Francis Henry Hill Guillemard

Francis Henry Hill Guillemard (12 September 1852 – 23 December 1933) was the first reader of geography at Cambridge University, a traveller, writer and naturalist.

Biography

Henry Guillemard was born in Eltham, Kent, the fifth son of Dr Isaac Guillemard. The family had Huguenot origins and had settled in Poitou following persecution in the seventeenth century. He took an interest in natural history at an early age. He wrote on pigeons in the Boys' Weekly in 1866. He was unable to go to Rugby owing to poor health, and so was educated by a private tutor between 1866 and 1868, after which he went to a cram school in Richmond. He attended natural history auctions regularly where he met Newton, Howard Saunders, and other ornithologists of the period. He went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1870 receiving a BA in 1874 followed by work at St Bartholomew's Hospital before embarking on medical studies. During his undergraduate days he made expeditions to Orkney to study birds and also travelled through the Balkans and Lapland. He also did ornithological work in southern Africa. His medical thesis of 1881 was on bilharzia. After receiving his medical degree he worked briefly as a doctor but did not practice for long; however, he served in South Africa as a doctor during the first Boer War. He served as a naturalist on an expedition into Southeast Asia about which he wrote in his The Cruise of the Marchesa (1886) which became a popular travel book. He was co-founder of the Cyprus Exploration Fund and inspected sites for archaeological excavation. He became a reader in geography at Cambridge in 1888 but resigned later that year. In 1890 he wrote a book on Ferdinand Magellan and his travels.

He married his cousin Katharine Stephanie Guillemard in 1890, but they separated after a dozen years; there were no children.

External links

• Archives at Cambridge
• The life of Ferdinand Magellan and the first circumnavigation of the globe : 1480-1521 (1891)
• The cruise of the Marchesa to Kamschatka & New Guinea (Volume 1) (Volume 2) (1886)