Brought up in Scotland and trained as a doctor before emigrating, with his wife and three boys, to Australia in the mid 1950s. The family returned to England in 1970 when to he took up the post of Professor of Pharmacology at St Georges Hospital, London.
He had always had a love of natural history and made a collection of Coleoptera, which he presented to the RSM before moving to Australia. On return he is reported to have asked for it back, but was not successful. He then made a second extensive collection during the course of which he published more than 200 papers and added 18 new species to the British list. He was a tireless and skilled field work, sometimes using traps of his own invention. These included a trap for catching subterranean beetles (the original of which he presented to the writer), which has since been widely used by others, and in which he captured Ferreria marqueti (Aube) from his garden and Medon dilutus (Erichson) from Richmond Park.
As well as seeking out rarities he also contributed to a large number of local surveys. These included, in particular, Abernethy Forest in the Highlands - he was a frequent visitor to Scotland with his family - and to several nearer home including Richmond Park, Chobham Common and Windsor where he was a fierce critic of official damage done to the habitat (see Coleopterists Newsletter, 31, 1988.) Many of us will remember joining him on these trips and particularly his memory for where he'd placed traps often years before. But apart from collecting and recording he also turned to breeding in paerticular of Cryptocephalus species on which he wrote several important papers.
Both John and his wife Doreen were very hospitable and many coleopterists, including myself and family, remember many happy times spent with them. He was also very generous, always delighted to help others and I owe him a personal debt of gratitude for gifts of Ptiliidae over many years.
He had one beetle named after him, the seashore staphylinid Myrmecopora owen Assing. His second collection joined the first at the RSM. His mounting method often using very short pins and with location information (often indecipherable!) written directly on the bottom of the mounts, makes specimens collected by him distinctive.
There are 164 pages of correspondence with Colin Johnson in MM (Box 14) dating from 1978-2004
There is brief obituary by Garth Foster, with portrait, in Latissimus,38, 2016, 1. (MD 1/22)