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THE ROMANTIC LEPIDOPTERIST
from The Chap Issue 111
by thechap
Lepidoptery
MARGARET FOUNTAINE
An historian once assertively wrote ‘‘…a globe-trotting lady scientist could not possibly hope to be taken seriously either as traveller, lady or scientist”. Yet, as Olivier Woodes-Farquharson discovers, over a hundred years ago pioneer Margaret Fountaine was excelling at all of those, also finding time for some unconventional romance
aturday 15th April, 1978 was a fairly quiet
Snews day. There was yet another British nuclear test, but most people seemed too engrossed with listening and dancing to disco to care too much. For once – and this is not something that you can say very often – all the excitement was happening in Norwich. For in the Castle Museum, a sealed black metal box was being opened, on the strict instructions of its original owner who had died 38 years previously; its contents had remained a genuine mystery since. On breaking the seals, 12 leather-bound journals were found within, totalling
The sealed box containing Margaret’s journals being opened in 1978
3000 pages of diaries written in captivating prose, together with an assortment of photos, some vivid drawings and even some pressed flowers. They were the work of Margaret Fountaine, a trailblazing lepidopterist born 116 years earlier near that very city, and whose diaries would reveal an extraordinary combination of intrepid travel, pioneering science and globetrotting romance.
Her upbringing was hardly a natural springboard for such a life. A strict but useless clergyman father and seven younger siblings, in the hamlet of South Acre in Norfolk, suggested she would be destined for home schooling, becoming a governess, marrying off to a suitable suitor and carrying on a life of suffocating tedium. But Margaret was having none of it. She first revealed her more obsessional side as a teenager, where she fell passionately for an Irish chorister at Norwich cathedral with the hearty Victorian name of Septimus Hewson. Neither was it a passing fancy,
Margaret Fountaine at work in the field
for it ate at her for fully seven years. She followed him, learned his routines and took out her feelings on her diary – which she started 100 years to the day before they were allowed to be opened. That Hewson was a relentless drunk, swindler and blackguard didn’t put her off, and even after he was kicked out of the cathedral and sent home to Limerick, she wrote to him asking to visit, before finally declaring her tireless love.
Hewson made the right noises, with Fountaine leaving with the assumption that they were betrothed. Weeks later, and with her subsequent letters unanswered, a different missive arrived, this time from his family, suggesting that she was wasting her time, as he had betrayed them as well as her for all manner of reasons. Heartbroken, she finally realised how much of her life she had wasted, during which her time to ‘marry off’ the traditional way had come and gone. Fountaine needed a distraction to focus her obsessional nature and soon after fate dictated that, with a wealthy uncle passing away and leaving her a £100-a-year income, she now had the means to fund that distraction.
This may still have been the age of the Grand Tour of Europe, but seldom had it been done by single women. Margaret initially set off with her sister Rachel, armed with little more than Thomas Cook’s pioneering Tourist Handbook, the original travel guide. Taking in France and Switzerland, it was in the latter that she suddenly rediscovered the animal that had charmed her so much in her childhood garden: the butterfly. Instinctively an obsessional type, she thereafter poured her time, energy and life into studying and collecting them, and as butterflies couldn’t get drunk and cheat on you like Septimus had, it was a love that would last until her last breath.
From Switzerland, she would ultimately set off to over 60 other countries in almost all continents, armed with a butterfly net, incongruous clothing and an indomitable will. And almost everywhere she went, it seems, she attracted plenty of attention. For although some of the photos of Fountaine make her seem straight-laced and a little sad, she was anything but. Her fizzing diary entries reveal a passionate, charismatic and attractive soul who couldn’t be filed away as ‘demure’. Chasing
butterflies in remote Tuscan villages, she casually mentions: ‘I spent most of my time with the Baron… as I might have expected, he too ended by making me an improper proposition’.
But Fountaine more than knew how to look after herself. Moving to the Corsican mountains, where she had heard there were little known, endemic species to be found, she stumbled across a different kind of rare specimen, the notorious bandit Jacques Bellacoscia, who had first announced himself by murdering the Mayor of Ajaccio. Most outsiders, even male, would have been petrified at such an encounter; not so the inimitable Margaret, who squeezed in some socialising when not exploring: ’I drank with Jacques, and sometimes in the quieter walks of life, I love to look back upon that wild mountain scene, the outlaw and his clan, the savage dogs who prowled about the grey rocks and the purple heather’. Her diaries also revealed that her successful coping mechanism when coming across the unsavoury – and very likely armed – types in the wild mountains was to do the most un-Victorian thing possible and ‘swear for all I was worth’.
Fountaine would need occasionally to return to England, although increasingly disliked it. She usually bought six pairs of plimsolls, and sometimes some silk dresses, from Harrods, which she would ask to be slit down the sides in order to insert pockets and be able to carry huge butterfly-boxes, to the bewilderment of the tailor. But as her collection and reputation grew, she was also invited to see the collection at the estate of Henry Elwes, another collector/traveller who encouraged her to continue and to apply a more scientific bent to her pursuits.
Despite realising that she had a long way to go to have a collection to rival Elwes’, she took his advice with predictable gusto. In 1897, therefore, her first port of call was Sicily, where again she found herself braving Mediterranean brigands in order to secure her prize. She linked up with Signor Enrico Ragusa, Sicily’s pre-eminent Lepidopterist, for local advice before setting off alone, this time collecting new and detailed observations on habitats, varieties of sub-species, and starting to use the scientific (Linnaen) names for her butterflies instead of the common names in her write-ups. Her subsequent paper made it to The Entomologist journal, a true rarity both for a supposed amateur and for a woman in what was still overwhelmingly a man’s scientific world. Some of her collected specimens were of such high quality that they were accepted for display by the British Museum, who always insisted on exceptional quality and rarity. Fountaine had properly arrived.
Yet such success did nothing to slow her down, as she promptly hotfooted it first to Trieste and then to Budapest, where the local butterfly experts were entranced by her – a little too much in the case of Dr Popovich, one of their number who joined the list of many to fall under her peculiar, indefinable spell. She did not reciprocate his ardour, but her passions were aroused soon after when she joined them on a collecting expedition in the Transdanubian Mountains and was charmed to the hilt by another of their group, the fair-haired and faintly mysterious Herr Torok. Lovesick she may have been, but it didn’t stop her branching off on her own to undertake 12-hour hikes armed only with a hunk of bread and a flask of Sheep’s milk, while still dressed in bafflingly inappropriate clothing. The expedition complete, she delivered her second article to the Journal, which was promptly published. In 1898, she was elected a member of the Royal Entomological Society (RES).
It is again hard to overstate how impressive this was. It was a time of major transition for the world of Natural History study, and most scientific societies were not even contemplating female admissions; the few that did were inordinately choosy. As one sniffy historian phrased it, ‘A globetrotting lady scientist could not possibly hope to be taken seriously either as traveller, lady or scientist’. While the RES still only had six female members in 1910, they appear to have been at the more
progressive end, and were enthused by Fountaine’s presentations on the few times she was able to make their meetings in London.
The travel bug never left Margaret, even though her diaries, breathless and revealing in so many ways, are maddeningly vague about dates. In a way this was unsurprising, as there was no obligation at the time to travel with a passport and records are not kept as they are now. What we can be sure of is that she was off next to the French Alps in 1899 to collect and breed the caterpillars of certain little-known species, before the Middle East beckoned and in 1901 she made it to Syria. Here, after all her previous crushes, she would meet her true kindred spirit.
Not that Khalil Neimy was an obvious catch. 15 years her junior, speaking English with a bizarrely strong American accent, and initially acting as her ‘dragoman’ – interpreter, local fixer and travel companion all-in-one – he professed his undying love to her the day he laid eyes on her in Damascus. Carelessly, he omitted to mention that he had a wife and family, and Fountaine eventually fell for his charms. To his credit, he was a hugely able companion on all her subsequent expeditions from then until 1928, including to South Africa, Asia Minor, the Caribbean, India, Tibet, Australia and more, and she was at pains later in life to ensure their vast 22,000-specimen collection would be known as the Fountaine-Neimy collection.
Even for our less austere times, their relationship was unconventional. They were certainly lovers, but he was also her employee. Largely, it was a set-up that suited them both, even though she later found out that not only was Neimy not divorcing his wife as promised, but was also racking up a good few more children with her as he dragged his feet on signing the papers. The kindhearted Margaret eternally forgave him, and was genuinely grief-stricken when he contracted a fatal
malarial fever in 1928. Yet still she pressed on to collect new specimens and suffered for it. Once, in order to lay her hands on a rare but beautiful white specimen she visited a remote village in Tibet: ‘I passed a terrible night on the floor – the place was infested with fleas and vermin’.
Neither did her charms ever dim. On a ferry to Crete she was propositioned by the Egyptian ship’s officer; travelling down the Amazon she simply could not shake the relentless pursuit of a randy Brazilian, despite her best efforts (‘It forced itself upon my unsuspecting brain that very soon he would be out of his pyjamas; it reminded me of the days of long ago’); in the African bush she stumbled across a wandering Frenchman one morning who had proposed marriage to her before the sun set. Indeed, notwithstanding her intelligence and grace, her looks may also have become more exotic, for after contracting a nasty bout of malaria in Morocco she chose to start bathing in diluted creosote to put off the leeches, which permanently turned her skin a darker shade.
Even in later years her energy and drive were relentless, and she breezily recounts either cycling up hills for a day to look for certain species, or galloping on a pony for 45 miles in Tibet. Exaggerated and unlikely as this may seem, they are corroborated by eye-witnesses. And her evolving views were prescient too, as she was one of the first in her field to notice that nature’s bounty was not limitless, and that if everyone turned lepidopterist, butterflies would soon disappear; not that she herself could consider stopping. Her blend of no-nonsense, expectation-shattering travels and scientific discovery, coupled with her strange approach to love, allowed her to set a precedent that has yet to be matched.
It was on a dusty, remote Trinidadian road in 1940 than the indefatigable 78-year-old breathed her last. Found by a passing monk, she had endured a massive heart attack. Even in death, her hand still reached out to her beloved butterfly net, which she had dropped and which remained tantalizingly out of reach in her final moments. Yet thanks to her good planning and powerfully-written diaries, her unique story could and would be celebrated yet. n
BRITISH LEATHER GOODS
SARTORIAL
44 Photoshoot: La Bowtique
67 Pratt & Prasad 61 Leather Satchels
76 Grey Fox Column
