Robert Harold Compton, botanist, was the son of Robert Ernest Compton and his wife Eleanor, born Wilkes. He completed his schooling at Mill Hill School, London, and continued his studies at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, in 1905. He obtained a first class pass in both Part I (1907) and Part II (1909) of the Natural Science Tripos, the latter with a distinction in botany, and was later awarded the MA degree. He was also awarded a Fellowship in his college and from 1911 to 1913 was a demonstrator in botany. His earliest papers dealt with the anatomy and morphology of Gymnosperms, Pteridophytes and Angiosperm seedlings. Among others he investigated the genetics of right- and left-handedness in cereals, a topic on which he read a paper at the Sixth International Genetics Conference in Paris in 1911. In 1914 he participated in a year-long expedition funded by the Royal Society and the Percy Sladen Trust Fund to New Caledonia and the Isle of Pines in the Pacific Ocean, where he made extensive collections, including new genera and new species, and developed an interest in taxonomy. The next year he married Katherine Askin Sealy in Sydney, Australia, with whom he had a daughter and a son. He was on war service from 1915 to 1918 during World War I.
In March 1919 Compton arrived in South Africa to take up his appointment (made in December 1917) as both director of the National Botanic Gardens of South Africa at Kirstenbosch and professor of botany at the University of Cape Town, succeeding H.H.W. Pearson*. At that time he had already published some two dozen papers, but had no teaching experience. He and the curator of Kirstenbosch, J.W. Mathews*, developed the botanic garden as a scientific, educational and cultural institution of global repute. In 1921 he established the first subsidiary garden of the National Botanic Gardens on a site at Whitehill, near Matjiesfontein. Ten years later he described the flora of the Whitehill district in a paper published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa (1931, Vol. 19, pp 269-329) in which two new genera and many new species were named. In 1965 he recorded the history of the National Botanic Gardens in Kirstenbosch, garden for a nation. The administration of Kirstenbosch and his teaching duties left little time for research, but he nonetheless became one of the foremost South African taxonomists, describing 11 new genera and over 200 new species of plants. His specimens were placed in the Bolus Herbarium, then housed at Kirstenbosch, but this herbarium was moved to the University of Cape Town in 1938. He experienced the move as a serious personal setback and in 1939 proceeded to establish a new herbarium (later named the Compton Herbarium) at Kirstenbosch, maintaining that any botanic garden requires the service of its own herbarium. Another of his initiatives was the founding of the Journal of South African Botany in 1935, which he edited until his retirement in 1953.
Upon his retirement Compton settled on his farm Ukutula, near Mbabane in Swaziland. The Swaziland government asked him to initiate a botanical survey of the country, which he did in 1955. His work was discontinued in 1966 when financial support for the project was withdrawn. By this time he had made some 11 000 collections which were identified and housed at the Botanical Research Institute in Pretoria. His preliminary results were published as "An annotated check list of the flora of Swaziland" (Journal of South African Botany, Supplement 6, 1966). He then started work on a full-scale flora of Swaziland, continuing the work after returning to Cape Town in 1971. His "Flora of Swaziland" appeared as Supplement 11 of the Journal of South African Botany in 1976.
Compton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa in 1921. He was president of the Mountain Club of South Africa from 1940 to 1953 and was elected an honorary member of the club in 1963. He was awarded the South Africa Medal (gold) of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1954 and served as president of the association in 1957. The Royal Horticultural Society honoured him by making him an Honorary Fellow in 1935 and awarding him the Veitch Gold Medal. He was twice elected president of the Southern African Museums Association, in 1945 and 1948. In 1924 he was president of the South African Biological Society. He was an honorary member of the Cape Natural History Club and a club consultant for non-flowering plants from 1934 to at least 1939. The University of Cape Town awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) degree in 1968. His name is commemorated in the New Caledonian genus Comptonella (family Rutaceae) and the South African genus Comptonanthus (family Asteraceae), as well as more than 30 species. He was a prolific collector, his numbers exceeding 35 000. The specimens he collected in New Caledonia are in the Natural History Museum, London; the originals of those collected in South Africa are in the Compton Herbarium and those from Swaziland in the National Herbarium in Pretoria.
Compton was a warm-hearted and genial person, with a quiet dignity and charismatic charm, affectionately known as "Cummy". He is remembered for his lifetime of devoted and distinguished service to Kirstenbosch and to South African botany.
