Rowland Edward Turner, entomologist, worked voluntarily for the Department of Entomology of the British Museum (Natural History) for more than 30 years. During World War I (1914-1918) he worked on the department's collections of Hymenoptera (a large order of insects comprising the sawflies, wasps, bees and ants) and built up the first arranged national general collection of Braconidae (a family of parasitic wasps) and of a group of non-parasitic wasps then named Fossorial Hymenoptera, comprising the family Sphegidae and the superfamily Vespoidea. He published a paper on the Sphegidae of Australia as early as 1907 and described the Braconidae in two papers in 1918 and 1922. However, his most impressive contribution to the literature was a series of over 40 articles on the Fossorial Hymenoptera, published during 1909-1940, many of them in the Journal of Natural History and the rest in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. In most of these papers new species were described, based on the collections in the British Museum. He also became a recognised authority on the Thynnidae (flower wasps) and described that family in the serial publication initiated by P. A. G. Wytsman, Genera Insectorum (1902-1970). All together he published well over 100 scientific papers, mostly to describe new genera and species collected by himself.
After the war Turner spent most of his time until the outbreak of World War II (1939-1940) collecting for the museum. He stayed for some years as a sugar farmer in Australia and collected in Queensland, Western Australia and other regions. He also collected in Assam (a state in northeastern India) and worked in an honorary capacity at the British Museum. However, most of his time was spent in South Africa, where he settled at Mossel Bay in 1920 and appears to have remained until his death in 1945. During this time he went on many collecting expeditions and returned to the British Museum several times to study its collections. He had been in South Africa earlier too, for he published a paper, "On some Scoliidae, mostly Elidinae (Hymenoptera), in the South African Museum" (1916), in the museum's Annals (Vol. 15, Part VI, 9 pp.) followed by "On some new species and others of Fossorial Hymenoptera in the South African Museum" (Ibid, 1920, Vol 17, Part VI, 9 pp.) In all he collected and presented to the British Museum over 850 000 specimens, most of them Hymenoptera but also some species of Coleoptera and other orders, with most attention given to the more obscure forms neglected by other collectors. Among the discoveries based on his South African material was the new hymenopterous family Dinapsidae, proposed by Waterston in 1922 to accommodate the South African genus Dinapsis. At his death the bulk of his collections remained as an important resource for other workers to investigate, as he took great care in collecting only specimens in perfect condition.
Turner was a very shy person and had a speech impediment. However, he had a sweet temperament and had no unkind words for others.
