Biography

British botanist and artist born in Stroud Green, London. Winifred Brooke was based mainly in Alton, Hampshire, where she was President of the Alton Natural History Society. She organised botanical collecting trips to Southern Africa, South America and Borneo, selling her specimens to herbaria and seed shareholders to fund the trips.

As a child she spent three years in Switzerland, where she painted alpine flowers and collected seeds to send home. She later made a living by painting animal portraits and insect pests for horticultural magazines, and was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1946. She published a book of her work, Sketches from Nature in the North of Ireland (1935).

After her parents died, for whom she had been caring, she turned to exploration aged 43. She was inspired by Lucy Evelyn Cheesman, who had lectured at the South London Entomological Society which Brooke attended. Her first stop, in 1936, was the Canary Islands. She proceeded to South Africa, staying there for over a year, and also collected about 100 specimens in Lesotho, as well as making watercolour sketches of the flowers. She was active again in 1949-1950, this time exploring remote districts of Bolivia from a base in Cochabamba. She also took the opportunity to collect along the Chilean coast on her way home in 1950. Her collections from this time are primarily in London, New York and Chicago.

Again, she took leave in 1954-1955 to make a botanical voyage to Sarawak, a country to which she had connections being the great great niece of its first western rajah, James Brooke. Here she visited locations including the Santubong coast at one of the mouths of the Sarawak River, the Turtle Islands, Mt Gading and Berumpet on the Indonesian border, assisted by Ahmad bin Topin. In 1955 she made her base at Lawas and explored Bahkelalan and Simanggang shortly before leaving the country, now aged 62.

Of the thousands of specimens Brooke collected, she found more than 30 new species, some being named after her. Regarded as rather eccentric and domineering, Brooke travelled alone wearing a trademark brown raincoat, straw hat and green stockings. More than once she was suspected of being a spy, not an uncommon problem for plant collectors in foreign parts. She claimed to have once stumbled upon cannibals cooking a meal and to have shouted at them in disgust, forcing them to abandon their meal. The Natural History Museum in London holds a collection of 225 lantern slides taken by Brooke on her travels between 1925 and 1940.