TOTTENHAM, C. E.

Born at Seldmere, Yorkshire. After acquiring his BA (1917) and MA (1922) he was ordained in the Diocese of Chichester and his early curacies included St John sub Castro and Bexhill on Sea; Coveney, Cambridgeshire; Hanley, Staffordshire; Richmond, Surrey; Rous Lench, Worcestershire; and East Ardsley, Yorkshire. He also lived at Thorpe Bay, Essex where he was Headmaster of Southend Grammar School. He gave up Holy Orders in September 1937, moved to London and then to West Ewell, Surrey, and again to Cambridge where took up another teaching post in 1942 and also became Curator of the Zurich collection at Cambridge University Museum. His interests apart from entomology included music, swimming and philately. Tottenham is best know to British Coleopterists for his volume on Piestinae to Euaesthetinae (1954) in the Handbooks for the Identification of British Insects series. This was part 1 of a proposed two or more volume publication on the British Staphylinidae and he was working on part 2 at the time of his death. He is also known for adding a number of new species to the British list including two which were new t o science: Philonthus jurgans and Gynpeta rubrior. His major work on the Staphylinids, however, was largely confined to African Philonthus, to which he added many new species and sorted out several complications. At the time of his death he was re-organising the NHM’s collections of this genus, which had been arranged in alphabetical order, and he was also working on Peruvian Staphylinidae. A complete list of his publications is appended to his obituary by Horace Last in EMM.,113, 1977, pp.174-75. Last states that Tottenham ‘kept his specimens in small ‘trays’ made by himself and which fitted into the shallow drawers of his home made cabinets. Each tray contained specimens of one species and were edged with differently coloured paper based on his own geographical key, but whole drawers were allocated to one species of British material, often a very common one, with each locality in its little tray with the county or vice-county symbol. These are now in the NHM and Max Barclay provided the following further information about them in March 2003 on the Beetles-BritishIsles web site: ‘From memory Tottenham wrote data underneath the card, two letter vice-county code on top of card, pinned flat on the balsa wood of his home made unit trays... [he] usually wrote data on the first specimen of each series only, and left the remaining members of that series without data. This means that if specimens are moved from their original position in his collection, their data will be lost. Luckily it is in ‘unit trays’ of a sort. For smaller species he used a label, and larger (5mm up) wrote on the underside of the card. His habit of leaving most specimens without data has greatly slowed the incorporation of his collection. A volunteer, Miriam Thomas, has spent many years printing individual data labels and adding them to his specimens. His collection also needs to be re-pinned as he used copper-based cabinet points which have corroded.’ There are also specimens collected by Tottenham in the general collection at Doncaster Museum eg Haliplidae. The Sharp Correspondence at Liverpool (vol. 1.) contains a letter from Tottenham dated 19 April 1923 from 47 Lichfield Street, Hanley. (p.560). (MD 12/04)