Private School News

Waterton’s Collection returns to Stonyhurst

Part of Charles Waterton’s remarkable and famous personal collection of animals, birds, crustaceans and insects has returned to Stonyhurst College this month, having been on loan to a Yorkshire museum for 40 years. It includes a tarantula spider, vampire bat and a platypus.

Charles Waterton, an old boy of the College who attended Stonyhurst in the late 1700’s, was one of Britain’s first natural historians; he is described by David Attenborough as “one of the first people anywhere to recognise that the natural world needed protection as humanity made more and more demands on it.” A devout man, he slept on bare boards and rose at 3am every day to pray and read the Life of St Francis Xavier for an hour. He had a lasting affection for Stonyhurst, which he visited every year until his death in 1865.

To mark the return of the Collection to Stonyhurst, a new portrait of Waterton has been unveiled, painted by Helena Callinicos, a former Stonyhurst pupil. Over the next five years Waterton’s entire collection of some 1000 specimens from Europe, Africa, India, Australia and South America will be returned to the Lancashire College. The College curator, Mrs Jan Graffius, has created a new display, which can be seen in the summer when the College opens for public tours.

Photo: the new portrait unveiled.