiness and leadership, his energy and joie de vivre, and his buoyant, optimistic spirit. But most of all, we shall miss the fun.
From: Foster, W. (1990) Antenna 14: 6 – 9. [with permission]
*The Galapagos Affair (1983), The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde (1984), The Trap (1985), Mangrove Chronicle (1986), Dangerous Precincts (1987), The Walk to Acorn Bridge (1989), The Canning Enigma (1989)