Thomas Henry Holland

Sir Thomas Henry Holland

Early life Thomas Holland was born on 22 November 1868 in Helston, Cornwall, to John Holland and Grace Treloar Roberts who later emigrated to Canada to live in a farm in Springfield, Manitoba.

In 1884, Thomas won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Science, graduating with a first class degree in Geology. The dean at the Royal College of Science, Thomas Henry Huxley, made a great impression on Holland. He stayed on as an assistant to Professor John Wesley Judd and was awarded a Berkeley Fellowship at Owens College, Manchester, in 1889. Holland continued work on the gneisses of southern India that had earlier been classified by William King and Robert Bruce Foote. Holland reclassified the hypersthene granites as acidic (the charnockites, with the type being from St Thomas Mount), the intermediate, basic, and ultrabasic. In 1908, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (KCIE) for his services to the Geological Survey of India. He served the Government of India as the President of the Indian Munitions Board from 1916-1919. He was president of the British Association in 1928–1929.

Under the editorship of Holland a four volume "Provincial Geographies of India" series was published between 1913 and 1923 from the Cambridge University Press.

Holland was Rector of Imperial College London from 1922 to 1929 and Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1929 to 1944. The Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for 1939 was awarded to Sir Thomas H. Holland, "for his services to the mineral industries". He was also a member of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society.

Death Holland died unexpectedly at his home in Surbiton on 15 May 1947.

Family He married twice: firstly in 1896 to Frances Maud Chapman (d.1942); secondly in 1946, aged 78, to Helen Ethleen Verrall.