Born at Westwell, near Ashford, Kent. Educated at a private school where she learned French and German. Enjoyed the study of natural history as a child and after failing to gain entrance to the London Veterinary College because she was a woman, she became a canine nurse. During the First World War she worked as a temporary Civil Servant with the Admiralty. After the War she came into contact with Grace Lefroy, through whose husband Maxwell she acquired the post of Curator of Insects at the Zoological Society of London, a post which she held from 1920-1926. During this period she attended Lefroy's lectures at the Royal College of Science, and wrote her first two books Everyday Doings of Insects, 1924, and The Great Little Insect, 1924.
In 1924 she travelled to the West Indies, Galapagos Islands and South Pacific with the St. George's Expedition as official entomologist, an account of which she published under the title Islands in the Sun, 1927. At Tahiti she left the expedition to continue collecting alone, and having stayed away longer than her leave would permit had to resign her post at the Zoological Society.
On returning to London she continued to study entomology at the NHM until she could gather sufficient funds to finance a second collecting trip to the New Hebrides which took place 1929-1931. As a result of these trips collecting abroad became her great passion and she visited Papua 1933-1934, Cyclops Mountains of Dutch New Guinea, 1936, Waigeu and Japan, Dutch New Guinea and the Torricelli Mountains Mandated Territory 1938-1939, New Caledonia 1949-1950, and Aneityum, New Hebrides, 1954-1955. Her adventures on these journeys which she undertook alone, are recounted in her autobiography Things Worth While, 1957.
Miss Cheesman's main entomological interests were the Hymenoptera and Hemiptera although the many thousands of insects she sent to the NHM during her travels included beetles (listed in Riley (1964). A large amount of MS material is also in the NHM (listed in Harvey et al. (1996), 44-46.
FRES 1919-1937 and from 1947, FZS 1922-1937. She received the OBE in 1955. There are obituaries in EMM,105, 1969, 217-219 (by K.G.V. Smith, from which much of the above is taken. Includes portrait and full bibliography); Times, 17 April 1969; and Proc RESL, 34, 1969-1970 (C), 61. (MD 3/02)