Captain Cyril Diver, C.B., C.B.E., (1892 – 17 February 1969), was a civil servant and amateur naturalist. He became the first Director-General of the Nature Conservancy.
Diver was born in 1892, the son of Lt Colonel C Diver and the author, Maud Diver. Educated at Dover College and Trinity College, Oxford, after serving in France during World War I, he became a clerk in the House of Commons.[1]
In the 1930s he performed a systematic survey of the varied ecosystems of Studland, Dorset.[2] A keen naturalist he was especially interested in molluscan ecology and genetics.
During the war he was a clerk to the select committee on national expenditure. In May 1940 the House of Commons appointed its "Miss K Midwinter" as the first woman to be a clerk. She was initially placed as an assistant to "Captain Diver", but she went on to have her own committee in the following year.[3]
Between 2012 and 2015, the National Trust ran a citizen science project named after Cyril – the Cyril Diver Project that was designed to carry out a comprehensive ecological survey of the Studland peninsula in a similar manner to Diver's original study.[4]