Born in Paddington, London. Worked for a few years in a solicitor's office before joining the Post Office in 1883 where he remained until his retirement in 1924. Died at his house in Harrow.
Charles Mackechnie Jarvis, who received his early instruction in the Coleoptera from Ashby and who acquired part of Ashby's collection of British beetles, notices in his obituary of him in Proc.Trans.S.Lond.ent.nat.Hist., 1944-45, xxv-xxvii: ‘Ashby was primarily a Coleopterist and studied the British fauna throughout his 64 active collecting years. In earlier days, from 1880 to about 1910, he took Lepidoptera also and built up a representative collection, but found that the time required for attending to his breeding cages prejudiced the study of other orders. Preferring to break new ground, he took up the study of the Hemiptera under the expert guidance of [William] West, and at the same time paid attention in the field to several of the lesser known orders as well.’
‘In addition to his extensive British collections, he amassed some 150 store boxes of foreign Lepidoptera, Coleoptera and 'Other Orders', all of which he carefully arranged and for the most named. Perhaps it was his early training in the solicitor's office which caused him to develop his elaborate system of colour coding and indexing by which his specimens were recorded. The card index relating to his favourite Order, the British Coleoptera, is particularly comprehensive and gives full details of capture and references to the relevant literature...’
‘Having always lived in the London district with access to good libraries Ashby kept few books. He was undoubtedly a field entomologist at heart and felt no urge to write for publication, although in earlier years he had corresponded widely with entomologists interested in Coleoptera and Hemiptera’.
‘Methodical to an extraordinary degree, his passion for cataloguing everything connected with insects (and much besides) is reflected in the contents of some fifty loose leaf binders...’
Ashby was also a very active member of the South London which he joined in 1895 and was for many years Curator of the Society's collections. MacKechnie Jarvis records that Ashby's own collection of Coleoptera and Lepidoptera from Britain ‘in two 40 drawer Brady cabinets’, and also his collection of British Hemiptera and miscellaneous other Orders ‘with the relevant card-indexes, and unworked material together with a selection of the foreign Coleoptera’ was retained by himself, while Ashby's collection of foreign Lepidoptera and Coleoptera in some 120 store boxes was dispersed. A further collection of some British Hymenoptera and Diptera passed to E.E.Syms. I have seen beetles Collected by Ashby in the Hudson Beare collection at the RSM, and in the collection of Doncaster Museum.
FRES from 1907 to death. There are other obituaries in Ent.mon.Mag., 80, 1944, 264 and Proc.R.Ent.Soc., (C)9, 1944-45, 47. (MD 7.01)