although Gilles lived in the under-recorded agricultural belt (see above), very
few of his diary records refer to this part of Essex.
Harwood lived and recorded in north-east Essex which was also the home of
Paymaster-in-Chief G.F. Mathew, a distinguished macrolepidopterist who
also took an interest in the mesolepidoptera. His records are the only ones
available for several of the species in this list; most of them are extracted from
an interleaved copy of Stainton's Manual, kindly lent to me by the Essex
Naturalists' Trust. They include my favourite record - "taken on my wife's
dress at a garden party". Would a very senior naval officer have ventured to
secure a moth from the dress of someone else's wife in the decorous Edwardian
era? Mathew's collection, also a useful source, is in the British Museum
(Natural History).
We now come to two entomologists who died only recently. During the late
1920s and early 1930s Stanley Wakely lived in the Tiptree area and throughout
the rest of his life was a frequent visitor to the well-known Thames estuary
localities. During his period of residence he had not yet reached the maturity as
an entomologist he was to attain through association with other collectors such
as L.T.Ford, and at this stage wrote very little. It was during this period that he
took the specimens at Burnham-on-Crouch which Pierce recognised as a
species new to the British list, now known as Bactra robustana. Wakely's
collection, now at Cambridge University, has been the source of the majority
of records appearing under his name.
The last name on our list is that of Harry Huggins, who lived at Westcliff-on-
Sea from 1932 until his death in 1977. During this period he was the dominant
personality in Essex entomology. He specialised in mesolepidoptera but never
tackled the smaller 'micros'. As an authority on the Tortricidae of Essex he is
second to Thurnall only because the latter was earlier in the field and covered a
larger section of the county in his records. Huggins' knowledge of the Pyralidae
was particularly extensive and he contributed much valuable information on
habits and life history to British pyralid and plume moths (Beirne, 1952); he is
unquestionably my best authority for this family. His collection, now in the
British Museum (Natural History), was virtually completed before he came to
Essex and consequently includes few specimens taken in the county. However,
he made comprehensive records for south-east Essex and is the only Essex
collector to have made regular light-trap records for the mesolepidoptera. In a
sense, he was unfortunate to live in the part of Essex that had already been so
thoroughly worked by Whittle; nevertheless, he added 12 species to the county
list and valuable detail on many others. He wrote over 400 papers on Lepid-
optera, many of which dealt with Essex. In 1975 he prepared a paper which he
entitled "Notes on the Microlepidoptera of Essex"at the request of the Lepid-
optera Panel of the County Trust. It dealt only with the mesolepidoptera and,
as its title implies, Huggins did not intend this to be a county list; apart from his
own records from south-east Essex, he included only those to be found in the
VCH. For the part of Essex and the part of the microlepidoptera covered, his
paper is one of my most important sources and the extent of my debt to these
notes will be readily apparent to the reader.
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