LEWIS, Ernest Sidney

Born in South Norwood and lived with his father John, a carpenter, mother and older sister. Attended the John Ruskin School, Croydon, leaving at the outbreak of War in 1939 without qualifications. He was not called up for active service perhaps because he was underweight for his height. Instead, he joined the Continental Union Trust in 1941 as a book-keeper. He was quickly appointed Company Secretary and thirty three years later, after moving to Warlingham, gained Fellowship of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries. He retired in 1984 and moved to Chagford, Devon in 1990. Jonathan Cooter who wrote his obituary in EMM, 145, 2009, 253-54, states that Lewis was both a good all round naturalist and a Coleopterist: ‘he collected widely in the south east of England particularly around Croydon...Ernest’s interest in Phalacridae began around 1954 after seeking advice from E.B.Britton who, after discussion with J. Balfour-Browne, directed Ernest to this neglected family. Ernest took up the study with energy and enthusiasm and became, in the opinion of a mutual friend of both myself and Ernest, Ing. Zdenek Svec (Prague), the most accomplished authority on the Phalacridae. Ernest was of the opinion that major revisions were the way forward and did not describe individual species in a piecemeal fashion’. Lewis is thanked by R.T.Thompson for reading the ms of his Phalacridae Handbook. To British Coleopterists he is best known as the discoverer of Omophrum limbatum at Rye. (EMM 106, 1970, pp.219-221) Lewis’s early interest in entomology was such that in 1946 he joined both the AES and the Croydon Natural History Society, and in the following year the BENHS, then the South London, too. Of the Croydon Society he was Honorary Treasurer 1961-1970 and a founding Director in 1967; of the AES he was President in 1987/88 and of BENHS he was made a Special Life Member in 1997. It was meetings of the Croydon NHS that he met Connie Catchpole whom he married in June 1965. They had one son, David. The present writer is grateful to Lewis for providing information about a number of Coleopterists for this Dictionary. His letters were sometimes hand written in an attractive and distinctive copperplate script which fits so well with Cooter’s description of him attending field meetings in a business suit and black shoes. His collection was bequeathed to the HDO. (MD 11/09)