Biographical dictionary
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Name |
Dates | Biography | |
|---|---|---|---|
| NORRIS, Adrian | b. 25 December 1942 | Born in Hull. A collection of 2000 plus insects including beetles is mentioned in the Fenscore database. (MD 5/04) | |
| NORTON, Frank (d. c.1949) | There is a collection of 3,00 beetles and some Hymonoptera Parasitica from Glamorgan in the NMW. Norton is recorded to have lived in Cardiff and to have supported the entomological group which developed around the enthusiasm of Howard Hallett. (1878-1958). (MD 5/04) | ||
| NURSE, Euston John | 1865-1945 | There are specimens bearing this name in a small collection of mainly local Lepidoptera and Coleoptera at Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery. (Fenscore). Gilbert (1977) mentions an obituary in Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc., 5, 1945, which I have not seen. (MD 5/04) | |
| OMER-COOPER, Joyce | Worker on water beetles who was wife of Professor Joseph Omer-Cooper (1893-1972) the distinquished invertebrate zoologist. Spent much of their professional lives in South Africa after he left Durham University in 1936 to take up the post of Senior Lecturer at Rhodes University College. She was a lecturer at King’s College, Newcastle in 1935 and a Northern Naturalist’s Union referee for Isopoda, Dytiscidae and Gyrinidae. It is not clear whether the collection of Coleoptera at the Hancock Museum (donated in 1982), was formed by her or her husband, or by both of them. | ||
| ORAM, Mr | Mentioned by Lott (2009) p.14 as a dealer in insects(?) living in Loughborough who sold 500 beetles to the Leicester Museum on 14 September 1878. He was apparently highly skilled at entomological preparations.(see Holyoak, H.) (MD 11/09) | ||
| ORMEROD, Eleanor Anne | 11 May 1828 – 19 July 1901 | Well known economic entomologist who wrote an autobiography together with transcripts of correspondence which was edited by Robert Wallace (348pp. Published by John Murray 1904. Includes portraits and illustrations). She was born at Sedbury in Gloucestershire the younger daughter of George Ormerod and educated at home. Following the capture of a locust in 1852 she became sufficiently interested in entomology that ‘In March I began my studies by buying my first entomological book, and I chose beetles for the subject, and Stephens’s Manual... for my teacher. Those who know the book will understand my difficulties.... But I made up my mind that I was going to learn [and] struck out a plan of my own. From time to time I got one of the very largest beetles I could find, something that I was quite sure of and turned it into my teacher. I carefully dissected it and matched the parts to the details of the description given by Stephens... Identification was very difficult for a long time but I ‘looked out’ my beetles laboriously till I was sure of the name, and then, to make quite certain, I took the subject the other way forward – worked back systematically from the species till I found that there was no other kind that it could be. Killing my specimens was another difficulty. I was told that if beetles were dropped into hot water death was instantaneous. I was not aware that it should be boiling. So into the kitchen I went with a water beetle.. . to my perfect horror, instead of being killed instantaneously it skimmed round and round on the water for perhaps a minute as if in the greatest agony... thenceforth I supplied myself with chloroform...’ (pp.54-55) Ormerod’s first publications, in 1874, included ‘Life history of Meligethes’ (EMM., 11, pp.46-52) and this was followed by numerous further notes including many on beetles of economic importance. The publications for which she is best known, however, were the series of 24 annual reports titled Notes of Observations of Injurious Insects, which she published entirely at her own expense from 1877, and several books including A Manual of Injurious Insects. With Methods of Prevention and Remedy for their Attacks to Food Crops, Forest Trees, and Fruit, 1881, with a second edition in 1890, and A Text Book of Agricultural Entomology, 1892, the last derived from lecture texts. Many of these works were illustrated by her sister Georgiana S. Ormerod. Ormerod was strong minded and self confident which sometimes lead to strained relations with the organisations for which she worked including the Royal Agricultural Society, of which she was Honorary Entomologist 1882-1892, and the RESL. Furthermore, it is clear that many entomologists found her amateur status, accentuated by her style of writing, difficult to accept, the EMM., for example, wrote in its obituary (37, 1901, p.230) that she was ‘able to impart information in a manner in which it came to be appreciated by the class of readers for whom it was intended.’ Although there was ‘Possibly... an occasional tendency to exaggerate the evils on which she was writing’. Smith (1986) p.139 notes that there is material in the HDO including beetles collected by Ormerod in Madeira (named by Bewicke); Harvey, et al. (1996) p.112 note that there is correspondence (1879-1900) in the Janson family archive at the NHM; and Chalmers-Hunt (1976) pp.138,155, records that her library was sold by Stevens on 14 April 1902 and 20-21 June 1916.Ormerod was the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Meterological Society and to be awarded an honorary doctorate by Edinburgh University. She also received many foreign distinctions. FRES from 1878. (MD 7/04) | |
| Orsquo; NIEL, J.A. |
Jesuit priest who collected Coleoptera in Africa mainly at Dunbrody, near Port Elizabeth and in Rhodesia. The bulk of his insects are in the South African Museum and in the Albany Museum at Grahamstown. Further beetles collected by him in Rhodesia, 1913-14, are at Glasgow Museum in the collection from the Notre Dame Teacher Training College presented in 1985 (information from Geoff Hancock); and there are also beetles bearing his name in Willoughby Ellis’ foreign collection at Liverpool Museum, and in the NHM collected between 1919-20. O’Niel is recorded to have had a species of moth named after him. (MD 7/04) |
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| ORTON, Peter Darbishire | 28 January 1916 - 7 April 2005 |
Expert mycologist with many publications on mushrooms and toadstools. Collected Coleoptera as a hobby and contributed numerous records to Duff (1993) The following is taken from an obituary by Peter Marren in The Independent, 28 April 2005. Orton was born in 1916 in Plymouth, where his father, James Herbert Orton, later Professor of Zoology at Liverpool University, worked as a marine scientist. An only child of a broken marriage and as a teenager he suffered from measles which left him partially deaf and with poor eyesight. He was sent to Oundle School in Northamptonshire in 1929 where he came under the kindly eye of the headmaster, Kenneth Fisher, a keen ornithologist and musician. From an early age Orton had become fascinated by natural history, especially insects, plants and fungi, and at school also became a proficient pianist and organist. He won a place at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, Music and History, passing with a general degree in 1937. He later studied at the Royal College of Music. Arriving late and flustered for his examination at the top of a flight of stairs he tripped and fell straight into the arms of his examiner - who turned out to be Ralph Vaughan Williams. From 1940 to 1946 Orton served in the Royal Artillery, where his quick mathematical mind was used to help direct radar-guided anti-aircraft guns in London. After completing his studies at the Royal College, he secured a post at Epsom College, where he taught music. In 1960 he took up a new post at Rannoch School in Perthshire, where he at first taught biology, and later English and music. He ran a school field club, which raided the surrounding woods and moors for beetles and bugs, and gave annual piano recitals, as well as playing at services and events. Loath to leave his beloved Scotland after his retirement in 1981, Orton rented a house in Nethybridge, near Grantown-on-Spey, for several years. In 1986 he returned south to Crewkerne, Somerset, becoming a first-time house buyer at the age of 70. Orton spent much of his spare time on his various hobbies. He was "mad keen" on steam engines and haunted the sheds where they were kept, noting down their serial numbers. He was also fascinated by beetles, and over a lifetime amassed a large collection of mounted specimens which he left to the Royal Scottish Museum. (MD 11/09, 2/20, 1/22) |
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| Owen, John Andrew | 1926 -22 April 2016 |
Brought up in Scotland and trained as a doctor before emigrating, with his wife and three boys, to Australia in the mid 1950s. The family returned to England in 1970 when to he took up the post of Professor of Pharmacology at St Georges Hospital, London. He had always had a love of natural history and made a collection of Coleoptera, which he presented to the RSM before moving to Australia. On return he is reported to have asked for it back, but was not successful. He then made a second extensive collection during the course of which he published more than 200 papers and added 18 new species to the British list. He was a tireless and skilled field work, sometimes using traps of his own invention. These included a trap for catching subterranean beetles (the original of which he presented to the writer), which has since been widely used by others, and in which he captured Ferreria marqueti (Aube) from his garden and Medon dilutus (Erichson) from Richmond Park. As well as seeking out rarities he also contributed to a large number of local surveys. These included, in particular, Abernethy Forest in the Highlands - he was a frequent visitor to Scotland with his family - and to several nearer home including Richmond Park, Chobham Common and Windsor where he was a fierce critic of official damage done to the habitat (see Coleopterists Newsletter, 31, 1988.) Many of us will remember joining him on these trips and particularly his memory for where he'd placed traps often years before. But apart from collecting and recording he also turned to breeding in paerticular of Cryptocephalus species on which he wrote several important papers. Both John and his wife Doreen were very hospitable and many coleopterists, including myself and family, remember many happy times spent with them. He was also very generous, always delighted to help others and I owe him a personal debt of gratitude for gifts of Ptiliidae over many years. He had one beetle named after him, the seashore staphylinid Myrmecopora owen Assing. His second collection joined the first at the RSM. His mounting method often using very short pins and with location information (often indecipherable!) written directly on the bottom of the mounts, makes specimens collected by him distinctive. There are 164 pages of correspondence with Colin Johnson in MM (Box 14) dating from 1978-2004 There is brief obituary by Garth Foster, with portrait, in Latissimus,38, 2016, 1. (MD 1/22) |
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| PAGET, Charles John | 1812 - 1844 | Brother of the well-known surgeon Sir James Paget with whom he compiled a Sketch of the Natural History of Great Yarmouth and its Neighbourhood, 1834, which included a very complete list of insects. In an obituary of his brother in Trans. Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Soc., 6, pp.74-76, Sir James said that his zeal and industry might be estimated by the extent of the insect list in the Sketch which was entirely written by him. (MD 9/04) |