British Museum (Natural History): Department of Zoology: Mollusca Section: Correspondence

The series consists of the correspondence of successive heads of the Mollusca section, and deals with the acquisition, exchange, donation, and identification of specimens, as well as molluscan research and the answering of routine enquiries.

Series held at The Natural History Museum are catalogued more fully in its online catalogue (reference DF ZOO/254). Online descriptions of some individual records can also be viewed on Discovery, see DF 254.

Letters are arranged alphabetically within two-, five- or ten-year collections.

Topics

Museums and galleries

The Mollusca Section was formally set up in 1913 when the old Invertebrate Section was split up on the retirement of E A Smith. Guy Coburn Robson (1888-1945) was the first head of section, and had been working on the collections since 1911, when he entered the Museum after study at Oxford and in Naples. He had a particular interest in cephalopods and published an important monograph in 1929-1932, but also wrote on broader problems of species and variation. When Robson resigned due to ill health in 1935 he was succeeded by George Ivor Crawford, who had studied at Cambridge and worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Plymouth. Crawford was followed in 1946 by William James Rees (1913-1967), who was heavily involved in the post-war reconstruction of the galleries and a reorganisation of the collections. Like Robson, he paid particular attention to the cephalopods until he moved to the Coelenterate Section in 1955. The fourth head of the Section was Ian Courtney Julian Galbraith, who was followed by Norman Tebble in 1959 when he transferred to the Bird Section. The heads of section were assisted by J C Vickery, who joined as a Boy Attendant in 1897, and finally retired as a Higher Grade Technical Assistant in 1947. Guy L Wilkins and S Peter Dance served as successive Experimental Officers in the Section.