Ingold was one of the most influential mycologists of the twentieth century and president of the British Mycological Society where he organized the first international congress of mycologists. Born in Blackrock, Dublin, Cecil Terence Ingold was awarded a first-class honours in Botany from Queen’s University Belfast in 1926.

In 1944 he was appointed to probably the foremost chair in the UK in the field of mycology at Birkbeck. The Department of Botany had been led to prominence since 1909 by Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, pioneer in fungal genetics, who was made Professor in 1921.

At Birkbeck, Ingold continued to take a major role in the undergraduate teaching and was joined in 1946 by his wartime Leicester student Bryan Plunkett as lecturer, who remained with him permanently thereafter.

Ingold retired from post at Birkbeck in 1972 and is best remembered for his discovery of an entirely new group of fungi – the aquatic hyphomycetes – of which more than 300 species are now recognized.