English manufacturing clerk and self taught bryologist, James Eustace Bagnall studied the flora of the counties surrounding his native Birmingham and was the first to publish a flora of Warwickshire. Eldest son in a family of ten children, his father owned a warehouse and James Eustace worked there as a brass founder in his youth. At the age of 14 he left Singers' Hill School in order to become a factory clerk for Hinks and Wells, a steel pen-nib manufacturer in Birmingham, and he remained there until his retirement in 1897.
It was not until his mid-thirties that Bagnall developed an interest in botany, reportedly when a friend lent him a microscope, and he began to teach himself how to collect, preserve and classify specimens. Over the years that followed he explored the countryside of Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire, particularly focusing on the mosses, and by 1874 he had published a Moss Flora of Warwickshire. Soon afterwards he produced a seminal flora for Sutton Park, now a nature reserve in the West Midlands (1876). After publishing a series of papers in the Midland Naturalist between 1881 and 1885 he later compiled these into an extensive account of the geography, topography and meteorology of Warwickshire as well as its cryptogamic and phanerogamic flora and the Flora of Warwickshire was published in 1891. Ten years later he produced his Flora of Staffordshire, which appeared as an update to Robert Garner's flora from 1844.
One of Bagnall's most important contributions to the field of bryology was his widely consulted Handbook of Mosses. Produced as part of the Young Collector Series between 1886 and 1910, it contained information on collecting mosses as well as their distribution, habitats, development and classification. He also contributed a bryological section in The Botany of Worcestershire, published 1909.
Bagnall never married and for the latter part of his life lived in Aston, Birmingham, with his sister Fanny. Elected an associate of the Linnaean Society in 1885 and an honorary member of the Moss Exchange Club in 1909, his herbarium and papers are currently held at Birmingham Central Library and 125 of his bryological specimens are contained in the National Museum and Gallery of Wales in Cardiff.
Sources:
M. Lawley, James Eustace Bagnall (1830-1918), The British Bryological Society:
http://rbgweb2.rbge.org.uk/bbs/Learning/Bryohistory/Bygone%20Bryologists/JAMES%20EUSTACE%20BAGNALL.pdf, accessed August 2010
M. Lawley, A social and biographical history of British and Irish field bryologists, The British Bryological Society:
http://rbgweb2.rbge.org.uk/bbs/Learning/Bryohistory/History%20of%20British%20Bryology.pdf, accessed August 2010.
