Mr and Mrs Francis Day
(1829-1889 and 1837-1869)

Sir Francis Day was an army surgeon and naturalist in the Madras Presidency who later became the Inspector-General of Fisheries in India and Burma. A pioneer ichthyologist, he described more than three hundred fishes in the two-volume work on The Fishes of India. He was created a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1885. 

He is seen here with his first wife, Emma, daughter of Dr Edward Covey of Basington. The couple were married on 3 November 1857. A son, Francis Meredith Day, was born in 1864 and a daughter, Edith Mary Day, in 1867. Following the death of his first wife in 1869, Day married secondly, on 13 April 1872, Emily, the youngest daughter of the Reverend Thomas Sheepshanks, vicar of St John’s, Coventry. She died the following year.  

Sir Francis Day died of stomach cancer on 10 July 1889 at his residence, Kenilworth House in Cheltenham. He was buried in the cemetery at Cheltenham.