George Robert Gray

George Robert Gray FRS (8 July 1808 – 6 May 1872) was an English zoologist and author, and head of the ornithological section of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum, in London for forty-one years. He was the younger brother of the zoologist John Edward Gray and the son of the botanist Samuel Frederick Gray.

George Gray's most important publication was his Genera of Birds (1844–49), illustrated by David William Mitchell and Joseph Wolf, which included 46,000 references.

Biography

He was born in Little Chelsea, London to Samuel Frederick Gray, naturalist and pharmacologist, and Elizabeth (née Forfeit), his wife. He was educated at Merchant Taylor's School.

Gray started at the British Museum as Assistant Keeper of the Zoology Branch in 1831.

He began by cataloguing insects, and published an Entomology of Australia (1833) and contributed the entomogical section to an English edition of Georges Cuvier's Animal Kingdom. Gray described many species of Lepidoptera.

In 1833, he was a founder of what became the Royal Entomological Society of London.

Robert Gray

Robert Gray may refer to:

Robert Gray (poet)

Robert William Geoffrey Gray (born 23 February 1945) is an Australian poet, freelance writer, and critic. He has been described as 'an Imagist without a rival in the English speaking world' and 'one of the contemporary masters of poetry in English'.

Biography

Gray was born in Port Macquarie, grew up in Coffs Harbour and was educated in a country town on the north coast of New South Wales. He trained there as a journalist, and since then has worked in Sydney as an editor, advertising copywriter, reviewer and buyer for bookshops. His first book of poems, Creekwater Journal, was published in 1973.

As a poet Gray is most notable for his keen visual imagery and intensely observed landscapes. His wide reading in and experience of East Asian cultures and their varieties of Buddhism is clear in many of the themes and forms he chooses to work in, including, for example haiku-style free verse works. Gray's essentially Australian response to nature is reinforced by what he sees as a commonsensical Eastern view of man as within nature rather than an agent removable from, and capable of controlling nature. Martin Langford has written that Gray's poetry captures the Australian ambivalence towards their own landscapes. 'No-one captures better that dual sense of our fascination with the physical world, and our dismay at its indifference.'

Robert Gray (Scottish politician)

Robert Gray (c.1895 – 12 April 1975), often known as Bertie Gray, was a Scottish nationalist politician.

Gray worked as a stonemason and in 1928 was a founder member of the National Party of Scotland. In 1929, he made two copies of the Stone of Scone, a coronation stone originally used by Scottish monarchs, but taken by Edward I of England to Westminster Abbey in 1296.

Gray stood unsuccessfully for the National Party at the Dunbartonshire by-election, 1932, then when it merged into the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 1934 became the Assistant Secretary of the new party. He stood for the SNP in Dunbartonshire at the 1935 UK general election and a 1936 by-election in the seat, although he received less than 10% of the vote on each occasion. Disillusioned with the SNP, Gray joined the Progressives, an anti-Labour coalition, and in 1947 was elected to Glasgow City Council, representing Blythswood.

Gray retained his nationalist beliefs. In 1950, the Stone of Scone was removed from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalist activists. It was damaged in the process, and MacCormick, who had been involved in the plot, delivered it to Gray's stonemason business, where he arranged for his head stonemason to repair it. The following year, Gray and Ian Hamilton left the stone at Arbroath Abbey to be returned. Gray later refused to confirm whether this was the genuine stone, claiming that he had hidden a note in a brass tube inside the real stone, and that the text of this would be revealed to his wife, Marion, as part of his will.