Master of Clare College, 1959-1975.
Born on 24 August 1904 at 12 Fairlop Road, north Leyton, London, the eldest of three sons of Herbert Charles Ashby, commercial clerk (and later accountant), and his wife, Helëna Maria, née Chater.
Educated at the City of London School and then Imperial College, London graduating in 1926 with a BSc, gaining first-class honours in botany and geology, and was awarded the Forbes medal. He was appointed a demonstrator at Imperial College which enabled him to begin his research on plant growth and development.
1929 - awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship and worked at the University of Chicago and the Desert Research Laboratory of the Carnegie Foundation. He returned to Imperial College in 1931 and was appointed as a lecturer.
26 December 1931 - he married (Elizabeth) Helen Margaret Farries, a graduate of Glasgow University who had won a scholarship to Imperial College to work for a PhD on fungal physiology. They had two sons: Michael Farries (b. 1935) and Peter Harries Chater (b. 1937).
1935 - moved to the University of Bristol as a reader in botany, where his teaching was mainly in genetics.
1938 - appointed to the professorship of botany in the University of Sydney.
During the Second World War he worked for the Australian Government and was the scientific counsellor and chargé d'affaires at the Australian legation in Moscow (1944-1946).
1946-1949 - Harrison Professor of Botany in the University of Manchester.
1950-1959 - President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University, Belfast.
Spring 1958 - Pre-elected Master of Clare College, the first Master from outside Cambridge. Such an election would have been forbidden by the College Statutes had he not first been elected to a Fellowship so that he could obtain a Cambridge degree by incorporation. After a year completing their duties in Belfast the Ashbys took up residence in the Master's lodge at Clare in April 1959.
The lodge became a home for chamber music by dons and students, including performances by a string quartet in which Ashby played the viola. His fostering of music in the College extended to the Chapel Choir which, with the inclusion of women students, contributed to Clare's growing reputation for distinction in music.
During his Mastership Clare Hall was founded. He also set up a study group which he chaired to consider the admittance of women. In May 1970 the Governing Body repealed the statute that prevented the admission of women. The following year the first two women Fellows were admitted and in 1972 Clare admitted thirty women undergraduates; by the 1990s about half of the Clare undergraduates were women.
1954-1966 - he spent ten periods in Africa and visited more than a dozen countries, serving on commissions, visiting groups, and governing bodies, and acting as consultant and lecturer
1959-1961 - Chairman of a commission sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation to advise on the development of universities in Nigeria
1959-1967 - member of the University Grants Committee
1960-1969 - chairman of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission
1963 - President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
1963 - Fellow of the Royal Society
1971-1973 - first Chairman of the standing Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
1974 - chaired a working to examine the possible hazards for the environment from genetically engineered organisms
1956 - Knighted
1973 - Life Peer
1975 - retired
22 October 1992 – he died in Cambridge.
