1
Plague, murder and taxidermy Some of the tales behind one of the Museum’s exhibits
2016 President’s Lecture by Andy Sandford
2 Foreword The inspiration for this lecture came from two separate directions. First of all, I was impressed by Neil McGregor’s Radio 4 series on the History of the world in 100 objects, in particular with the way that a single object could bring together multiple strands to tell a complex story. I wondered how I could do something similar relating to the Club. What I wanted to do was to try and capture the ideas and enthusiasms that inspired the great amateur naturalists of the Victorian and Edwardian times – such as those that created the Holmesdale Natural History Club. Who were these people, how did they think, and what drove their passion for knowledge and collecting? The second thing that inspired this lecture was an item in our collection that I had come across while I was stewarding for the Heritage Open Days one year. This was the case of birds shown on the cover. These were obviously not local, in fact quite exotic. What really intrigued me when I looked closer was a small stone in the corner of the case with the words written on it: ‘Collected by Hon N C Rothschild, Soudan, 1901’
That sounded a bit exotic – the birds had obviously been put together in this case for some kind of scientific purpose – it wasn’t just a decorative object.
3 And the name Hon N C Rothschild – given what I knew about the Rothschild family’s interest in Natural History and the Museum at Tring – I wondered if there was a link. Who was NC Rothschild, what was he doing in the Sudan in 1901, and how did this case of birds come to be in the Holmesdale? Andy Sandford
4 Rothschild and Wollaston Born in 1877, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, known as Charles, was the son of Nathan Rothschild – the first Baron Rothschild and the younger brother of Walter Rothschild – the second Baron Rothschild – who had his own Natural History Museum at Tring.
Nathaniel Charles Rothschild Charles was also a dedicated naturalist, becoming an excellent entomologist and developed a particular interested in Siphonaptera – fleas.
5 Some online research turned up a paper in ‘The Ibis’ entitled - ‘On a collection of birds from Shendi, Sudan, by the Hon N Charles Rothschild and A F R Wollaston’ which sounded as if it could be very closely connected to the Holmesdale birds.
6 Rothschild’s co-author and companion on the expedition, Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston, born in 1875, was a naturalist, medical doctor and explorer.
Sandy Wollaston on a later expedition to New Guinea Son of a Housemaster at Clifton College, where he was also pupil, he was a keen naturalist even as a schoolboy.
7 Wollaston studied biology and geology at Kings College, Cambridge – but was more interested in going out or birdwatching or climbing expeditions than studying and so only scraped a pass degree. He nevertheless stayed at Kings for a further two years – during which time he spent his time on nature expeditions including a couple of extended trips to Lapland Having decided that exploration was what he wanted to do most in his life he decided to study medicine as he reasoned that as a doctor and naturalist he would stand a better chance of being recruited for exhibitions. He started work at the London hospital in Whitechapel in 1898, but hated both London and medical practice – he went out into the country as much as possible and managed to wangle a return to Cambridge for a while to study physiology. When one of his friends from Kings, Francis Gayner, wrote to him in 1900 telling him that he was with Charles Rothschild on an exhibition in in Wady Hafa Wollaston wrote: “Lucky dogs. Confound it, why must I be bottled up in this accursed London”.
Cambridge University Natural Science Club: Gayner is second from right on the
second row and Walter Rothschild second from right on the third row
8 Gayner was also a contemporary of Walter Rothschild at Cambridge, and both were members of the Cambridge University Natural Science Club. Francis Gayner later became a doctor – also studying at the London Hospital – a and was for a time Hon. Physician at Addenbrooke's Hospital. He was a Member of the British Ornithologists' Union and Fellow of the Entomological Society. Possibly through his friendship with Gayner, Rothschild seemed to know Wollaston and in the winter of 1900 invited him to come on his collecting expedition to the Sudan. At the time Rothschild was 23 and Wollaston was 25. The trip was a great adventure for the two young men. On the voyage out Wollaston wrote to Gayner: “All day long it grew warmer and southerner and I forgot Whitechapel and all its works and became a new man. At Port Said it was simply magnificent; what with the flamingos and pelicans and kingfishers – not to mention the sun and the desert – I nearly went off my head with delight.” Rothschild writes in the Ibis paper that they arrived at Shendi in the Sudan on 16 February 1901. Shendi is on the north bank of the Nile and offered a range of different habitats ranging from the riverside, through a margin of grassland to scrub and then hills trailing off into the desert. Rothschild wrote: “Our choice of collecting ground fell upon Shendi partly on account of its comparatively luxuriant vegetation, which is richer than any other part of the Nile valley between Khartum and Assuan . . . partly because we expected to find the northern limit of many tropical species, partly also on account of the fact that since 1850 . . . no ornithologist had paid more than a passing visit to this part of the country” They then set to work hunting, shooting, trapping and skinning as many bird species as they could find – attitudes to nature conservation were somewhat different then – the main objective was to catalogue as completely as possible the local fauna and preserve samples for identification and study – this was done by skinning the birds and then drying the skins.
9 It was very hot, 110⁰ - 120⁰ F in the shade, so the birds needed to be skinned as quickly as possible before they went off.
Extract from the Ibis paper Altogether the pair collected hundreds of specimens representing 89 species – and identified a further 9 species that they didn’t collect samples of. Most of the bird skins were destined for the Museum at Tring to be classified and identified by Ernst Hartert, Walter Rothschild’s ornithological curator. But Charles seems to have wanted to have some souvenir of the trip and in June 1901 he sent a nine bird skins to Sheal’s, a taxidermist in Belfast. The order book entry states: “9 Soudanese Bird Skins, to be mounted in case or cases in best style for The Hon N C Rothschild, 148 Piccadilly, London”
10
Sheal’s order book entry: thanks to Angela Ross, Curator of Vertebrates Department of Natural Sciences, National Museums Northern Ireland
11 And, indeed, a label in the bottom right of our case identifies them as ‘Sheal’s 1901’ as does writing on the back of the case.
12
The birds in our case can be tied into the descriptions of their demise in the Ibis paper. Firstly, there are two Abyssinian rollers.
The two Abyssinian Roller’s in the Holmesdale case
13 Rothschild wrote: “The Abyssinian Roller was occasionally seen, but it was usually very wary and difficult to approach. The native name which means ‘Child of the clouds’ is well chosen; you hear one of these birds high up above your head almost out of sight, and then it suddenly comes in a fluttering corkscrew flight, with wings and tail spread out, to perch and chatter at you from the top of the tree, just out of gunshot” – not these two apparently.
The case of birds We also have an African Collared Dove – as ubiquitous there apparently as in Surrey gardens. “This dove was very common” wrote Rothschild, “Upwards of fifty might sometimes be seen sitting in one of the bigger trees near the river.”
14 There is another dove, which I haven’t been able to identify, two further birds which might be a Barbet and an Indigo Bird, a Grey Hornbill and a Nightjar.
The Grey Hornbill in the Holmesdale case Rothschild wrote: “These remarkably ugly Hornbills were fairly numerous at Shendi . . . Not the least remarkable feature of this bird is its extraordinarily tough skin which is capable of turning shot of almost any size at more than thirty yards’ distance.”
15 I couldn’t find a specific reference to the Nightjar in the Ibis paper, but in one of his letters Wollaston writes: “Of birds, our nightjars are perhaps the best. We have five eximius’ by which he means Caprimulgus eximius – the Golden Nightjar.
The Golden Nightjar Caprimulgus eximius Ours doesn’t quite look like this, but Wollaston adds: “We have five eximius including a female never yet described, a male and a female of a very beautiful long-tailed species and a female of a third (to us unknown and possibly a new species very much like eximius but greyer.” Looking at pictures of Nightjars I think that could be one of the long tailed or the greyer ones. At the end of the trip Wollaston wrote: “Altogether this has been a very great success and it has certainly been far and away the very best time I ever had in my life – I never expect to have another half so jolly.”
16
The Nightjar in the Holmesdale case On the expedition Wollaston also identified a number of previously unknown fleas, reporting on them in a paper ‘New species of Siphonaptera from Egypt and the Soudan’ published in The Entomologist's Monthly Magazine These included the Oriental Rat Flea – which he named Pulex (Xenopsylla) cheopis after the great Pharaoh Cheops – which carries the bacterium Yersinia Pestis – bubonic plague. The flea spreads the plague by feeding on an infected rodent and then biting a human. In the paper Rothchild recounts how he found the Cheopsis fleas on a variety of animals – including Acomys Witherbyi – an African spiny mouse, Gerbilus robustus – a gerbil, Arvicanthis testicularis – the African grass rat, dipodillus (gerbillus) watersi – another gerbil , Dipus jaculus a jerboa and genetta dongolana a genet.
17
The Oriental Rat Flea –Pulex (Xenopsylla) cheopis Another paper – written for Rothschild by the eminent zoologist William Edward de Winton – details all the mammals collected on the expedition – including bats, cats, hyenas, jackals, foxes, gazelles, porcupines, hares and indeed some of the mammals from which the fleas were collected.
18
A plague-bearing Gerbil?
What Charles Rothschild and A. F. R. Wollaston do after the Soudan expedition? For one thing, they both had families. Charles met his Hungarian-born wife Rozsika von Wertheimstein (1870-1940) on a butterfly-collecting trip in the Carpathian Mountains. The couple had three children. Victor – the third Baron Rothschild and the exotically named Pannonica – or to give her full title - Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter who went on the be a leading patron of bebop music and muse to jazz musician Thelonius Monk – Charlie Parker died on here sofa. And finally, Miriam Rothschild who became a renowned entomologist in her own right. He went on many further expeditions and was a pioneer of nature conservation in Britain. He was the founder and first Chairman of The Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves – which went on to become The Wildlife Trusts. He also donated the first parcel of land for the Wicken Fen nature reserve, the UK’s oldest. Coincidentally,
19 this had been one of Wollaston’s favourite bird watching destinations when he was at Kings College. He also worked in the family business, N M Rothschild & Sons, was responsible for the management of the Royal Mint Refinery and was Chairman of the Alliance Assurance Company. During the first world war he was a member of the Munitions Board. He was Deputy Lieutenant of the City of London, Justice of the Peace and had been High Sheriff of Northamptonshire. Sadly In 1917 he caught a form of encephalitis that was associated with the Spanish flu. This left him with severe mental health problems – including clinical depression. And in 1923 he took his own life.
20 After the 1901 expedition, Wollaston returned to the Sudan with Charles Rothschild in 1904 and followed this with expeditions Central Africa and Dutch New Guinea, Papua. After serving as a naval surgeon in the war he was elected a Fellow and returned to Kings College. He was then invited to join Mallory’s first Mount Everest expedition in 1921 as medical officer and Naturalist.
Wollaston second from left in the front row on Mallory’s first Everest expedition He became Honorary Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society in 1928 and that same year returned to Kings as a tutor – invited by John Maynard Keynes. At Kings he was said to be a good tutor and this may well have led to his untimely death. A rather disreputable student called Douglas Newton Potts had got into debt and had decided to embark on a life of crime. He went absent without leave and stole a gun. After a few days a friend persuaded Potts to come back to Cambridge to face the music where – unaware he had a gun, a police officer was on his tail. Potts met Wollaston by chance in the street and invited him to his rooms to share the burden of his predicament. Detective sergeant Willis followed them at a distance. Willis called at the porter’s lodge with a warrant for Pott’s arrest and was directed to Wollaston’s rooms. He began reading out the warrant, but Potts drew the gun and shot
21 him in the shoulder. Potts then fired twice at Wollaston, killing him outright, and again at Willis and then shot himself in the head.
So the birds certainly had a story to tell. But one mystery remained – how the birds came to be in the Holmesdale’s collections?
22 There was no reference to the birds that I could find in the Club’s archives and I thought I had come to a dead end. But, I was just tidying up some loose ends and decided to look a bit closer into F Gayner – who we know was a doctor – and I found his obituary in the British Medical Journal of 1933. This reported the death of Dr Francis Gayner of Redhill who, like Wollaston, trained at the London Hospital and later went into partnership in Redhill and practised there until his death. It said: “ Through twenty-six years of general practise Dr Gayner found time to continue his natural history studies, being a member of the Linnaean Society – and The Holmesdale Natural History Club Reigate” I then looked again at the Club’s proceedings and saw that he was twice president himself – finishing his first term in 1916, exactly 100 years before my lecture. Footnote I found the final part of the story over a year later when I was looking through the Holmesdale’s record of donations for my 2019 lecture on the Reigate surgeon and benefactor Thomas Martin. This details a donation of a case of birds in Dr Gaymer’s memory by his widow. This must surely be the same case of birds that Rothschild and Wollaston collected during their adventure in the Sudan. How and when the birds came from Rothschild to Gaymer remains a mystery though…for now.