Fly-time and the archive: Francis Jenkinson’s Diptera and papers at the University of Cambridge

Francis Jenkinson (1853–1923) was University Librarian at Cambridge, but is also remembered as an entomologist who assembled an outstanding collection of Diptera. His flies are housed at the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, alongside some notebooks and correspondence, though his diaries and the majority of letters are held at the University Library. Jenkinson was part of the circle of dipterists at the forefront of taxonomical work in the early twentieth century, but his collecting network also included his family, friends and domestic staff, most notably his housekeeper Annie Allard (1871–1956). Jenkinson’s collecting sites were similarly diverse, from his gardens and house in Cambridge, to Logie in the Scottish Highlands, and the windows of the University Library. Taken together, Jenkinson’s insects and papers give us a nuanced picture of his collecting practices, one that recovers the contributions of a wider range of actors whose voices have sometimes been silenced by time and changing interests in the scientific record. They also reveal how collecting flies was intrinsically governed by time, from the life cycle of the insects, to knowledge of the best times to collect, or the demanding schedule of pinning captures before the natural process of decay made them unpliable. By exploring the connections between ‘fly-time’ and institutional, domestic and social time, we see how ‘fly-time’ profoundly influenced human time and led to a range of strategies in an attempt to gain order and control through the archive.