Margarita Dawson Stelfox

Margarita Dawson Stelfox ARCScI (1886 – 1971) was an Irish botanist, specialising in Mycetozoa.

Margarita Dawson Stelfox

ARCScI
Born
Margarita Dawson Mitchell

1886
Lisburn, Ireland
Died1971(1971-00-00) (aged 84–85)

Life

Margarita Dawson Stelfox was born Margarita Dawson Mitchell in 1886 in Lisburn to Elizabeth (née Pounden) and the Rev. George P. Mitchell.[1][2] She studied chemistry at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, the only woman in her class, and graduated in 1908.[2] She spent a year teaching in Waterford before returning to Belfast to take up a post at Victoria College.[2] She continued to teach there part time, once she became a student of botany at the newly-constituted The Queen's University of Belfast, from which graduated with honours in 1912, having won the Danville Studentship.[2]

She joined the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club in 1909, where she met Arthur Wilson Stelfox—in the year 1911/1912, the pair were listed as the club's joint honorary secretaries.[3] They married in 1914.[4] During their engagement, she was offered a teaching post at The Queen's University, but declined it due to her impending marriage.[2] The couple had three children, two sons and a daughter. One son and their daughter died in childhood.

During World War I the couple worked as fruit-growers in Ballymagee, County Down. They moved to Dublin in 1920, when her husband was offered the job of assistant naturalist in the Natural History Museum there.[5] The family home was on Clareville Road, Harold's Cross. In the early 1920s, with her husband as collaborator, she produced a textbook for primary schools, The National Programme of Rural Science or Nature Study, published by the Educational Company of Ireland.[2] In October 1925, the couple jointly found the first confirmed record of the rare slime mold Diderma lucidum in Ireland, at Powerscourt Waterfall.[2] In 1947 they found the first occurrence of the alpine myxomycete Lepidoderma carestianum in the British Isles, at Ben Lawers; the specimen was not identified until 1965.[2]

He recognised her knowledge, and in 1941 wrote:[6]

That an ant not previously recorded from Ireland should enter the house of one of the few people in the country who would recognise it seems a very remote possibility, yet on the 17th September 1941, such a coincidence happened ... (bringing in the washing after a warm day) my wife found, wrapped in a handkerchief, a small winged hymenopteron, which on examination proved to be a female of the ant.Ponera punctatissima Roger. not previously found in Ireland.

After her husband's 1948 retirement they moved to Newcastle, County Down.[7] [8]

She was one of the few Irish botanists of her time who specialised in Mycetozoa. She collaborated with Margaret Williamson Rea, co-authoring at least one paper with her.[9] Specimens collected by the two women form part of the Stelfox Collection in the herbarium of the Ulster Museum.[10]

After several months of illness, Margarita Stelfox died on 13 August 1971; her husband died eight months later.[2]

References
  1. Praeger, Robert Lloyd (1949). Some Irish Naturalists: A Biographical Note-book. Dundalk: W.Tempest, Dundalgan Press. Archived from the original on 2015-01-23. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
  2. "Margarita Dawson Stelfox, 1886-1971". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 17 (9): 296–297. 1973. ISSN 0021-1311. JSTOR 25537622.
  3. "Annual Report". Annual Reports and Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club. Belfast Naturalists' Field Club: 484. 1912.
  4. Ogilvie, Marilyn; Harvey, Joy (2000). The biographical dictionary of women in science : pioneering lives from ancient times to the mid-20th century. New York: Routledge. p. 1226. ISBN 9781135963439.
  5. McMillan, Nora F. "Arthur Wilson Stelfox, 1896 - 1970". Journal of Conchology. 27: 520–522.
  6. Stelfox, Arthur Wilson (1941). "An Ant New to the Irish List". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 8: 44. ISSN 0021-1311.
  7. Graham; Marcus; Heal. "Arthur Wilson Stelfox, 1883 - 1972". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 17 (9): 285–295.
  8. O'Brien, Andrew (2009). "Stelfox, Arthur Wilson". In McGuire, James; Quinn, James (eds.). Dictionary of Irish Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  9. Rea, Margaret W.; Stelfox, Margarita D. (1917). "Some Records for Irish Mycetozoa". The Irish Naturalist. 26 (4): 57–65. ISSN 2009-2598. JSTOR 25524605.
  10. Hackney, Paul (1973). "Additional Notes on the Herbarium of the Ulster Museum". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 17 (9): 318. ISSN 0021-1311. JSTOR 25537631.
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