Sylvia Haslam ScD Cantab. 1934-2026
It is with sadness that we announce the death at the age of 91 of Dr. Sylvia Haslam who was a Life Member and longstanding supporter of the Cam Valley Forum. She will be best known to CVF members as the co-author, in her retirement, with the late fellow CVF member Tina Bone, of their ‘River Friend’ series of books. Details of these can be found here. Various reviews of the series are included on our website here . The final book in the series, Book 9, was published last year and focuses on the River Cam.
Sylvia was a distinguished botanist who researched aquatic macrophytes, river ecology and fluvial landscapes across Europe. Howard Griffiths, recently retired from the Cambridge Dept. of Plant Sciences, has written admiringly of her extensive work including the landmark 1975 publication (with co-authors C A Sinker and P A Wolseley) of ‘British Water Plants’. He spoke of being taken by Sylvia to the headwaters of the Granta and Rhee ‘searching for Chalk stream macrophytes from which we hoped to characterise Rubisco kinetic properties as a function of their contrasting leaf carbon uptake strategies’. (Rubisco being that vital enzyme that all plants employ to remove carbon dioxide from the environment!)
Dr. Haslam generously left funds to establish a Tripos Part II prize in Plant Ecology when she moved from Cambridge to Somerset to be closer to her family. After a funeral service in Taunton she was buried in the churchyard of St. Andrew and St. Mary, Grantchester in July.
Sylvia expressed her despair at the declining state of rivers, not least the Cam. An inveterate long-hand letter-writer Sylvia was sharp to the end.
DB