The death of the British pollen analyst and palaeolimnologist Winifred Tutin (née Pennington) has deprived palaeolimnology of one of its outstanding pioneers.

Winifred Pennington was born on 8 October 1915 in Barrow-in-Furness, then Lancashire, now Cumbria. She was educated at Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School and graduated in Botany from the University of Reading in 1938. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 1941 by the University of Reading for a thesis on ‘An investigation of some problems of freshwater algae, with special reference to the process of sedimentation’. Her PhD supervisor was the famous Mesozoic palaeobotanist, Tom Harris. She began her life-long links with the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA) in the English Lake District as a student on the then annual FBA Easter Course in 1936 (Lund 1984). In 1942 she married Tom Tutin who, at that stage, was working on aquatic vegetation in the Lake District. He subsequently became a lecturer and later a professor in the Botany Department at University College Leicester (after 1957, the University of Leicester) and one of Europe’s most eminent plant taxonomists. Winifred was appointed a demonstrator and temporary lecturer at Leicester in 1947, part-time lecturer in 1948, special lecturer in 1961, honorary reader in 1971, and honorary professor in 1980, a title she held until her death. Although based in Leicester she maintained close links with the FBA and served on its Council from 1956–1967. She was appointed a Principal Scientific Officer at the FBA in 1967, and she built up a small multi-disciplinary group of researchers based at the FBA working on various aspects of palaeolimnology, including inorganic and organic sediment chemistry, pollen, and diatoms. This group included Christine Brown (based in Leicester), the late Anne Bonny (also based in Leicester), Peter Cranwell, Elizabeth Haworth, and Jean Lishman. Winifred worked closely with John Mackereth until his tragic death in 1971 at the early age of 51. Winifred was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979 in recognition of her contributions to environmental and vegetational history. A volume of papers dedicated to her on the occasion of her 70th birthday was edited by Elizabeth Howarth and John Lund (Howarth and Lund 1984). She retired from the FBA in 1987 but she retained close contact with the FBA until just before her death (Plate 1).

Plate 1
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Winifred Tutin by Windermere, about 1980. Photo: Trevor Furnass (from Haworth and Lund 1984)

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She published throughout her scientific career as Winifred Pennington (with the exception of one paper) but she preferred to be called Anne by her close friends. Her parents had planned to call her Winifred Anne but at her christening, the clergyman or registrar made a mistake and the ‘Anne’ was omitted. It was only relatively late in her life that she added Anne to her name, for example, for her election to the Royal Society.

Like many pioneers in palaeolimnology, Winifred began her scientific career as an algologist and limnologist, and published a paper as an undergraduate on the anatomy of the sea-weed Fucus (Pennington 1937) followed by papers on aquatic bryophytes (Pennington 1949; Walker and Pennington 1939) and on the results of an experimental study on the interaction between phyto- and zoo-plankton (Pennington 1941a), on the supply of nitrogen to algae and its loss during decomposition (Pennington 1942), and on the possible wartime-uses of algae (Pennington 1941b). These algal studies formed part of her 1941 Ph.D. thesis. The other part was on lake sediments and the sedimentation of seston based on sampling various lakes in the Lake District and on diatom changes in the uppermost sediments of Windermere with a great increase in Asterionella formosa in the top 20 cm. She interpreted this increase as being a response to ‘the opening up of the Lake District at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (Pennington 1943).

Whilst attending the FBA annual Easter courses, Winifred came into contact with the physical limnologist Clifford Mortimer and the plant ecologist W.H. Pearsall, both of whom were to have major influences on Winifred’s subsequent scientific research. After a detailed bathymetric survey of Windermere by echo-sounding, Mortimer was fascinated by the consistent layering of the traces obtained and he hypothesised that these layers might represent changes between different types of sediment. At Mortimer’s instigation, B.M. Jenkin developed an early type of lake-sediment corer. When this was forced into the shallow-water deposits in Low Wray Bay in 1936, there was great excitement when the resulting core was discovered to consist of upper mud-laminated clay-mud with abundant plant macrofossils-basal laminated clay. By 1940 an improved version of the Jenkin corer extracted a 6 m core from the North Basin of Windermere and the paper describing this (Jenkin et al. 1941) is probably the first paper about palaeolimnology, as we know it today, to be published in Britain.

Winifred was fascinated by the basal clay-mud-clay sequence at the base of the Windermere cores. Could this really be the late-glacial sequence recognised in Denmark by Hartz and Milthers in 1901? In her spare time in the evenings, after counting diatoms during the day, she looked at the macroscopic plant remains in the mud layer and found birch catkin scales. At Tom Harris’s suggestion, she contacted Harry Godwin in Cambridge, who with his wife Margaret, was pioneering in Britain the use of pollen analysis as a means of reconstructing vegetational history. Winifred recalled to us in 1969 in her cottage at Coniston that she first met Godwin in 1941. As soon as she mentioned Betula catkin scales to him, Godwin leapt to his feet in excitement and asked what species! Winifred then heard the terms Allerød and Younger Dryas for the first time. Godwin introduced her to the Danish literature and arranged for her to work in the then Botany School in Cambridge from 1942 to 1944 to learn pollen analysis. Winifred told us that Godwin’s kindness and enthusiasm were wonderful, as she had feared that Godwin would be put out to meet an unknown young woman with such a promising sedimentary sequence, the first incontrovertible evidence for the late-glacial climatic oscillation in Britain.

After obtaining her Ph.D. in 1941, Winifred worked partly at the FBA where she held the position of ‘research student’ and partly in Cambridge with Harry Godwin. The results of her pioneering diatom and pollen investigations on the post-glacial and late-glacial sediments from Windermere formed two classic papers (Pennington 1943, 1947) that marked the onset of palaeolimnological research in Britain. In conjunction with W.H. Pearsall, she wrote in 1947 an amazingly perceptive paper on the ecological history of the English Lake District (Pearsall and Pennington 1947) in which they outline in remarkable detail the underlying ecological processes and factors that may have influenced the ecological history of this fascinating area. Later, in 1973, Winifred was to publish a magnificent volume in the classic New Naturalist series on The Lake District: A Landscape History using the original plan and notes left by Pearsall at his death as well as her own detailed knowledge and insights and some contributions from colleagues (Pearsall and Pennington 1973).

The births of her 4 children (three daughters, one son) in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the demands on her from her growing family plus her lecturing in Leicester on a range of botanical topics including mycology, restricted the time Winifred could devote to research for several years. However, by 1955 she was once again visiting the FBA, now housed at Ferry House on the western shore of Windermere, and she joined the FBA Council in 1956. She began to reactivate the FBA’s interests on lake sediments and environmental history. One of her major successes whilst she was on the FBA Council was to stimulate the interest of the FBA’s chemist, John Mackereth, in lake sediments and their geo-chemistry. To follow up these interests, Mackereth designed and largely made himself a pneumatic corer which, by not needing weights or lifting equipment, was portable and could be operated by two people in a smallish boat (Mackereth 1958). Given high-quality continuous cores up to 6 m long obtained with the Mackereth corer, Mackereth (1965, 1966) was able to develop his hypothesis that much of the sediment accumulating in oligotrophic lakes resulted from inwash from the catchment. In addition he studied oscillations in the declination of the remanent magnetism in cores as a means of dating (Mackereth 1971). He also developed a short version of his pneumatic corer to collect undisturbed top sediment cores 80–100 cm long. Winifred used this corer to establish dates for recent sediments using 137Cs and 210Pb (Pennington et al. 1973, 1976).

In 1967, Winifred joined the FBA staff and set up their Quaternary Research Unit. Her own research from about 1962 was centred on the vegetational and environmental history of the English Lake District, based primarily on pollen analysis of sediments from a large number of lakes and tarns (Pennington 1964, 1965, 1970, 1978, 1984). One of her particular interests, no doubt stimulated by her early discoveries of late-glacial sediments in Windermere, was the late-glacial period (Pennington 1975b, 1977a, 1977b, 1980, 1981a; Pennington and Bonny 1970). She made major contributions by establishing in detail the relative and absolute pollen stratigraphy of the late-glacial in both north-west England and also in north-west Scotland. She continued her interest in recent sediments (Pennington 1973a) and seston and sediment formation (Pennington 1974a). She was also interested in the origin of pollen in lake sediments (Pennington 1979, 1996) and she and her research associate Anne Bonny (Bonny 1976, 1978, 1980) showed that much of the pollen in lakes is waterborne. She also studied the causes of between-lake variation in absolute pollen frequencies (Pennington 1973b). Although she worked almost exclusively in the Lake District, she did pioneering multi-proxy studies in north-west Scotland (Pennington et al. 1972) and in linking pollen-stratigraphical changes to changes in other proxy records (Pennington 1981b, 1981c, 1986; Pennington and Lishman 1971, 1984; Pennington et al. 1977). In addition, she wrote a very readable and important undergraduate textbook The History of British Vegetation (Pennington 1969, 1974b). Although she had planned to revise this book thoroughly in her retirement, she decided that it was not, after all, possible because of the sheer quantity and rate of publication of new relevant literature. She did, however, continue to publish after her retirement (e.g. Pennington 1991, 1996, 1997). Her last publication (Pennington 2003) was, very appropriately, a review of the vegetational, climatic, and settlement history of the upland parts of the English Lake District based on her 40 years work on the upland tarns (cf. Pennington 1964, 1965). The survey, sampling, and coring of these tarns involved an immense amount of physically demanding, voluntary work by the Brathay Exploration Group who carried boats, corers, and other equipment to many remote tarns. Winifred Tutin was a strong supporter of the Brathay Group with its involvement of volunteers from many walks of life in science-based surveys and expeditions in challenging landscapes. She served as one of its scientific advisors for several years.

Her husband, Tom Tutin, also a Fellow of the Royal Society, died in 1987. There cannot have been many married couples who were both professors of botany and Fellows of the Royal Society. A few years after Tom’s death, Winifred moved from Leicester to a cottage in the lovely village of Kingsclere in Berkshire. She continued to exchange news and send Christmas cards to her friends until a few months before her death.

As a person, Winifred was, like many of her generation, rather formal. She would always refer to people as ‘Professor Godwin’ or ‘Dr Iversen’. She was conscious of being a woman in science, but through her personality and excellence she became universally regarded as an equal and a leader in her field. Once she got to know you and she accepted you and your science, she was friendly and kind and would ask you to call her Anne. She was generous with her time and vigorous in all scientific discussions. Her homes in Leicester, Coniston, and Kingsclere always provided a warm welcome to friends from near and far.

Although she made fundamental contributions to palaeolimnology and palaeoecology during her long and distinguished scientific career, she never considered herself a palaeolimnologist or palaeoecologist. If one used such words, she would respond, politely but firmly, by saying that she only studied lake history or ecological history. Despite claiming not to be a palaeolimnologist, Winifred Tutin will long be remembered as one of the great pioneers of palaeolimnology in Britain. She made outstanding contributions to our understanding of the historical development of lakes and of the environmental and ecological history of the English Lake District and she helped to develop several new approaches and methodologies in palaeoecology and palaeolimnology. As Haworth (2007) says, Winifred ‘became one of the new generation of respected women researchers’.