Claude Wardlaw

Claude Wilson Wardlaw (1901 to 1985) was a British botanist who specialised in diseases of the banana. Born in western central Scotland, he studied natural sciences at the University of Glasgow, took a doctorate there and a second doctorate at McGill University in Canada, and began lecturing in botany at Glasgow around 1927. In 1928 he became plant pathologist for banana research at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, where he investigated the Panama disease that had affected plantations in the West Indies, an investigation described in his book Green Havoc in 1935. He also published Diseases of the Banana in 1935, later republished in expanded editions as Banana Diseases in 1961 and 1972, and in 1933 he became officer in charge of the Low Temperature Research Station in Trinidad. In 1940 he returned to Britain as Professor of Cryptogamic Botany at the University of Manchester, and from 1958 he was the George Harrison Professor of Botany.