New Zealand clergyman and botanist. Born in Christchurch, John Holloway was heavily influenced by his father, a keen churchman and amateur naturalist. He entered St. John’s College to train as an Anglican minister and also enrolled at Auckland University College, studying sciences. He achieved his MSc in 1905 with a thesis on the anatomy of native club mosses and in 1908 was ordained as a Protestant vicar. In the same year he married Margaret North, whose family the couple visited in England from 1909-1911. Here he encountered fossilised plants in coal balls.

Holloway was a vicar at Oxford, North Canterbury, from 1912-1916, then at Leeston in the Canterbury Plains (1922-1923). While at Oxford he presented three papers to the Canterbury Philosophical Institute on the life histories and methods of reproduction of Lycopodium and collected specimens near Mount Oxford, preparing them in the laboratories at Canterbury College, where he met biology professor Charles Chilton. His parishioners kindly supported his botanical endeavours by purchasing him apparatus and he was awarded a DSc from the University of New Zealand in 1917. Further honours ensued; in 1920 he received the Hutton Memorial Medal and in 1921 was elected to the New Zealand Institute (the Royal Society of New Zealand). In 1930 he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal and Prize and in 1937 became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

In 1923 Holloway began a lectureship at the University of Otago, which forced him to give up a great deal of his parish work, much to his regret, for the working conditions at the university’s botany department left a lot to be desired. Nevertheless he produced several first class botanists from his honours students, including Dame Ella Campbell and Jack Holloway, his son, who became the country’s foremost forest ecologist.

Meanwhile, Holloway continued his work on primitive ferns including Tmesipteris. He was given the title lecturer-in-charge after becoming FRS and hired Ella Campbell as an assistant. He died within a year of retiring in 1944 following a deterioration in his health.

Sources:
H.H Allan, 1947, "Obituary. John Ernest Holloway (1881-1945)", Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 76: xlv-xlvi
G. Baylis, "Holloway, John Ernest 1881-1945", Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007:
http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/, accessed 16 June 2010.