Ian Heslop

Ian Robert Penicuick Heslop was born in India in 1904, shortly after 2 June.[3][4] His father, Septimus, served in the British Army as part of the Royal Engineers.[5] Heslop grew up in Bristol,[6] where he attended Clifton College, a public school in the city.[5]

Septimus Heslop was a keen butterfly collector.[6] According to Oates's biography, the younger Heslop first began to collect butterflies at the age of seven, when a family member gave him a jar of Pieris larvae to keep him entertained through a bout of mumps. His mother subsequently forbade him from collecting: two years later, however, Septimus returned from service in India and permitted his son to resume the hobby.[5] On his eleventh birthday, he collected his first Vanessa cardui ("Painted Lady") using a net owned by his uncle, a vicar, who used it to catch bats in his church.[2]

At Clifton, a number of pupils interested in butterfly collecting attended the school's Scientific Society, which was allowed on periodic afternoons to take trips to collect specimens. In 1921, he made what Oates calls "his first major capture", that of a Nymphalis antiopa ("Camberwell Beauty") in the Forest of Dean. In 1923, he visited the New Forest, a noted site for butterfly collecting, for the first time, with his father.[5]

Cambridge University

Heslop's parents intended for him to follow his father into the Royal Engineers, though Heslop himself aspired to a career in zoology or as a museum curator; the family therefore compromised on sending him to Cambridge University with a view to a post in either the civil service or colonial administration.[5] The journalist Benedict Le Vay described him as "among the pleasantly battiest of 20th-century Cambridge eccentrics".[7]

Nymphalis antiopa, photographed in Romania in 2013

Heslop went up to Cambridge in 1923,[6] where he read classics at Corpus Christi College[8] and was a member of the Officers' Training Corps.[9] He met and befriended Charles de Worms, then studying at King's College, who would become a noted lepidopterologist and Heslop's long-time friend and collecting companion.[5] Heslop and de Worms often travelled to nearby Wicken Fen and the woods near Huntingdon in search of specimens.[10] Heslop secured what Oates calls a "good" MA, despite spending much of his final year collecting butterflies.[5]

Heslop was a prominent member of the Cambridge University Small Bore Club (CUSBC), which took part in smallbore rifle shooting: he helped Cambridge to back-to-back victories in the annual Varsity match against Oxford University between 1923 and 1926. He received his Blue in shooting,[lower-alpha 1] and was CUSBC's captain in 1926.[6] He was also a prominent revolver shot: in 1929, Heslop presented the trophy awarded ever since for the Varsity match in revolver shooting, which was known as the "Heslop Match" until 1948.[12][lower-alpha 2] He also donated the trophy for the smallbore Varsity match, which continues to be known as the "Heslop".[14]

1967 map of the languages of Nigeria; the city of Owerri can be seen in the south.

After graduating in 1926, Heslop spent the summer of 1927 on excursions to collect butterflies, then returned to Cambridge in 1928 for a course in colonial administration. On 3 July 1929, he left for Nigeria,[15] then a British colony, to take up a position with the Nigerian Administration Services as part of the British Colonial Service.[14] He was stationed in the southern province of Owerri, where he rose to the rank of district commissioner.[14] His duties in Nigeria included presiding over legal cases: he acted as a magistrate in trials of local people charged with slave trading, and was once required to supervise an execution.[16]

A Nigerian caricature of a European official, perhaps a missionary or district administrator, made in the first half of the twentieth century.

Heslop learned to speak the Igbo language, and became an expert in local wildlife as well as a prolific hunter,[17] acquiring the nickname "King of the Hunters". He took part in local ceremonies,[18] but wrote unfavourably of the people of his district in a report to his British superiors about the Nkalu people:

The Nkalus are on the whole not likeable people. Their extraordinary deceitfulness and lack of good faith towards each other is their most repulsive characteristic. They are, however, free from the vulgarity that so defiles the more sophisticated communities of this province.[15]

Heslop took leave twice a year to return to England, usually over the main butterfly-collecting season; he wrote the first edition of his Check-List of the British Lepidoptera while in Nigeria, with little access to libraries or museums.[15] Despite these difficulties, the Check-List was considered a "standard work" of lepidopterology by the 1970s.[4] Heslop considered, though never completed, writing a book on his time in Nigeria,[17] which he later described as the happiest in his life.[16]

While in Nigeria during the early 1940s, Heslop met and married Eileen Huxford, a Church of England missionary: the two were engaged in 1942.[15] Huxford took up shooting and butterfly collecting after meeting Heslop, and went with him on hunting expeditions.[19] In 1951, finding it difficult to raise a family in Nigeria, Eileen and their children returned to England.[18] They lived in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, which would be Heslop's family home for the remainder of his life.[15]

Study of the Nigerian pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis heslopi)

Main article: Pygmy hippopotamus

Range of Choeropsis liberiensis liberiensis, c. 1943 (red, to the east)

Heslop has been described as a "key player" in the history of the pygmy hippopotamus, a species known by the name ogomogo in his jurisdiction.[6] Before the 1940s, western naturalists generally considered that the animals could not be found in Nigeria, since the nearest generally-recognised population was in Liberia, around 1,000 miles (1,600 km) to the west.[20] Heslop made his first report of the existence of the species in Nigeria in 1934.[19]

However, his observations were frequently disbelieved in the academic community.[21] He shot two of the animals in 1935 and sent their skulls to the British Museum (Natural History) in London for scientific study.[22] He shot another in 1943, and prepared the animal's entire carcass as a scientific specimen;[19] he sent its skin to the British Museum in 1968, and it was used by the naturalist Gordon Barclay Corbet to demonstrate that the Nigerian pygmy hippopotamus was indeed a distinct subspecies from the Liberian (Choeropsis liberiensis liberiensis). Corbet named the Nigerian subspecies Hexaprotodon[lower-alpha 3] liberiensis heslopi in Heslop's honour.[24]

Heslop had intended the specimens he took to serve as evidence of the existence of the subspecies,[18] which he believed to be on the verge of extinction.[18] In 1945, he estimated that no more than thirty of the animals remained, divided between small, isolated populations.[25] He also ate meat from the animal, describing its taste as "intermediate between beef and pork".[16] He counted the skull and jaw of his third hippopotamus among his most prized possessions, and kept them until his death, when his wife Eileen donated them to the British Museum along with his hunting records.[21]

Heslop's work with the pygmy hippopotamus remained largely unknown and uncelebrated during his lifetime.[14] In 1953, the Nigerian Inspector-General of Forests acknowledged the pygmy hippopotamus as among Nigeria's native mammals, albeit as the one with the narrowest known geographical range.[18] Heslop's reports remain the last confirmed sightings of the Nigerian subspecies,[26] and it was designated Extinct on the IUCN Red List in 1994.[27] Heslop is the only person known to have written an account of Choeropsis liberiensis heslopi in the wild.[18]

A male Apatura iris ("Purple Emperor"), photographed in Bernwood Forest, Oxfordshire

Heslop's attitude to butterfly collecting has been described by Oates as "turning the gentle pursuit of butterflies into an extreme country sport."[5] He collected his first example of Leptidea sinapis ("Wood White") on the tracks at a railway station, only narrowly escaping being hit by an oncoming express train. In 1968, aged sixty-four, he waded and swam into a flooded Woodwalton Fen to collect examples of Lycaena dispar batavus ("Large Copper").[5]

He had a particular interest in Maculinea arion ("Large Blue"): in 1949, he rediscovered the existence of the species in the Polden Hills of Somerset, and later discovered previously-unknown populations of it in the Quantock Hills and near Minack Head in Cornwall.[28] In his obituary of Heslop, the naturalist John F. Burton wrote that he had probably been the greatest living authority on the distribution of the species.[4] Heslop's greatest obsession, however, was with Apatura iris ("Purple Emperor"), which he called in his diary "the monarch of all the butterflies".[9]

De Worms considered Heslop's acquisition of specimens from sixty-five species to be the most ever attained by a single person, and described Heslop as "probably the foremost authority of his day" on the history of British butterflies.[3] Among butterfly collectors, he acquired the nickname "the Purple Emperor" after Apatura iris,[29] following a tradition of ascribing to collectors the name of a particular species: de Worms, for instance, was nicknamed "the setaceous Hebrew character" after the moth Xestia c-nigrum.[5] Heslop kept thorough notes on where and how he acquired his butterflies, but refused to share detailed information about where he found rare species such as Apatura iris, for fear that other collectors would damage the sites or butterfly populations.[17]

Michael Salmon, a historian of British butterfly collecting, describes Heslop as a "[naturalist] with the blood of the old Aurelians in [his] veins", referring to the eighteenth-century pioneers of the discipline who formed London's Society of Aurelians.[30] On Heslop's death, his wife Eileen donated his collection of British and African butterflies to the Bristol City Museum.[31] The collection included over 150 specimens of Apatura iris alone.[6]

Blackmoor Copse, photographed in 2011

Heslop returned from Nigeria in 1952,[35] and taught Latin in six[36] British preparatory schools.[14] These schools were located in Wiltshire, Sussex, in the Cotswolds[36] and near Romsey in Hampshire, all – "providentially", as de Worms put it in his obituary of Heslop – located near rich habitats of Apatura iris and other collectable butterflies.[37] He was involved in the establishment of nature reserves around the United Kingdom, including Blackmoor Copse near Salisbury and Shapwick Heath in Somerset.[14]

Towards the end of his life, Heslop was a frequent panellist on Country Parliament,[10] a BBC Radio 4 show which answered listeners' questions on wildlife and the countryside.[38] He retired from teaching on 22 July 1969.[36] He fractured his hip in a fall in March 1970,[36] bringing on an embolism from which he died on 2 June 1970.[4][21]

Oates describes Heslop as "a large and distinctive man, with a stentorian delivery and a voluble command of English."[1] He has also been characterised as "a solitary creature, preferring the peace and privacy of collecting on his own to the companionship of others."[17]

Heslop had one son, a daughter[35] named Margaret,[17] and another named Jane.[39][lower-alpha 4]

• Heslop, I.R.P.; Hyde, G.E.; Stockley, R.E. (1964). Notes & Views of the Purple Emperor. Brighton: Southern Publishing Company. OCLC 4101405.
• Heslop, I.R.P. (1938). New Bilingual Catalogue of the British Lepidoptera. London: Watkins and Doncaster. OL 16838884M.
• — (1945). "The Pygmy Hippopotamus in Nigeria". Field (Nigeria). Vol. 185. pp. 629–630.
• — (1945). Revised Indexed Check-List of the British Lepidoptera with the English Name of Each of the 2,404 Species. London: Watkins and Doncaster. OL 47768923M.
• — (1961). A New Label List of the British Macrolepidoptera. London: Watkins and Doncaster. OL 35352690W.