William Noel Benson, 1885-1957

• Published in: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 1958
• Subjects: Shackleton; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1958.0003; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1958.0003

William Noel Benson was born near London on 26 December 1885, the son of William Benson, an English Quaker, who was a shipping manager, and who shortly afterwards took up residence in Tasmania. Benson was educated at The Friends’ School, Hobart, and later at the University of Hobart and the University of Sydney, where he came under the influence of the inspiring personality and teaching of Edgeworth David. While still at Sydney and before even graduating, he published a paper on the contact aureole of a granitic body. He graduated in 1907 with First Class Honours in Geology-Mineralogy, and in the following year, during Mawson’s absence in Antarctica with the Shackleton expedition, he acted as Lecturer in Mineralogy and Petrology in the University of Adelaide. Three papers followed this sojourn in South Australia, two on the petrology of Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian rocks from the Barossa Ranges and Blinman, in which he postulated the existence of a titanium-rich Houghton magma, and one on the geomorphology of the Mt Lofty Ranges, in which he was the first to put forward the idea of Cainozoic step-faulting.