W. B. R. King

Who was W. B. R. King?

William Bernard Robinson King, OBE MC FRS was a British geologist.

He was born in West Burton, Yorkshire.

In 1912 he graduated from Cambridge with a first-class Honours degree in Geology. He joined the Geological Survey and distinguished himself on field studies in Wales. In 1914 he was commissioned as a second-lieutenant in the Territorial Army and in 1915 was rapidly trained as a hydrologist and sent to France to assist the Chief Engineer of the B.E.F establish potable water supplies from boreholes.

The most senior of the three military geologists at the start of World War II, Major King was sent to France in 1939. where he later advised on suitable sites for airfields and the D-Day landings. He was awarded a Military Cross in 1940.

In 1943 he became Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge University.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949. His candidacy document read "Woodwardian Professor of Geology; during two wars field-geologist R. E. serving with the British Army. As stratigrapher has mapped and worked out the Upper Ordovician Shelly succession through Sedgwicks classic ground along the Welsh Borderland and in Ribblesdale. As Palaeontologist has described new trilobites and correlated Cambrian faunas from Iran and The Salt Range. A co-worker with Marr on Cambridgeshire gravels has successfully applied the Abbe Breuil's Somme Valley flint-implement typology in England. And presented an acceptable synthesis of the Pleistocene succession in the valley of the Lower Thames. His war-time responsibilities included underground hydrography for emergency water-supplies in France, surface and sub-soil hydrology for selection of airfield sites in France and Belgium, and "D Day" beach intelligence."