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Frederic William Harmer was born on 24 April 1835 in Norwich. His father, Thomas Harmer, was a partner in the local clothes manufacturing company Harmer and Rivett. At the age of 15, Frederic joined the family firm and would eventually change the firm's name to F W Harmer and Co.
The early period of his life was focussed on business, but in 1864 he met the younger Valentine Searles Wood (1830-1884) on the Mundesley shore and began a firm friendship and geological partnership. Together they studied the Pliocene deposits, the fauna of which was then being described in the monographs of the Palaeontographical Society ('The Crag Mollusca') by Searles Wood the elder. The Drift deposits also engaged their attention, and between them the two men surveyed an area of 2000 square miles, Harmer undertaking the survey of Norfolk and Northern Suffolk. Their map, produced on a scale of 1 inch to the mile, was claimed to be the first 'drift' map of the kind.
The prolonged illness and then death of the younger Searles Wood in 1884, and his reluctance to study geology alone, saw Harmer devoting the next few years to municipal duties and politics of the day. However a disagreement over the question of Irish Home Rule, caused Harmer to return whole-heartedly to geology.
His later work concerned the Tertiary and Quaternary deposits of East Anglia and the Continent, and comparing the Pliocene sequence in Britain with that in Holland and Belgium. He devoted the last few years of his life updating the 'Monograph of the Crag Mollusca'. Harmer died on 11 April 1923.
He became a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1869, and was awarded the Murchison Medal in 1902 in recognition of his work on the Pliocene and other deposits of East Anglia.