Name Maurice Yonge Died March 17, 1986 | ||
Books Collins Pocket Guide to the Sea Shore, The Sea Shore, Living Marine Molluscs | ||
Education University of Edinburgh | ||
Sir Charles Maurice Yonge, CBE, FRS (9 December 1899 – 17 March 1986) was an English marine zoologist.
Charles Maurice Yonge was born in Yorkshire in 1899. He was educated at Silcoates School, where his father was headmaster.
After leaving school at 17, and enrolling in the University of Leeds, Yonge joined the Army Training Corps during 1917-1918. After the war ended, Yonge read history at the University of Oxford, before transferring to the University of Edinburgh in 1919 to study forestry and later zoology. He was a Baxter Natural Science Scholar while at Edinburgh, working as an Assistant Naturalist with the Marine Biological Association, mainly at Plymouth.
Career
After graduation with a B.Sc. in 1922, Yonge proceeded to a PhD on the digestive system of marine invertebrates. He took his D.Sc in 1927, for his research into oysters, and then moved to Cambridge in 1927 as a Balfour student, where he was invited to join and lead the Great Barrier Reef Expedition of 1928-1929. Yonge, his wife and his colleagues in the expedition spent a year off the coast of Queensland, studying Australia's Great Barrier Reef, in particular Low Isles Reef. Their work was published in the book, A year on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as other publications.
In 1933, Yonge became Professor of Zoology at the University of Bristol, and was made Regius Professor of Zoology at the University of Glasgow in 1944.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946 and won its Darwin Medal in 1968. He received his knighthood in 1967.
Yonge also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1971.
Yonge married Dr Martha "Mattie" Lennox in 1927, a fellow student he had met during their days at Edinburgh, where she was reading medicine. They had two children, Elspeth (born 1931) and Robin (born 1934). Mattie Lennox Yonge died in 1945. In 1955, Yonge became father-in-law of the physicist Bruno Touschek due to Elspeth's marriage.
Yonge died in 1986. He was survived by his second wife, Phyllis, who he married in 1954. They had a son, Christopher (born 1955).