An organ builder and restorer who lived in Leicester and started collecting beetles in 1903. He was friendly with W.H.Barrow (see above) for many years and was responsible for first inspiring a number of young coleopterists including Donald Tozer and Claude Henderson. He published a note on the discovery of Cis bilamellatus at Sherwood in EMM, 74, 1938, p.52. On Taylor’s collection Lott (2009) states ‘In the 1950s, the beetle collections at Leicester Museum were rearranged into one integrated collection. The four main constituent collections at the time were given coloured labels in order to distinquish them. These coloured labels are now fading to the point where they are indistinquishable. One of the enduring mysteries to successive curators has been the origin of the collection given blue labels in the reorganisation (Acc. No. Z20.1954). This collection was acquired in 23 store boxes, on 31 December 1953 from S.A.Taylor, after the death of his father, S.O.Taylor, in the previous September. S.A.Taylor died in a car crash just eight days later and his father’s collection was acquired in an oak cabinet on 1 April 1954 from S.A.Taylor’s widow. It was originally assumed that the collection in store boxes, later given the blue labels, was that of S.A.Taylor. However S.A.Taylor was primarily a botanist. According to Don Tozer, he never kept his own collection and it is highly likely that he collected beetles only on behalf of his father. I was told by W. Hunt that W.H.Barrow gave his collection to S.O.Taylor. The collection given blue labels is therefore more likely to be the remainder of Barrow’s collection after some material had been incorporated into Taylor’s own collection. A number of clues support this contention. The blue-labelled collection largely lacks locality labels, but the details of the few that do, carry Barrow’s name. The pinning and mounting style is similar to Taylor’s collection, as would be expected considering the close association of Taylor and Barrow right from the start of their collecting careers, Barrow was still alive in August 1945 when he sent Taylor some beetles from Barrowden ‘out of a harvest wagon containing logs’. At this time Barrow would have been nearly 90 years old and if he died soon after, his collection would have passed to Taylor not long before Taylor himself became ill and bed-ridden in 1949. On acquiring someone else’s collection it was normal practice to incorporate desiderata into your own collection and keep the remainder as spares. Some material was incorporated into Taylor’s collection and the fact that the remainder remained intact is probably due, either to Taylor’s subsequent early demise or because he always intended to donate them to the museum, which his son duly did.’ Taylor’s collection also included part of J.H.Woolley’s collection, and his collection notebook is also in the Museum. I have also seen specimens collected by him in the Kauffmann collection of Cerambycidae at Manchester. (MD 12/04, 11/09)
Dates
1870 – September 1953