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WILLIAM ALEXANDER DEER 1910-2009

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Alex Deer was born into a world of empires soon to be torn apart. His earliest memory was of the sun blotting out as the sinister bulk of a zeppelin passed over on its bombing run into the Mersey docks. Home was in Rusholme, a working class suburb of Manchester, where he was brought up in a strictly Baptist family. If he was later to abandon the more ascetic features of his upbringing, he retained for life the self discipline and sense of duty it instilled.

An avid reader from an early age, in his midteens he came across in the local library a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species. Reading this through seems to have been his epiphany, determining his ambition to become a natural scientist. His was hardly a privileged family, but with an excellent state school education, and scholarship aid, he was able to graduate from Manchester University and start his first research project, on the diorites of Glen Tilt - pushing his bike from Rusholme to the field area and lodging with a gamekeeper's family. His first stroke of luck came on applying for a Strathcona scholarship to Cambridge. The admissions tutor at St. John's College, James Wordie (the geologist on Shackleton's 1914 expedition and Elephant Island castaway) spotted and supported the application; so in 1934 Alex came to Cambridge as a Johnian and one of the first research students in C.E. Tilley's newly assembled Department of Mineralogy and Petrology.

L.R. Wager now enters the story. Although only four years older than Alex, Laurence was already a seasoned explorer, on Shipton's 1933 expedition the highest attainer up Everest, and the veteran of two Greenland expeditions. On Gino Watkins' British Arctic Air Route Expedition (BAARE) of 1930, Wager had discovered what we now know as the . . . [Full Text of this Article]