Eva Crane obituarie from 'The Independent'
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2961245.ece
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Eva Crane
Authority on the history of beekeeping and honey-hunting who travelled the
world in pursuit of bees
Published: 14 September 2007
Ethel Eva Widdowson, beekeeper, physicist and writer: born London 12 June
1912; Lecturer in Physics, Sheffield University 1941-43; Director, Bee
Research Association (later the International Bee Research Association)
1949-84; OBE 1986; married 1942 James Crane (died 1978); died Slough,
Berkshire 6 September 2007.
The name of Eva Crane is synonymous the world over with bees and
beekeeping. She was at once author, editor, archivist, research scientist
and historian, and possibly the most travelled person in pursuit of bees
that has ever lived. She was a noted authority on the history of
beekeeping and honey-hunting, including archaeology and rock art in her
studies. She founded one of the leading institutions of the beekeeping
world, the International Bee Research Association (IBRA), and ran it
herself until her 72nd year. And yet her academic background was not in
apiculture or biology, but in nuclear physics.
She possessed "an intellect that took no prisoners", said Richard Jones,
her successor as director of the IBRA. Always precise, her maxim
was "observe, check the facts, and always get your research right". Yet
she was a modest person with a piercing curiosity. She insisted that she
wasn't at all interesting; that it was the places she went to, and the
people she met, that were. For that reason, though a clear, intelligent
and most prolific writer, she never wrote a memoir. The nearest she came
was a book of travel writings, Making a Bee-line (2003), written near the
end of her long life.
Crane has been compared with Dame Freya Stark in her willingness to travel
to remote places, often alone and at an advanced age. Her aim was to share
her beekeeping knowledge with farmers, voluntary bodies and governments,
but, typically, she claimed to have learned far more than she taught.
Between 1949 and 2000 she visited at least 60 countries by means as varied
as dog-sled, dugout canoe and light aircraft. In a remote corner of
Pakistan, she discovered that beekeeping was still practiced using the
horizontal hives she had seen only in excavations of Ancient Greece.
Another place that intrigued her was the Zagros mountains on the borders
of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, where rich local traditions and an unusual
variety of hives suggest that it was here that the age-old association of
man and bees first began.
She was born Eva Widdowson in 1912, the younger daughter of Thomas and
Rose Widdowson. Her elder sister was Elsie Widdowson, who became a world-
famous nutritionist. Eva was educated at Sydenham Secondary School in
Kent, and won a scholarship to read mathematics at King's College London.
A brilliant student, and one of only two women then reading mathematics at
London University, she completed her degree in two years. An MSc in
quantum mechanics soon followed, and she received her PhD in nuclear
physics in 1938.
An academic career at the cutting edge of quantum science seemed to
beckon. Eva Widdowson took up the post of Lecturer in Physics at Sheffield
University in 1941. The next year she married James Crane, a stockbroker
then serving in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
Among their wedding presents was a working beehive. The idea had been for
the couple to use the honey to eke out their wartime sugar ration, but Eva
quickly became fascinated with bees and their ways. It led to a radically
different and unexpected turning in her life, from the arcane study of
particles and energy to the lively, buzzing world of the hive.
She took out a subscription to Bee World and became an active member of
the local beekeepers' association. Later she became secretary of the
research committee of the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA). However,
convinced of the vast potential of beekeeping in the tropics, her outlook
was international. In 1949 she founded the Bee Research Association,
dedicated to "working to increase awareness of the vital role of bees in
the environment". The charity was renamed the International Bee Research
Association (IBRA) in 1976.
The rest of Eva Crane's life was devoted to building the IBRA into a world
centre of expertise on beekeeping. Based in her front room at Chalfont St
Giles in Buckinghamshire until 1966, the association eventually found an
office in the village and since 1985 has been based in Cardiff.
Her work as an editor and archivist was prodigious. From its outset in
1962 until 1982 Crane edited the association's Journal of Apicultural
Research. She also edited Bee World from 1949 until her retirement in 1984
(the two journals were united in 2006). Another major activity was
compiling and publishing regular research abstracts, Apicultural
Abstracts, which she also edited from 1950 to 1984. It is now one of the
world's major databases on bee science.
She assiduously collected and filed scientific papers, which eventually
resulted in an archive of 60,000 works on apiculture. It includes a unique
collection of 130 bee journals from around the world, including perhaps
the only complete runs of some of them. The archive is now so large (and
in need of professional management) that it is housed at the National
Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.
In support of the IBRA and its work, Crane also established the Eva Crane
Trust. Its aim is to advance the science of apiology, and in particular
the publication of books on the subject, and the promotion of apicultural
libraries and museums of historical beekeeping artefacts throughout the
world.
Eva Crane was a prolific writer, with over 180 papers, articles and books
to her name. Her broad-ranging and extremely learned books were mostly
written in her seventies and eighties after her retirement in 1984 from
the day-to-day running of the Association. A Book of Honey (1980) and The
Archaeology of Beekeeping (1983) reflected her strong interests in
nutrition and the ancient past of beekeeping. Her writing culminated in
two mighty, encyclopaedic tomes, Bees and Beekeeping: science, practice
and world resources (1990; at 614 pages) and The World History of
Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (1999; 682 pages). These distilled a
lifetime's knowledge and experience and are regarded as seminal textbooks
throughout the beekeeping world.
Peter Marren
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Best Wishes,
Joe
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