MORLEY, Claude

Born in Blackheath and educated at Beccles, King’s School, Peterborough and Epsom College. After spending much time on the Isle of Wight where his father had a house at Cowes, he moved in about 1892 to Ipswich and studied under John E,Taylor, Curator of the Museum there. After marrying in 1904 he settled in Monks Soham where he remained until his death. He is recorded to have been highly individualistic and to have had a hatred of modern progress so that he would not permit a radio, telephone, electricity into his house nor would he accept ‘summer time’. His closest friend was E.A.Elliott (on their relationship see D.Nash ‘A Little-Known Important Recorder of Suffolk Insects Ernest Arthur Elliott (1850-1936)’ in White Admiral, Newsletter of the Suffolk Naturalists’ Soc., 65, 2006, pp.23-30 (and later corrections) Another close friend was Arthur Chitty (QV). Morley’s interest in entomology was already well established by the early 1890s and appears to have centred on the Coleoptera, although he quickly moved on to the Hemiptera and the Ichneumonidae, for the study of which he is best known. His magnum opus was the five volume Ichneumons of Great Britain (1903-1914). His most important work on the Coleoptera was The Coleoptera of Suffolk, 1899 (published in Plymouth by the Coleopterist J.H.Keys) and its Supplement, 1915 (also Keys); the first listed 1783 species and the second 237. He also wrote many articles in the EMM., ERJV., and other periodicals, and was on the editorial staff of the Entomologist from 1909. Morley’s collection of mainly Suffolk material covering the period 1898-1951 was acquired by the Suffolk Naturalists Society and is housed at Ispwish Museum where it is maintained separately and occupies c.260 drawers.Of this collection Nash (op. cit) notes that several thousand beetles had disintegrated by the 1970s and that the Museum then threw out the mounts and labels without recording the information they contained. There are Cerambycids bearing his name in the Kauffmann collection at Manchester. MSS material at Ipswich was acquired with his collection. His obituary in EMM, 87, 1951, p. 327, refers to a collection associated with his 1899 Suffolk list being given by him to Bury St Edmonds Museum in 1905. There are letters and postcards from Morley to C.J.Wainwright dated 1900-1944 in the RESL (Pedersen (2002) p.140. FESL from 1896. (MD 2/04)