Born in Plymouth. Showed an early interest in natural history and wanted to pursue this professionally but was persuaded by his father to join the printing and bookselling business which he had established in 1830. In this he remained until his retirement in 1933. He married in 1884 Eliza Mary Bloye who died in 1926 leaving a son and daughter.
Malcolm Cameron in an obituary of Keys in EMM, 77, 1941, 60-61, recorded that he first met him in 1898 ‘and on that occasion and many others I look back with great pleasure on numerous excursions over Dartmoor. He was very versatile, and apart from his great skill as a microscopist and micro photographer he not only invented various ingenious gadgets to facilitate his work, but made them himself. He had a broad outlook on life and was of extremely modest temperament...’ . In a postscript to the same obituary R.W.Lloyd recorded that he used to meet him on journeys to Plymouth when staying with his friend F.C.Lemann and that they enjoyed ‘talking about our beetle captures’.
There is a third interesting and amusing account of him in Sir John Squire’s The Honeysuckle and the Bee, 1937 in which Sir John describes how he started collecting beetles as a youth and went into Keys’ shop to buy an exercise book in which to record his captures not knowing that Keys was an enthusiast. He described him as ‘a lively little man with spectacles and a big black moustache’.
Keys’ first article on entomology was on the Hemipteran Aepophilus bonnairii found when he was looking for Aepus murinus and A.robinii about which he published his first Coleoptera note in EMM, 24, 1888, 275-76. Many articles on the Plymouth fauna then followed leading up to his pamphlet Northern and Hill Country Coleoptera of South Devon (1920). He described three beetles as new to science: Plagiarthrina forhamiana (EMM, 56, 1920, 131-33), Atheta cambricina (ibid., 69, 1933, 77-78) and Atheta oloriphila (ibid., 270-71), all now synonymised with existing species, and three species new to Britain: Anchonidium unguiculare (ibid., 52, 1916, 112-13), Cathormiocerus attaphilus (ibid., 57, 1921, 100-02), and Atheta spissata (ibid., 62, 1926,159-61). He also published a ‘List of the maritime, sub-maritime and coast-frequenting Coleoptera of South Devon and South Cornwall with especial reference to the Plymouth district’ (Journal of the Marine Biological Association, 11(4), 1918, 497-513). Through his business he published a number of entomological books including Claude Morley’s volume on the Ichneumons of Great Britain.
Keys’ collection amounting to some 25,700 specimens along with his original catalogue is in the Plymouth City Museum (bequeathed, but only appears to cover the period from 1880-1910), and there are also specimens in the Marlborough College Collection (on permanent loan to the writer). A notebook and entomological journal covering the period 1889 – 1909, are in the RESL library, presented by E.W.Classey in April 1955 (Pedersen, 2002, p.53). J. Freedman, D.Hodge & A. Kearney 'The Life and Entomological Collections of George Carter Bignell', Antenna, 34(1), 2010, 3-8, includes an illustration of Key's bookplate and a picture of his entomology room including microscope. etc..
FRESL 1900-1941. (MD 8/03, 11/09)