Edgar Leopold Layard

Who was Edgar Leopold Layard?

Edgar Leopold Layard CMG FZS MBOU, was a British diplomat and a naturalist mainly interested in ornithology.

Born in Florence, Italy, to a family of Huguenot descent, Layard was the sixth son of Henry Peter John Layard of the Ceylon Civil Service with his wife Marianne, a daughter of Nathaniel Austen, banker, of Ramsgate. Through her, he was partly of Spanish descent. His uncle was Benjamin Austen, a London solicitor and close friend of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1820s and 1830s. He was the brother of the archaeologist and politician Sir Austen Henry Layard.

Layard spent ten years in Ceylon, where he studied the local fauna with Robert Templeton. In 1854, he went to the Cape Colony as a civil servant working in the service of the governor George Edward Grey. In 1855, during his spare time, Layard was a curator in the South African Museum, and was succeeded by Roland Trimen. After this, he had posts in Brazil, where he collected birds for Arthur Hay.

Edgar Layard administered the government of Fiji from 1874 to 1875 and was honorary British Consul at Noumea, New Caledonia from 1876. Edgar Layard and his son, Edgar Leopold Calthrop Layard, were active collectors in this region, mainly of bird specimens. Between 1870 and 1881, they visited Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, New Britain and Norfolk Island. Aside from the South African material, the bird collections they made from their 'home base' of New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands are the most scientifically important. The Layards sent material to William Sharp MacLeay in Sydney, but also to many other ornithologists. Their specimens have become very scattered. Many went to the British Museum in London. Others went to Henry Baker Tristram, and are now in the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside in Liverpool, England.