Herbert Musgrave Phipson

Herbert Musgrave Phipson (c. 1850 – 7 August 1936), was a British wine merchant and naturalist who lived in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, from 1878 to 1905.

Upon his return to Bombay, he immediately joined BNHS and in January 1884 offered office space belonging to his business as a permanent home for the Society.

Two years later, when the need was felt for BNHS to expand, he again offered the Society part of the larger premises he had acquired for his business at 6 Apollo Street, Bombay.

His main area of scholarly interest was snakes and, in spite of being tied down by his business and BNHS work, he found time to write the occasional note.

Phipson's proposal, including the site selected by him and the proposal for a separate building for natural history, was incorporated into the committee's final report presented in 1904; it found concrete expression in the inauguration in 1922 of the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, many of whose natural history collections were both donated and managed by BNHS.

It was through his activities at the Fund that Phipson met his future wife, Edith Pechey, who had just arrived in Bombay as Senior Physician at the Cama Hospital for Women and Children.

[6] Here they constructed a convalescent community – with almost two dozen cottages, a working-girls' hostel, and a library – to which families or individuals that lacked the means to escape the "heat of the Bombay summer were invited to come for a month's stay; convalescent women and children especially were encouraged to take advantage of a health-renewing sojourn"[6] at no rent and at nominal cost.

Although successful for the cancer, the surgery could not save Edith's life, and she died in a diabetic coma on 14 April 1908 at their home in Folkestone, Kent.

[7] In 1916, during BNHS's "Mammal Survey of India, Burma and Ceylon," the Indian race of the flying squirrel Petinomys vordermanni was named Petinomys phipsoni by Oldfield Thomas, who in the introduction to his paper said, "I have named this beautiful little animal in honour of Mr. H. M. Phipson, the former secretary of the Society, to whose initiative and enthusiasm the Society owes so much of its prosperity and to whose ready help most Indian Zoologists have at various times been greatly indebted.