Edgar Layard lived at Otterbourne House in Coastguards Road from about 1882 until his death in 1900 (1,2).  He was a naturalist whose main interest was ornithology and he had a career in the Colonial Civil and Consular services (3,4). He was born in Florence in 1824 and was the sixth son of Henry Peter John Layard (brother of the Countess of Linsey), who was in the Ceylon Civil Service, and his wife Marianne Austen, daughter of a Ramsgate banker.  An older brother was Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894), politician, diplomat, traveller and archaeologist, best known as the excavator of Nineveh.  The Layards were of Huguenot ancestry.

The Layard family held many important posts in Ceylon and Edgar entered the Ceylon Civil Service in 1844 where he remained until 1854 when his health failed.  During his time in Ceylon he studied the local fauna with Robert Templeton and published valuable scientific papers in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for 1852-1854 (5). 

In 1854 he was offered a post in the Civil Service of the Cape Colony working for the Governor Sir George Grey.  He became the first curator of the South Africa Museum when it was opened in 1855.  In 1869 he published the first account of the birds of South Africa; it was apparently not totally successful but formed the foundation for later works notably a second edition of the book completed by Dr Bowdler Sharpe from the British Museum using Layard’s notes.

He held several posts in the Cape Civil Service until he transferred to the Consular Service in 1872.  He was appointed to Para in Brazil where he continued to collect birds.  In the first week of February 1874 he was in Fiji with a Commission investigating the state of affairs in Fiji and the advisability of its annexation to Great Britain (6).  This Royal Commission consisted of Commodore James Goodenough  RN, and Mr Edgar Leopold Layard (and he was described at that time as Her British Majesty’s Consul for Fiji and Tonga).  

He then became Honorary British Consul at Nouea, New Caledonia and he, along with his son Leopold, was an active collector of bird specimens.  They made particularly good collections from New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands but also collected in Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, New Britain and Norfolk Island.  The collection is widely scattered now, being in museums in Sydney, London and Liverpool. 

Layard married twice.  In 1845 he married Barbara Anne Calthrop in Newmarket (7), presumably before he travelled to Ceylon, and they had a son Leopold Calthrop born in Colombo around 1849, who also joined the Consular Service. Edgar’s wife is commemorated in the specific epithet he gave to Layard's Parakeet (Psittacula calthropae); he also named a brown breasted flycatcher (Muscicapa muttui) after his Tamil cook Muttu.

His second wife, Jane, was born in India but where and when they married is a mystery.  By 1883 he was back in England living at Otterbourne House (1) with Jane, his son (Edgar) Leopold (now a retired Vice-Consul), and two servants (8). He had been created CMG (Companion of St. Michael and St. George) and he had also been elected a Fellow of the Zoological Society before he left Ceylon. He died on January 1st 1900 and over a year later when the census was taken his wife had moved to Tiverton where she died aged 80 in 1912.  His son was living at 14 Fore Street, Budleigh Salterton in 1911, dying in 1921 at the age of 72.

Complied and Researched by Roger Lendon, © 2010

(1)Kelly’s Directory

(2)1891 census

(3)Wikipedia

(4)The Journal of the South African Ornothologists Union. Vols 1 & 2, 1905

(5)Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon: lakdiva.org/books/tennent/introduction

(6)Seven years in Fiji. The Letters of Jack James plus information from the diaries of Jack’s friend and later partner, G.H.W.Markham. www.Ancestry.com

(7)FreeBMD.com

(8)1891 census

BS-B-00022 Biography 85 any