Pitcher was born in
London and became interested in
fossils in childhood. At 17 he started work as an assistant
assayer, attending college part-time to study for a degree in Chemistry and Geology at Chelsea College, London, graduating after war service in 1947. Professor
Herbert Harold Read of
Imperial College offered him a post as a Demonstrator with the opportunity to study
granite rocks in Donegal, and Pitcher, with his wife Stella Scutt, started in 1948 a 25-year programme of rock mapping in Donegal. He was promoted to Assistant Lecturer (1948) and then to Lecturer (1950–1955). He developed new procedures based on
colorimetry and flame-photometry which speeded up the rock analyses. In 1972 he published
The Geology of Donegal: A Study of Granite Emplacement and Unroofing. In 1955 he moved to
King's College London as Reader in Geology and then in 1962 to the George Herdman Chair of Geology at the
University of Liverpool where he remained until retirement in 1981. Whilst at Liverpool he took part in field surveys of the rocks in the
Peruvian
Andes. He held the post of Secretary (1970–1973), Foreign Secretary (1974–1975) and then President (1977–1978) of the
Geological Society, and awarded the
Murchison Medal in 1979. He was a founder member of the
Institution of Geologists and their
Aberconway Medallist in 1983. He wrote another book,
The Nature of and Origin of Granite (1993); second edition (1997). ==References==