of its kind in England", and Oxford professor E. B. Poulton wrote that "to leave the collection without a competent head would be a national disaster". In 1919, the collection was valued at £50,000 (approximately ). It consisted of 1.5 million specimens held in a room containing chests of drawers with "5000 compartments neatly arranged round the room, and in addition 4000 cases, all carefully labelled". It was reported that, Here were butterflies of all sizes, of all colours – all arranged in an effective colour grouping. In one compartment were ... great winged beauties half a foot from wing tip to wing tip. In another were creatures so small that it needed a microscope to discern their beauty. An annexe to the museum "over eighty feet long by twenty feet wide" (approximately 24 by 6 m) was built in 1920. In 1927 it was reported that the main building of the Museum was "as large as a dance hall. The specimens are kept in special cabinets stacked almost to the roof. Here, all day long, Mr. Joicey and his assistants ... work at arranging and naming the fresh arrivals." Some specimens dated from the 1830s, and others were from the Stanley expedition of 1871. Some were caught 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from land, others on the Alpine snowfields. They ranged in size from 1/2 inch to 10 inches (approximately 1 cm to 25 cm) wing spread. By 1930 the Hill Museum contained over 380,000 specimens. Joicey and his Hill Museum colleagues published more than 190 scientific articles on world Lepidoptera and "produced some excellent work, especially on the Lepidoptera of New Guinea, Hainan Island, and Central and Eastern Africa". These include the four volumes of The Bulletin of the Hill Museum, 1921–1932, edited by Joicey and Talbot, and A Catalogue of the Type Specimens of Lepidoptera Rhopalocera in the Hill Museum, 1932, by Alfred George Gabriel. During his lifetime, Joicey "presented to the Nation" between 200,000 and 300,000 Lepidoptera specimens including about 75,000 to the Natural History Museum. The latter figure included 15,500 moths and a number of butterflies (1923), his whole collection of over 30,000 Hesperiidae butterflies (1926), 6,000 Lymantriidae moths (1928), and, in 1931, a series of 800 type butterflies being "the most valuable, both scientifically and intrinsically ... received for the past two decades", some thousands of moths including over 600 type and paratype moths, and