Mary Gillham
Mary Eleanor Gillham MBE (26 November 1921 – 23 March 2013) was a British naturalist, university lecturer, and writer, who was resident for many years in Gwaelod y Garth and then Radyr, in Cardiff, Wales until her death. Although born in a London suburb, and serving five wartime years in the Women's Land Army working on multiple farms, Mary Gillham spent much of her time in Wales. As a post-war student in the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and Bangor, she gained a degree in agriculture, a first-class honours in botany, and a PhD in island ecology. She lectured in the universities of Exeter (Devon), Massey (New Zealand), Melbourne (Australia), Kano (Nigeria), and worked in the Adult Education Department at University College Cardiff from 1961 until her retirement in 1988. As a teacher of adult amateur naturalists, she saw her role as an interpreter of scientific data for the layman, and took to writing books and popular articles. Spray-washed seabird colonies were her main love, and research on these took her to remote islands in many parts of the world, where she has lived in tents, huts, lighthouses, etc. Her major research projects were around the coasts of West Wales