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 […]

Richard Bowdler Sharpe (RBS) is unquestionably the outstanding bird curator in the history of what are now the Natural History Museum (NHM) collections. Born on 22 November 1847, the son of the publisher of “Sharpe’s London Magazine”, he was a brilliant scholar with a deep love of natural history and when still young began to assemble a substantial bird skin collection. His father viewed these interests with disfavour and, on leaving school in 1863, RBS […]