14
Profile of a Naturalist
Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Maitland Emmet, MBE, TD, MA, HON. FRES, FLS.
BRIAN GOODEY
298 Ipswich Road, Colchester, Essex C04 4ET.
On 6 March 1999 Maitland Emmet became the first recipient of Butterfly Conservation's Marsh
Award. It is the latest in a long line of accolades and was given for a lifetime's achievements in
Lepidoptera conservation.
I first met Maitland on the
morning of 6 July 1986
when, following the start
of correspondence
between us, he invited me
to Langham Pools a few-
miles north of Colchester
in order to record smaller
moths. As an aspiring
entomologist I
approached the meeting
with some trepidation, for
I was well aware of his
high standing in the
Lepidoptera community
and conscious of my own
lack of experience in the
field. After a rather
formal greeting and an
introduction to wife Katie

we set off. Upon arrival at the gravel car park,
bathed in strong sunlight, I could not help but
wonder how productive such a trip would be
and how many moths we would see, away
from the glare and convenience of a moth trap.
Arthur Maitland Emmet was born in 1908 in
the small village of West Hendred, Berkshire,
some fifteen miles north west of Reading. At
the age of 11 his father, a vicar, became a
university teacher at Oxford, to where the
family moved in 1919. An early interest in
natural history was encouraged by two elder
sisters, Margery and Dorothy, now aged 92
and 94, the younger of whom was and still is a
keen bird-watcher.
Birds continued to fascinate but it was at
Weymouth Preparatory School, Dorset, two
years later that an interest in Lepidoptera
started to develop. His parents asked the
headmaster what useful item they could buy
their son for his 13th birthday, to which was
suggested a butterfly net. a hobby much in
vogue with other boarders. A comma butterfly
was caught with virtually the first sweep of his
new net. Having gone through a time of
drastic range reduction during the 1800s, the
comma was at last beginning a process of re-
colonisation and this was the first Dorset
specimen for forty years. News of the capture
was written up by the school chaplain and
published in the countryside journal The Field.
Seeing his name in print naturally made an
impression and promoted an interest in the
local Lepidoptera, an interest that was to last a
lifetime.
An hour later we had not progressed away
from the bushes in the car park at Langham.
Essex Naturalist (New Series) 16 (1999)