Biography

South African mycologist and plant bacteriologist. Ethel Doidge was born in Nottingham, England, but moved with her family to Pietermaritzburg in 1897. Her father, an analytical chemist, died when she was still young. She received her early botanical training under Bertha Stoneman at Huguenot College, Wellington. After graduating, she joined the Transvaal Department of Agriculture as the assistant of I.B. Pole Evans, the only government mycologist and plant pathologist then working in South Africa. She was appointed to the Division of Botany and Mycology in 1912, and became Principal Plant Pathologist in 1929, a position she held until her retirement in 1942.

The University of the Cape of Good Hope awarded her the Cornwall and York prize for her MA thesis on "The Flora of Certain Kaffir Beers" in 1909, and granted her a PhD in 1914 for her research into a previously undescribed disease that was devastating mango crops. In 1922 she received the Captain Scott Memorial Medal from the South African Biological Society for her pioneering work in plant pathology.

After retiring, she completed a comprehensive listing of "The South African fungi and lichens to the end of 1945", which was the culmination of 35 years of study, and was published as an entire volume of Bothalia in 1950. To support her research, she made extensive collections of South African fungi, lichens, algae and phanerogam hosts of fungi. She is commemorated in the botanical names of 15 fungi, the phanerogams Aplanodes doidgeana Marais and Crotalaria doidgeae Verdoorn, and the charophyte Nitella doidgeae J. Groves & Stephens.

Sources:
M.D. Gunn, 1968, Bothalia, 9: 251-53.