THE FIELDS HIS STUDY

47 THE FIELDS HIS STUDY

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

THE FIELDS HIS STUDY

ALASDAIR ASTON

Well, thank you very much for inviting me to say a few words this evening, here at Copdock. Copdock, as I remember it, was the place at which a young, thirsty cyclist, on his way from Stowmarket to Bentley Woods, would stop to buy a stone bottle of ginger-ale from the village shop. And Bentley Woods, where I mislaid my walking-stick amidst thousands of others, was a place perennially associated with the Large Tortoiseshell, with elm trees, with the landscapes of Constable and, by extension, of Ruysdael. Arriving at Bentley once, I heard a welcoming voice from down the path, “Ah! Here’s Dair Aston. He can show us where the Large Tortoiseshells are!” It was Sam Beaufoy, introducing me to his colleague, Dr E. B. Ford. Together they were a team who had wonderfully outlined the history of British butterfly study in their New Naturalist’s book of 1945. Sam Beaufoy, himself, has been an immense inspiration to generations of Suffolk Naturalists. It is fitting that we remember him tonight with love and gratitude.

Our Society, the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society, was founded just over 70 years ago when, on 1 April 1929, “A few Gentlemen interested in local Natural Science met at The Haynings, Framlingham, and decided to found a Naturalists’ Society in Suffolk. It was agreed that Ethnology were best left to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia and Historic Man to the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History.” That first sentence today sounds sexist indeed with its reference to “Gentlemen”, whilst the second accurately reflects the dissatisfaction of our founder, Claude Morley, with the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, who had published very little on Natural History. At his second attempt, Claude Morley had managed to launch this Society.

In 1929 the Original Members were aware that “It is well to keep in mind those openers of roads who have paved the way for our present knowledge of Suffolk.” Later, in the Introduction to the 1937 Final Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Suffolk, Morley wrote, “Various entirely adventitious circumstances have combined to render our county among the earliest, and one of the best, worked counties of Britain.” Those early Suffolk Naturalists make an impressive list: John Parkinson (Framlingham), Sir Thomas Browne (Trimley), John Ray (Orford), George Crabbe (Aldeburgh), William Kirby and his visitors William Spence, James Francis Stephens and James Charles Dale (Barham), John Curtis (Covehithe), Sir William Jackson and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (Halesworth), Laetitia Jermyn (Ipswich), John Stevens Henslow (Hitcham), George Verrall and James Collin (Newmarket), William Hind (Honington) and Edwin Bloomfield (Swefling), to name but a few! Impressive as these names are, perhaps Morley ought to have acknowledged as a factor the diversity of the habitats that existed in Suffolk.

At the first Annual General Meeting of the Society, the President, Dr C. H. S. Vinter, gave an address largely devoted to the early life of the great French naturalist, Jean Henri Fabre. In his village of St. Léons in the Rouergue the children had to share their school room with litters of piglets, an enlivening


Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 36 48

experience, no doubt! The school-day was not over until the class had picked all the snails from the teacher’s vegetable garden, an exacting introduction to life-studies. Dr Vinter referred to Fabre’s “Life of the Anthrax Fly”, in which Fabre recounts his return after some years to Carpentras in the Vaucluse where he enlisted the help of all the local shepherd lads: “Not one of us had succeeded in seeing the big, black fly perching on the dome of the mason bee. She never perches. She can detect as she flies the earthen dome which she is seeking and, having found it, she swoops down, leaves her eggs on it and makes off without setting foot on the ground.” Dr Vinter commended Fabre’s emphasis on behaviour as the important study and praised his habit of recording his close observations. This is reminiscent of one possible interpretation of our Society’s motto: “Experto crede” or “Believe in what you have experienced or observed.” By the way, as I read Fabre recently I was struck by the fact that he was forced, as a young teacher, to hire his blackboard every year, as he could not afford to buy it outright.

Claude Morley, our Founder, had been born in 1874. By the time he was five he was asking his governess, Miss Lucy Lavender, at Orchard Hall in Newark, “Do stones grow?” When he was nine he “teemed a potful of water-beetles” into his governess’s lap at Newark. After schooling at Beccles and King’s, Peterborough, he went on to Epsom College, which was noted for science and where he acquired some Latin, for example his favourite quotation: “Finis coronat opus”, with which his hero, Kirby, had saluted the beautiful purple weevil, Apion limonii. In August 1887, when he was thirteen, Claude started his entomological diary with his record of a Convolvulus Hawk-moth at Gothic House on the Isle of Wight. At nineteen, he came to Ipswich Museum where he studied mainly in the field of geology under Dr John Ellor Taylor, known affectionately to all as “The Old Doctor”.

By 1898, we find Claude at the Bramford home of his friend, Ted Platten. They had returned after a dark winter night’s adventurous cycling and colliding with the Bramford village pump. Ted’s mother was most anxious about their “frostbite”, while the father looked on with concern from behind his beard. Ted’s was a most important friendship for Claude in those, their moth years. Ted was a distinguished botanist and entomologist. I can remember visiting him in his Needham Market shop and being shown some of his amazing captures:- the Orache Moth, the Scarce Chocolate-tip, the Frosted Yellow and the Plumed Prominent, but his Weaver’s Fritillary, caught near here in a marsh beside Bentley Woods on 16 May 1899, had already been presented to Claude.

It would be all too easy in recalling Morley’s eccentricities and whims to forget his distinction. He began contributing to “The Entomologist” in 1893, when he was nineteen. He was elected to the Entomological Society of London at twenty-one. He published separate catalogues of the Suffolk Coleoptera, Hemiptera and Hymenoptera. His great work, apart from founding our Society, was his five-volume “Ichneumons of Great Britain”, 1903-1914, but he had also worked on the staff of the British Museum (Natural History), where he catalogued their Chalcididae and Ichneumonidae. In addition, he found time to contribute to surveys of South African and Indian Parasitica. He



could, it was said by knowledgeable contemporaries, identify any British insect on sight. Those facts are just some indication of his talents.

The Haynings, Framlingham, home of Dr Vinter, used to be called The Doctor’s House because medical men had lived there in an unbroken line from 1845 to 1971. It stands on the site of former cottages on the corner of Fore Street and Castle Street, just opposite Jeaffreson’s Well. Pevsner, in his Buildings of Suffolk, describes it as No. 38 Castle Street. It was there on 1 April, 1929, that Morley gathered round him a gifted circle most of whom later became the Suffolk County Recorders, their names almost household words: Francis Engleheart, Arthur Mayfield, Edward Platten, Chester Doughty, Ernest Elliott, Arthur Waller, Walter Whittingham, Bernard Harwood and Henry Andrews, with others waiting in the wings: Claude Ticehurst, John Moore, Julian Tuck, Dudley Collings and Ernest Bedwell. This last named, the hemipterist Ernest Bedwell, was probably that companion who used to add his initials to those of Morley in the bark of that noted holly-tree in Old Hall Wood, Bentley. Famously, some of this band of brothers would lose their moth-nets in the night. Infamously, the Bishop would arrive for a Confirmation Service with his gaiters muddy from chasing fenny micros.

Morley was thus a great collector of people. He recruited from his contacts at the British Museum, at the Entomological Society and, most especially, from those insect-people who convened annually near Denny Wood or Stubby’s Copse in the New Forest. He also made systematic approaches to the landowners in Suffolk, and not simply from a desire to consort with the powerful, either. An invitation to join the Society would soon be followed by a suggestion that an estate might be opened to one of our field-meetings and it was a short step from that to angling for hospitality to be spread in the shape of afternoon tea. The Hon. Secretary was expert in such manoeuvres and our benefits included access to hitherto unexplored territory for the purposes of survey and documentation. Many of our early hosts became subsequently and consequently committed to Suffolk Natural History.

Key to the documentation of Suffolk’s wildlife was the publication of annual “Transactions”. In 1934, Canon Waller “indicated the Transactions’ constant expansion as the chief feature of the Society’s growth. He trusted full use would be made of them to place upon permanent record everything of value in Suffolk. They constituted an eternal store-house of facts that future generations would perpetually visit.” Time has confirmed what Canon Waller prophesied. If Morley and the naturalists of his day could see the Society’s unequalled current publications I think they would be delighted: “Suffolk Natural History”, “Suffolk Birds”, the list of special monographs and “White Admiral”. During the 1930s Morley had made an energetic start to cataloguing past records, with lists covering a wide range of life-forms appearing in the Transactions. In 1937, he edited the Society’s First Memoir, “The Final Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Suffolk”. In the light of later developments the word “Final” has caused amusement but it merely signalled an intention to summarise preceding knowledge.

In the Claude Morley’s hero stakes, the runner-up to William Kirby was definitely Edwin Newson Bloomfield, Rector of Guestling in Sussex for 51



years and author of “The Lepidoptera of Suffolk”, 1890, and “Supplement”, 1900. Bloomfield was born in 1827 at a place called Great Glemham - Where else?- and attended, first, Dedham Grammar School, which was not far from here, and, then, Clare College, Cambridge, where he was 13th. Wrangler in 1850, going on to lecture in Mathematics and to become Deputy College Bursar. A member of the Ray Club, he contributed extensively to Hind’s “Flora of Suffolk” and regularly attended, in London, The Verrall Supper, an event I found still surviving in 1960. Bloomfield, who died in 1914, was noted as “a genial man, ready to place his large store of knowledge at others’ disposal.” Claude responded readily to, I quote, “Our late friend’s kindness” and drew heavily on it in his 1937 Moth Memoir, with acknowledgement and an engaging photograph of his entomological tutor.

In the Transactions Claude found ample space for his skill in observation and recording. In 1933, for example, he wrote a piece entitled “Two in a Wood. - Along the narrow footpath shaded from the sun by bushes in Letheringham Park, we met a Stoat on 4 May last. He was in the broiling sun, we in the dappled shade, so he did not recognise Man. But he heard him: and reared on hind legs for a clearer view above the primroses, celandines, barren strawberry and grasses. Our immobility reassured him, for there was no breeze, and he quested into the adjacent scrub of honeysuckle, bramble and hornbeam, circling round through a tangle of stitchwort and late anemones to just four feet on my right. Another hind-legs elevation to prospect the terrain. Then back unhurriedly, and softly off amid the undergrowth’s shrubbacity, swiftly and silently with many upliftings to peer around, and all in the most lithe and graceful manner imaginable, full of rearings, twistings and vertical convolutions: the “slimmest” Cat is a clumsy brute compared with a questing Stoat.”

In the Proceedings of 1934, Morley closes down on the Breck for us like this, quoting, of course, from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: “But dusk above Judes Bridge with Stone-curlews’ pleading cries, a superb and breathless dusk, as the splendid sun dipped softly over the low horizon to the distant Fens, pervaded us with a great content, for here the Tawny Wave flew ‘thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa’”.

From “Observations” in 1937, we are given a glimpse entitled ‘Bed time at home’, quoting, this time, from Thomas Gray: “A pale Moth, doubtless The Blood Vein, flitted past my chair; and I heard the Shard-borne Beetle, The Dor, booming on his blind course through the dusk. Then came the first Bat, with its plaintive vespertilian squeak, foreboding ill to all the Insect world less fleet of wing. The erstwhile yellow of the west paled to tender saffron and my Robin twittered cosily from the ivy mantling an aged Elder-bush as he tucked himself up for the night, not without some protest grunted surlily by a Blackbird from the opposing Ash. Then dusk fell so dim I could see but the sombre glimmer of the moat and scarce distinguish the gay pattern of deck-chairs on the lawn, in one of which I sat till all was sunk to sleep in the gracious murk, leaving the world to darkness and to me.” That is the poetic Claude at Monks’ Soham, a steady point in a turning world!



As the first circle of friends, whom Morley dubbed The Veteran Try-Hards, handed over to their successors, The Little Besters, Morley modestly but optimistically identified himself with the latter. Sometimes, things did not work out quite as intended, though. In 1929 we read “Thus our Society has all things well en train for the Dutch Elm Disease’s extirpation in Suffolk.” At other times familiar situations emerge. “One’s hands were numb in the old aquascutum pockets, while watching the moth-light on the evening of 23rd. May 1936, and soon after midnight the thermometer lost itself below the freezing-point.”

He was what is now called a “one-off”, an eccentric with a hatred of modern progress. During over 40 years of happy married life with Rose Anne Edmonds, he would have no truck with wireless, telephone, electricity or summer-time, which he called “lying-in time”. He loved to hear a countryman speak of “God’s Time”. He was notoriously territorial about Suffolk and did not ever quite seem to believe those outsiders who, in 1939, trespassed upon our Breckland Preserves at Brandon to record the Flame Wainscot and the Orange-rayed Pearl.

On field-excursions he had been known to seize a companion’s umbrella so that he could use it to beat for the larvae of hairstreak butterflies. When he led a meeting, he led it literally, striding out in front, shouting over his shoulder the scientific names of his observations, to the bemusement of those trying to keep pace with him. In private company he moved much more slowly, noting quietly every visitor to umbellifer or ivy blossom, before a movement of extraordinary dash and dexterity would net a desired rarity, for example The Golden Hoverer, Callicera spinolae, which he introduced new to the British List.

Two of the earlier members of this Society were George Kloet and Walter Hincks. In the Introduction to their magnificent volume, “A Check List Of British Insects”, 1945, they wrote, “In the large family Ichneumonidae it is well known that the systems adopted by Morley and Schmiedeknecht are quite out of date and, in part at least, erroneous.” That makes sad reading at first sight but, on reflection, one has to ask, “Just how many people have erected an identifiable system or are significant enough to gain a mention in a context of this importance?”

Claude Morley’s insect collections comprise 80,000 specimens. Since his death in 1951, they have been maintained and made accessible at Ipswich Museum. Together with Claude’s energy and enterprise, the collections are part of his legacy to us, a part I hope we can pass on in safety to the many Suffolk Naturalists of the future.

Acknowledgements I am grateful for the expert assistance I received from Berit Pedersen, Librarian of the Royal Entomological Society, and from Gina Douglas, Librarian of the Linnean Society of London. I am also indebted to members of the Framlingham Constabulary and of the Framlingham Library for details of “Haynings”.



References Bloomfield, E. N. (1890). The Lepidoptera of Suffolk. London: Wesley. &

(1900). Supplement. St.Leonard’s-on-Sea. Fabre, J. H. (1913), translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. The Life of

the Fly. London: Hodder & Stoughton’s People’s Library. Ford, E. B. & Beaufoy, S.(1945). Butterflies. London: Collins, The New

Naturalist. Hind, W. M. (1889). The Flora of Suffolk. London: Gurney & Jackson. Kloet, G. S. & Hincks, W. D. (1945). A Check List of British Insects.

Stockport: Kloet & Hincks. p. xxx. Morley, C. (1899). Coleoptera of Suffolk. Plymouth. & (1915) Supplement.

Plymouth. Morley, C. (1903). Hymenoptera of Suffolk: part 1. Plymouth. Morley, C. (1903-1914). Ichneumonologia Britannica, in five volumes.

Plymouth. Morley, C. (1905). Hemiptera of Suffolk. Ipswich. Morley, C. (1910). Catalogue of the Chalcididae in the British Museum.

London: British Museum. Morley, C. (1912-1915). Revisions of the Ichneumonidae in the British

Museum, four volumes. London: British Museum. Morley, C. (1915). Fauna of India: chapter on Ichneumonidae. Morley, C. (various dates). Papers on South African Parasitica. Morley, C. (1933). Two in a wood. Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc., 2: 197. Morley, C.( 1934). Breck proceedings. Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc., 2: clxxxiv. Morley, C. (1937). Bed time at home. Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc., 3: 310. Morley, C. (1937). Final Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Suffolk. Ipswich:

Suffolk Naturalists’ Society. Pevsner, N. (1961). The Buildings of England: Suffolk. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, p. 199.

This paper is a transcript of Alasdair’s talk at the SNS Members’ Evening on 16 February 2000.

Alasdair Aston Wake’s Cottage 1 The Street Selborne Nr Alton Hampshire GU34 3JH

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