Harry Edwin Laws was the son of James John Laws and his wife Emily Bloy. He graduated as Bachelor of Science (BSc) and
was a Fellow of the (British) Institute of Chemistry (FIC). Around 1909 he
worked at the Cooper Laboratory for Economic Research in Watford, England, but probably
in that same year came to South Africa to represent Cooper and Nephews, makers
of sheep dip, at their property in Gonubie Park, East London. He and B. Manning
published the results of an experimental investigation, "Eradication of ticks
by the starvation method", in the Agricultural
Journal of the Cape of Good Hope (Vol. 37, pp. 9-17) in 1910. They showed
that the number of ticks (and the diseases they transmit) can be drastically
reduced by periodic dipping, grass burning, and enclosing confined feeding areas
long enough to starve the ticks. Laws contributed a note on the same topic to
the Agricultural Journal of the Union
of South Africa the next year. Subsequently he contributed three more articles
to the same journal: "The tick-killing properties of sodium arsenate" and "Cattle
dipping at short intervals" (1913, Vol. 5), and "How ticks are killed when
cattle are dipped" (1913, Vol. 6).
A few years later W.F. Cooper and Laws published "Some
observations on the theory and practice of dipping" in the journal Parasitology (1915). One H.E. Laws,
presumably the same person, also contributed a paper on "Anaesthetic ether" to The Lancet (1927).
In 1910 Laws was a member of the South African Association
for the Advancement of Science. In March 1909 in East London he married Eveline Margaret Derrick.
