MORGAN, Joan (Margaret)

Born in Halifax, the daughter of a Welsh father and English mother. Went to Liverpool University in 1939 where she took a degree in Zoology. After graduating she took a teaching certificate in 1944 and then taught at a grammar school in the Isle of Man before marrying her cousin, a merchant navy seaman. Subsequently did an MSc. on midges before moving with her three children to north Wales where in 1957 she began teaching in the Department of Agricultural and Forest Zoology at the University College of North Wales, Bangor. Her appointment resulted from the death of Neil Chrystal who had been doing entomology demonstrations there. (Morgan in litt) She remained at Bangor until retirement in 1989. Morgan served on the Committee for the Conservation of British Insects, and was active in what is now known as the North Wales Wildlife Trust. Served on the editorial board of Nature in Wales and started, in 1990, the North Wales Invertebrate Group Newsletter. Wrote with Bill Lacey The Nature of North Wales. Morgan’s work on entomology stretched to most groups and she was invertebrate recorder for six Welsh Vice Counties. She also built up an impressive reference collection for the Bangor area which includes not only the specimens she collected, but also those collected by her students. The data which accompanied the collection includes more than 60,000 records and is now in the NMW. A computerised copy of her complete faunal list has been produced by the Countryside Council for Wales. Her publications on entomology encompassed all orders and involved adding many insects to the Welsh list, often as the result of identifications which she had made for others, as well as confirmations of several rare species. The work for which she is best known amongst Coleopterists is the Supplement to Skidmore and Johnson’s list of the Coleoptera of Merioneth (1989) in Ent. Gaz., 25, 1974, pp.53-75 . This added some 88 new records to the original 1,150.There are obituaries in Society for the History of Natural History Newsletter, 65, July 1999, pp.11-12, and by Paul Whalley in Antenna, 23(4), 1999, pp.210-211. (MD 2/04)