Sir Guy Anstruther Knox Marshall, was an Indian-born British entomologist and authority on Curculionidae.
Background
Marshall was the youngest of three children born to Colonel Charles Henry Tilson Marshall (1841-1927), a district judge, and Laura Frances Pollock (1846-1912), daughter of Sir Frederick Pollock, 1st Baronet and Chief Baron of the Exchequer. When he failed the Indian Civil Service entrance examination, his father shipped him off to Natal in South Africa to learn sheep farming.
Career
Early Marshall was sent from India to a school in Margate where he started a butterfly collection. He transferred his attentions to beetles when he enrolled at Charterhouse. He ended up in Rhodesia, managing the Salisbury District and Estates Company and owning two farms, one managed by Charles Francis Massy Swynnerton.
Marshall corresponded with the prominent Darwinian, Edward Bagnall Poulton, Hope Professor of Zoology at Oxford University who had written The Colours of Animals (1890).
Poulton urged Marshall to study insect colours in mimicry and camouflage. His findings were published as a joint paper in Transactions of the Entomological Society of London in 1902.
Poulton later helped Marshall in obtaining an appointment at Sarawak Museum. Marshall, however, became ill during a stay-over in London.
When some of his papers on weevils were published, he was offered an appointment as scientific secretary to the Entomological Research Committee (Tropical Africa).
The Committee"s function was to post field entomologists to East and West Africa who would study insects harmful to humans, crops and animals and send specimens to the Natural History Museum in London for identification. Under Marshall’s management the Committee grew into a powerful and efficient body. Eventually all the agricultural information services were merged as the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux (Civil Aeronautics Board).
Marshall established the biological control service at Farnham House, giving rise to a global network of laboratories and creating two scientific publications: the Bulletin of Entomological Research and the Review of Applied Entomology.
Marshall"s organisation took on the enormous task of writing up the ‘Insecta’ division of The Zoological Record. In 1916 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford for his contribution to economic entomology.
He was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society of London.