BUXTON, David Roden 1910-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born February 26, 1910, in London, England; died November 17, 2003. Entomologist, government worker, and author. Buxton's interests ranged from insects to photography, but he is most often remembered for his research and writings on Christian churches and other historical architecture around the world. His first love was entomology, which he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, earning a bachelor's degree in 1931 and a master's degree in 1936. During the 1930s he traveled to East Africa with the Imperial Institute of Entomology and discovered several new species of beetles. In 1937, he joined the British Colonial Service and was assigned to Nigeria, where he worked to suppress the breeding of disease-carrying tsetse flies; he also worked as an education officer in Sierra Leone. From 1942 to 1949, Buxton spent a rewarding period studying the Christian culture of Ethiopia and discovering its ancient churches; he even helped preserve one of these structures in Debra Damo. While in Ethiopia, Buxton left the Colonial Service to join the British Council as an education worker. His experiences in Ethiopia are related in his 1949 book, Travels in Ethiopia; and he later returned to the subject of Ethiopia in The Abyssinians (1970). After leaving Africa, Buxton traveled on various British Council assignments in Europe, where he visited old churches and wrote about them in his books. Having already published a work on architecture in his Russian Medieval Architecture (1934), he would go on to publish two more during his career, including Russian Medieval Architecture: With an Account of the Transcaucasian Styles and Their Influence in the West (1975) and The Wooden Churches of Eastern Europe: An Introductory Survey (1981). Fluent in several languages, Buxton also translated Emile Male's The Early Churches of Rome (1960) and edited Alexander Opolovnikov and Yelena Opolovnikova's Wooden Architecture of Russia: Houses, Fortifications, and Churches (1989).

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PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), December 3, 2003, p. 31.