Donation of a Silver Tankard

This would have been a precious item in the family due to it being passed through several generations. It is unknown whether the silver tankard was used at all or if it is kept at the University in the present day. Especially as it was gifted in the condition that it would remain at the university so long as it existed.

John was also from a hosiery manufacturing family in Leicester which was one of the main industries in Leicester. He was known for his earlier donations to the University around 1921 when he gifted the university a microscope and £100. The microscope that he gave was also passed through the family by a well-known Victorian naturalist and explorer Henry Walter Bates (1825-1892). Henry was known for the first scientific account in mimicry in animals and his expeditions in the Amazon Forest.

Henry managed to collect over 14,712 species which were mostly insects and wrote a book on his adventures ‘The Naturalist on the River Amazons: a record of adventures, habits of animals, sketches of Brazilian and Indian life, and aspects of nature under the Equator, during eleven years of travel’. A copy of this is currently in the University of Leicester’s Special Collections, which was donated in 1919.

When John died in 1949 he left a huge sum of money (£10,000) to the University and is remembered in the present day through the John Heggs Bates charity which provide grants for those who are recovering from an illness and their carers. In the present day, this charity uses the charity link which is also a Leicestershire organisation founded in 1876.