Thomas de Grey

While he is best remembered for his record bags and prowess with a sporting gun, Lord Walsingham's achievements extend far beyond the field, says Sir Johnny Scott

- Sir Johnny Scott

THOMAS 'Tommy' de Grey, 6th Baron Walsingham, of Merton Hall in Norfolk, was a man of many parts. A first-class cricketer in his youth, he was the Conservative MP for West Norfolk from 1865 until 1870, when he inherited his father's title and became a member of the House of Lords, serving as lord-in-waiting during Disraeli's second government. He was a trustee of the British Museum, a fellow of the Royal Society, president of the Entomological Society of London, member of the exclusive Literary Society and founder member of the Norwich Museum. His twin interests were lepidoptery (the study of butterflies and moths) and ornithology, of which he had an encyclopaedic knowledge. The extensive display of hummingbirds in the Natural History Museum were all shot by him using 'powder' shot to protect them from damage.

Walsingham's collection of lepidoptera, particularly microlepidoptera, was one of the most important ever made. When he purchased the collections of the German entomologists Philipp Zeller, Ernst Hofmann and Hugo Christoph, it amounted to more than 260,000 species, all of which he painstakingly catalogued. Among other publications on the subject, he wrote several learned papers on the microlepidoptera of the West Indies, Asia and Hawaii, and on the unique plume moths of California and Oregon, now held in the Smithsonian, London Zoological Society, universities of California and Toronto and multiple other institutions.

Walsingham's achievements as an academic, collector and amateur scientist are overshadowed by his prowess as one of the finest shots during the heyday of the Victorian and Edwardian great country house shoots, and his solo records of shooting grouse to his own gun on Blubberhouse Moor in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire. It was here, according to