Major Robert Mervyn Craske
5th December 1909 – 5th May 2001
Robert was born on 5th December 1909 in Farnbrough. Roberts father was Colonel John Craske (CMG, DSO) who served with the Leinster Rifles in Gallipoli during the First World War and Clara Grave Oliver of Halifax, Nova Scotia was his mother.
By 1921, Robert was listed as being in full-time education in Shipdham, Norfolk where he lived with his parents and four siblings.
In December 1934, Robert sailed New Zealand to compete in the Empire Championship as a long distance runner where he ran in the 2 mile race with a time of 9 minutes 27s. (the World Record at the time was 8 minutes 59 set in 1931 set by Paavo Nurmi).
Sailing back to Southampton on the S/S Taihui on 12th April 1935, Robert’s profession was listed as “Bank Official”.
Robert’s engagement to Helen Marian Borrer was posted in both “The Bystander” and “The Tatler” magazine in Summer 1936 followed by photos of their wedding later that year in Chelsea, London on 31st October 1936.
On 16th May 1939, Robert took his commission as 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, first serving with 53rd (London) Medium Regiment R.A.
The image of Robert in uniform was taken in Gosforth Park, Newcastle in June 1942 just before shipping out to Egypt via South Africa. Robert’s name does not appear in the 111th Field Regiment War Diary much other than on 14th March 1943 near Metameur, Tunisia when he was evacuated for unlisted reasons.
Robert’s obituary in the British Journal of Entomology and Natural History read “Robert was an intelligent, enterprising, resourceful, and investigative collector who, after a long spell spent working for the Bank of England before the Second World War, became a peacetime dealer in antiques and thus had the time to devote to his passion. He started collecting both moths and butterflies, but from the early 1930s onwards exclusively focused on the rarest and most extreme butterfly aberrations. Renowned for his indefatigability—and as a shameless flatterer—Craske worked Shoreham Bank to exhaustion from between the wars, when he was one of the lucky few to have knowledge of the site, until into the 1990s. All of the Bank’s finest forms
of coridon (chalkhill blue) fell to his net.”
Robert died in Brighton, Sussex on the 5th May 2001, age 91.
