George Fleming Richardson (1796-1848) - man of letters, lecturer and geological curator

Seeing the familiar poem The Nautilus and the Ammonite featured in a recent issue of the Geological Curator (Delair 1984) reawakened an idea which has Iain dormant for some time: that we should start a series on forgotten or neglected curators. In my view the single most important cause of the widespread neglect which geological and other natural science collections have suffered in Britain over the years can be put down to a lack of caring curators. Sometimes there was a lack of curators, othertimes they didn't care! The history of curation seems to be an even more neglected subject than the history of collections - a point I tried to make at the Ashmolean Tercentenary Symposium in Oxford in 1983 (Torrens 1985b). So while we try to document the collections perhaps we should also stop to consider the curators who *made it all possible*. This point was made specifically by Edwards (1984) about one of the most remarkable of such curators, ex-railway clerk Thomas Sheppard (1876-1945), the Curator of Hull Museums from 1900 to 1941. What has all this to do with the poem The Nautilus and the Ammonite? Simply that it is not by Ernest Westlake, and was neither written in the 1880s nor hitherto unpublished as claimed by Delair (1984). Instead it is by one of the earliest forgotten curators - George Fleming Richardson (1796-1848).