President's Page
Peter Harvey 32 Lodge Lane, Grays, Essex RM16 2YP. Tel: (01375) 371571.
Email: grays@peterharvey.freeserve.co.uk
Progress continues on a new centre for the Club at Wat Tyler Country Park, and we should
soon be in a position to be able to report more fully on plans. In the meantime we are busy
with the project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to digitise of the Club's publications
back to 1880. Council decided to use Teknica Ltd to undertake this work, and good progress
is already being made. Although the digitised publications will be fully searchable, it
would still help to have a database of abstracts and keywords, so if you would like to
volunteer to help in this process please contact me. We also have a library card
catalogue (typed) from the original Passmore Edwards Museum, as well as a handwritten
inventory (a lot of pages!) of the Club's collections. It would be enormously useful to be
able to get either or both of these into a computerised searchable format, which could
then be made available to members. If you are a reasonable typist and would like to
help, then please let me know. The more people that can help the easier the task will
be. We will also want to get feedback on the project website as it is developed, so
any members with internet access who can help, again please let me know as soon as
possible so that you can be involved in its design and implementation. We have located
a Museum Handbook No. 3 in the library. If anyone knows about Nos. 1 and 2, or
whether there are any other volumes, again please contact me.
Our website has undergone some more developments. There is now a facility for registered
users to submit their interests, which are accessed by a My interests link in the My stuff
page. This information will be useful in helping the Club know where it should target its
activities. Another development is that anyone can now click on a dot in the species
distribution maps and see the tetrad and last year recorded. Contact the County Recorder
if you want greater access to the data behind the dots. As you will read later in this
newsletter, Adrian Knowles would like feedback on the current status of the Lily Beetle
after our cold winter. You can contact Adrian directly or submit your response via the
website at http://www.essexfieldclub.org.uk/portal/p/Enter+vour+records/s/Lilioceris
lilii/.
After the formal meeting business at the AGM this year on Saturday 14th March, we had
a number of interesting exhibits brought by members and a large display about the work
of the RSPB. Theo Tamblyn brought a large collection of freshwater mollusc shells he
had collected in the flood debris from the River Stour between Dedham and Manningtree
earlier this year, and a few other samples he had found elsewhere. Ken Adams brought
some surplus magazines for people to take, some books for sale, and some dot maps
showing the distribution of most of the clones of the Water Poplar Populus nigra subsp.
nigra in Essex. David Bloomfield brought two separate exhibits: one was some papers
relating to Charles Darwin, it being his bicentenary year, and who was elected an honorary
member of the Club at the inaugural meeting; and some papers relating to Epping Forest
Boundary Stones by Raphael Meldola, a founder member of the Club, and it was 100
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 59, May 2009 1