Wallace Spencer Pitcher (1919-2004): an appreciation

Wallace Pitcher, (or Wally, as he was generally known), who died in the Wirral on 4 September 2004, was born in London on 3 March 1919, and became the leading and most distinguished British expert on granites and their emplacement mechanisms, the geology of Donegal and the Donegal granites and, with John Cobbing, the geology of the Peruvian batholith. He was elected an Honorary FRSE in 1993. His parents, Harry George and Irene Bertha Pitcher, lived modestly in Acton, west London, although his father was still in the Army when he was born. His father had joined the army before becoming trained and chose to stay in for about two years after the First World War, as work was hard to find; eventually he became a plumber. His mother worked for a time as a dressmaker but was mostly a housewife, as was usual then. He was an only child and went to Hounslow and Bulstrode Schools and, at the age of 13, to Acton Technical School, where he took a matriculation course and also received a good technical education. He showed an early interest in fossils, collecting his first London Clay fossil by the age of ten from a local excavation and, by his early twenties, he was an amateur expert on the Tertiary fauna of the London Clay.