Received his education in Manchester, firstly in a school under the well-known conchologist Dr Adams, and later at Owens College where he graduated in 1891. Married in 1895 and after practising as a Doctor of Medicine in Manchester, moved to the Isle of Man in about 1902 because of his wife's ill health. There J.R.le B. Tomlin records that he was a 'trenchant and convincing speaker in the local Debating Society, (Ent.mon.Mag., 45, 1909, 260-61). He had one son, and died at the early age of thirty-nine, in Port Erin.
Bailey published his first article on 'Coleoptera in Middlesex' in Ent., 19, 1886,187-88 and followed this with various notes in the Ent.mon.Mag., including an obituary of his friend Joseph Chappell. It was through Chappell and Samuel Stevens that he is recorded to have switched his early interest in Lepidoptera to Coleoptera. Bailey's great forte was his knowledge of the fauna of the Isle of Man. In December 1907 he delivered his Vice-Presidential address on this subject to the Lancashire and Cheshire Entomological Society and at the time of his death he is recorded to have almost completed a book on the Manx Coleoptera.
A collection of mainly Isle of Man material in twenty-two drawers was purchased by the Manx Museum in 1910 and is maintained separately. Further information about this collection is given in Hancock & Pettit (1981).
There are obituaries in Ent.mon.Mag., 45, 1909, 260-61 (by J.R. le B. Tomlin); Dt.ent.Ztschr., 1909, 112 (by W. Horn) and Ent.Rdsch., 27, 1910, 10. (MD 9/01)