While little remembered today, William Lutley Sclater was a founding member of the British Ornithologists’ Club and a successful ornithologist, well-known in his day especially for his museum work and studies on African birds. He also studied mammals, and described several new species of amphibians and reptiles in a paper in 1891, notably  four new snake species including Enuliophis sclateri, named for his father Philip. He was born in 1863 in the Hanover Square district in London, the eldest of […]

Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) was a person for whom the term “indefatigable” might have been invented. His astonishing diversity of interests and contributions to numerous organisations included being a founder member of both the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) and the British Ornithologists’ Club (BOC), as well as subsequently playing a major role in the running of each. Born in Hampshire to a wealthy family, he was fascinated by natural history, in particular birds, from an […]

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, […]

Businessman, celebrated botanist, horticulturalist, entomologist, and ornithologist, Philip Crowley was a versatile polymath. Born in Alton, Hampshire on the 28 August 1837, his life spanned the Victorian era. He rose to be elected to some of London’s premier scientific associations, including the Linnean, Zoological, and Royal Entomological Societies in addition to his election as a chairman of the Royal Horticultural Society. He helped found the British Ornithologists’ Club and was its Vice Chairman at the […]

Trite, but true to say, is that Howard Saunders, the first Secretary and the first Treasurer of the Club, was born in 1835 in London into a very different world.  Dickens was writing the Pickwick Papers and King William IV was on the throne.  Saunders’ business role as a merchant banker saw him travelling widely.  From 1855 to 1862 it took him to Brazil and Chile.  He studied the birds of Spain and Italy during […]

Henry Seebohm was a distinguished writer, traveller, collector, ethnographer, and theorist and was instrumental in the founding and management of many of the learned societies of the day. Early Life He was born into a Quaker family in Bradford, Yorkshire, on 12th July 1832, the oldest child of a wool merchant, and was educated in the Quaker community in York. After working as a grocery assistant, he soon embarked on a life in business, initially […]