Biography

British teacher and naturalist who spent much of his life in India. Frank Ludlow is known, along with George Sherriff, for making pioneering collections of plants in the eastern Himalayas from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. As well as dried specimens they sent a large volume of living material to gardens such as Kew and the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley, leading many new Asian plants to be introduced into cultivation.

Ludlow was born in Chelsea, London, and attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in natural science in 1908 he travelled to India, where he taught at Sind College, Karachi. With the onset of World War One, Ludlow signed up to the infantry and survived service in Mesopotamia. Returning to India he went into the Indian Education Service as an Inspector of European Schools. In 1923 he was invited to Gyantse in south-eastern Tibet to set up a European style school, a chance at which he leapt, for he was eager to escape the searing heat of the Indian plains. In fact, Ludlow had been asked to supply names of candidates to head the new school, amongst which he successfully put forward his own name. While there he studied the birds of the region and after his retirement in 1927 (when the school was forced to close) lived in Srinigar, Kashmir, where he also collected birds. It was while on an expedition to Chinese Turkestan in 1929 that he met retired army officer George Sherriff in Kashgar, and the pair's fruitful collaboration began.

Political resistance to outsiders entering the territory meant that Europeans had little explored the Himalayan region east of Sikkim. Ludlow and Sherriff were thus met with a region virtually unknown, botanically. Their path in gaining permission to explore was eased by the good reputation Ludlow had earned while working in the Tibetan education system. Neither were botanists by profession (Ludlow was more interested in ornithology and shooting and Sherriff was a keen gardener) but it was their collecting work that first revealed the floristic riches of the area. Plants certainly became Ludlow and Sherriff's dominating interest in their later years. In all they gathered more than 21,000 specimens, adding greatly to the knowledge of plant distribution in the eastern Himalayas.

Their first expeditions were to Bhutan in 1933 and 1934, and to the Mago district of Tibet. Over the next 15 years they carried out a series of expeditions reaching eastward to the great bend of the Tsangpo river, assisted by a band of men hailing from Bhutan, Sikkim, Kashmir and Lepchas. Occasionally they received grants from the British Museum (Natural History), but it was mostly Sherriff who financed the trips. They were at one point joined by a botanist from the British Museum, Sir George Taylor.

Ludlow and Sherriff's activities were interrupted by the Second World War, during which Ludlow became Joint Commissioner in Ladakh and then in 1942 took charge of the British Mission at Lhasa, Tibet. He returned to Ladakh in 1943 and come 1945 was able to resume his expeditions with Sherriff, travelling to the Kongbo and Pome districts of south-eastern Tibet. After a sojourn in England in 1947-1948, Ludlow returned to India and then to Bhutan in 1949. He settled permanently back in England in 1950, working for the rest of his life at the British Museum (Natural History), where he studied his own collections and those of others made in the Himalayas. He became particularly interested in the genus Corydalis and his paper "New Himalayan and Tibetan species of Corydalis" was published posthumously. His work Reliquiae botanicae Himalaicae also appeared after his death, edited by W.T. Stearn. After a fall in 1962 his health never returned entirely, though he continued to work in the museum until his death ten years later.

Ludlow's ornithological work was equal in significance to his botanical exploits in Asia. He published a number of papers on the birds of Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet in the ornithology journal Ibis and collected nearly 7,000 bird specimens, which are now in the possession of the Natural History Museum, London. The museum also holds his manuscripts and correspondence.

Sources:
H.R. Fletcher, 1975, A quest of flowers: the plant exploration of Frank Ludlow and George Sherriff told from their diaries and other occasional writings
M. Rank, 2003, "Frank Ludlow and the English school in Tibet 1923-1926", Asian Affairs, 34(1): 33-45
M. Rank, 2009, "Ludlow, Frank (1885-1972)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/96789, accessed 10 February 2011
W.T. Stearn, 1976, "Frank Ludlow (1885-1972) and the Ludlow-Sherriff expeditions to Bhutan and south-eastern Tibet of 1933-1950", Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Botany, 5(5): 243-289.