S2A3 Biographical Database of Southern African Science



Littledale, Captain Henry Ambrose Pudsay (ornithology)

Born: 31 August 1881, Dublin, Ireland.
Died: Date not known, Streatley on Thames, Berkshire, United Kingdom.
Active in: SA.

Henry Ambrose Pudsay Littledale, a British soldier and natural historian, was the son of Captain Henry William Assheton Littledale and his wife Catherine Wray. After the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) then Lieutenant H.A.P. Littledale of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry was for some time stationed at Roberts Heights, a military establishment in south-western Pretoria. In 1906 he became a member of the South African Ornithologists' Union (founded in 1904) and between 1906 and 1911 collected birds' eggs in southern Africa. His specimens went to the Natural History Museum in London. He contributed a paper on "The nesting and other habits of the Cape Widgeon (Nettion capense)" to the union's Journal (Vol. 4(1), pp. 1-15) in 1908. A wider interest in natural history is shown by his presentation of moths collected at Irene, just south of Pretoria, to the Transvaal Museum during 1906-1907. He also collected the type specimen of the whistling rat, Paratomys littledalei (named after him in 1918), a species that occurs in the arid regions of western South Africa and Namibia.

Lieutenant Henry A.P. Littledale of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry was promoted to Captain from 1 June 1909. On 17 August 1910 he married Lucy Mildred Swan in Wynberg, Western Cape. In 1933, then living in Streatley on Thames, Berkshire, United Kingdom, he was awarded a patent for improvements in hard soldering mixtures and hard soldering processes.

Henry A.P. Littledale should not be confused with another Irishman, Harold Littledale (1853-1930), a British academic and amateur ornithologist who worked in India and published a number of papers on the bird life of mainly western India.


List of sources:

Beolens, B., Watkins, M. & Grayson, M. The eponym dictionary of mammals. JHU Publishing, 2009.

Captain Henry Ambrose Pudsay Littledale. British nobility and landed gentry in a single tree (Compiler: Brian Townsley). Retrieved on 29June 2021 from http://www.townsley.info/Strangeway/GedSite/g3/p2008.htm#i100397

Googal Patents: Improvements in hard soldering mixtures and hard soldering processes. https://patents.google.com/patent/GB415181A/en

Journal of the South African Ornithologists' Union, 1908, Vol. 4, paper by Littledale; 1909, Vol. 5(3), list of members.

The London Gazette, 9 July 1909, p. 5284. Retrieved from https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/28269/page/5284/data.pdf on 2018-5-30.

Shyamal Lakshminarayanan. Personal communication, 28 June 2021.

Transvaal Museum. Annual report for the year 1906-07. (National Archives, Pretoria, Vol. TKP196).


Compiled by: C. Plug

Last updated: 2021-06-30 10:39:47


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