Biography

South African banker from Grahamstown and enthusiastic amateur botanist. His father was the British civil engineer Henry Carter Galpin (-1886) who emigrated to Grahamstown in 1850 and became a watchmaker and jeweller. He was a successful businessman with seven sons, and pursued amateur interests of astronomy, optics, natural history, music and practical mechanics. At the family house H.C. Galpin created an elaborate observatory incorporating a reflecting telescope and a camera obscura, the building also being the place where the Eureka diamond was identified in 1867 and the house much later turned into the Observatory Museum.

E.E. Galpin took control of the family business owing to his father's ill-health and later joined the Oriental Banking Corporation in Grahamstown. He subsequently moved to Middelburg as an accountant in the Bank of Africa and it was here that he developed his interest in botany. He was promoted to submanager of the Bank of Africa in Johannesburg (1888) but his accomodation was poor and the hours long and it was with relief that he was made manager the bank in Barberton (1889). Here he spent all of his spare time collecting in the field or identifying specimens in his rapidly growing private herbarium. Galpin exchanged specimens with many of the leading South African botanists of the day, sent duplicate specimens to Kew and Zürich, and had many friends and family members that collected specimens for his herbarium. He collected with H.H.W. Pearson who also donated him a set of specimens collected on the Percy Sladen Memorial Expedition. In 1916 Galpin donated his private herbarium of around 16,000 specimens to form the founding collections of the National herbarium in Pretoria (PRE). After his retirement in 1917 he purchased a farm which he named Mosdene at Naboomspruit Nylsvlei. He restarted his herbarium collections and later donated some further 6,000 specimens to PRE. He was made a Fellow of the Linnean Society (1890) and The University of South Africa conferred an honorary doctorate (1935). Galpin is commemorated by the genus Galpinia N.E. Br. and the name of his home farm is the basis of Mosdenia Stent. Many species are named in his honour including the garden plants Bauhinia galpinii N.E. Br. and Kniphofia galpinii Baker.