Jan Gillett was a leading researcher in tropical African botany. He served as Botanist in Charge of the East African Herbarium, Nairobi, and made significant collections in Iraq as well as Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

Gillett was born in Oxford and won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, in 1929. His interest in botany was encouraged by his mother, and before his studies at Cambridge he joined Kew botanist John Hutchinson on a collecting expedition in South Africa. He also visited Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe). Hutchinson gave an account of their trip in A Botanist in Southern Africa (1946).

While at Cambridge, Gillett collected plants with the British Somaliland-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (1932), producing a vegetation survey which was published in Kew Bulletin in 1941.

After taking First Class Honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos, Gillett did not enter a career in botanical research but instead obtained a diploma in education (London University), and taught at the Warehouseman and Clerks School in Cheadle Hulme. His radical political beliefs guided his career until the onset of the Second World War, and he was to be a member of the Communist Party from 1932-1946.

Gillett married Gertrude Spector in 1937, with whom he had four children. Called up in 1941, Gillett served in India with the Reconnaissance Regiment of the 2nd (British) Division, and later, as an intelligence officer.

After his return to England, Gillett was appointed botanist to the Iraq Department of Agriculture, based at the Abu Ghraib research station. His extensive collections from this time were heavily drawn on for Kew's Flora of Iraq. Life in Iraq became difficult after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, for Gillett's wife was Jewish, so the couple returned to England, Gillett taking a post in the Colonial Office as a Principal Scientific Officer at Kew.

At Kew, Gillett was assigned to work under Edgar Milne-Redhead on the Flora of Tropical East Africa. Undertaking revisionary work on the legumes, he laid the foundations for a new classification for the subfamily of peaflowers.

In 1952-1953 Gillett was given the opportunity to collect in Africa again, with a boundary commission on the Kenya-Ethiopia border. Visiting little-known parts, his collections included many species new to science. He thereafter remained in Kenya, as Botanist in Charge of the Herbarium from 1964-1971. His appointment had initially been vetoed due to the colonial authorities objecting to having an ex-Communist in a government role, but after Kenyan independence in 1963 he was able to succeed Bernard Verdcourt. Ugandan botanist Christine Kabuye became his assistant, and later succeeded him.

Gillett oversaw the transfer of the herbarium from the East African High Commission to the National Museums of Kenya, and trained a new generation of botanists.

In 1963 he accompanied an ecological survey mission in Jordan at the invitation of King Hussein. An account was given by ornithologist Guy Mountford in Portrait of a Desert (1965).

After handing over responsibility for the herbarium to Kabuye, Gillett devoted more time to field work, especially in Somalia, and studied the myrrh-producing commiphoras. In ailing health, however, Gillett returned to England in 1984. He visited Kew daily, and after by-pass surgery in 1989 his health improved.

Gillett completed an account of the commiphoras for the Flora of Tropical East Africa in 1991 and continued studies of arid-land plants for the new Flora of Somalia. These would prove to be his final botanical works; he died in Kew on 17 March 1995.

Sources:
R. Polhill, "Obituary: Jan Gillett", The Independent, 23 March 1995.