J. Starkie Gardner

John Starkie Gardner was born in 1844 and educated abroad. He died in December 1930.

In 1883 he founded a metal works in London, J. Starkie Gardner Ltd. Their most famous commission was a set of gates for Holyrood Palace, made for King Edward VII.
He published articles on armour, silver work, 17th and 18th century ironwork and modern metalworking.

Prior to this, in the 1870s, he wrote extensively on geology and botany. But by 1876 he had begun to sell off his fossil collections, mainly to the British Museum of Natural History in London.
Whether his interest had waned, or he needed the money to establish his metalworks, we do not know.

In 1887 Bolton purchased a portion of this collection.

The material was actually collected and prepared by John Griffiths of Folkestone.
As this image shows, Griffiths was a skilled preparator.

The specimen seen here is a fossil lobster (a real “Rock Lobster”) called Hoploparia.
It was found at East Wear Bay in Folkestone. It lived in the lower Cretaceous, making it about 110 million years old.