“Ben’’ Battle was born in 1919 and educated at Leeds and Cambridge Universities. While still reading for his honours degree in Geography he led the Leeds University Expedition to East Greenland in 1948, where he worked on the Pasterze Glacier. In 1949 he continued this field work on neighbouring Clavering Ø. He therefore came to the Geography Department at Cambridge in 1949 as a research student with considerable field experience. His Greenland work demonstrated the erratic movement of the Pasterze Glacier, and he concerned himself particularly with temperature and other conditions in bergschrunds, where his ability as a climber and his determination as a research worker enabled him to gain valuable information under the most arduous conditions. While at Cambridge he worked in Jotunheimen in 1950 and 1951, and in the Jungfraujoch area in the easter and summer vacations of 1951. His results showed that temperatures in bergschrunds changed far less than had been widely suggested; they rarely, if ever, rose above 0° C. and rarely fell more than a very few degrees below it. In the laboratory he subjected various rock samples repeatedly to those changes of temperature which he had found to occur in nature, and even his careful “beam” tests showed that the rock specimens suffered little or no damage. It can be confidently stated that his work alone would have gone far to discredit the earlier bergschrund hypothesis of cirque erosion, which assumed that rises and falls of temperature across the freezing point led to the disintegration of bedrock. It did much to limit my own enthusiasm for the melt-water variant of this hypothesis, and in doing so encouraged us to look elsewhere for an explanation of erosion deep beneath a glacier.
In addition to his five published papers an important contribution is ready for publication in the Royal Geographical Society’s research monograph Investigation on Norwegian Glaciers 1951–52; much besides of his Ph.D. thesis will be published with the assistance of Mrs. Battle.
Battle pursued his researches in his own dogged manner, and their success owed something to his not always taking the advice of those around him.
In 1952 he went to Montreal with a Senior Carnegie Fellowship and as a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at McGill University. In the summer of 1953 he joined the Arctic Institute Expedition to Baffin Island, where he worked on the glaciers descending from the Penny Highland to the Pangnirtung Pass. He met his death in a melt-water stream that had remained frozen over and concealed, while returning to camp across a portion of the glacier that had regularly been used as a route.
His popularity with his companions on this last expedition had fully equalled that with which he had been received in the wide circle of friends which his active and all too short life had encompassed.
