William Robert Ogilvie-Grant was born in Edinburgh in 1863 and educated there at Fettes College. He joined the British Museum as an Assistant (2nd class) in 1882, working first in the fish section and then, from 1885, in the bird section under Richard Bowdler Sharpe (BOC Founders Blog 1). In that year, he took temporary charge of the section when Bowdler Sharpe went to India to bring back A. O. Hume’s huge bequest of skins, eggs and nests. After Sharpe’s death in 1909, he took charge of the bird collection and was promoted to Assistant Keeper of Zoology in 1913.
Ogilvie-Grant was a man of great energy, drive and organizational skills, with a penchant for foreign travel. He travelled to Madeira in 1890 and to the Salvage Islands (lying between Madeira and the Canaries) in 1895 before taking co-leadership of the joint Liverpool and British Museum expedition to Socotra and Abd al-Kuri with H O Forbes during 1898-99. He subsequently wrote the sections on mammals, birds and butterflies in the official account of the expedition. In his narrative of the expedition, Forbes noted that, ‘Mr Grant secured some excellent specimens of the endemic Grosbeak and other birds …. as well as capturing numerous other insects.’ A species of Gecko endemic to Socotra was named after him: Hemidactylus granti or Grant’s Leaf-toed Gecko. In the early 1900s, he travelled to the Azores, making another important collection of birds.
As well as travelling himself, Ogilvie-Grant became instrumental in helping to organize large-scale expeditions by others to remote places to collect material for the museum’s collection. These included the Ruwenzori Expedition of 1905-6 and, most notably, the B.O.U. Jubilee Expedition to Dutch New Guinea, phases of which lasted from 1909 to 1913, and also undertook considerable responsibility for these expeditions’ reports.
Among other major publications, he wrote vol. 22 (Game Birds) of the British Museum Catalogue of Birds, plus parts of Vols 17 and 26, as well as Vol. 5 of the museum’s Catalogue of Eggs. He further wrote the Guide to the Bird Gallery of the museum, a two-volume work on Game Birds, plus the bird section in The Gun at Home and Abroad, as well as innumerable papers in the Ibis and other journals, notably on collections received by the museum. His interest in conservation is revealed by his role, with Charles Rothschild, in co-founding the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves.
In the midst of all this demanding and highly productive work he found time to be editor of the Club’s Bulletin from 1904 to 1914. On his retirement as editor, which he ascribed to ‘his ever increasing official duties’, Lord Walter Rothschild recorded that the ‘Excellence of the Bulletin was owing to the untiring efforts of Mr Ogilvie-Grant’. He was indefatigable in introducing new species at the regular Club meetings, organized the printing of packets of postcards on the ‘nesting-groups of birds in the British Museum’, the proceeds of which went towards defraying the costs of the Club’s Migration Committee, Kite Fund and other activities, and was much involved in the regular annual Reports on the Immigration of Summer Residents in Britain. At the Club meeting on 14 December 1910, he exhibited and described a new species of titmouse from Ireland – Parus hibernicus. However, nearly 100 years later, it was demonstrated in the Bull. BOC that Sir William Ingram should have been credited with the first description of the said tit, not Grant, based on a report in the Daily Mail from three days earlier.
Even after retirement from his editing role he remained very active in the Club, contributing to the species debate with the statement:
‘By splitting up groups of species into endless unnecessary genera, we are only overburdening our memories with endless names and rendering classification more difficult, thus retarding what we are trying to advance – the study of ornithology’
This however laid him open to Witherby’s later view that under Grant ‘… the arrangement of our great national collection fell sadly behind the times.’
During the Great War, he suffered sunstroke whilst a Volunteer with the 1st County of London Regiment, and this progressed to a paralysis that led to his early retirement in 1918, subsequently dying on 26 July 1924. The Club meeting on 8 October of that year noted that the Chairman, H. F. Witherby, ‘made sympathetic reference to Mr William R. Ogilvie-Grant [who was] well remembered by many members who greatly deplored his death.’ His Ibis obituary records: ‘A tall, handsome man of somewhat overbearing temper and sharp tongue, Grant had a good many enemies, but he bore no malice, and he had a most kindly disposition and nature in reality, which greatly endeared him to his many friends. He was a good sportsman and shot and a fine field naturalist.’
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Chris Storey
