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 the six children of Philip Lutley Sclater (1829–1913, see Founders Blog no. 6) and Jane Ann Eliza Sclater, and was educated at Eagle House, Winchester, and Keble College, Oxford, where he received a Master of Arts degree in Natural Science in 1885. His father was an expert ornithologist and identified the main zoogeographic regions of the world, as well as being a founding member of the British Ornithologists’ Club, the founding editor of The Ibis (the journal of the British Ornithologists’ Union) and serving as Secretary of the Zoological Society of London for 43 years, from 1859–1903.
Following his graduation from Oxford, William worked as a Demonstrator at University College, London (1885–6) and then a Demonstrator in zoology at Cambridge University (1886–7) under Professor Adam Sedgwick, during which time he went on a collecting expedition to British Guiana, bringing back, amongst other specimens, sixteen new species of birds, later described in The Ibis in 1887.
In 1887, he moved to the Indian Museum, Calcutta, to become Deputy Superintendent and worked there until 1891. He prepared a catalogue of the birds in the collection (published in The Ibis in 1892) and a catalogue of the snakes and batrachian amphibians (frogs and salamanders).
He returned to Britain in 1891 to work as an Assistant Master at Eton College where he met his future wife, Charlotte Mellen Stephenson, an American divorcée whose two sons attended the school. Shortly after they married in 1896, they moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where William took up the position of Curator at the newly opened South African Museum (1896–1906). He reorganized the collections and moved them to a new site. The collection and staff grew under his stewardship and he founded the Annals of the South African Museum and set about completing publication of the Fauna and Flora of South Africa. He also completed the four-volume series The Birds of South Africa, begun by Arthur Stark, of which only the first volume had been completed before Stark’s death on active service at Ladysmith. He further undertook completion of the five-volume Birds of Africa, begun by Captain George Shelley, and The Birds of Kenya Colony and the Uganda Protectorate, begun by Sir Frederick John Jackson. He was one of the founders and first President of the South African Ornithologists’ Union. During this period, he also published The Geography of Mammals (1899) with his father, Philip. In 1906, following a dispute with the museum’s board of trustees, William resigned as Curator and travelled home with his wife via Mombasa, Lake Victoria, Khartoum, and Cairo.
Charlotte’s brother-in-law, General William Jackson Palmer, had founded the Colorado College Museum in Colorado Springs. Palmer offered William a small estate outside the city and a professorship at Colorado College in order to help in reorganizing the museum (1906–1909). While there, he wrote the Birds of Colorado, which was finally published in 1912. When the General died in 1909, the Sclater family returned to England.
On his return to London, he took unpaid work as a ‘supernumerary’ member of staff at the British Museum (Natural History) and become a formal staff member as Curator of the Bird Room after the retirement, in 1918, of William Robert Ogilvie-Grant (see Founders Blog no. 5). After the curatorship passed to Percy R. Lowe in 1919, William continued to work in the museum in an unpaid capacity until his death in 1944, cataloguing many groups and reorganising the Ethiopian and American specimens. Between 1919 and 1920, William and Charlotte travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa and made a trip around the world, visiting many museums in the USA and taking in the Annual Meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union in New York, before returning via Singapore and Colombo.
On his return, he suggested a scheme to the British Ornithologists’ Union to publish a series of lists of the birds of the different geographical regions of the world. He proposed that the Neotropical Region should be prepared by an American ornithologist, the Palaearctic by Ernst Hartert, the Ethiopian by himself, the Indian by Stuart Baker, and the Australasian by Gregory M Mathews. This scheme was partially accepted, and William was asked to write the volumes dealing with the Ethiopian Region, while Mathews undertook those on Australasia. He also compiled the two-volume Systema Avium Aethiopicarum (published in 1924 and 1930, respectively).
In 1935, William and Charlotte went to the West Indies to stay with Sir Charles Belcher in Tobago, making a trip to Trinidad to see Oil-birds in the Arima Valley, as well as visiting an Audubon’s Shearwater colony off the coast of Tobago.
During the First World War, in which both of his stepsons perished, William did voluntary work at the Hammersmith Branch of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association. Charlotte was killed in 1942 during a Second World War bombing raid on London. Two years later, William Sclater died at the age of eighty at St. George’s Hospital, two days after sustaining injuries from a German V1 ‘flying bomb’ strike on his house in Chelsea.
William Sclater’s Society Work
In addition to his involvement in the founding of the British Ornithologists’ Club and serving as its Chairman from 1918–1924, he held several other notable society positions. He succeeded his father as the Editor of The Ibis from 1913–1930, was twice Vice-President of the British Ornithologists’ Union (1922 and 1926) and then its President (1928–1933), as well as being Chairman of its List Committee (1928–1944). He was awarded the British Ornithologists’ Union Godman-Salvin medal in 1930. He further served as secretary of the Royal Geographical Society from 1931–1943. However, William Sclater’s name has always been associated with the Zoological Record. He served as recorder for the Aves section for thirty-five years after the death of Richard Bowdler Sharpe, and was responsible for the Mammalia, Crustacea, and the Comprehensive Zoology sections for shorter periods. As General Editor (1921–1937), he made many improvements to the arrangement of the subject headings.
Sources:
Obituary: Ibis, 87 (1) : 115-1211945, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1474-919X.1945.tb01364.x
http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/SCLA1863.htmSome Biogeographers
www.londonremembers.com/subjects/william-lutley-sclater-1
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Persons&id=PX30591863-1944
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lutley_Sclater
https://dbpedia.org/page/William_Lutley_Sclater
Author Information
Andrew Richford
