An insurance broker who lived in the Leeds area of Yorkshire until the late 1940s when he moved to Nottingham. Although he worked on the Neuroptera, Diptera, Ephemeroptera and other orders, he is best known to entomologists for his Field Book of Beetles, 1948 and for the Passalidae sections of the Coleopterorum Catalogus. The latter was compiled in conjunction with W.D.Hincks, with whom he worked closely, and was the result of a detailed study of this group which Dibb had started in his early twenties. Many of the more than sixty articles which he contributed to the entomological press concerned Passalidae and included descriptions of numerous new species and genera.
The Field Book was of particular interest because it was bionomic in arrangement and allowed determination of species on ecological criteria rather than conventional taxonomic lines. 2,500 species are included in the keys. I have in my library a single sheet headed ‘Beetle Natural History’, published by A. Brown and Sons, the publishers of Dibb's book, which gives details of a student's course which they organised based on the Field Book. The course comprised 22 lessons including many field trips to the different habitat groups listed by Dibb. It is not clear whether Dibb himself was the teacher.
Dibb worked closely with W.D. Hincks and most collections are listed as being by both. The collection was dispersed several years before Dibb's death. Part went to the Leeds Museum, where it remained during the War (some specimens were lost through bombing). This part, consisting mainly of a world-wide collection built up by purchase between 1930 and 1940, which subsequently found its way to Manchester through Hincks, and where it was later united with other material which the museum acquired from Leeds. Adam Parker has pointed out to me that Simms (1968) mentions a collection of 6000 Carabidae, mainly north of England, in the Yorkshire Museum acquired in 1941. Other parts of collections went to the Museum at Nottingham and to the NHM. FRES from 1930 (with a short break in the late 1960s). There is an obituary by A.D.Lees in Proc.RESL., 38, 1973-74 (C), pp.58-59. (MD 6/02, 12/21)