Leopold Hartley Grindon

Leopold Hartley Grindon (28 March 1818 – 1904) was an educator and botanist. He was a pioneer in the sphere of adult education. His collection of plants, related botanical drawings and writings, formed one of the principal assets of the herbarium at Manchester Museum at the time of its foundation in 1860.

Early life

Leopold Hartley Grindon was born in Bristol on 28 March 1818 and educated at Bristol College. He established the Bristol Philobotanical Society while still at school. He moved to Manchester when aged 20 where he spent a year as an apprentice in a warehouse before becoming a cashier for John Whittaker & Company's cotton business where he stayed until 1864.

Botany

Grindon, whose father was a solicitor and a coroner, developed an early interest in botany and was self-taught in other areas of science, such as astronomy and geology. At the age of 13, he started a collection of dried plants and by 18 he envisaged the creation of a herbarium of all the cultivated and wild plants found in Britain. He grew many specimens from seed and collected writings and drawings, particularly of plants that were difficult to grow or obtain in specimen form. He described that

I desired also to introduce every bit of printed matter referring to the plant that might come in my way, with descriptions alike of the individual species and of the Natural Orders, the uses and other particulars also have a place and seeing that Botany is wreathed also with all kinds of poetical and other human associations, everything that would illustrate these was also to go into the Herbarium so-called, which thus to be a Herbarium and a Botanical library fused into one.

In 1860, Grindon and the calico printer, Joseph Sidebotham, founded the Manchester Field-Naturalists' Society (MFNS). He attended the Mechanics' Institute and was appointed a lecturer in botany at the Manchester Royal School of Medicine whilst offering private tuition in the subject.

Death

When Grindon moved to Manchester, he lived in Portland Street and moved to Romford Street where he lived for a 30 years. In 1883 he moved to Cecil Street in Greenheys where he died aged 87 in 1904.

He married Rosa Elverson, a sympathsiser of the feminist movement and lecturer at local institutions such as the Manchester Geographical Society and the Manchester Working Men's Clubs Association. She outlived him and donated a large stained-glass window to Manchester Central Library in his memory. The window designed by Robert Anning Bell, is above the entrance to the library's Shakespeare Hall.

Publications

File:The Manchester Flora - Leo Grindon.png

Frontispiece to The Manchester Flora, a Leo. H. Grindon book published in 1859.

Among Grindon's publications, many of which were written while still employed as a cashier, are:

• Manchester Walks and Wild Flowers (1858)
• The Fairfield Orchids (1872)
• History of the Rhododendron (1876)

He also contributed to many journals and to the Manchester City News, and wrote items entirely unconnected to botany such as Manchester Banks and Bankers (1877) and A History of Lancashire (1882).

Further reading

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External links

• Official blog of the Manchester Museum Herbarium
• Works by Leo Hartley Grindon at Project Gutenberg