Rollo Russell

Francis Albert Rollo Russell (11 July 1849 – 30 March 1914) was an English meteorologist and scientific writer. Russell was also an alternative cancer treatment advocate who promoted the idea that cancer is caused by excessive consumption of meat, alcohol, coffee and tea.

Russell was born at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park. He was the third son of then-serving Prime Minister Lord John Russell and was the uncle of Bertrand Russell. His mother was Lord Russell's second wife, Lady Frances. Russell was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and graduated with distinction in natural science in 1872. He worked as clerk for the British Foreign Office. Russell was reclusive and a shy man. He suffered from poor eyesight, resigned from the British Civil Service in 1888 and took up scientific writing. He studied the relationship between atmosphere and disease.

Russell married Alice Sophia Godfrey in 1885; they had a son Arthur. She died within a year and Russell married Gertrude Ellen Cornelia Joachim (sister of Harold H. Joachim) in 1891. They had a son John and a daughter Margaret. Russell was a Unitarian and a founding member of the Unitarian Christian Church in Richmond, in 1888. Russell has been described as an "advocate of vegetarianism".

The Nature journal positively reviewed Russell's Epidemics, Plagues and Fevers as a valuable service to public health for collecting important facts concerning preventable diseases.

Bertrand Russell in his autobiography noted that Rollo Russell stimulated his scientific interests. He wrote that Rollo Russell "suffered all his life from a morbid shyness so intense as to prevent him from achieving anything that involved contact with other human beings. But with me, so long as I was a child, he was not shy, and he used to display a vein of droll humour of which adults would not have suspected in him."

Russell died at Holland Street, Kensington from septicaemia. He is buried in the churchyard at Steep, Hampshire.

Russell contributed to the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society and Symon's Meteorological Magazine. He authored an influential pamphlet London Fogs, in 1880, in which he argued that "smoke in London has continued probably for many years to shorten the lives of thousands". It was a prophetic warning, more than 70 years before the Great London Smog of 1952 killed an estimated 12,000 people. Apart from documenting the effects of fog on health, such as lung diseases, it also listed the damage caused to buildings and monuments.

Russell became a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1868. He served on the council from 1879 to 1892 and in 1914, and was Vice-President 1893–1894. He co-authored an important meteorological paper on the global effects of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. His paper, On the Unusual Optical Phenomena of the Atmosphere, 1883–1886 co-authored with E. Douglas Archibald was published in the volume The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena by the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society.