Catalogue description British Museum (Natural History): Department of Mineralogy: Correspondence and Papers of W Campbell Smith

This series consists of correspondence and papers of W Campbell Smith of the British Museum (Natural History) Department of Mineralogy. These papers remained in the Department after he ceased his research work in the mid 1960s.

It includes diaries, laboratory and jotting notebooks, files of correspondence and notes, drafts of papers, photographs and some drawings. The papers relate to petrology, mineralogy and the history of geology.

Diaries and notebooks are at the beginning of the series, (pieces 1-83) and research files follow on, with Antarctic and African files (pieces 84-119) being followed by those on other topics, arranged chronologically.

Access conditions: Subject to 30 year closure

Most of the records were transferred to the archives in 1981.

'Walter Campbell Smith', by A C Bishop, 1989; 'Yearbook of the Geological Society for 1988', pp. 30-33

• People: Walter Campbell Smith (1887-1988)

Walter Campbell Smith was born at Soligull on 30 November 1887, and educated at Solihull School and at Cambridge University, where he read crystallography and mineralogy, together with geology and petrology. He graduated with first class honours in 1910, and was appointed as Assistant in the Department of Mineralogy at the Museum in the same year.

He worked as a petrologist, studying the rocks collected on Captain Scott's 'Terra Nova' expedition, and tackling the curation of the Geological Society's foreign rocks, which were acquired in 1911. Campbell Smith served with the Artists' Rifles during the First World War, being demobilised in 1919 as a Lieutenant Colonel. He travelled in Europe in 1927 and in North America in 1933, becoming Deputy Keeper in 1931 and Keeper of Mineralogy in 1937. Campbell Smith collaborated with Frank Dixey in a study of linestones in Nyasaland from 1933 onwards, and his recognition of their magmatic origin is his single most important scientific achievement. He also worked on meteorites, the petrology of hand axes, the geology of the sea floor, among other things, and published more than one hundred scientific papers. He was Deputy Chief Scientific Officer of the British Museum (Natural History) from 1948 to 1952.

Campbell Smith married Susan Finnegan of the Department of Zoology in 1936, and retired from the Keepership in 1952, although he continued to work in the Museum until about 1965.