Edmund William Mason was christened in
Barking on 30 March 1890. After secondary education at
Oundle School he matriculated at
St John's College, Cambridge. There he graduated in 1912 with a degree in botany and later was awarded a diploma in agriculture. At the beginning of WWI, he became a commissioned officer in the
Northumberland Fusiliers. In 1916 in the
Battle of the Somme, he was severely wounded. Upon his recovery he spent the remainder of the war attached to the
Durham Light Infantry. In 1919 he became a graduate student at the
University of Birmingham, where he graduated with an M.Sc. in 1921. and Una Mason (who died in 1974) served as the vice-president for one year from 1945 to 1946. He was also the president for one year from 1953 to 1954 for the
Yorkshire Naturalists' Union. In their 1976 obituary for E. W. Mason, the mycologists
Martin Beazor Ellis and
Stanley John Hughes claimed that Mason "did as much for mycology as anybody in this century." ==Selected publications==