Joseph Sidebotham: Vicissitudes of a Victorian Collector

Archives of natural history 42.2 (2015): 197–210 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/anh.2015.0305 # The Society for the History of Natural History www.euppublishing.com/journal/anh Joseph Sidebotham: vicissitudes of a Victorian collector LAURENCE M. COOK School of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PT, United Kingdom (email: [email protected]). ABSTRACT: Joseph Sidebotham (1824–1885) was a Manchester cotton baron whose natural history collections are now in the Manchester Museum. In addition to collecting he suggested a method for identifying and classifying Lepidoptera and investigated variation within species as well as species limits. With three close collaborators, he is credited with discovering many species new to Britain in both Lepidoptera and Coleoptera. A suspicion of fraud attaches to these claims. The evidence is not clear-cut in the Lepidoptera, but a possible reason is suggested why Sidebotham, as an amateur in the increasingly professional scientific world, might have engaged in deceit. KEY WORDS : Manchester – nineteenth century – collections – British records – entomology – Lepidoptera. INTRODUCTION In the early twentieth century the Manchester Museum received a donation of Lepidoptera and another of Coleoptera assembled by Joseph Sidebotham, a Manchester business man (Logunov 2010, 2012). They are good examples of Victorian private entomological collections. A scan through the drawers raises questions as to how the collector came by the specimens and why some species appear to have been of particular interest. Joseph Sidebotham (Figure 1) was born in 1824, son of the owner and manager of a cotton mill on the river Tame near Hyde, then in Cheshire and now part of Greater Manchester. After school education he worked in a Manchester cotton-printing firm, meeting for the first time his lifelong friend the botanist Leo Grindon. Later he moved to the Strines Printing Company, with works at Strines in the Goyt valley, becoming a partner in 1849. The Tame and the Goyt are two rivers to the east of Greater Manchester, flowing respectively south and north towards Stockport, where they meet and become the River Mersey. Both were important locations in the history of the Manchester cotton industry, the water being required for the processes of printing and dyeing. Substantial legacies from two cousins allowed Sidebotham to retire early to devote himself to his numerous interests. These included natural history, microscopy, photography and astronomy. He was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London and of societies related to his biological interests, including the Linnean Society and the Entomological Society of London. Locally, he was a founding member of the Manchester Photographic and Microscopical Societies and a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, attending and occasionally chairing meetings. He could play the organ, draw and sketch with skill and paint on porcelain. He was a county magistrate of Cheshire. An indication of his sense of civic responsibility was that he encouraged education among mill workers, first by running classes on the sciences for lads at his father’s mill, then providing 198 JOSEPH SIDEBOTHAM: VICISSITUDES OF A VICTORIAN COLLECTOR Figure 1. Joseph Sidebotham: the frontispiece from Grindon’s (1886) memoir. and endowing a library at the Strines mill, fostering the study of music and supporting and contributing to a manuscript journal produced by employees of the mill. He married Ann Coward in 1852, with whom he had three sons and three daughters. After his wife died, he founded and endowed a church as a memorial to her. After 1875 ill health led to visits to the south of France. He died in 1885 at a large residence befitting a Manchester magnate, in affluent Bowdon, a Cheshire location accessible by rail from Manchester in the mid- nineteenth century. One son, Edward, a Cambridge graduate, lectured in the Manchester Medical School. A nephew, T. A. Coward, who also lived in Bowdon, continued the interest in natural history, writing a number of popular books (for example, Coward 1919) and served as acting Keeper of the Manchester Museum during the First World War (Alberti 2009). SIDEBOTHAM’S NATURAL HISTORY Among several contemporary obituaries in scientific journals the most expansive was that of the Royal Astronomical Society (Anonymous 1886a), which emphasized the range of Sidebotham’s interests. This can also be seen in accounts of his early interests in the local flora. Grindon (1882) wrote, The upper portion of the Tame Valley between Reddish and Hyde was successfully explored in 1840–42 by Joseph Sidebotham, of Apethorne, a townsman whom we have not more reason to be proud of as of a naturalist of the most varied and accurate information, and as one of the most scientific and successful prosecutors of microscopical research, than as a singularly skilful artist in photography. It was Mr Sidebotham who first drew the attention of Manchester naturalists to the freshwater algae of our district, and who principally determined their form and number. He also it was who collected the principal portion known of up to 1858 of the local Diatomaceae. During the five or six years he devoted to the botany of Bredbury, Reddish, and the banks of the Tame generally, he added no fewer than twenty-five species to the Manchester flora. JOSEPH SIDEBOTHAM: VICISSITUDES OF A VICTORIAN COLLECTOR 199 His other chief natural history interests were Lepidoptera and Coleoptera (Anonymous 1886a). Nearly all specimens in his collections were perfectly mounted and are in good condition, although many are unlabelled. Apart from the collecting, Sidebotham reared insects such as Orgyia antiqua (vapourer moth) and Acherontia atropos (death’s head hawk moth) (Sidebotham 1865a, 1869a). He also made microscopical examinations of lepidopteran wing scales (see for example, Sidebotham 1865b) and illustrated papers by John Watson (1868, 1869) (Figure 2) on plumules (androconia). These were intended to illustrate a joint treatise involving several hundred figures that could be used as an aid to classification. In a rare reference to collecting abroad he described some land snails found at Mentone (or Menton) in France (Sidebotham 1880). Sidebotham’s published notes on the Lepidoptera are brief, and often refer to reports of, or localities for, rare species. Many name a friend who accompanied him and was sometimes the actual collector, as if to give support for the record. A typical example refers to Deilephila livornica (striped hawk moth), an immigrant species caught in Knutsford by a friend (Sidebotham 1878). There are five specimens in his collection. One is labelled “Taken on Tuesday morning 25th June 1844 under the straw on a cucumber vine bed at Brundrett’s Farm in Chorlton by John Brundrett RSE July 8/44”. The initials are those of R. S. Edleston (see below). There were also observations of Leucodonta bicoloria (white prominent moth) (Sidebotham 1874). He stated that a specimen was captured by Joseph Smith about 1862 at Burnt Wood, Staffordshire, where it was later also found by Joseph Chappell. The two specimens in his collection are labelled “Burnt Wood Staffordshire 1865 Joe Chappell” and Figure 2. Illustrations by Joseph Sidebotham for John Watson’s (1868) paper on the plumules or battledore scales (androconia) of Lepidoptera. 200 JOSEPH SIDEBOTHAM: VICISSITUDES OF A VICTORIAN COLLECTOR “Burnt Wood 1866 C[?] Chappell”. The moth occurs on the Continent and sporadically in the south of Ireland, but the Staffordshire ones “remain the only English records” (Skinner 1984). Earlier, South (1909) noted that one specimen was found in 1861 and six in 1865 while Barrett (1895) mentioned a specimen captured in 1880 near Exeter, Devon, possibly a continental immigrant. Sidebotham was an assiduous collector of beetles, again with friends and colleagues. To give a flavour of the type of communication associated with these records, an entry in The entomologist stated (Anonymous 1865): “After presentation of the vase to Mr. Saunders, as recorded in No. 9 of the ‘Entomologist’, Mr. Janson exhibited four species of Coleoptera from the collection of Mr. Sidebotham of Manchester, all of them new to the British list.” This ended with “Peritelus griseus, Oliv.; several specimens collected at Ventnor by Mr. Wainwright, probably by shaking herbage upon a piece of paper, in which manner some bottles full of Coleoptera have been obtained by that gentleman.” SOME ASSOCIATES Joel Wainwright was manager at the mill in Strines and co-editor of “The Strines Journal”, a hand written and illustrated production that existed between 1852 and 1856 (Hallett 1989; Swindells 1972). Drawings were augmented by photographs provided by Sidebotham. It was passed round the employees and contained their own contributions and those of the partners, topics including current affairs, literature and scientific subjects. Joseph Chappell (1830–1896), who often co-operated with Sidebotham, was a mechanic in Sir Joseph Whitworth’s engineering works in Manchester. Of him, a contemporary account (Farrer and Brownbill 1906) stated: ... he has told the present writer how on a Saturday evening after work – and there was no Saturday half holiday in those days – he would walk some thirty miles to Burnt Wood in Staffordshire, sleeping in the open, collect all day Sunday and walk back on Sunday night in time for work at six o’clock on Monday morning. Entomological literature from the early part of the nineteenth century suggests that Burnt Wood (now Burntwood) was an important collecting area, although coal mining, canals and railways were soon to change it. Chappell observed numerous rarities, as, for example, Hyles galii (bedstraw hawk moth) near Morecambe, and H. euphorbiae (spurge hawk moth) near Bolton (Tutt 1904). He also noted a specimen of the spurge hawk moth caught in Bowdon and brought to him. Both wings were crippled on one side, indicating that it must have emerged locally (Chappell 1886a, and see below), whereas the other hawk moths would have been migrants.

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