William Bonny, Army Hospital Corps, Private

1879Graves any chance of a photo of Grave.

Hi Admin

I do not have a photograph of his grave, but I am lead to believe that he is buried in the military plot at Brompton Cemetery.
Have we got any forum members willing to walk Brompton Cemetery and try and locate the grave?

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William Bonny is buried in London only two miles from The Natural History Museum, and the butterflies he collected, in the military plot at Brompton Cemetery. Where is the remaining material that we couldn't find? Joicey was very generous in his lifetime and gave away specimens, so it is unlikely that the museum received all the material from this collection. I suspect that it went to other museums and collections in the UK. Recently, I was looking through the material bequeathed to the museum by John Levick in the 1940s. In this collection I found, quite by chance, a few more specimens of the species Cymothoe bonny bearing identical labels to those characteristic of the William Bonny collection.

Not unduly discouraged by this partial failure, it was decided to further pursue collectionreconstruction using a collection made by Emin Pasha himself, building on the background we had already established. We again had an original list, A.G. Butler's On the Lepidoptera received from Dr Emin Pasha (1888). This time, we were much more successful, finding 184 butterfly specimensrepresenting 75 of the 128 species on the list.

Much of the material originated in two localities: Lado in southern Sudan, and Wadelai in present day Uganda. But by far the most interesting specimens were acquired on a short expedition to the Monbuttu area (in present-day Congo) about 100 miles to the west, where the butterfly fauna is remarkably different from that of Lado and Wadelai. It is obvious from contemporary accounts that various authors readily appreciated the importance of Monbuttu material. The Monbuttu mammal account lists 28 species, 16 of which were, until that time, regarded as being exclusively west African species. This represents a 1,000 mile eastward extension of the then known ranges for west
African species, and contrasts very strongly with the situation in nearby Wadelai and Lado where there was no evidence of a west African influence.