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The Seaweed Queens of Torquay: Amelia Griffiths and Mary Wyatt
Two women, five books, two hundred and thirty four seaweeds
In the summer of 1830, a woman in a broad-brimmed hat and voluminous skirt picks her way over the rocks of a Devon beach. She gathers seaweed from the tidepools and places them in a creel. If other beach-goers think her eccentric, they keep it to themselves. Locals know her as the widow of a Cornish clergyman who died some years earlier. In scientific circles, she is known as the Queen of Algology.
Amelia Griffiths had a fascination for seaweed. She collected them, made observations about their distribution and life histories, described new species, and shared her knowledge and material freely with botanists in Britain and Ireland. Species were named in her honour, as was a genus of red algae. William Harvey dedicated his Manual of the British Marine Algae (1849) to
Mrs Griffiths, of Torquay, Devon, a lady whose long-continued researches have, more than those of any other observer in Britain, contributed to the present advanced state of marine botany, and whose numerous discoveries…entitle her to the lasting gratitude of her fellow-students.
and when the David Landsborough referred to her ‘the Queen of Algologists’, no one disputed the title.
