Harold William Woolhouse

Harold William Woolhouse was born in  Sheffield in 1932.

Harold Woolhouse went to a local school and his love of "botanising" began there with walks over the common, encouraged and inspired by his chemistry master, Alfred Ridler. When he left he did not apply to university (he would have been the first in his family to do so) but worked for a year as a market gardener, thinking to study Horticulture at college. At the same time he tried and failed to get a job at the John Innes. The year over, he took up a place at Reading University to study Horticultural Botany instead.

Aat the University of Reading he gained a BSc in Horticultural Botany and at the University of Adelaide he gained his PhD.

While in Adelaide he met his wife Leonie, an undergraduate who, by coincidence, was living in Urrbrae House, later the focal point of his directorship of the Waite.

After four years in Adelaide, he brought Leonie home to England, where they intended to stay for no longer than two years before returning to Australia. In the meantime he started on the academic ladder.

Woolhouse began his academic career in 1960 as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield progressing to Senior Lecturer by 1969.

He was then Professor of Botany at the University of Leeds from 1969 to 1980 and thereafter director of the  John Innes Centre from 1980 to 1989.

His achievement at the John Innes was to turn it, during a period of government disinvestment, from an institute for plant research into a centre of international scientific excellence. Woolhouse believed that the problems of feeding the world and the protection of the environment could be solved by the application of scientific research, and he encouraged international co-operation to that end. He brought in part of the Plant Breeding Institute under the title of the Cambridge Laboratory and negotiated with the Gatsby Foundation to have the Sainsbury Laboratory installed there. A new library was built under his directorship and he put in train the transfer of the Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory from Brighton to Norwich.

At 60, as a civil servant, he would have had to retire but chose instead to take up the Directorship of the Waite Institute in Adelaide in 1990. His dynamic leadership there was widely acknowledged, as were his achievements in bringing together important institutions and state resources.  As Director, he turned the Waite Agricultural Research Institute into the premier southern hemisphere plant research institute, providing vital training for biologists throughout the Far East.  While at Waite he was also Dean, Faculty of Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences.

It was at Adelaide that he developed the lung tumour that was to spread and kill him, though the process took 16 months longer than the two months first feared. He had been in the last stages of building a A$70m plant research laboratory. The new library he had built at Adelaide has been named in his memory.

In 1996, the University of Adelaide established the Harold Woolhouse Fund for the purpose of establishing a prize for the best PhD thesis produced in the Faculty of Sciences. Friends, family and colleagues of Harold Woolhouse donated to the fund in support of the prize.