Roger Neves (1932–2020)

A holiday snapshot of Roger Neves at Rozel Bay, northeast Jersey, Channel Islands taken on the 20th September 1988. The photographer is not known. Roger was intensely camera-shy, and a very private person generally. Despite this, the authors have located the photograph above, and three others in the Supplemental Data.

1. Introduction

The distinguished palynologist Roger Neves died on the 29th of April 2020 at the age of eighty-nine. Roger worked all his career in the Department of Geology at the University of Sheffield, UK. He published extensively on Carboniferous miospores (Appendix to the Supplemental Data), gave his name to the ‘Neves Effect’, and supervised numerous postgraduate students (Wellman 2005). He is perhaps best known for his work as Director of the MSc course in Palynology at Sheffield. Many palaeopalynologists trained at Sheffield, and owe a substantial debt of gratitude to Roger for his advice, mentorship, tuition, and general wisdom.

2. Early years and university education

Roger Neves was born in Somercotes, Derbyshire, UK in 1932 to Fred and Daisy Neves. The family moved north to Sheffield in Yorkshire where Fred worked as a draughtsman in a large steel foundry. They lived in Tinsley in the Lower Don Valley, close to the centre of Sheffield’s legendary steel industry. As a child during World War II (WWII), Roger was evacuated to Dronfield in Derbyshire. After WWII in 1950, Roger was conscripted into two years of compulsory National Service. This was at the time of the Korean War (1950–1953), and he was fortunate to avoid active service because many of his regimental colleagues were killed in action during that conflict.

Roger studied as an undergraduate in the Department of Geology at the University of Sheffield between 1953 and 1956 (Photograph 1 in the Supplemental Data). Along with fellow bachelor’s students, he was involved in the departmental expeditions to produce the first geological maps of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (Downie et al. 1964, 1965). It is interesting to note that the first report of those expeditions was published in the journal Nature (Downie et al. 1956). How things have changed regarding the editorial policy of that journal! In those days, fieldwork in the African bush was demanding in many ways. Roger liked to tell a story about the local men who were employed to work as porters to carry boxes of rock samples for petrological analysis from remote fieldwork sites on the mountain down to the base camp. The porters obviously thought that the geologists were rather strange, bagging up pieces of rock and having heavy crates of these carried for miles. Consequently, the porters simply waited until nobody was looking, tipped the bags out, ran off down the mountain with the empty crates, and filled the bags back up with new rock samples immediately before entering the base camp. A rock is a rock, right? Unfortunately for the porters this practice was quickly spotted and curtailed.

Roger and his fiancée Barbara were undergraduates together at the University of Sheffield. They married in 1960 and lived in Nether Edge, a suburb in south Sheffield. Later, Roger and his family moved to the village of Edale in the Hope Valley, north Derbyshire. Here he had space to indulge in one of his favourite pastimes, renovating second-hand cars (some of which were sold to students!). Visitors were always welcome in Edale, particularly if they were prepared to ‘muck-in’ and help with manual tasks such as erecting wooden fences on the property.

3. Postgraduate research and a career at the University of Sheffield

At the University of Sheffield, Roger embarked upon research towards a PhD under the guidance of Professor Leslie Moore in 1956. Roger had become fascinated by the geology of the Mixon-Morridge anticline, an area of high moorland east of Leek in north Staffordshire where outcrops of the ‘middle’ Carboniferous bedrock were poor and the stratigraphy difficult to resolve, partly because of a lack of index macrofossils. The area was one of the last in England to be mapped by the British Geological Survey. Leslie Moore had already studied miospores from coals (Moore 1946), and work by Charles Downie and others in the Sheffield department had demonstrated that palynomorphs could be recovered in abundance from clastic sedimentary rocks and used in biostratigraphy. As a PhD student, Roger worked alongside Leonard Love, Bill Sarjeant and Herbert Sullivan, and later with George Hart and John Richardson (Sarjeant 1984). Working across the southern Pennines on sections dated by goniatites Roger successfully produced the first detailed miospore biostratigraphy for the Namurian (Serpukhovian and Bashkirian) (Neves 1959, 1961). He also recognised the variations in miospore assemblages from strata deposited in different palaeoenvironments (Neves 1958). This was termed the ‘Neves Effect’ by Chaloner (1958), and is driven by sea level fluctuations. It was concisely described by Riding et al. (2020, p. 137–138). Roger successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled An investigation into the Namurian microflora of parts of the southern Pennines in 1959.

Possibly because of his African fieldwork adventures described in section 2, when Roger returned to Sheffield, he ran night classes at the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). The WEA is a charity established in 1903 dedicated to bringing high-quality, professional education to all who need it. Initially it was firmly aimed at working class communities (Jennings 2002). Roger taught the rudiments of geology to adults with little or no formal education, typically coal miners and steelworkers from the Barnsley and Sheffield areas.

Almost immediately following his PhD defence, Roger was appointed as a lecturer in the Sheffield department, where he remained for his entire career. He rose through the ranks of academe to Reader, via Senior Lecturer. Roger immediately began to train PhD students, the first of these being Bernard Owens, extending the knowledge of the stratigraphical distribution of Carboniferous miospores (Owens 1963; Owens and Burgess 1965; Neves and Owens 1966; Riding et al. 2020). The concerted efforts to document the stratigraphical distributions of British Carboniferous miospores by several of Roger’s research students led to the publication of biozonations (Neves et al. 1972, 1973; Owens et al. 1977) which provided a significant contribution to the enduring standard zonal scheme of Clayton et al. (1977).

Roger supervised well over thirty PhD students on the palynology of the Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Many of his students went on to become notable palaeopalynologists in academia or industry. Roger’s PhD students included, in chronological order: Bernard Owens; Alan Marshall; David Mishell; Keith Gueinn; Dick Neville; Hassan Sabry; Graham Dolby; John Utting; Nicos Ioannides; Judi Lentin; John Williams; Geoff Clayton; Efe Sinanoglu; Jack Morbey; Frank Spode; Ken Higgs; Kam Lam; Jim Fenton; Tony Welsh; Chris Parry; Richard Porter; Bob Kiteley; Ron Woollam; Muzzahim Razzo; Jim Riding; Joanna Davis; Gordon Forbes; William Walton; Paul Williams; Qinhua Jiang; John Keating; Nick Butler; Duncan McLean; and Tony Loy. Between 1963 and 1975, most of these projects were on Carboniferous miospores. However, from the late 1970s onwards, the majority of the investigations supervised by Roger were on the Jurassic of offshore and onshore UK; this trend reflected his interests in the petroleum geology of the Mesozoic of the North Sea (Wellman 2005, p. 270–272). The number of PhD projects instigated and guided by Roger was truly exceptional. He also supervised MPhil projects and numerous MSc dissertations (Photograph 2 in the Supplemental Data, Wellman 2005, p. 272–278).

4. Applied palynology

The potential for the commercial application of stratigraphical palynology was immediately apparent to both Roger and his close colleague Charles Downie. In the early 1960s, they began to work with companies such as British Gas and Taylor Woodrow in their drilling campaigns searching for oil and gas in the Carboniferous successions of the Cleveland Basin in Yorkshire and the Jurassic strata of southern England. With the discovery of economic volumes of hydrocarbons in the North Sea in 1965, Neves and Downie were ideally placed to provide consulting services to exploration companies working on the UK sector.

Downie, Neves, and Moore all perceived substantial future demand for palaeopalynologists and in 1967 the University of Sheffield MSc course in palynology was set up, and convened by Roger and Charles. Roger was the Director of the course, and a very good judge of character; he took great pride in his selection of postgraduate students. He was also very proud indeed when his students obtained vocational employment, although he never pressured students to stay in the subject. Sheffield was to become one of the pre-eminent schools in palaeopalynology and trained more than 300 postgraduate students, many of whom went on to work as palynologists in academia and industry. The Sheffield department rapidly developed a worldwide reputation for excellence in stratigraphical palynology (Wellman 2005). Roger was rightly very proud of the substantial influence of Sheffield in palaeopalynology worldwide via the Department itself and its myriad alumni.

Also in 1967, Roger began to provide consultancy services for Conoco UK and established a close working relationship with their geologists and management. He and Charles Downie provided palynostratigraphical interpretations on almost all the North Sea wells drilled by Conoco until well into the 1990s. Roger retired from his full-time academic post in 1984 but maintained his consultancy work which was formalised with the setting up of the Industrial Palynology Unit in 1988. The Unit signed a contract to provide services to Conoco UK in 1992. Conoco had already funded a postdoctoral research fellow since 1985 and provided money for academic information technology support earlier in 1992.

5. The digital revolution

Roger Neves was an early adopter of, and advocate for, computers in geology. He had known W.H.C. (‘Bill’) Ramsbottom, an expert on Carboniferous palaeontology and stratigraphy (e.g. Ramsbottom 1973) and Chief Palaeontologist at the British Geological Survey in Leeds since his days as a PhD student. Bill was also very keen on computer applications and, in the early 1980s, Roger asked him to develop software which could produce range charts. Bill undertook this challenge and initially called his software ‘Rampal’. Version two was termed ‘Palpal’ and Bill gave it the catchy strapline ‘Palpal – the palynologist’s pal’. However, Palpal was rather cumbersome and user-unfriendly. It involved typing numerous lines of machine code and had no option to save work. It rapidly became known colloquially to its users as ‘Palpal – the palynologist’s enemy’. It was, somewhat grudgingly, used in Sheffield for several years. Eventually, in 1992, Roger convinced Conoco UK to pay for new computers, and commercially available, user-friendly software.

6. Conferences, societies, miospores named for Roger, and publications

Early in his career, Roger became an active member of the Commission Internationale de Microflore du Paléozoïque (CIMP). He was closely involved in several CIMP taxonomic Working Groups, for example for the genera Knoxisporites and Triquitrites, and presented results at CIMP conferences associated with the International Carboniferous Congress in Paris in 1963 (Neves 1964, Sullivan and Neves 1964). Roger was General Secretary of CIMP between 1967 and 1971, beginning his term of office at the CIMP meeting held prior to the International Carboniferous Congress in Sheffield in 1967. After this event, his attendance of scientific conferences substantially diminished; his papers to the CIMP conference in Liege in 1969 and at the Carboniferous Congress in Krefeld in 1971 were presented in absentia. Subsequently, Roger very rarely attended scientific conferences and other meetings except some held in the UK (Photograph 3 in the Supplemental Data). He much preferred his students to do the talking. In addition to CIMP, Roger had a long association with the Yorkshire Geological Society (YGS). In 1988, he instigated and raised the funds for the YGS Moore Medal in memory of Professor and Mrs Leslie Moore, and is awarded for ‘services to geology in the North of England’ (https://www.yorksgeolsoc.org.uk/awards). Roger was also a founder member of the British Micropalaeontological Group (now The Micropalaeontological Society).

Roger was honoured by the naming of three miospore taxa for him. These are the genus Nevesisporites (type species Nevesisporites vallatus), and the species Concentricisporites nevesii and Ginkgocycadophytus nevesii (now Cycadopites nevesii).

Between 1958 and 2005, Roger authored and co-authored 44 publications; these are all listed in the Appendix to the Supplemental Data. The main body of his research was on the Carboniferous miospores of northwest Europe, largely between 1958 and 1979. From 1980 onwards, the rate of Roger’s publications slowed markedly, doubtless due to the pressures of his consultancy work. A major career highlight was Neves and Downie (1967), a book documenting 24 geological excursions in the Sheffield region and the Peak District National Park. This volume clearly reflects Roger’s great affinity for northern England, especially Derbyshire and Yorkshire. He also published on dinoflagellate cysts (Fenton et al. 1980; Jiang et al. 1992), fossil osteocytes (Neves and Tarlo 1965), the geology of the Peak District (Kanaris-Sotiriou et al. 1986), igneous geology (Gibb et al. 1986), palynological preparation techniques (Neves and Dale 1963), and Mesozoic palynology (Morbey and Neves 1974; Neves and Selley 1975). Later in Roger’s career, he published several further articles on Carboniferous palynology, for example McLean and Neves (2003) and McLean et al. (2005).

7. Retirement and later years

In 1998, the Centre for Palynology, as the Industrial Palynology Unit had become, was relocated to the main the Sheffield campus on Western Bank. Previously it was sited on Mappin Street (Riding 2021, fig. 1). Rather than make this move, Roger decided to retire from his consultancy work. He maintained close friendships with colleagues, kept a keen interest in palynology, and Roger published several papers in the early years of his retirement. However, eventually his other interests took over and Roger visited the university less and less often. Former students from around the world would occasionally drop in to his house in Edale, and Roger was always interested to learn of the recent developments in geology and palynology. Following a series of short illnesses, Roger Neves died in Nether Edge, Sheffield on the 29th of April 2020. He is survived by his three children, seven grandchildren and one great granddaughter. Roger Neves’s influence on palynology was immense. He was one of the pioneers of Carboniferous miospore biostratigraphy, and facilitated much research on this topic via his numerous PhD students. However, a major part of his legacy is the Sheffield MSc course and his training of prodigious numbers of palaeopalynologists.

Acknowledgements

Austin Neves kindly helped the authors with information about Roger and some photographs. James B. Riding publishes with the approval of the Director, British Geological Survey (NERC).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).