Alexander Frederick Richmond “Sandy” Wollaston (1875 - 3 June 1930) was a British medical doctor, ornithologist, botanist, climber and explorer.

Wollaston was educated at Clifton College and studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1896 and qualifying as a surgeon in 1903.[1] However, he disliked the medical profession and preferred to spend his life on exploration and natural history. He travelled extensively, visiting Lapland, the Dolomites, Sudan and Japan, as well as participating in an expedition to the Ruwenzori Mountains of Uganda in 1905.
Wollaston was murdered by Douglas Potts, a student, at his rooms in Cambridge.


Expeditions to New Guinea

Wollaston participated in the BOU Expedition to the Snow Mountains of Netherlands New Guinea in 1910–11. The main aim was to climb the highest mountains there as well as to collect biological and ethnological specimens. However, the expedition was unsuccessful in its primary aim largely because of obfuscation by the Dutch authorities.

In 1912–13 Wollaston led a second expedition (the Wollaston Expedition) to New Guinea. There he succeeded in climbing to within 150 m of the summit of the Carstensz Pyramid, at 4884 m the highest peak on the island, and one not summited until 1962.[3][4] He is commemorated in the name of a bat – Wollaston's Roundleaf Bat, Hipposideros wollastoni.

A third expedition to New Guinea was planned but fell through because of the outbreak of the First World War, during which he served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy.

Wollaston took part (as doctor, ornithologist and botanist) in the first British reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest in 1921. It was in the course of this expedition that he discovered a new Primula, a flower which was subsequently named after him as Wollaston’s Primrose, Primula wollastonii.

In 1923 Wollaston married Mary "Polly" Meinertzhagen, the sister of Richard Meinertzhagen, with whom he had three children.

He was elected to a Fellowship in the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) in 1907, and received the Gill Memorial in 1914, followed by the RGS Patron's Medal in 1925 for his expeditions into Africa and New Guinea. He was appointed Honorary Secretary of the RGS in 1928.

Wollaston was invited by John Maynard Keynes to be a tutor at Cambridge. He was killed in 1930 in his rooms at King's College by a deranged student, D. N. Potts, who fatally shot Wollaston and a police officer before shooting himself in a triple murder-suicide.

My Father, Sandy
by Nicholas Wollaston
176pp, Short Books, £12.99

What can you say about fathers that hasn't been said before? We've had abusive, alcoholic fathers, baby-fathers, barefaced lying fathers, dead and dying fathers, Freudian and post-Freudian fathers, gay dads, mad dads and just about every kind of father in between.

Now the novelist and travel-writer Nicholas Wollaston has written a book about his father, who was shot dead by a deranged student in Cambridge in 1930, that really is unique - books about dead dons usually being mys- teries or essays in honour. Wollaston's book is both - and more.

Alexander Frederick Rich mond "Sandy" Wollaston was born in 1875. Educated at Clifton College and King's College, Cambridge, he was, as they say, a born naturalist, a boy with the proverbial ants in his pants. As soon as he got the opportunity he set off exploring. His first short expedition seems to have been to Lapland, which gave him the taste for adventure. He trained as a doctor, a profession which he hated and saw merely as a passport.

His great opportunity arrived when he was invited to join Charles Rothschild in the Sudan, collecting specimens for Rothschild's private natural history collection. After several trips to the Sudan he eventually returned to Cambridge to become, briefly, a house surgeon at Addenbrooke's, before joining a British Museum expedition to the Ruwenzori mountains on the borders of Uganda and the Belgian Congo. Just to get there took three months: "Slow boat to Mombasa, the new railway through Kenya to Lake Victoria, a steamer to Entebbe and rickshaw to Kampala, two weeks' march to Fort Portal, another week up into the Ruwenzori . . ."

Wollaston's book announces itself as intimate, as a memoir, but it is also a book about another age entirely, the age of whiskers and Kipling and Rider Haggard, when explorers wore tweeds and drank champagne. While climbing Ruwenzori, Sandy and his colleagues scattered flowers behind them in order to be able to retrace their steps. All this is extremely beguiling, but Wollaston does his best not to give in to nostalgia. His father was, he admits in a memorable phrase, on the evidence of his book From Ruwenzori to the Congo (1908), "touched with patriotism, tinged with racism". After the Congo, Sandy was then doctor on another British expedition to Dutch New Guinea (his book Pygmies and Papuans was published in 1912).

At the outbreak of war he joined the navy as a surgeon, where he seems to have spent five happy years circumnavigating the globe, writing his Letters of a Naval Surgeon , and being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He was then rightly elected to a six-year fellowship at his old college before being invited, in 1921, to join Mallory's first unsuccessful expedition to Mount Everest.

In 1923, aged 48, he married Mary Meinertzhagen who was 14 years his junior, but every bit as adventurous: they honeymooned in Colombia. Wollaston includes in his book photographs of his mother, in plaits, on honeymoon, bathing naked. They had three children, and Sandy became absorbed in the life and work of the college, which was not entirely to Mary's liking. "Though he wrote books and articles about his travels and won medals and honours, and his name was given to a mountain in Africa, a kind of Tibetan rabbit, a tree frog and a pipit and a bat from New Guinea, a Himalayan primula and a giant African lobelia and 40 other plants . . . he told her, 'I have been more proud of being a member of the college than of anything else in my life.'" It was ironic then that the college was also to be the death of him.

Wollaston's account of his father's bizarre death makes for gripping reading, but his death was the least of him and remains for Wollaston only the beginning. He was only four years old when Sandy was killed, and he's now in his 70s: the book is about falling in love with someone he never knew. "All his life that never-never land, the elusive Beyond, was the goal," he writes. Like father, like son.