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Marguerite Cooper (Henry, 1913)

Renowned crustaceologist, Marguerite Henry (1913) was awarded three Macleay Fellowships by the Linnean Society of NSW for research into freshwater pond life. From 1919 to 1924 she published eight scientific papers on the freshwater entomostracans (crustaceans) of Australia and New Zealand. She was elected a member of the Linnean Society of NSW in 1920.

Marguerite Cooper (Henry, 1913), known as Madge at School, enrolled at Â鶹ÊÓƵ School in 1907 at the age of 11. Her sister Helene Meyers (Henry, 1924) enrolled aged 11 in 1918, the year Marguerite entered university.

In her final year at Â鶹ÊÓƵ School, Marguerite won the 1913 Speech Night prizes for Senior French and Senior Botany Science Diagrams. She achieved honours in English and Botany in the Leaving Certificate¹ and won a University Exhibition (scholarship) to the University of Sydney where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and Botany in 1917.

On 18 December 1914, the Sydney Morning Herald report on the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Science stated that Marguerite Henry had won first-year Honors (with ‘Distinction’) in Botany and a scholarship by examination.

A University of Sydney alumni article in the Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February 1917, under the title ‘Girl Scientists’ reported: ‘Two of our brilliant women graduates, Miss Marguerite Henry, of the Public Health Department, and Miss Eleanor Chase, both Bachelor of Science graduates of Sydney University, have been spending the beginning of this year in an occupation which is certainly a novel one for women. They have been dissecting March flies on the Manning River at Kew near Taree; Miss Chase acting as Miss Henry’s assistant.’

They were there to investigate any sources that might lead to information about nodules in beef, ‘those destructive defects which do so much harm to the meat export trade by lowering the value of the carcass’. March flies were suspects, and, consequently, they devoted their time to the anatomy of the scores of different kinds of march flies.

Marguerite then undertook work on the life history of the nematode Onchocerca gibsoni, a parasite of cattle, as an assistant zoologist for a special committee of the Commonwealth Advisory Council of Science and Industry. This research was centred on an experimental station at Kendall, on the mid-north coast of NSW. Off-season efforts were continued in the zoological laboratory of the university. This occupied the greater part of three years and the findings were published in the 1920 Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Ferguson E. W., and Henry M., 1920. Tabanidae from Camden Haven District, New South Wales, with descriptions of new species. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 44(4): 828-849.).

During the years she worked on the freshwater entomostracans (crustaceans) of Australia and New Zealand (1919 to 1924), Marguerite named seven species in the copepod subclass and the calanoid genus Gladioferens. (This work was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1919.) She also described twelve new cladocerans, eight new ostracodes, and six new phyllopods.

A new life with marriage and children started in 1925 and she left her profession to focus on her family.

Marguerite is memorialised in the freshwater crustacean copepod species Gladioferens henryae (Brehm, 1950) and Canthocamptus henryae (Hamond, 1988) and her work has recently been included in a three-volume history on copepodology written by an American copepodologist.

In the 1936 Â鶹ÊÓƵ School publication Jubilee, Marguerite reminisced:

"Every year [at school] was better than the last, right up to sixth form, with its extra responsibilities and deeper fellowships. Everyone of us loved those last two years. The work was so interesting: Botany with Miss Mabel Sutton, an unforgettable experience and History with Miss Griffiths, who made it live and encouraged us to argue, quite the first time we had been allowed, much less encouraged, to indulge in this practice."

"The Sports took an important part in our lives: we played tennis, hockey and basket ball, and were considered very ‘modern’ because we had a Sports Day² and ran races like our brothers … The sporting spirit was always excellent … Surely it was this early developed team spirit which enabled the School to be so successful in inter-school contests."

Footnotes

1. The Leaving Certificate was the precursor to the HSC/IB.
2. On 3 November 1906, Â鶹ÊÓƵ School became the first school in Australia to hold an Athletics Sports Carnival for girls.

References

Sydney Morning Herald articles were sourced from Trove, National Library of Australia.