83 Serendipity – The SNS of Yesteryear In 1948, the year that my father took over the living of Waldringfield and Hemley from my grandfather, Canon A. P. Waller, my mother paid my first subscription to the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society. At that time my grandfather and two uncles had the initials ‘OM’ (original members) after their names on the membership list. My grandfather was a well-known Suffolk entomologist and had contributed to the first edition of South’s iconic guide The Moths of the British Isles. He was also a friend of Claude Morley. It was he who encouraged me to take an interest in Lepidoptera. In the same year I myself met Claude Morley but I don’t remember much about him but for years after his death in 1951 my grandfather referred to him as a kind of Delphic oracle on all things entomological. Since 1929 my grandfather contributed many articles on Suffolk Lepidoptera in the Transactions and Proceedings but always after consulting Claude. Encouraged by my grandfather, I began to collect moths from the GPO telephone box at the top of our road in Waldringfield. Aficionados will know that the old style box had an air vent at the top and an electric light inside which was permanently switched on. It proved to be an excellent moth trap. In my early morning visits apart from the resting moths there was often a pecuniary reward too in that previous users had forgotten to press the Return Money button. From there I progressed to a homemade moth trap with a mercury vapour bulb on a tripod and so became one of the first users of a m.v. moth trap in the county. The new trap attracted more species and larger numbers in one night’s operation than the telephone box in a month. Soon I too began to contribute to the Transactions and was in regular correspondence with Baron de Worms who was then working in the entomological section of the Natural History Museum in London and later in the same section in the Cambridge Museum when I was an undergraduate there. Later Messrs Beaufoy and Chipperfield were respectively the recorders for butterflies and moths. Those were the days when the Misses Colquhoun of Martlesham Hall were active in the Society. Among the field events there were mysterious fungus forays. I often wondered who went on them and whether they ate what they found. I was recently reminded of those earlier times when I opened a trunk in my attic, probably for the first time in thirty years. Buried at the bottom was a large envelope. I had struck gold. It was addressed to my grandfather from Claude Morley and postmarked 1930. The envelope had been labelled in pencil ‘Entomological Records’. In it was a notebook of what Lepidoptera my grandfather had collected at Waldringfield from 1897 onwards; a press cutting referring to the first list of Lepidoptera of Suffolk published by the Rev. E. N. Bloomfield in1900 and a subsequent update a decade later produced by my grandfather. Most of the contributions were from Suffolk clergymen who obviously had copious spare time from ministering their flocks. Also included was one from a certain Claude Morley F.E.S.
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 50 (2014)