Attended Minchenden School, Southgate, London from 1929-36. Upon the death of his father, being the eldest son, he had to support his family so took up the post of Medical Laboratory Technician with Middlesex County Council. Shortly before the outbreak of the 2nd World War he joined ICI where he worked on plastics until 1945 when he transferred to the Agricultural Control Section. Here he was able to work with insects in which he had been interested since a boy. In 1959 he was appointed Senior Experimental Field Officer at Silwood Park, Imperial College’s Field Station, and it was then that he was able to pursue professionally his interest in the taxonomy of the Coleoptera. Whilst in this post he studied for a degree but this, and his taking up a Lectureship in Entomology which had been offered to him, were forestalled by his early death. A doctorate was awarded to him posthumously. Steel’s other interests included the Territorial Army reserve and the Boy Scout movement, and he was a national authority on 19th century railway goods stock. Lived at Bracknell in 1948 and Maidenhead in 1955. Steel was on the editorial board off the EMM and succeeded W.D.Hincks as editor of the Coleopterorum Catalogus. For the RESL he edited three parts of the revised edition of Kloet and Hincks Check List of British Insects and prepared a handbook on the Lathridiidae which was not published. He was also much involved with survey work for the Nature Conservancy Council as a member of their Survey Committee and of their Entomological Liaison Committee. He died whilst undertaking a survey on the Isle of Rhum, which was the subject of his last edited publication (with G.E.Woodroffe) ‘The Entomology of the Isle of Rhum National Nature Reserve’ in Trans. Soc .Brit. Ent., 18, 1969, pp.91-167. Steel’s great interest in the Coleoptera was the Staphylinidae and their larvae particularly the Proteininae and Omalinae which he studied on a world basis. The first of his 65 notes and articles on this subject, many of which describe new genera and species, was published in EMM., 74, 1938, pp.28-30. His additions to the British list included Bohemiellina paradoxa, Carpelimus subtlicornis and Tachinus flavolimbatus Steel’s collection passed to the NHM. There are also beetles collected by him in the D.G.Hall collection at the North Hertfordshire Museum (Information from Trevor James) and Johnson (2004) p.15 notes that there is a collection of 2,000 specimens, being Scottish survey material (1960-68) and English Ptiliidae (1939-43), in the Manchester Museum, acquired in c.1970. This collection is accompanied by locality lists. FRESL from 1952. There is an obituary by T.R.E.Southwood in EMM., 105, 1969, pp. 144-49, which includes a complete bibliography and photograph, and another in Proc.RESL., 34, 1969-70, (C), p.63. (MD 11/04)
Dates
23 September 1917 – 5/6 September 1969