Charles Gardiner

Charles Irving Gardiner ([1868]-10th December 1940) was one of the leading figures in Gloucestershire geology from 1895 and for the next 45 years. In 1895 he was appointed Senior Science Master at Cheltenham College and Honorary Curator of their Museum. He was a contemporary of Sidney Savory Buckman, who helped him sort out the geology collections at the College Museum. The Cheltenham College museum was at that time the only public museum in Cheltenham, being open two days per week and contained the collections of the defunct Cheltenham Literary and Philosophical Institute. Gardiner donated some of his own Silurian fossils to the College Collection.

He wrote two books on geology: "An Introduction to Geology" in 1914 and "Geology" in 1923. He enjoyed field geology and mapped the three inliers in the Welsh Borderlands, May Hill, Usk, and Woolhope. He was well versed in igneous and metamorphic petrology and structural geology.

After his retirement from Cheltenham College in 1928, he was appointed as the first full-time professional Curator of the Cowle Trust museum in Stroud. He was responsible for obtaining their fine collection of fossil reptile and dinosaur bones, as well as a fine series of Pleistocene mammal material from the local gravel pits. He helped other museums including Gloucester, where he produced the first catalogue of the important Upton collection of brachiopods.

All this all came to an end with the outbreak of World War Two. Lionel Walrond, himself a Geological Curator, relates the story of what happened when the Cowle Trust buildings were requisitioned by the army without warning: "Gardiner arrived one morning to find a notice pinned on the door saying that the building had been requisitioned, and telling him to go home. Although they relented later on, Gardiner had by this time caught the train to join his relatives in Scotland, a couple of days later he suffered a seizure and died".

His collections are now at Bristol City Museum, Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge; The Natural History Museum and Portsmouth College of Technology.



Updated and corrected 20.6.1999