Wally Pitcher, who died last week aged 85, was a leading international authority on the nature and origin of granites. Irish geologists knew him through his long-continued research in Donegal, a county he loved for far more than just its geology and where he was known as Fir na Cloch.
His enthusiasm and engaging personality gave him a wide circle of friends. He was a superb performer in the lecture theatre, but it was in the field, before some granite exposure, that his full inspirational brilliance was revealed.
Those who joined him on excursions in Donegal will ever carry with them the memory of a great geologist. He was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1977 and in 1983 he received from the University of Dublin the degree of ScD (honoris causa).
Born in 1919 in Acton, west London, Pitcher attended Acton Central school, Hounslow school and Bulstrode school. When he was 10, the purchase of a battered copy of Charles Lyell's Elements of Geology gave to his life its eventual orientation. Apprenticed at 17 as an assayer with George T. Holloway and Co., he enrolled in a part-time degree course in chemistry and geology at Chelsea Polytechnic.
During the second World War, he served as a sergeant medical orderly in the RAMC. He renewed his studies, now full-time, at Chelsea after the war and graduated in 1947.
There followed successive appointments as demonstrator, assistant lecturer and lecturer in Imperial College London, in the department of the distinguished H.H. Read.
Pitcher soon discovered that his wish to study tertiary fauna was deemed inappropriate in a department concerned with metamorphic and granitic rocks. Read was involved internationally in the lively granite controversy and, on a recommendation from R.M. Shackleton, he sent Pitcher to look at the granites of Donegal.
His early work on the Thorr Granite both earned him a PhD in 1950 and placed him at the cutting edge of granite studies. For almost 25 years he directed granite research in Donegal, where the programme eventually came to involve about 40 scientists.
An appointment in 1955 as university reader at King's College London afforded him the opportunity to study granites in the northern half of Nigeria, thus improving his knowledge of granites in their large-scale settings.
Pitcher was appointed George Herdman Professor of Geology in Liverpool University in 1962. National and international recognition came as his Donegal work continued. Especially noteworthy was his Geology Of Donegal: A Study Of Granite Emplacement And Unroofing (with A.R. Berger) published in 1972.
He initiated new work in Peru, where the three dimensions offered by the granitic coastal batholith of the Peruvian Andes attracted his attention. For almost 20 years a large team of scientists mapped and studied a 1,300-km segment, relating their findings to subduction of the Pacific plate beneath South America.
Collaboration with local scientists, as well as with E.J. Cobbing and his team from the British Geological Survey, all proved extremely fruitful. Pitcher was a key member of the Circum-Pacific granite group, led by P.C. Bateman, and that group once visited Donegal.
Retirement in 1981 provided time for further involvement in Donegal and Peru, and for the writing of three more outstanding books: Magmatism At A Plate Edge: The Peruvian Andes (with P. Atherton, E.J. Cobbing and R.D. Beckinsale, 1985); The Nature And Origin Of Granite (1993, 2nd edition 1997); and A Master Class Guide To The Granites Of Donegal (with D.H.W. Hutton - Geological Survey of Ireland in 2003).
Pitcher deposited copies of his Donegal field-maps in the Geological Survey of Ireland where they serve as an Irish memorial to one of the greatest geologists ever to have hammered an Irish rock. Many in Donegal who have no knowledge of granites will cherish fond memories of him.
On one of his last visits to the county, he needed to confirm an observation made 30 years before. Punctilious about manners in the field, he sought permission from the farmer upon whose land lay the exposure in question.
"I had no objection when you were here 30 years ago," replied the farmer, "and I've no objection now, and I see you're still carrying the very same notebook!"
He married Stella Ann Scott in 1947 and they had two sons and two daughters.
Wally Pitcher: born, March 3rd, 1919; died September 4th, 2004