David R. Oldroyd

David Roger Oldroyd (20 January 1936, Luton – 7 November 2014, Sydney) was an English-Australian historian of the geological sciences.

Biography During WW II, he was sent, with many other children, to the safety of the Lake District. After studying sciences at Luton Grammar School, he entered in 1955 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied chemistry and geology and graduated in 1958 with a B.A. in Natural Sciences. In 1958 he became, in Harrow, London, a school teacher and, in a ceremony in Stroud, married Jane Dawes. He met her in the National Youth Orchestra — he played the cello and she played the oboe. While teaching, he began to attend evening classes to gain an M.Sc. in the history of science at University College London. In 1962 he and his wife emigrated from England to New Zealand, where he wrote Geology in New Zealand Prior to 1900 as his M.Sc. dissertation. He was examined, and passed postally, by Victor Eyles, His best known book might be The Highlands controversy: constructing geological knowledge through fieldwork in nineteenth-century Britain. which is a member organization of the American Geosciences Institute (AGI).

Oldroyd was elected in 1994 a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He received in 1994 the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal of the Geological Society of London, in 1999 the History of Geology Award of the Geological Society of America, His last award was the 2014 Tom Vallance Medal of the Geological Society of Australia — the medal was awarded in absentia because Oldroyd was dying from a brain tumour.

As editor

(reprint of 1983 1st edition)