140 OBITUARY.
Russell was born on October 19th, 1820, and was the eldest son of the late Cham-
pion E. Branfill, of Upminster Hall. He assumed the name of Russell on suc-
ceeding to the estates of the late Joseph Russell. He married, in 1855, Emily
Augusta, eldest daughter of the late Rev. C. Way, who survives him, and he
leaves a somewhat numerous family. He is buried in the churchyard of North
Ockendon, in which parish he was one of the principal land-owners. Colonel
Russell took considerable interest in county affairs ; was High Sheriff of Essex in
1858-9, and was for many years connected with the Militia and Volunteer forces.
He joined the West Essex Militia, now the Fourth Battalion Essex Regiment, as
a Captain in 1852. He was promoted to the rank of Major in 1855, to Hon.
Lieut-Colonel in 1880, and retired from the service in 1881 with the rank of
Lieut.-Colonel. From 1860 to 1873 he was also Captain of the Romford Com-
pany of Rifle Volunteers, and only resigned when the order came into force which
prevented any person from being connected with more than one branch of the
Service at a time. From his earliest years persevering, painstaking and
ambitious, he possessed a great amount of determination, and threw himself with
zest into any subject to which he devoted his attention. He showed the vigour of his
character at Cambridge by winning the Wingfield Sculls in 1846, thus becoming
amateur champion sculler of the Thames. Colonel Russell was a very good chemist,
and was most inventive and neat-fingered, always ready with contrivances for
effecting any purpose in hand. In 1859 he patented an invention for the improve-
ment of marine engines, chiefly with a view to the economy of fuel; and among
other scientific work he studied photography with considerable success, being
awarded a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition, and a bronze one at Dublin,
for his discovery of the tannin process in dry plate photography. The open-air
study of nature, as a sportsman and wildfowler, was his greatest delight, and
aroused all the enthusiasm of his character ; his knowledge of birds, their habits
and feeding grounds, was most extensive and accurate, far more so than his written
notes ever expressed. The company of congenial listeners called forth from the
stores of Colonel Russell's memory a remarkable flow of capitally expressed narrative
and anecdote, and he has been known to talk continuously for four hours without
in the least repeating himself! A well-known Essex wildfowler once said, "He
was a marvellous man ; I believe he remembered distinctly every shot he had
ever fired, and they were thousands." Even in the study his ruling passion was
manifest, his favourite literature being books of travel and sport. He collected
birds in America and South Africa. The Kafirs had a great respect for the
"Whitebeard's" skill as a shot, and it is related that he astonished them once by
patiently skinning a black eagle that had become so "high" that even they were
repulsed. He was a great advocate for protecting birds and animals, and gave
important evidence before the Wild Bird Commission, taking a prominent part in
the alteration of the close time, and was the chairman of the committee on this
subject appointed by the court of Quarter Sessions. The house-sparrows found in
him a persevering and relentless foe, his argument being that the martins and
swallows about our villages and homesteads were being rapidly exterminated by
this dominant and ubiquitous species. He boasted that at "Stubbers" he had,
by killing off the sparrows, increased the number of martins' nests from two to
nigh one hundred and fifty. It will be remembered that Colonel Russell read a
paper on "Martins and Sparrows" before the Essex Field Club in 1882 (see
"Proceedings E. F. C.,"- vol. iii., pp. xx. xvii). He was a frequent contributor to
the natural history and public journals on this question, and was one of the writers,