Walter Wilson Froggatt

Walter Wilson Froggatt was an Australian-born amateur entomologist who spent most of his later life in England. He made his fortune in mining shares and moved to England in 1902. He became interested in producing an exhaustive work on Australian insects after visiting the British Museum and meeting R. Bowdler Sharpe, the keeper of the bird collection. He worked tirelessly on his research, writing, skin and book-collecting, and corresponded with experts all over the world. He published the first volume of Australian Insects in 1907, and completed the 12-volume work in 1927. He also founded, funded, edited and contributed to the journal The Austral Avian Record. He was a controversial figure in Australian entomology, as he was regarded as an extreme splitter who recognised large numbers of subspecies on scant evidence. He also split many genera and proposed new names for them. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1910 and a Fellow of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union in 1939. He was made CBE in 1939 for his services to entomology. He donated his ornithological library to the National Library of Australia in 1939 and a small collection of Aboriginal ethnographic items to the British Museum in 1939. He died of a heart failure in Sydney on 18 March 1937.