C F B Shillito

by Mike Horne

Mr. Charles Shillito was the President of the Hull Geological Society from 1939 to 1947. He worked for the Earl of Yarborough in Lincolnshire. In his will he left a substantial sum of money to the Society. Due to his bequest the Society was able to reform as an educational charity in the 1960s and since then the Society has been able to maintain a full programme of meetings at moderate subscription rates for its members.

There is little in our archives about Mr. Shillito nor in our publications. He died at a time when the Society had stopped printing its Transactions. It is therefore fitting that we include two papers about him as a tribute, in this centenary publication, because the Society would probably not exist today if he had not remembered us so generously in his will.

The first is his obituary written by his close friend, the late, Mr. T B Parks:-

Charles Frederick Brightman Shillito was born at East Halton, Lincolnshire, and educated at Askern College, Doncaster, 0undle College, and also at Leeds, from where he became articled as an Architect.

As a young man he came to Scawby and worked on the estate of Col. Sutton Nelthorpe. In 1903 he came to Brocklesby and was architect on the estate of the Earls of Yarborough until 1949, when he was forced to retire owing to ill health. He died at Scarthoe Road Hospital, Grimsby, on the l0th December 1950, at the age of 80.

As a young man he became interested in Geology, and was later described as The Greatest Geologist in Lincolnshire.

He was also described as an authority on Cretaceous and Jurassic rocks and was even better known for his records of Lincolnshire wells and bores.

Some of his collection are considered the finest of their kind. He assisted in many important surveys in the County, and was a brilliant draughtsman and an outstanding microscopist.

Mr. Shilliio, a bachelor, was a member of the Hull Geological Society,- and President for many years, the Lincolnshire Naturalist Union, the Yorkshire Naturalist Union, the Sorby Natural History Society (Geological Section), Sheffield. Many of the Staff of the Geological Survey and Museum, London, paid high tribute to him for his very generous and helpful assistance in compiling the records of wells and borings to whom he gave very accurate details of many hundreds, together with levels and useful detail. In fact it was said that he gave more detailed work of this kind than any other individual, not in the profession.

His records too, of rainfall together with the rise and fall of springs taken most carefully over a period of many years and drawn to scale are indeed of great value to the department concerned with water supply.

One more study, that of Conchology should be mentioned. (Shells mainly from the Holocene Tufaceous deposits, mainly from Broughton and District, Lincolnshire).

As Mr. Shillito travelled many miles to gather samples of Marl, which when washed with great care and patience and identified by Messrs. J.F. Musham, A.S.Kennard, and Mr. Oldham, and numbering many many thousands with a great variety of species are regarded as one of the finest collections known.

A detailed account of the shells of this productive and important deposit was published in the Proceedings of the Mala-Cological Society, Vol. XXII, pt. VI pp. 374-9, November, 1937, by A.S.Kennard, A.L.S., F.G.S., and J.F. Musham.

Also many articles appeared from time to time in the Transactions of the Lincolnshire Naturalists Union.

Mr. Shillito was a hard working man with a profound knowledge of many subjects. It was of course as a Geologist that he was best known to us. But it is impossible in this place to do justice to his achievements.

Mr. Shillito had a truly charming manner and our Geologists have lost a diligent and enthusiastic colleague and the Societies and Unions to which he belonged one of the best of friends.

T.B. Parks. (signed)

The only paper published by Mr. Shillito in the Society's Transactions is about the Kirmington Fjord in volume 7 (1936).

But in the Society's archives are the notes for a paper he gave to the Society as a Presidential Address in 1948 on the Cretaceous of North Lincolnshire, which he illustrated with several cross sections of the area based upon his knowledge of the wells and boreholes. As far as we know the cross sections have been lost, but we reproduce some of the notes he had prepared for the lecture (and a map reconstructed to show the lines of the sections) to give the reader an indication of the vast knowledge Mr. Shillito had of the subject. The notes show that Mr. Shillito had prepared eleven cross sections and George de Boer remembers attending the meeting in his article in Humberside Geologist No. 6.

References :

Shillito, C.F.B 1936. The Kirmington Fjord. Transactions of the Hull Geological Society, 7, 125-9

de Boer, G 1988. The Hull Geological Society 1945-1962. Humberside Geologist No. 6, 5-6.

copyright Hull Geological Society 2021