John Henry (or Henri) Roosegaarde Bisschop (or Roosegaarde-Bisschop) was the son of August Roosegaarde-Bisschop and his wife Ada. He first obtained an Agricultural Diploma (Cum Laude) at Elsenburg School of Agriculture, Stellenbosch (1917), then a BSc (Agric) at the Transvaal University College (1920) and finally qualified as a veterinarian with the first group of eight students at the Veterinary Faculty, Onderstepoort, in 1925. He served for a while in the Department of Gynaecology/Surgery at the Veterinary Research Institute until 1927 when he took charge of the experimental station at Armoedsvlakte, near Vryburg. Here he collected a few hundred plants, which are housed in the herbarium of the National Botanical Research Institute, Pretoria. Although he returned to Onderstepoort in 1928 he remained in charge of the Armoedsvlakte station until 1958.
At Onderstepoort in 1930 Bisschop became lecturer and in 1936 professor in Zootechnics, until his retirement in 1962. In this capacity he became a recognized expert on the indigenous cattle breeds of Africa and their resistance to tropical diseases and acted as consultant to Swaziland (1943), Kenya (1945), Botswana (1946), Uganda (1949), Sudan (1951), Lesotho (1952), and Malawi (1953). He also published about 20 scientific papers. In South Africa he served, inter alia, on the Tomlinson Commission (1950-1956) as consultant on the development of rural areas. Documents relating to his work for the commission are housed at the University of Johannesburg.
Bisschop married Helena Neethling in August 1930 at Lydenburg, Transvaal. Both his sons qualified as veterinarians.
