Robert Walter Campbell Shelford

Robert Walter Campbell Shelford (3 August 1872 – 22 June 1912), was a British entomologist and museum administrator and naturalist, with a special interest in entomology and insect mimicry; he specialised in cockroaches and also did some significant work on stick insects.

Robert Walter Campbell Shelford was born 3 August 1872 in Singapore, the son of a prominent British merchant. As a child, after an accident at the age of three, he developed a tubercular hip joint that incapacitated him for several years as a child. He became more mobile after an operation but was never able to participate in active sports as a child, although as an adult he enjoyed playing golf. The tuberculosis recurred in later life, and was the eventual cause of his death at an early age.

Shelford studied at King's College, London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After graduating from Cambridge in 1895 he went to Yorkshire College in Leeds as a demonstrator in Biology. In 1897 he went to Sarawak as the Curator of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching, a post he held for seven years. While he was at the Sarawak Museum quite a lot of specimens were sent to his old university at Cambridge.

In 1905 he left Sarawak Museum and returned to England. He went to Oxford and became an Assistant Curator of the Hope Department of Zoology at the University Museum. On his way back to England he collected many specimens which he gave to the Hope Collection in Oxford, in addition to "the vast collection of Bornean insects which he had presented [to the Hope Collection] during 1899-1901 while Curator of the Sarawak Museum" (Smith, 1986: 58).

Most of his work at Oxford was on cockroaches, but he also worked on the other insects he had brought back from Borneo, and assisted in the library. It was at Oxford that he did most of his published research on phasmids.

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