Expert mycologist with many publications on mushrooms and toadstools. Collected Coleoptera as a hobby and contributed numerous records to Duff (1993) The following is taken from an obituary by Peter Marren in The Independent, 28 April 2005.
Orton was born in 1916 in Plymouth, where his father, James Herbert Orton, later Professor of Zoology at Liverpool University, worked as a marine scientist. An only child of a broken marriage and as a teenager he suffered from measles which left him partially deaf and with poor eyesight. He was sent to Oundle School in Northamptonshire in 1929 where he came under the kindly eye of the headmaster, Kenneth Fisher, a keen ornithologist and musician. From an early age Orton had become fascinated by natural history, especially insects, plants and fungi, and at school also became a proficient pianist and organist.
He won a place at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, Music and History, passing with a general degree in 1937. He later studied at the Royal College of Music. Arriving late and flustered for his examination at the top of a flight of stairs he tripped and fell straight into the arms of his examiner - who turned out to be Ralph Vaughan Williams.
(MD 11/09, 2/20, 1/22)