Red 22 - Game Dept., Dar es Salaam

EASC Vol 6 p 816 - 1914 - curator of the Museum in Nairobi - ….. The First World War interrupted his curatorial career as he signed up with the EAMR, …………. After the war, and in the depressed economy of the time, he changed his career to become an assistant game warden in Tanganyika. He married and unfortunately his wife became very sick and they had to leave Africa. …
Virginia Morrell, Ancestral Passions: the Leakey Family The first curator of Nairobi's Natural History Museum, Loveridge was employed by the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society in 1914. He was a slim young zoologist who knew the Latin names for all the birds, animals, and flowers. He was the type of fellow who had been born with a butterfly net in one hand, a killing bottle in the other. He loved to roam the bush and collect specimens and despite the chaotic condition of museum, he spent as much time in the forest as he could. Many of these trips took him to the Kabete area, where he stayed with the Leakeys and found a kindred spirit in Harry Leakey and saw in Louis an image of his younger self.

Mwishowe, Arthur Loveridge, Old Africa Magazine no. 122 He decided to become a museum curator at the age of 10. 14 he applied for the newly created post of curator at the Nairobi Museum. He had taken a year's course in zoology and botany in the University College of South Wales on the way to appointments at the Manchester University Museum and then in the temporary museum in Cardiff. While in Cardiff making a card index of the whole British fauna (about 23,000 cards) he heard of an open position in Africa. Although he already had a private collection of nearly 250 jars of preserved reptiles and over 300 glass-topped drawers containing birds, insects and other specimens, he was always avid for more. He was accepted and arrived in Nairobi in mid 1914. He joined the local forces shortly after his arrival and was soon on active duty. His passion for collecting when travelling through German East Africa was aided when all necessary preservatives and pickling jars were found in captured German towns. A few years after the war ended he set up Nairobi's fledgling museum.

After Nairobi in 1924 he went on to be the curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He travelled back to Africa to do collecting. His trips enriched the Harvard collections. He made the last African expedition of his Harvard career to Nyasaland in 1948-9. After this he devoted himself to a summary of East African herpetology, culminating with the East African Check List published in the year of his retirement, 1957. In that year he retired to St Helena. He was a punctilious letter writer and classifier. His fanatic passion for his collection astonished his colleagues. But attention to detail is a good thing in a curator and certainly the museum was well served by his devotion. He was in no sense academic. He belonged to another generation and another lifestyle: he was pre-eminently a collector-naturalist. He wrote: 'Probably only a zoologist can look at an uncaught cobra and feel the joy a child feels on Christmas morning.'