Dr Herbert William Richmond, the eminent geometer, died in the Evelyn Nursing Home, Cambridge, on 22 April 1948, at the age of eighty-four. At the time of his death he was Senior Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, in which college he had resided almost continuously for sixty-five years. Though crippled with rheumatism, he had been able, till within a few days of his death, to move about his rooms in a wheeled chair, to descend the staircase reasonably nimbly with the aid of crutches and to propel himself in his bath-chair as far as the King’s Fellows’ Garden. Except for a somewhat marked deafness caused by his attendance at gun-trials at Eastney, Portsmouth, in 1916-1919, he was in full possession of all his faculties to the end, and to the end he maintained his interest in research and in his fellow-mathematicians and other friends. He died of heart failure following an attack of pneumonia. Richmond was born on 17 July 1863, at Tottenham, Middlesex, at Drapers’ College (a school established by the Drapers’ Company) of which his father, the Rev. William Hall Richmond, was headmaster. His mother was Charlotte Mary, nee Ward, the daughter of Dr Joseph Ward of Epsom. Herbert William was the eldest of the family, having two younger brothers, George Ward and Alfred Mewburn, and two younger sisters, Margaret Evelyn and Ethel Mary. For five or six generations his forbears who bore his name Richmond had lived near Hexham on the Tyne, at Humshaugh or Haydon Bridge: small squires or parsons (or both). One of his other great-great-grandfathers, William Hall, was a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; William Hall’s brother was Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. On his mother’s side his great-uncle Nathaniel Bagshawe Ward, F.R.S. (1791-1868), elder brother of the above-mentioned Dr Joseph Ward, had been a doctor with a large practice in East London and an ardent nature-lover; he earned the gratitude of botanists by his discovery of the principle of the
Wardian Case
, invaluable for the introduction of species of plants to distant countries—tea, bananas, cinchona (quinine), and more recently, rubber.
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