William Broadhurst Brierley (1889–1963) was an English mycologist. He is known particularly for his work on "grey mould".
Life
Brierley had a deprived background, and was brought up in a poor district of Manchester. At 14 he became a pupil-teacher in his elementary school. He went into teacher training at Victoria University of Manchester, and then moved to the botany course.[1] There he studied under Frederick Ernest Weiss at[2] At this period he taught evening classes to support himself. With an honours degree of 1911 in botany, he went on at Manchester to complete an M.Sc.[1] He married in July 1914: he knew Susan Fairhurst through the undergraduate Sociological Society. They lived in Levenshulme.[3] He was then an assistant lecturer in economic botany and demonstrator at Manchester.[4]
In 1916 Brierley showed that shab, a disease of lavender plants, was fungal, caused by a fungus that attacked parts of the plant above ground. The disease was further investigated by Charles Russell Metcalfe (1904–1991).[10] His work in 1918 clarified the life cycle of Botrytis cinerea, the "grey mould" fungus.[11] In the 1920s, he with colleagues made standard a dilution plate technique for studying soil fungi.[12]
Brierley married, firstly, in 1914 Susan Sutherland Fairhurst. They were divorced, after a separation that began around 1918; and in 1922 she married Nathan Isaacs.[14][15] Brierley's second wife was Marjorie Brierley.[16]
Notes
^ abGraham, Philip Jeremy (2009). Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children. Karnac. p. 57. ISBN978-1-85575-691-5.
^H. Hamshaw Thomas, Frederick Ernest Weiss. 1865-1953, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 8, No. 22 (Nov., 1953), pp. 601–608, at p. 603. Published by: Royal Society. JSTOR769232
^ abGraham, Philip Jeremy (2009). Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children. Karnac. p. 58. ISBN978-1-85575-691-5.
^Manchester, University of (1914). Calendar. p. 68.
^Bentley Glass, Reviewed Work: Principles of Plant Infection. A Text-Book of General Plant Pathology for Biologists, Agriculturists, Foresters and Plant Breeders. by Ernst Gaumann, The Quarterly Review of Biology Vol. 26, No. 3 (Sep., 1951), p. 297. Published by: The University of Chicago Press JSTOR2809911