Botanist at the University of Cambridge. Primarily a morphologist, Sporne had a strong interest in palaeobotany. Until his retirement in 1982, Sporne alone taught courses at Cambridge on the morphology of fossils. His textbooks on pteridophyte and gymnosperm morphology were used worldwide, while his pioneering statistical analysis of the correlations between characteristics of plants to infer which were found in the most primitive flowering plants resonates with modern-day cladistics. He was married Helen Fletcher in 1943.