Biographical dictionary

Son of the Reverend Hugh Fowler, Vicar of Barnwood, Gloucestershire. Educated at Rugby School and at Jesus College, Cambridge where he was a Scholar. Ordained in 1875 two years after his appointment as a Master at Repton School. In 1880 he became Headmaster of Lincoln Grammar School, a post which he held for more than twenty years before relinquishing it to become Rector of Rotherfield Peppard, near Henley, Oxfordshire. This last post he held for three years but he did not find the work sufficiently taxing and he exchanged with the Vicar of St Peters, Earley, near Reading where he was preparing to officiate at a Sunday service at the time of his death.

He also held a number of other offices including: Canon of Welton Brinkhall at Lincoln (1887), President of the Headmasters Association (1907), Vice President of the Linnean Society (1906-1907), Member of the Scientific Committee of the Royal Horticultural Society, and Member of the Reading Guardians.

Hi's interest in entomology began when he was at Repton and centred initially on the Lepidoptera of which he is said to have formed a large collection. His interests soon transferred to the Coleoptera, however, and led within a decade to his being appointed to the editorial panel of the EMM. (June 1885, a post which he held for thirty eight years); to the publication of the first volume of the work for which he will always be best known by British entomologists The Coleoptera of the British Islands (1887-1891,1913) and to his being appointed Secretary of the Entomological Society, a post which he held for ten years, before, in 1901, he was made President.

An advertisement in Ent., 19, 1886, p.167, makes clear that 250 copies of the large colour plate version of The Coleoptera of the British Islands were produced, limited, initially at least, to subscribers, but also that Messers Power, Sharp, Mason and Champion acted as "referees". The first five volumes were produced in monthly parts price 3s plain and 5s coloured, most containing 4 plates and a variable number of pages of text. The only breaks in this sequence were in September 1887 when the publishers regretted "that the artist has been unable to finish the plates in time for this month's issue. Additional letterpress is therefore given instead", and in August 1888 when a double part price 6s plain and 10s coloured was issued. The only copy of the work of which I know into which the part covers have been bound is that in the NHM. (Mr Ernest Lewis has written to tell me that he remembers many years ago seeing another copy in its original parts in the library of the Passmore Edwards Museum, Stratford, London E.17). Because the parts were stamped by the librarian with the dates on which they were received one can trace the chronology of publication very clearly. Receipt of the sixth, supplementary volume, on which Donisthorpe also worked, was recorded on 8 April 1913 as one work. The Coleoptera lists two more genera and fifty more species than appear in H.E.Cox's Handbook, published some thirteen years earlier.

He also took on several other onerous works as an author including the introductory volume and account of the Cicindelidae and Paussidae of the Fauna of British India series; a contribution to the Genera Insectorum on the Languriidae, and, most ambitiously, he dealt with all the Homopterous insects except the Cicadidae, Fulgoridae, Coccidae and Aleurodidae for Godman and Salvin's Biologia Centrali-Americana. This last took him fifteen years between 1894 and 1909.

His notes on Coleoptera in the journals started with ‘Harpalus tenebrosus at Bridlington’ in EMM., 15, 1878, p.134, and stretched to more than 150, including a number of obituaries of eminent Coleopterists, before his death. Finally, as far as Fowler's publications are concerned, the two Catalogues of the British fauna which he compiled with A. Matthews in 1883 and with D. Sharp in 1893 should also be noticed, the last being an updated version of Sharp's earlier lists of 1871 and 1883.

G.J.Arrow said of him: ‘In his small and apparently delicate frame Fowler held a great store of vitality and an apparently inexhaustible appetite for hard work, notwithstanding which he was by no means a hard taskmaster to those under him, and by his invariably cheerful and amiable disposition never failed to win popularity and esteem from his pupils and associates of every kind. Although possessed of little critical power or gift for origination, he had a taste for the not usually attractive labour of collating and tabulating the records of others' results and a readiness to undertake toil from which other men turned away which led him sometimes into fields for which his qualifications were not apparent. Entomology has reason for gratitude to him for much useful spadework, and, to all who study British Beetles, his principal achievement, the Coleoptera of the British Islands, is the indispensable starting-point for any fresh advance, and is not likely soon to be superseded’ (Ent., 722, July 1923, p.170).

One interesting fact about his entomological education which must also have had a considerable influence on his working method, particularly when compiling the Coleoptera of the British Islands, is mentioned by Charles MacKechnie-Jarvis in his 1975 BENHS Presidential Address: ‘about 1879 Canon Fowler, then a schoolmaster at Repton...developed a purposeful interest in Coleoptera. Realising perhaps that time was not on his side, he established a close contact with the Powers and was thus able to draw extensively on the Doctor's knowledge of our Fauna. For a period Fowler had apartments in the house next door to the Powers as a pied-a-terre for use on his many trips from Lincoln, and this house, no 83 Ashburnham Road, Bedford, was the wartime HQ of the 5th Beds. Battalion of the Home Guards. "And who", asked Miss Power of me on one occasion, "was the young clergyman we always had in the house? My mother said that she thought that he did most of his collecting in my father's cabinets".’

His collection, with other material, is preserved at Nottingham. Other specimens collected by him in Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Isle of Wight and Solway are to be found in the Hall collection at Oldham Museum (Information from Simon Hayhow). There are also specimens bearing his name in the H.J. Thouless collection at Norwich (information from Tony Irwin who states that the insects are labelled with a code number only, relating to a notebook which is missing). 4 letters dated 1890,1919 and 1921 are in the RESL (Pedersen (2002) p.80). Gilbert,P. (1977) lists eight obituary and other notices and there is a ninth in Trans.RESL., C, 1923, p.cxi. Of these J.J.Walker in EMM., 59, 1923, pp.150-152, G.J.Arrow in Ent., 56, 1923, p.170 and H.J.Donisthorpe in Nature, Lond. III, 1923, p.388 are probably the most useful. (MD 12/02, 2/08, 11/09)