Augustus Daniel Imms, 1880 - 1949

Abstract Augustus Daniel Imms was born on 24 August 1880 at Moseley, Worcestershire, now in the city of Birmingham. He was the elder of two children, his sister dying before him. His father was Walter Imms, a member of the staff of Lloyds Bank. His mother, Mary Jane Daniel, was born at Newark, New Jersey, U.S.A., of English parents who returned to England a few years later. None of his relatives appears to have been noteworthy in science. In his boyhood, as in later life, Imms was frequently laid up with bad attacks of asthma. His interrupted schooldays were spent chiefly at St Edmunds Eligh School, Birmingham, where the headmaster, W. B. Grove, was a well-known mycologist. But it was C. F. Olney of the Northampton Natural History Society who first aroused his interest in insect life and taught him how to mount and set butterflies and moths. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and of an unbroken zest for entomology. The boy, debarred from many of the activities of his fellows, quickly devoured and assimilated all the popular handbooks for collectors that were current at that time. And then the chance purchase of Todd’s Encyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology when he was about seventeen years old evoked a more scientific interest; for this encyclopaedia, published many years before, contained Newport’s masterly article on the ‘Insecta’. On leaving school, Imms joined the science classes at Mason University College, Birmingham, where his father wished him to become an industrial chemist. But biology proved too strong an attraction. Fie owed much to the splendid clarity of the lectures and the kindly help and interest of T. W. Bridge, then Professor of Zoology, under whose guidance he produced two scientific papers on fishes (1904, 1905). Among his contemporaries were B. Fantham, T. Goodey and R. H. Whitehouse. Imms graduated B.Sc. London with second-class honours in zoology in 1903. After spending two years under Bridge at Birmingham, the award of an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship in 1905 decided him to go to Cambridge where he entered Christ’s College with A. E. Shipley as his tutor.