| Activity | Museum staff. Appointed boy attendant in Department of Botany 1895; left 1896. Grant studied field surveying at London University then worked on field surveying at the Royal Geographical Society. He worked as a taxidermist at the Museum from 1898 to [1903?]. In 1899 he joined the Yeomanry for the South African War. He collected in South Africa on behalf of the museum 1903-07 (see paper by W.L.Sclater in Ibis at that time). He collected in South America 1908-10 (see Ibis 1911 & 1912). He joined the BOU expedition in New Guinea and was awarded the BOU's Silver Medal in 1912 for his work there. In 1913 & 1914 he worked at BM(NH) but was not on the staff (Ibis 1915). In 1914-18 war he served with the Rifle Brigade and the East African Expeditionary Force, then from 1919 to 1932 was with the Colonial Administration of Tanganyika Territory, devoting a good deal of his time to surveying and map-making. Captain Grant was a volunteer and, from May 1948, an Honorary Associate (Museum Notice 12/1948). In 1932 he returned home from Africa and began work on the six volume African Handbook of Birds (1952-73) in collaboration with Col. C W Mackworth Praed and worked daily in the Bird Section. While working on the Handbook he did much research on the African material which indirectly benefited the Bird Section. Grant's notes into the travels of early ornithologists, African localities, and notes on comparative material borrowed, are now with the Manuscript collection at Tring. During WW2 he worked at Tring Museum (November 1940 to at least September 1942) on the African bird collections evacuated there for his Handbook. In 1958 he died in a London Underground train aged about 80 on his way home after a day's work in the Museum.
Obituary: Ibis 1958: 271-273, portrait. Rep. Stoneham Museum 1959?: 11. Portrait Ibis 1959, pl.5. Biographical note in 1980 reprint of Series 1 of African Handbook of Birds. See Wynne. See Warr 1996.
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