Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen survived with his reputation undiminished and died a hero. Seventeen years after his death, his scientific history began to unravel. There were many early indications of untrustworthiness that had been ignored in the aftermath of his generous gift. He had been under suspicion of purloining specimens some years beforehand—there had been a partially successful attempt to ban him for a time from the “bird room.” When the extent of his duplicity was revealed at last it cast a cloud over much of his published research. He had stolen specimens from other museums and incorporated them into his collection, and then claimed to have recovered the specimens from new localities. In astonishing examples of sang-froid, he even took specimens from the Natural History Museum’s own collections, relabelled them, and then presented them back to the institution with a flamboyant bow. Thanks to careful research by Robert Prys-Jones, the original status of specimens was reconstructed. For example, consider the Blyth’s kingfisher (Alcedo hercules), which Meinertzhagen claimed from two specimens from Burma. It transpired that both specimens had been stolen—one from the Whitehead Collection at the Natural History Museum, the other from the Owston Collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York—and both were really from Hainan Island, China, where they should have been.
The labels tell the story of Meinertzhagen’s deception on an owlet specimen.
As Prys-Jones and others dug into Meinertzhagen’s collection, more and more bogus examples were discovered. It began to seem appropriate that one of the animals he really did discover was an African giant hog (Hylocheorus meinertzhageni). The problem with the whole collection is that many specimens are perfectly genuine, but careful research work is needed to establish which ones. The type specimens of the Afghan snowfinch (Montifringilla theresae) are undoubtedly authentic, to take just one example. This species is named for entomologist Theresa Clay, thirty-three years Meinertzhagen’s junior, who was his “companion” latterly, and who had catalogued the insect collections he had presented to the Museum. They lived next door to one another at 17 and 18 Kensington Gardens with a passage connecting them. The more one finds out about Meinertzhagen, the more dangerous he seems. It was said that he killed a native assistant while in India, an incident that was covered up as a death from plague. Theresa Clay, I should add, was a charming woman who I am sure had no conception of her lover’s dark history. Others had seen his character more clearly from the first. Lawrence of Arabia said of him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) that “he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of Good.” Meinertzhagen had been an effective spy in Palestine during the First World War, and the business of spies is duplicity. It is hard to construe his motivation for zoological fakery as anything other than a love of mischief and confabulation for its own sake. He could have enjoyed an unsullied reputation had he wished to. He was what novels of his time would have described as a cad and a bounder—and the most dangerous of his kind, one gifted with a luminous personality.
Another figure broke the rule of trustworthiness without which scientific research cannot operate. Arthur Kingsbury died the year after Meinertzhagen. He was a solicitor and amateur mineralogist who during the middle decades of the last century built up a reputation for finding astounding specimens in the field, especially in localities in Cornwall. It was all most extraordinary: a group of mineral enthusiasts would be grubbing around on a spoil heap for some interesting species, when Kingsbury would suddenly wave around a stunning specimen of the object of desire—quite the best ever to have been discovered from the locality. He dressed distinctively in old-fashioned, colonial gear in the field, complete with knee breeches, and became something of a legend. His abilities were attributed to a miraculous sixth sense about where the good specimen lay hidden—and nobody asked awkward questions. Well, scientists don’t make things up—it’s against the rules. After he died his widow sold the collection to the Natural History Museum. The first misgivings about authenticity began to emerge in the 1980s. Collectors who had not been in thrall to the Kingsbury mystique began to complain that they could not duplicate his results from certain localities in spite of their most diligent efforts. Eventually George Ryback was employed to undertake a detailed investigation. The earlier specimens in the Kingsbury Collection were respectable, having been mostly acquired from other collections. But many of those that had astonished his fellow collectors in the field were “plants”—they were from well-known localities elsewhere in the world, and Kingsbury must have had them secreted on his person, only to whip them out at the right dramatic moment. Detailed mineralogical studies showed that a gold specimen (Reg. No. 1965, 83) said to come from Porthcurnick Beach, near Portscatho in Cornwall, actually came from Kanowna, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The occurrence of native gold atop manganese oxide crystals is thoroughly characteristic of the latter locality. Then there was a green fibrous malachite specimen that Kingsbury claimed to have found at the Driggith Mine in Cumbria, but which was identifiable as having come from Zellerfeld in the Harz Mountains of Germany. This list went on and on.
Oddly enough, I believe I can understand Kingsbury’s motivation rather better than I can Meinertzhagen’s. When I was a student I had one day on a field trip during which I genuinely had a “magic hammer”: every locality yielded its treasures instantly to my most cursory tap. My fellow students were half admiring, half envious. The don in charge took notice of me, eventually nodding significantly at me when we arrived at a new locality and indicating that he would not have long to wait for me to find a diagnostic fossil. It was a good feeling (it didn’t last) and I can understand how somebody might want to get a reputation for omnipresent luck. However, the whole scientific endeavour relies on truthfulness. Scientists are not supposed to make mistakes, though almost every scientist will have done so once in their career. Mistakes can be corrected, admitted to and even forgiven. But deliberately to mislead is the ultimate sin in science. It is the fact that both Kingsbury and Meinertzhagen died unexposed that really rankles. It also remains true that such duplicity is rare, and that the integrity of the collections is preserved by frankly admitting to the bad hats and mountebanks.
There were greater threats to the collections than the activities of charismatic fraudsters: two world wars. During the First World War the main threat to the collections seems to have come from the government itself, which several times tried to purloin the space for its own purposes, notably to house huge numbers of clerks in 1918. The Natural History Museum never entirely closed, and provided solace and entertainment for convalescent troops; it continued to have about half a million visitors a year throughout that war. William Stearn discovered an entertaining faux pas by the Speaker of the House of Commons. In 1916, during one of the attempts to close the museums (Bloomsbury, the Tate Gallery, the Science Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Wallace Collection were also included in the plan), the politician spoke in a disparaging manner of “deciphering hieroglyphs and cataloguing microlepidoptera,” the implication being that all real men were out there in the trenches doing useful stuff. He could not have picked a worse example. Hermetically sealed tins of army biscuits destined for troops in all corners of the Empire proved to be full of maggots when they were opened. An entomologist at the Natural History Museum, John Durrant, was called in by the War Office—and the maggots proved to include the larvae of three species of flour moths, all of them belonging to Microlepidoptera. The Speaker was also one of the Principal Trustees of the Natural History Museum, so he should have known better. The Museum contributed to the war effort in a dozen ways ranging from the treatment of body vermin to advice on which wood to use for aircraft. As in every other institution in Britain, most of the younger men saw active service and many did not return to their benches.
Specimens had to move to safety during the Second World War; a large snake moves to a storage facility deep under Surrey.
At 4:30 a.m. on 9 September 1940 two incendiaries and an oil bomb hit the roof of the Bot
any Department; the damage to the collections took years to repair. Stored seeds germinated.
The Second World War brought much more serious threats to the Museum. If one wanders up Exhibition Road to the entrance to the Earth Galleries, it is easy to see where lumps were gouged out of the limestone blocks in the wall: a bomb fell in the road, and could easily have demolished the adjacent buildings. These holes are the last visible evidence of the bombing of this part of London. The war in the air made things much more dangerous for the type collections, and a decision was made to evacuate most of them, beginning in August 1939. Various stately homes deep in the countryside became temporary quarters to butterflies or molluscs from the national collections, and the aristocratic owners welcomed them enthusiastically, for the most part, as preferable to having a whole lot of troops billeted on them. The public galleries were closed, and then they were open, and then closed again as circumstances changed. The first closure happened on 29 August 1939; by 3 February 1940 the Museum was opening on Saturday and Sunday, and, later that same month, daily; by 29 May—closed again. It must have been confusing for the visitors, in spite of announcements in the newspapers. The archives show that many of the scientists who remained in the Museum did work for the Red Cross or as auxiliary firemen. But the Natural History Museum was a conspicuous target, and life was exciting from time to time. An oil-bomb fire started in the Botany Gallery on 9 September 1940 at 4:30 a.m. and caused much damage. Some seeds of the silk tree, Albizia julibrissin, collected from China by Sir George Staunton in 1793, got an unexpected soaking, and proceeded to germinate. This was the first of a number of hits and near misses—there were three more before the year’s end.
At the eastern end of the old building, where the palaeontology wing now stands, a series of concrete bunkers were built. They are still there under the new building—I have always known them as the War Rooms. Now they form a low basement housing some of the anthropology collections, boxes of human skulls and bones, a dark and oppressive place. When they tried to blow the rooms up many years later, the exceptional thickness of the concrete made it an impossible task, so the War Rooms were incorporated into the new building instead. Airborne attacks continued sporadically until 11 July 1944, when a flying bomb in the Cromwell Road did severe damage to the western galleries and the central towers. The Museum had reopened to the public again on 1 August 1942, but closed once more on 6 July 1944, the day after the first flying bombs landed in Queen’s Gate on the western side of the building. At the end of the war one could say that the Natural History Museum had come out of it better than might have been expected. Waterhouse’s extravagant creatures were still on their perches. The longest-paid member of staff on record was remunerated as a result of the damage to the Botany collections: Arthur Hales was brought back to sort out the specimens he knew so well, reconstructing their curation history from surviving scraps of writing. He eventually retired, the job done, at the age of seventy-three.
The Second World War years are recorded in a house magazine called the Tin Hat. The first number was produced on 30 September 1939. It is illustrated with charming, if crude, cartoons, often in the deft abbreviated style of Fougasse. The tone is best described by using the wartime word “chipper”—cheery in an eye-rolling way. I particularly like the section on overheard remarks appearing under the heading “The Brighter Side.” They tended to record humour from moments of extreme tension, as when somebody remarked after the bomb damage to the bird room that he had never seen so many birds killed with a single shot. According to the instructions, contributions to “The Brighter Side” “should be sent to Messrs Claxton or Smith. They should be brief.” Another bird-room example will give you the idea. “The shattered Bird Gallery! Broken glass, torn blinds, blasted doors and window frames, dust and grit everywhere. And at the gallery entrance lying conspicuously on the floor, a large printed label ‘BIRD MIGRATION.’” We learn about the Air Raid Protection shelter, and the suggestion that it may have had bugs. In June 1944 the first number of another magazine, 6323, was issued, which published news of staff fighting in the forces all over the world. There is something rather eloquent about these pages, maybe having something to do with the old-fashioned typewriter on which it appears to have been rapidly knocked out. If it had been done these days on a computer it would be slicker but somehow more impersonal. Peter Purves appeared to me in these pages for the first time, complaining of mud everywhere and fungi rotting everything in the jungles of the Far East. 6323 was the telephone number of the Natural History Museum at the time, as it still was when I joined the staff several decades after the war had finished. Looking at these fading pages, I sense a strong connection with all those curators and collectors, scientists and plant pressers, an unbroken string of scholars united by the collections, enduring through peace and war, small champions of order in a world where chaos is always a possibility.
Cheery under fire: the cover of an edition of the wartime house journal Tin Hat
At one time it must have seemed possible to grasp the totality of the world’s biodiversity, to discover the entirety of what the Reverend Gilbert White would have called “the system.” In the days of Britain’s imperial greatness such optimism informed the initiation of great expeditions to map the unknown and collect its life. On 7 December 1872 HMS Challenger set off around the world under Captain John Nares to find out about the oceans and the life they contained. This was an expedition in the tradition of the famous Beagle voyage of Fitzroy and Darwin, but with a particular scientific focus on the least-known two-thirds of the globe. Britain was the leading maritime nation, and a voyage like this was then a top research priority. Richard Corfield has redescribed the journey that founded the science of oceanography in The Silent Landscape. The ship returned in 1876, having taken samples of water, sea floor and organisms at 362 different sites. Among the many discoveries was the recognition of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, not to mention the realization that life—in rich variety—could exist deep in the oceans in the realm of eternal darkness. Challenger was possibly the first vessel to be kitted out fully with purpose-built laboratories in order to allow conservation of specimens as soon as they were collected. The obligation to publish the results occupied the talents of several employees of the Natural History Museum for years. Under the editorship of John Murray the Challenger report, or The Report of the Scientific Results of the Exploratory Voyage of the HMS Challenger During the Years 1873–1876, was one of the great achievements of scientific investigation, running to some fifty volumes published in the decade 1885–95, each volume weighing in at about the same size as the family Bible. More than four thousand species new to science were named in one or another of these works, and many of their type specimens still reside on the shelves in the Darwin Centre. I have looked at a series of crabs sadly contemplating me from inside their glass jars, Challenger having granted them this strange kind of immortality. If only enough expeditions could be mounted it might be possible to catalogue the whole world, and bring it back to the shelves of a great museum for perpetuity! And indeed there were many more collecting trips, but perhaps nothing on so grand a scale as HMS Challenger. Brave individuals voracious for specimens, such as Evelyn Cheesman, or even Colonel Meinertzhagen, added mightily to the collections and the coverage of the remoter corners of the world, but these collecting trips were tasks that knew no end. By a cruel transmogrification of Parkinson’s Law—“work expands to fill the time available for its completion”—biodiversity apparently expanded to match the best endeavours of experts to get to know it. Possibly the last tailor-made expedition run from the Museum was the African entomological shindig in the converted truck during the 1970s with Peter Hammond and Dick Vane-Wright.
HMS Challenger, the foundation of scientific oceanography
Meanwhile, the world was changing, and paying little attention to the Natural History Museum. In the early days it would have been assumed that an unthreatened series of glo
bal ecologies would be there for sampling in perpetuity. The rapid disappearance of marsupial mammals from Australia following the introduction of cats and foxes showed how vulnerable species could be to mankind’s interference. This lesson was reinforced when knowledge of the riches of island faunas and floras like those found on Hawaii was coupled with an awareness of their fragility and vulnerability to extinction. During the twentieth century, destruction of whole habitats continued to gather pace, particularly in India and the Far East, and the systematic mission was more and more coloured by such phrases as “before it’s too late.” The taxonomist was beginning to be both christener and obituarist. Taxonomic collections and skills were reborn in mitigation of this new and harsher world. If dense concentrations of species could be recognized in particular places and habitats, such diversity “hot spots” could be more readily targeted for protection and conservation. The Worldmap Project was started in 1988 at the Natural History Museum, using computer mapping of species based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. The entomologist Dick Vane-Wright and the botanist and computer virtuoso Chris Humphries began the project and laid down the ground rules for recording species distributions, and Worldmap is now fully operational under the amiable guidance of Paul Williams. Digitization of collections and their occurrences, as well as many other kinds of biological records, allowed any area of the world to be interrogated for its taxonomic richness. To take one example, it is obvious from the biodiversity maps that the Malay Peninsula fully deserves protection efforts to be concentrated upon it. The identification of unknown species from this area should be a priority, but even before that stage is reached conservation of threatened habitats should ensure that such species do not become extinct before they can be identified. That is the theory, at least—but human rapacity often outstrips good intentions, as has happened for many years in Indonesia, where habitat destruction of rainforest is continuing at a dizzying rate. Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity. I believe the organizers of the Challenger expedition would have approved. But it is a long road from the quiet vaults of a museum to staying the hand of an illegal logger.
Dry Storeroom No. 1 Page 30
