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Featured Biography: Charles Alfred Barber
Charles Alfred Barber
Charles Alfred Barber was a British botanist and taxonomist, he was born on November 10, 1860 in Wynberg, Cape Town. He was the son of William Barber, and Edith Leather, who was the daughter of the Reverend G. R. Osborne. Charles Barber went to study at New Kingswood, Bath and later at Bonn University. He joined Cambridge University and received an MA in 1892 and a Sc.D. in 1908.
In 1892 he joined in the Leeward Islands as a Superintendent of the Botanical Station and worked for four years before joining as a lecturer in botany at the Royal Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill. In 1898 he joined the Madras Presidency as Government Botanist, where he was given the assignment to make a comprehensive study of plants for the preparation of a of registry titled “Flora of the Madras Presidency.”
He studied root-parasitism in plants from 1906-1908 and was appointed to the government of India as Sugarcane Expert in 1912.
The varieties of sugarcane available for cultivation were limited at the time, and attempts at creating new ones had failed. In a paper titled “Some Difficulties in the Improvement of Indian Sugarcanes,” published in January of 1915, Dr. Barber stated:
“The need for improving the class of sugarcane grown in India has long been recognised, and fitful efforts in this direction have been made during the last hundred years or more. These efforts have, almost uniformly, resulted in failure, chiefly owing to a lack of appreciation of the factors involved. The subject has, however, again forced itself on the attention of Government because of the steadily increasing imports into India of Java sugar. There is, in India, a much larger acreage under sugarcane than in any other country and it has been not unreasonably maintained that there must be something wrong if it cannot supply its own demand for sugar. The produce of the fields is, however, so low that it is quite insufficient to meet the demands of the growing population.
In approaching the problem anew, it has been considered advisable to make a closer study of the canes themselves and the conditions of soil and climate under which they grow than appears to have been done before, and certain intrinsic difficulties have been met with which may very easily account for former failures.”
Dr. Barber worked on many aspects of sugarcane breeding and in botany, leading to the establishment of a sugarcane research station that is now known as the Sugarcane breeding institute at Coimbatore. He focused on the transfer of commercially useful traits from “noble” cane to Indian cane, a process that is referred to as the nobilization of Indian canes.
Sugarcane
Following are a few of his achievements in the field of sugarcane cultivars:
• Along with T. S. Venkatraman, he developed hybrid sugarcane varieties suitable for India, including hybrids between local and hardy canes from India and the tropical high-sugar yielding Saccharum officinarum which did not survive in the winter of northern India. These are now called Saccharum barberi in honor of him.
• He was instrumental in identifying the first interspecific hybrid Co 205, released for commercial cultivation.
• And in doing so, he was the architect of the first successful inter-generic hybrid between S. officinarum clone ‘Vellai’ and Narenga porphyiocana.
In 1918 Dr. Barber was recognized as a C.I.E. (Commander of the Indian Empire) and in 1919 he became a lecturer on Tropical Agriculture at Cambridge University.
He was also the recipient of the Maynard-Ganga Ram prize in 1931 (awarded every three years for a discovery, invention or a new practical method which increases agricultural production in the Punjab).
He died at Cambridge on 23 February 1933.
Fun facts about sugarcane
Sources:
Sugarcane Breeding Institute, Coimbatore
Agricultural News, Volume 19