Professor Sir Kingsley Dunham, 1910–2001

Abstract

Kingsley Charles Dunham, who died in Durham at the age of 91 on 5 April 2001, was born in the Dorset village of Sturminster Newton on 2 January 1910, the only child of Ernest Pedder Dunham and his wife Edith Agnes. However, when he was three the family moved to Brancepeth, near Durham, where his father managed the estate, successively as Land Agent to Viscount Boyne and the Duke of Westminster. His early education was at the village school in Brancepeth, followed by the Durham Johnston School. With strong support and encouragement from his parents, he matriculated well and gained entrance to the University of Durham as a Foundation Scholar at Hatfield College in 1927. This scholarship partly related to him being a talented musician (piano, taught by his mother, and organ, with lessons given by Canon Culley at Durham Cathedral) and he was the College chapel organist. Having gone up to the University to read Honours Chemistry, Dunham became captivated by the lectures of Arthur Holmes, then Professor in Durham, and transferred to Honours Geology, in which he was the only candidate, receiving individual tuition from Holmes and his lecturer Bill Hopkins. After graduating with a first-class honours BSc degree in 1930, he was offered a postgraduate studentship in Durham to work under Holmes and chose to research the genesis of the lead-zinc-fluorine-barium mineralization in the Northern Pennine Orefield, upon which he continued investigations throughout his life. A PhD degree for his thesis on the subject was awarded in 1932. Upon gaining a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in 1932, study was undertaken in the USA at Harvard University, where he graduated MS in 1933 and, based upon a geological survey of the Organ Mountains for the New Mexico Bureau of Mines, SD in 1935. During this period, he also travelled …