John Downie Falconer

Dr John Downie Falconer FRSE FGS FRGS (1876 – 1947) was a Scottish geologist and geographer linked to colonial Africa.

Life

He was born in the village of Stow, south of Edinburgh, on 1 November 1876, the son of John Falconer and Sophia Downie. He attended Glasgow University graduating MA in 1897 and receiving a doctorate (DSc) in 1906.[1]

He then went to Edinburgh to act as Prof James Geikie’s assistant, before accepting a role overseeing the official mineral survey of Nigeria in 1904. In 1911 he returned to his alma mater to lecture in Geography. In 1907 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were James Geikie, John Horne, Ben Peach and Ramsay Heatley Traquair.[2]

During the First World War he was requested by the Colonial Office to act as Assistant District Commissioner for Nigeria, a relatively high-level responsibility. In 1918 he stayed in Nigeria as Director of the Geological Survey of Nigeria, leaving in 1927 on completion of this large task. He subsequently became official Geologist to the Republic of Uruguay, 1928-1934.[1][3]

His address in later life was 43 Fordhook Avenue in Ealing, in west London.[4] He died in Hounslow in west London on 16 April 1947.

Family

He married twice: in 1908 to Edith Burman (d.1934); and in 1941 to Catherine Elizabeth Hughes (d.1947), a Canadian. He had one son, John Geikie Falconer, and two daughters by his first wife. His daughter Dora Janet Burman Falconer (1911-2010) became a surgeon and served as a rare female doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War in East Africa rising to Lt Colonel. She married Dr Richard Savage and worked with him in Nigeria.[5]

Publications
  • The Igneous Geology of Bathgate and the Linlithgow Hills (1906)
  • The Geology of Ardrossan (1907)
  • The Geology and Geography of Northern Nigeria (1911)
  • On Horseback Through Nigeria (1911)
  • The Geology of the Plateau Tinfields of Nigeria (1921)
  • The Gondwana System of North-Eastern Uruguay (1937)
  • Darwin in Uruguay (1937)
gollark: If you want to factor in each individual location's needs in some giant model, you'll run into issues like:- people lying- it would be horrifically complex
gollark: Information flow: imagine some farmer, due to some detail of their climate/environment, needs extra wood or something. But the central planning models just say "each farmer needs 100 units of wood for farming 10 units of pig"; what are they meant to do?
gollark: The incentives problems: central planners aren't really as affected by how well they do their jobs as, say, someone managing a firm, and you probably lack a way to motivate people "on the ground" as it were.
gollark: What, so you just want us to be stuck at one standard of living forever? No. Technology advances and space mining will... probably eventually happen.
gollark: But that step itself is very hard, and you need to aggregate different people's preferences, and each step ends up being affected by the values of the people working on it.

References
  1. Scotland (16 April 1947). "University of Glasgow :: Story :: Biography of John Downie Falconer". Universitystory.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  2. Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0 902 198 84 X.
  3. "Natural History Museum Archive Catalogue". Nhm.ac.uk. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  4. "Who's Who". Ukwhoswho.com. 7 December 2015. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  5. "Sophia Mary E D Falconer - Find Living Relatives - Boards". Genes Reunited. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
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