COTT, Hugh Bamford

I am grateful to Andrew Duff for pointing out the Wikipedi entry on Cott from which the following is extracted: British zoologist, an authority on both natural and military camouflage, and a scientific illustrator and photographer. Many of his field studies took place in Africa, where he was especially interested in the Nile crocodile. Cott was born in Leicestershire. In 1919, he graduated from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Between 1922 and 1925, he studied at Selwyn College, Cambridge . In 1938, he earned a Doctor of Science degree at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) under the supervision of John Graham Kerr. Cott served in the British Army as a camouflage expert from 1919–1922, and, during World War II, as a camouflage instructor from 1939–1945. This work led to the publication of his classic: Adaptive Colouration in Animals (London: Methuen, 1940, with a foreword by Julian Huxley). His co-workers' first-hand accounts of his work can be found in the memoirs of two of his fellow camoufleurs: Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957), and Roland Penrose, Scrapbook 1900–1981 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). In the years following World War I, Cott traveled to South America, where he studied in eastern Brazil, and on the lower Amazon. He also went on research trips to the Canary Islands, and Africa, including Mozambique, Zambia and East Africa. As a zoologist, he was a lecturer at Bristol University, 1928–1932; a lecturer at Glasgow University, 1932–1938; Strickland curator and lecturer at Cambridge University, 1938–1967; and a lecturer and Fellow at Selwyn College, 1945–?. As a scientific illustrator and photographer, he also wrote three other books: Zoological Photography in Practice (1956); Uganda in Black and White (1959); and Looking at Animals: a Zoologist in Africa (1975). Cott was a founding member of the Society of Wildlife Artists, and a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. There is a box of Tenebrionidae collected by Cott in the Canary Islands in 1931 in the Museum at Cambridge. (MD 4/02, 11/09)