Professional collector who died in great poverty and whose discoveries, principally of saproxylic beetles, are regularly mentioned by Rye in his series of Ent Ann articles on additions to the British fauna. A short account in EMM,5, 1868, p.25 mentions that ‘for some years since he earned a precarious livelihood by gathering moss for the bird stuffers. When engaged in this pursuit he fell in with the late James Foxcroft, who induced him to collect insects.’ This is expanded in Ent., 4, 1868-69, p.107 where he is described as a collector of tact, intelligence, perservering and successful, possessed of a most accurate eye and with the ability to impress a rarity on his memory ‘taking only rough notes (intelligible to himself only) which seemed to guide him aright’. A rather different picture is given by Rye who devoted a couple of pages to him in the Ent.Ann., 1869 (pp.9-10) ‘only those who, like myself, have heard from the inhabitants of the distant localities in which he worked, accounts of his ways and means, and have seen his colossal ravages in situ, can be aware of the hardships and toil he endured in pursuit of these good things. There can be no doubt that he possessed strong determination and perseverance, ability to work very hard under very discouraging circumstances, an extremely quick eye and retentive memory (which enabled him to profit by the instructions of the ‘book learned’ for whom, however, he in unguarded moments expressed a copious contempt), great natural shrewdness, and a power of concealing his innate artful nature beneath an apparent frankness of manner. For, to use the mildest language, his natural mental bias was very distinctly in an oblique direction. But for this, he would have been supported to any extent by his patrons, whom , inspite of repeated condonements, he perpetually again deceived. I suppose it will never be known how many actual specimens of his rarities were taken by himself and his genial partner; but they must certainly have been very much larger in number than is generally believed. And it is sad to think how the contents of many ‘screws’ of his finest New Forest, Scotch and Sherwood beetles are probably now ‘wasting their sweetness and desert air’ of unappreciating possessors, or have been lost or destroyed as valueless... he had at times rudimentary instincts of justice, which impelled him to make good former deficiencies...’. Mackechnie-Jarvis (1976) states that Turner’s discoveries added 12 insects to the British list including Zeugophora turneri which he found in Scotland and which was named after him by Power in 1863, and added 35 others known only by single specimens or being mentioned by early authors as British. Mentioned in Janson diary at Cambridge eg. Dec 1866. There is a portrait photograph in Mackechnie-Jarvis (1976) pl.8. (MD 12/04)
Dates
c.1808 – May 1868