Biography

Ivan Mackenzie Lamb, polar explorer and botanist, specialised in the study of lichens and bryophytes. He is commonly cited as MacKenzie Lamb.

Lamb is famous for his part in a secret mission instigated by Churchill and the War Cabinet during the Second World War. Operation Tabarin, which lasted form 1943-1945, was a Royal Navy undertaking to occupy British Antarctic Territories and to deny access to enemy ships and submarines. It was led by the Canadian Andrew Taylor (1907-1993), the only Canadian ever to lead a British wartime operation. (Field Commander James Marr also took part in the mission. Famous as the Boy Scout who won a national newspaper competition to accompany Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) on an expedition to the Antarctic in 1921, Marr was later a zoologist employed at the Natural History Museum in London.) Operation Tabarin was the first of a series of British Antarctic naval expeditions, later known as the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey and subsequently the British Antarctic Survey.

After the war Lamb became Professor of Cryptogramic Botany at Tucum&#xán University in Argentina for four years and collected plants in South America. Botanical specimens at BM are mainly from his early career, in particular the Antarctic lichens, but there are also some South American specimens. Lamb returned to Canada and a post at the Canadian National Museum in Ottawa, followed by directorship of the Farlow Herbarium at Harvard (1954-1972). In 1971 having been diagnosed with Disfonia Syndrome, he underwent a sex change operation and changed his name to Elke Mackenzie. Lamb died of Lou Gehrig's disease in January 1990.