Published two notes on Coleoptera in the Lough Foyle district of Ireland in Irish Naturalist, 9, 1900, 2-11,130. Johnson & Halbert (1902), 536, note: 'of recent lists, apart from those for which we ourselves are responsible the most important is that by Mr C.W. Buckle of the coleoptera of the Foyle district. In it he has made many additions to our beetle fauna, and his list is further valuable as showing the species that inhabit the north western extremity of the Island'. (MD 12/01)

Born in Drury Lane, London. His father was a major in the army, and his mother a shopkeeper. Educated in an army school and at St. Dunstans in the West, before becoming an apprentice in the printing trade. From 1930 he worked at the Lincoln's Inn Press until 1941 when he was called up for service as a signal man in the Queens Royal Regiment. Shortly after he joined the intelligence section serving with the Desert Rats and in all the Middle East campaigns under Montgomery. He gained all five stars and was promoted to regimental sergeant. After the completion of the North Africa campaign he served in Europe until 1946 when he was demobbed. On his return home he worked for a short while with the Cable Press at Kings Cross before becoming Works Manager with Potter Brothers, the producers of the Hackney Gazette. In 1964, at the age of 47, he was declared redundant. A period of intensive re-education followed before he took up a new post with the Anchor Press at Tiptree, where he remained until his death from a heart attack. Buck had married one of his cousins, Evelyn Mason in 1941 and had three children.

Buck's interest in natural history appears to have been first stimulated by visits as a schoolboy to his numerous relatives in Norfolk. At the age of twenty he joined the SLENHS with which he remained closely involved for the rest of his life, serving on the Council from 1940, as lanternist until 1953, vice president in 1954, and finally president in 1955. Between 1956 and 1973 he edited the Society's Proceedings. His particular interest in beetles had certainly developed by the time of the War for his obituary in Proc.Brit.Ent.nat.Hist.Soc.,  10, 1977, 30-33, states: 'To hear Freddie talk of the War one could well believe that it consisted largely of collecting beetles on the continent and in North Africa, under conditions of extreme difficulties and under the eyes of frowning and disapproving authority'. The writer also notes that 'he was a superb field worker and taxonomist. He used to boast that his collection was not a neat display of tidily named species but a working collection filled with partly dissected specimens.

During his time at the Hackney Gazette when he lived in Canonbury, he published most of his entomological papers, mainly on new species of foreign coleoptera. After he moved to Tiptree his interests gradually changed from taxonomy towards field studies and conservation'.Of Buck's publications on the British Coleoptera perhaps the best known are his 'A Provisional List of the Coleoptera of Epping Forest' (EMM, 91, 1955, 174-192); 'A Provisional List of the Coleoptera in Wood Walton Fen Hunts., (Proc.S.Lond.Ent.nat.Hist.Soc., 1961, 93-117); and 'The British Mycetophagidae and Colydiidae', (ibid., 1955, 53-66).

Trevor James tells me that there are specimens collected by Buck in the D.G. Hall collection at Baldock Museum and K.C. Lewis has specimens in his collection.

Duff (1993) records that Buck's notebooks are in Colchester Museum, and Pederson (2002), 84, that there is correspondence with D.J. Jackson in the RES. The BENHS library at Dinton Pastures holds a folder of exercise books containing notes about beetle identification, and there are 10 box files of correspondence in the collection room. (MD 12/01, 12/06, 11/09, 1/22)