T.G. Howarth - A Selection of Books and Letters from his Library Collection
T.G. HOWARTH (1914-2015) was a British entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London. During the Second World War he enlisted in the Royal Medical Corps, and in 1941 was posted to Singapore with the mission of finding and destroying the breeding grounds of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Partly through his efforts, Singapore became malaria free, but in 1942 when the British army surrendered to the Japanese, Howarth was taken prisoner. He spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war, first in the notorious Changi jail in Singapore and later, in a forced labour camp in Jinsen, Korea. Howarth survived the insidious ‘war against boredom, starvation pestilence, and death’ by engaging in ‘prison camp entomology’. During his internment he discovered new species, collected 1,115 butterflies, 347 moths and many other insects.
After the war, Howarth started building strong ties with the Japanese lepidopterist community. He became an authority on Japanese butterflies, and the Japanese in their turn honored him with life membership of their Lepidopterological Society, as well as naming a new genus of hairstreak butterfly - Howarthia - after him.
Howarth’s life-long interest in Japanese butterflies is reflected in the present collection featuring Japanese books, mainly signed presentation copies, as well as correspondence with Japanese colleagues. He used books as repositories for his correspondence with authors, colleagues, researchers and publishers, and this material – manuscript and typed letters, photos, telegrams, and various ephemera - is offered together with the books in which they were ‘filed’. Especially noteworthy is the enduring correspondence with Suguru Igarashi, friend, colleague and chairman of the editorial committee of the Lepidopterological Society of Japan.
