Chris Yeates

This comes as something of a shock – and very sad news indeed.

As many viewers on here will know, Chris was an exceptionally knowledgeable mycologist, and as already mentioned, someone who was always willing to freely pass on that knowledge to anyone with genuine interest in fungi.

Through several twists of fate, I never actually had the pleasure of meeting Chris, but over the years, through email correspondence and posts on here, in fact, from my very first tentative posts on the now long defunct Wild About Britain, as someone with no mycological knowledge whatsoever, Chris helped me to improve my mycological knowledge more than I could ever have wished for.

I send my sincere condolences to Chris’s family and friends, and truly hope that the immense amount of work he has created over his mycological career will somehow be preserved and made available for the benefit of all mycologists present and future.

R.I.P. Chris – you will be sorely missed.

Carol Hobart has written an obituary of Chris on the BMS site https://www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/society/obituaries/chris-yeates. I had no idea that he was a pioneer in the use of RECORDER, but I did know he knew Bill Ely well.

There is also an article about Chris in the February issue of Field Mycology.

Unlike others I did meet Chris once on a WAB excursion to Anston Stones Wood in 2010 (IIRC). Les Coe had picked me up from Worksop station and we then picked up Chris at Kiveton Park. (AFAIK Chris never drove, notwithstanding the impression given when he appeared on CountryFile to talk about Knurr and Spell, and demonstrate equipment from the Huddersfield Museum collection).

Chris and I spent most of the morning together.

I lead him up a steep bank under the railway where he not only showed me a couple of Milesina species, but also a gall on Yellow Archangel.

We retreated to the stream at the lowest level of the wood, where Chris produced his piece de resistance. I’d been intriqued by the plastic spoon attached to his walking pole by several elastic bands. He now produced tubes of fixative from his rucksac, reversed the spoon to extend beyond the ferule and lengthed his pole. So prepared, he sampled foam from a small waterfall with the spoon, fixing the sample immediately. He was looking for Ingoldian fungi, and I think found 2-3 new species for Yorkshire from these samples. (I looked these fungi up that evening in Spooner & Roberts New Naturalist; years later I discovered a fomer colleague, Ursula Mittwoch, had Ingold as her external PhD examiner).

When we rejoined the party, Chris pointed out a rare Liverwort on a railway bridge. On leaving the wood we also simultaneously noticed Poplar suckers at the top of the wood, followed by the amused realisation that there was a mature tree a little further from the path.

IRL Chris in the field was exactly the same kind, informative person as he always was here and on WAB. I count myself lucky to have met him and spent time in the field with him.