Frederick Janson Hanbury

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Frederick Janson Hanbury (born May 27, 1851 in London , † March 1, 1938 in Uckfield , Sussex ) was a wealthy English merchant, plant collector and promoter of astronomy . He founded the Brockhurst Observatory in 1910 .

Live and act

Hanbury comes from an extended family who supported a wide variety of natural sciences for many decades , especially in the field of botany . He was the son of Cornelius and Sarah Jane Hanbury. His equally scientifically interested cousins ​​were Daniel Hanbury , Francis Hanbury and Sir Thomas Hanbury .

Frederick Hanbura owned a large estate in East Grinstead, West Sussex, called Brockhurst House , where he grew orchids. Together with Rachel Ford Thompson (1856–1906) he also worked as a plant collector and later headed the pharmaceutical company Allen & Hanburys . In 1873 he was accepted as a Fellow in the Linnean Society of London . His British herbarium with 20,000 plants, including a special collection of Hieracium species, was donated to the British Museum in 1938 .

In 1899, Hanbury published the botanical book Flora of Kent with Edward Shearburn Marshal . In addition to rock gardens and pleasure grounds, he built the Brockhurst Observatory on his property in 1909. It existed until 1940 and was initially intended as a guest observatory . But under William Sadler Franks (1851–1935) it was also used to study binary stars and galactic nebulae . In 1938, the future astronomer and specialist author Patrick Moore (1923–2012) took over the management and later published parts of Frank's extensive observation books .

He was married to Mary Jane Scarborough King since 1874, with whom he had three sons and three daughters. In 1930 he married Mary Ethel Lancaster in his second marriage.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ * Patrick Moore: Brockhurst: A Small Twentieth-Century Observatory . In: Society for the History of Astronomy Newsletter . Issue 1, November 2002, p. 3 , bibcode : 2002SHAN .... 1Q ... 3M (English, SHA [PDF]).
  2. ↑ Global plants, Hanbury, Frederick Janson (1851-1938) , Natural History Museum, accessed May 15, 2020
  3. ^ British Museum / The Natural History Museum Archives, London, DF 445
  4. ↑ Jeremy Shears: William Sadler Franks and the Brockhurst Observatory , pdf, accessed May 15, 2020
  5. ↑ Hanbury, Frederick Janson. In: Who Was Who 1929–1940: a Companion to Who's Who. Volume 3. Black, London 1941, p. 587.
personal data
SURNAME Hanbury, Frederick Janson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English botanist and patron of astronomy
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1851
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 1938
Place of death Uckfield , Sussex