Whilst the name of our founder Claude Morley will be well-known to all members following the recent publication of four papers in our Transactions by two longstanding members who knew him (Simpson, 1989, 1990; Aston, 1999, 2000), I suspect most will be unfamiliar with that of Ernest Elliott who, it appears, was his closest friend. This article attempts to remedy the situation by outlining his colourful, eventful life, appraising his contribution to our society, to Suffolk entomology in particular and to entomology in general. It also attempts to tease out for the first time, the way in which the lives of the two men intertwined and of how this symbiotic relationship benefited them both.

Ernest Arthur Elliott was born in Calcutta on June 20th 1850, the third son of William Henry Elliott (1811–1870), the Chief Magistrate of that city, and his wife Catherine Mary Elliott (née Pearson), daughter of the Dean of Salisbury. He was named after “Ernest Maltravers”, the central character of the now little-known book of that same name written by Edward Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton) and published in 1837.

As a member of an aristocratic family, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing and was privately educated at several exclusive schools on the continent and this country. Around 1865, the family left India and returned to this country. Ernest took up paid work for a short while in a London office. Here his foot was crushed – the first of many such accidents which were to subsequently befall him. He continued his education in 1867 by returning to Repton School in Lincolnshire where he just missed encountering William Weekes Fowler (1849–1923) who taught there from around the year 1873 until 1880. Fowler was destined to become, and arguably still remains, the most well-known and respected writer on British beetles as a result of his precisely detailed descriptions of, and keys to identify, the whole of the then-known British coleoptera.

It was around this time that Elliott appears to have first shown an interest in the natural world when, in 1868, he collected fossils at Dovedale in Derbyshire as part of a botanical survey. As Morley (1936b) informs us, Elliott became “essentially a collector – of coins, stamps and all objects of Natural History”. In some scientific circles today, the word “collector”, usually prefaced by “mere” or “only”, is used as a derogatory term to imply that a person’s activity in a particular field, is of little scientific value, but at that time, no stigma would have been implied by Morley’s use of the word in the context of living things. Collecting of natural objects, including acquisition purely for collecting’s sake or decoration, rather than for any scientific purpose, had been a normal and respectable activity in Victorian society and it had been especially espoused by many of the clergy who saw the natural world as evidence of the creator and enjoyment of the natural world as a sign of Christian piety. As we shall see later , both men had grown up in that culture, albeit at somewhat different times, and they were to remain entrenched in those attitudes throughout their lives.

Upon leaving Repton, and having by that time decided upon a career in forestry, Elliott went first to Hartley Forestry College in Southampton and then to the Hartz Mountains in Saxony where he worked with the Black Foresters between 1871 and 73. Whilst there he was Unteroffizier in the Saxon Iagers and assisted at King John of Saxony’s jubilee. He was later to help King John at Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1887.

He had hoped to get into the Indian Forestry Service but failed the medical because of poor health and problems with his eyesight both of which appear to have afflicted him throughout his life. He was, however, made an Assistant in Bombay in 1874 and remained in India until 1876.

In that year he travelled by windjammer round Cape Horn to Australia and, in addition to making an extensive collection of natural history specimens, took up cattle ranching and opal mining about which he was later to lecture to our newly formed society (Morley, 1931). His life there appears to have been adventurous, exciting and dangerous. His left arm was ripped up to the shoulder when a horse plunged him up against a stockade, he was attacked by a wild cow whilst attempting to protect it and its calf from a pack of dingoes, nearly roasted alive in two forest fires whilst on horseback and driven onto the roof of his house by a flood. He also contracted dysentery which persisted for his eight years there.

In 1884, Elliott decided to make what was meant to be only a temporary trip home. On his way to embark, all of the natural history collection which he had built up during the previous eight years was lost in a flooded river – an indication of the hazards of travelling at that time in remote parts of Australia. Unfortunately, his anticipated temporary return to this country turned into a permanent one. His father had died in 1870 at the relatively early age of fifty-nine and in the year of his return from Australia, both of his elder brothers died. These deaths were probably the reason behind Elliott’s decision to stay in London attending to his mother until she died in 1903. This enforced grounding put paid to his foreign travels but was instrumental in bringing him into contact with Claude Morley.

Elliott appears to have first met Morley at Cowes on the Isle of Wight on 8th September, 1885 when he was thirty-five and Morley was just a boy of eleven. Morley’s father had a home there at that time and we know that the seashore at Ryde was the initial stimulus for Morley’s life-time obsession with the natural world. It was also the start of a firm friendship which was to last for fifty-one years.

A family-living at Tattingstone was a major factor in the development of the friendship. Elliott’s father had married the daughter of the Dean of Salisbury and at St Mary’s Church,Tattingstone can be seen significant memorials commemorating his father, his uncle the Rev.Charles Boileau Elliott (1803–1875) and his grandparents Charles (1776–1856) and Alicia Elliott (née Boileau de Castelnau) (1779– 1851). There are also other Elliotts mentioned whose relationship to Ernest is unclear. Until the C20th, clergy and their families were members of a relatively tightly-knit social group. They were frequently related to each other by kinship or marriage so clerical colleagues were also often scientific colleagues and kinsfolk thereby creating a powerful network. The Morleys became part of this network as a result of Claude’s father, James Henry Morley ( a wealthy Manchester merchant involved in the cotton trade) marrying Alice Wilson, the daughter of Canon Josiah Bateman and the tradition was further perpetuated when, in 1904, Claude himself married Rose Anne, daughter of Canon Knowles Edmonds.

The parochial system also allowed parsons such as Gilbert White to devote their working lives to studying the natural history and people of a single discrete area of the countryside and although Morley was not a cleric himself he was part of the social group and showed this same tendency when he chose to devote a large part of his life to studying and writing about Suffolk natural history and the history of the county’s families.

Whilst the Tattingstone family living was probably the initial reason for Elliott’s visits to the county, a second emerged when around 1892 Morley set up home in Ipswich and went to study at Ipswich Museum under the then Curator John E. Taylor. Elliott and Morley plainly got on well together from the outset because of their shared interest in entomology and, more specifically in these early years, in beetles. For more than forty years Elliott was to collect insects, usually in fortnightly spells, almost annually in Suffolk, although it seems that he was never permanently resident in the county. Until Morley married in 1904 and acquired a permanent chauffeur in the form of his wife, he and Elliott used to cycle or use the train to reach their collecting destinations.

In October 1899, at the age of forty-nine, Elliott cemented his place in his social milieu by marrying his cousin Agnes Walker, the eldest daughter of Canon C. J. Elliott of Winkfield in Berkshire. The year of the marriage coincided with the publication by Claude Morley (then aged twenty-five) of his first separate work ”The Coleoptera of Suffolk” in which many beetle records by Elliott are included and in the introduction to which there appears a fulsome tribute to Elliott:

“My best thanks to my fidus Achates, Mr. Ernest A. Elliott, F.I. INST. etc., I will but mention. My obligations to him in this and in all matters scientific are too numerous and deep for mere wording.”

Coming from a well-educated background, Morley would, I feel sure, have used the well-known Latin tag from Virgil, not merely in its often translated form as “faithful friend” i.e. a perennial type of loyalty, but rather in its alternative form as a “faithful companion”. It appears almost certain that Morley’s choice of the Coleoptera for his first monograph had been influenced by the older man who, although little known as a British coleopterist probably already had a significant collection of British and foreign beetles.

Morley had started publishing entomological notes in 1894 at the age of twenty. His enthusiasm and abilities as a recorder and collator together with his encouragement were probably the stimuli for Elliott to follow in the younger man’s footsteps. In 1900, he started publishing notes and accounts of tropical insects in The Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine. He had several brothers who travelled extensively and we know that they sent him specimens to add to his foreign collection. Darby (1981) informs us that between 1897 and 1919 he presented more than 1,800 tropical beetles to the British Museum (Natural History).

Following the publication of his 1899 “Coleoptera”, Morley largely abandoned beetles and turned his attention to the taxonomically difficult group of Hymenoptera, the parasitic wasps (Ichneumonoidea), and these were to be the chief focus of his serious taxonomic work and publications for the next 15 years during which time he became one of the five major writers in the first third of the C20th on the European species. He did, however, find time to publish catalogues of the Suffolk Hemiptera (1905), Hymenoptera – part only (1910) and a supplement to his “Coleoptera” (1915) in which he tells us that he and Elliott had “continued to scour the county in every direction, as is our ancient wont” to find beetles new to Suffolk.

Given Morley’s interest in parasitic wasps at this time and Elliott’s continued preference for beetles, it is no surprise to find them publishing in 1907 a joint paper on the hymenopterous parasites of Coleoptera in the Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London and following this up with a supplement in 1911.

In 1919, Elliott moved from his home in London to St Leonards, Sussex in which county he had family connections. The following year, aged seventy, he was persuaded by Morley, to work on the British Museum (now Natural History Museum) material of the then poorly-known and difficult tropical family, the Stephanidae. This culminated in 1922 with Elliott’s important monograph published by the Zoological Society of London in which he described some 200 species and established the correct synonymy of many more. He followed this up between 1926–8 with papers in the Philippine Journal of Science describing new species of Stephanidae from Borneo etc. These papers established him as a respected world authority on the family.

Elliott gives the impression that he was a generous man, not only in spirit but also in respect of his wealth. The latter aspect is borne out by his gift to the Royal Entomological Society in 1932, of a complete set of the parts so far published of Wyts-man’s Genera Insectorum(1902–1970), a beautifully illustrated, multi-authored work worth more than a hundred guineas at that time.

When Morley established the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society in 1929, Elliott, then seventy-nine, became its first Treasurer and was to remain so until his death. The late Francis Simpson of Ipswich Museum first became involved with the meetings of the society in 1931 and met many of the so-called Original Members but he informs us (Simpson, 1989) that he never recalled Elliott at any of these – an absence, I suspect, almost certainly due to Elliott’s advanced age and poor health.

Having now effectively acquired his own publishing outlet with the society’s Transactions, Morley no longer had to rely as formerly, on the well-known coleopterist and professional printer J. H. Keys of Plymouth to print his separate works on Suffolk insects. In the first volume of these, Elliott published a second supplement to Morley’s 1899 Coleoptera”(Elliott, 1929) and this was later followed posthumously by what is essentially a third supplement (Elliott, 1936).

At the end of volume 2 of our Transactions (1934) and two years before Elliott’s death, there appears the following bizarre review written by Morley:

“Babblings of Bugland’s Bard. (One Hundred Copies Only. Beccles: Nobbs & Goate, Smallgate; 5s. 6d.).—This small and somewhat delicate volume merits and claims no place in scientific literature; but it may be cursorily referred to here for no better reason than its emanation from the —may we say, abnormal ? —brains of two of our own members, who maintain their own anonymity as The Bard, extenuated, condoned and abetted by the The Bardlet. Excluding a few graver pages, the whole is a relation, roughly thrown into verse, of what can (and cannot) happen to Naturalists, more especially “Bug-hunters,” in the great open spaces and most particularly those of Suffolk. “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men” : here you have it.”

This 117 page, small 8vo green cloth-covered book was privately printed and jointly authored, using thinly disguised pseudonyms, by Ernest Elliott and Claude Morley and reveals a light-hearted and humorous side of the pair which contrasts strongly with the seriousness of their scientific writings. The book consists of 37 poems (mostly written as parodies of well-known poetic works) and one prose piece which catalogue many of the authors’ entomological activities and interests over the years. It is a whimsical, sentimental, indulgent, divertissement of nostalgic reminiscences of their collecting trips and adventures together when they were younger. It is also a celebration of the undoubted very close friendship which they enjoyed.