Ian Hepburn

Ian Hepburn (29 May 1902 – 3 July 1974) was a British schoolmaster, botanist, ecologist and author.

Early life and education

Hepburn was born in Kensington, London, in 1902. He had a sister, Elspeth. His family later moved to North Cornwall, onto the Rock in the estuary of the River Camel, where he developed a love of nature and the sea. He was educated at Gresham's School in Norfolk, where he earned a scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford to study natural sciences. He published papers on the vegetation of coastal Cornwall and Norfolk (places he had known from boyhood), and on that of Northamptonshire Jurassic limestone. He served on the Council of the British Ecological Society, and was active as a journal editor. He was a member of several natural history clubs and trusts in Northamptonshire and, later, Cambridgeshire. An early review remarks, "This book, so clearly and unpretentiously written, so admirably illustrated, is imaginatively stimulating to a quite unusual degree. No fringe of beach or, scrubby headland, no strip of brackish marsh, no tidal estuary can seem, when one has read it, devoid of interest."

Personal life

Hepburn married Phyllis Champ, daughter of the school's Director of Music, in 1947.