Charles Burford Goodhart, M.A., Ph.D., F.L.S., 1919 – 2000

Charles Goodhart, Cambridge zoologist and Fellow of the Eugenics Society since 1956, died in December 2000 at the age of 81. He was a member of the Council at the time of his death, as he had been since 1994.

Goodhart was a complete zoologist of the old school, and there was no organism larger than an amoeba whose life history he did not know in intimate detail. He used this background of scholarly knowledge to extrapolate to man, whose activities he viewed from the dual perspective of Darwinian evolution and high Anglicanism.

He went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1937, and from a brilliant undergraduate start progressed to an outwardly orthodox academic career at Cambridge interrupted only by the Second World War, in which, as a Captain in the Royal Tank Regiment, he was taken prisoner in Italy. As Italy fell to the Allies he managed to escape from the train taking him and his fellow-prisoners to Germany, only to be recaptured. Whilst a prisoner of war in Germany he added Russian to his fluent French and Italian.

After the war he was elected to a Research Fellowship at Caius, and then to a Demonstratorship in the University’s Department of Zoology, and finally to a University Lectureship in the Department (at the time regarded as the ‘career grade’ at Cambridge when held together with a college teaching fellowship). The breadth of his zoological knowledge was much in evidence as Curator of Invertebrates in the Museum of Zoology and as a legendary leader of departmental field courses. He was an active Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.

Goodhart’s main area of research was the study of natural populations of the snail Cepaea nemoralis conveniently trapped on the banks of the Fenland dykes between the water and the road, but his contribution to Cambridge life was measured more in terms of his teaching and other activities. He was a Proctor in 1968, and wore his ‘Garden House riot’ scar with pride. In 1975 he became a member of the University’s Council of the Senate, where his trenchant expression of unfashionable views tended to obscure the enlightened suggestions he made on many issues. He was often keener to float a good idea for the sheer pleasure of the launch than he was to navigate it through the shoals of university business. He was Tutor, and then Senior Tutor, of his College, and enjoyed a Life Fellowship in retirement.

Never one to withhold an opinion, Goodhart used to claim that he was the liberal rock around which the tide of opinion flowed. He vigorously opposed ‘abortion on demand’ both through the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and at meetings of the Eugenics Society. Always preferring to call a spade a spade, he opposed the Society renaming itself the Galton Institute.

Charles is survived by his wife Diana, their three sons and a daughter, and numerous grandchildren.

A W F Edwards