Earlier this year I wrote about Francis Downes Ommanney (1903-1980), universally known as ‘Dick', his short period as head of the fisheries research unit at the University of Hong Kong and his account of that period of his life in his book Fragrant Harbour. The last major book he wrote, The River Bank, was an autobiography of that part his life after leaving school up to the start of the Second World War. It was a follow-on from The House in the Park, an account of his very early life where his family lived in the ‘grave and favour’ house in Richmond Park on a lease given to his great-grandfather, Richard Owen by Queen Victoria.
The River Bank, subtitled An Autobiography of the 1920s, published in 1966 reflects on his seemingly sad life, observing but never quite fitting in, succeeding but never quite so well as expected and haunted by the realisation of his homosexuality that was hinted at but never overtly acknowledged in his earlier books.
Ommanney was a very good writer as the awards for several of his books testify but when I read the book I found it also cast a great deal of light on that powerful, opinionated but woefully wrong character in academic zoology of the early 20th century, Ernest William MacBride FRS (1866-1940) who held the chair of zoology—Thomas Henry Huxley’s old chair—at Imperial College, London, I have written on MacBride previously HERE and quoted some of the trenchant views of those who worked with him as a man obsessed with still promoting the Lamarckian means of evolution, of his opposition to Mendelian genetics and denial of the existence of genes, and his promotion of eugenics which he saw as a natural extension of Lamarckism.
Ommanney’s account of student life at Imperial College provides interesting information on what student life was like in the 1920s but also on the nature of MacBride’s interactions with his students and his lasting effect on them.
After a miserable time in a job in the City of London, Ommanney’s father thought the time had come for young Dick to be set on the course towards a proper, well-paid job. Surely with Richard Owen as a near ancestor something like entomology would provide a proper job in somewhere like the tropics went the argument. The financial state of the family had declined under Ommanney senior thus ruling out Oxford or Cambridge. Imperial College was deemed the place for Ommanney junior to study biology but the first step on the way to a biological income was the matriculation exams for London University. Crammers had the sole aim of success in the various examination papers. A pass in all papers of six subjects at a single sitting was required for matriculation. Ommanney had great difficulty with mathematics but was relieved to find his name on the pass list that was pinned on the notice board on the appointed day in August 1921, He was in.
For anybody keen to get to biology in 1922, the Royal College of Science component of Imperial College did not make it easy. He have to try to fit into life as a student, noting the division that existed in the student body along class lines:
On the one hand there were the middle-class boys, mostly from public schools, who for one reason or another had not gone on to one of the senior universities on leaving school, and on the other hand there were the working-class boys who, usually through hard work at a grammar or secondary school, had come to the Imperial College determined to make good and complete their technical education. The two groups looked down upon each other with dislike and contempt.
Furthermore, for aspiring biologists the first year was only chemistry, physics and maths. He managed chemistry (but cut his finger to the bone when trying to push a piece of glass tubing through a rubber bung—almost a beginner’s rite of passage) and physics but failed the compulsory maths. He therefore had to repeat a year with additional tuition, another expense for his father. In that year he had time on his hands and therefore sought the advice of MacBride on how to fill it.
I suppose Ernest MacBride (known to his friends, his enemies and his students as MacB.) would have been in his middle fifties at the time I first met him, but he seemed to me to be much older. His round bald head was fringed with a short stubble of white hair and his large furrowed brow jutted over a pair of small, shrewd, blue eyes. He wore a white bristly moustache. His round, tubby frame was compounded of a series of intersecting circles but he had a dropped shoulder which caused him to carry himself slightly lopsidedly. He had a flat-footed walk and a rasping cough which could be heard a long way off. His zoology department was at the top of the Victorian building and students, waiting in his lecture theatre, could hear the Professor arriving on the ground floor by his cough and his clear precise voice as he entered the lift eight floors below.
Although on analysis MacBride presented an eccentric, even odd, appearance, it never occurred to me at that first meeting, or at any time afterwards, that he was in the least an ugly man. The fire of his spirit burnt in those small blue eyes and there was a warmth in his manner that made even a humble student such as I was, coming to ask him how I should spend time before beginning his course, feel instantly comfortable and at ease. He was a pugnacious Ulsterman who, during his scientific career, made many enemies because of the directness and incisiveness with which he put forward his unpopular views, and in his seamed face there shone a keen, combative intellect. It is often said by the irreverent that scientists, especially zoologists and botanists, who develop a passionate life interest in a particular group of animals or plants, grow by degrees to resemble the objects of their lifetime study in appearance. MacBride's special and lifelong interest lay in the great group of five-rayed animals, 'nature's pentagonal experiment, the group that includes the sea-urchins, the sea-cucumbers and the sea-lilies. His rotund figure, large round head fringed with a short stubble and his prickly disposition where his own particular subject was concerned, caused the irreverent to compare him with one of the thorned, rounded sea-urchins about which he became so lyrical and eloquent in his lectures.
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| Ernest McBride in The Radio Times |
Then, having started the course in zoology:
No two people could have been more different than my two zoology teachers. One, the Professor, was Ernest William MacBride, then at the height of his fame and pugnacity. The other, the Senior Lecturer, was Graham Cannon, at that time a young man of twenty-five but a rising star in the zoological fırmament. Later he became professor first at Sheffield and then at Manchester. When he was teaching me he was laying the foundations of his future fame with a series of beautiful and meticulous papers describing the filtration feeding mechanisms of very small crustaceans. These were masterpieces of technique and draughtsmanship and I remember thinking them magnificent but uninspiring.
The Professor himself, as seemed to be the custom in all departments of the college, lectured every morning to his elementary students, most of whom would go on to take degrees in other sciences after their preliminary zoology course. Cannon lectured to more advanced second and third year zoology students who were reading for a degree in zoology. There were seldom more than three or four of these in any one year. I was one of them because I had to graduate in zoology before I could go on to the insects (on the very top floor of the building) in my fourth year. As it turned out, owing to setbacks in mathematics, I did not in fact get there until my fifth year.
The teaching methods and approach to their subject of my two teachers were as different as their two characters. MacBride was all fire and poetry and he could strike sparks out of the most recondite subject. His discourses were a delight, peppered with quotations and apt allusions, often literary, because, like many of the great men who held chairs at South Kensington at that time, his head was among the stars. Unfortunately, however, the stars are not a very suitable vantage point from which to impart knowledge to elementary students struggling to acquire a first grasp of the subject, so that while the Professor's audience listened with rapt attention, they rose from their seats at the end of the lecture with their heads filled with ringing phrases but their notebooks blank. Cannon, on the other hand, attempted no flights to the stars. His lectures were pedestrian and unexciting to listen to, but admirably concise and clear and accompanied by splendid diagrams on the blackboard in coloured chalk which he gave his audience time to copy down, their heads buried in their notebooks. Whereas we rose from the Professor's lectures slightly dazed but enchanted, we rose from Cannon's feeling we had filled our magazines with ammunition for the exam which loomed ahead.
The students did have an outing:
The Professor was Vice-President of the London Zoo and Chairman of its Aquarium Committee. The aquarium was new in those days and once a year the Professor took his students on a conducted tour round the tanks. He was enormously proud of his aquarium which he had played a large part in bringing into existence. The tour was always a most enjoyable occasion for the Professor's vociferous eloquence often attracted quite a crowd of the general public. They were amazed to see this stout, white-haired old gentleman holding forth in stentorian tones and with such a proprietary air.
'I reckon 'e must be somebody,' said a woman on the out-skirts.
Another member of the paying public was less impressed. "This fellah's just a bloody nuisance," I heard a voice growl.
An apocryphal story relates that one year the Professor was conducting round the aquarium a party of students which included a lady research worker who was studying the breeding habits of small sharks and dogfish. In one tank two speckled dogfish were caught in the very lists of love on the sandy bottom while their fellow inmates glided unnoting to and fro. The Professor became quite transported with joy at this spectacle. 'For God's sake!' he stormed, shouting as usual at the top of his voice. 'For God's sake, where's Miss Smith? They're copulating!’
There was also the field course in marine biology at Plymouth where he found himself eating alongside Julian Huxley and Carl Pantin.
Then, of course, there were the seminars:
Once a month there were larger and more formal occasions than these which were more like serious scientific meetings. These, known as MacBride's tea parties, became famous, almost notorious, functions in the lively zoological world of London. They became so popular, attended by visitors from all over London, that tea became quite elaborate and was served in one of the laboratories. The old laboratory attendant put on a white coat and clumped around in his enormous boots with plates of cakes. The Professor and Cannon waged war over him.
Cannon wanted him got rid of and said so, but the Professor, who was a soft-hearted, kindly man, refused and sheltered the old scoundrel under his wing. After tea we all trooped up to the main zoology lecture theatre to hear a distinguished member of the company read a paper on a zoological subject. 'Read' was the operative word in many cases, for on the whole zoologists seem to be extraordinarily bad speakers and often have the gift of making the most interesting subject tedious beyond description. Many a scientific meeting have I slept through…Much of the floor space behind the seating was occupied by human and animal skeletons, stuffed apes, mammals, birds and reptiles. It must have been fifty years since that red stag was shot and now it stands there with glass eye and moth-eaten fur. There were dusty, scruffy birds and fishes hanging from the ceiling, poised for half a century in a moment of flight or swimming. But these grim spectators did not in the least inhibit the discussions that took place after the lectures, and the Professor could be relied upon to ginger things up. I used to experience a kind of thrilling embarrassment at seeing the sparks fly among these giants of science. It was the same sensation as that which I had experienced years before when, as a child, I found myself present at squabbles between my grandmother and my mother or my aunts. I wondered if I ought to be there and tried to make myself as small as possible lest they should suddenly remember me and send me out of the room. I remember feeling rooted to my seat when a famous professor from another college, whose name was a household word, an Olympian figure to me, stormed out of the lecture theatre, saying, 'Well, if that's your attitude there's no point in continuing the discussion.' Or when another irascible but renowned zoologist said he thought the Professor was talking absolute poppycock'.
The storms nearly always arose around the imperturbable figure of MacBride who, when the light of battle was in his eye, had the peculiarly Irish gift of infuriating his adversaries. His views were extremely controversial and he advanced them with all the provocative punch at his command…
The effect of a charismatic, opinionated but wrong-headed professor on the naive mind of his or her students is a worrying in the 2026 as it was a hundred years ago. There were only three students in Ommanney’s year on the advanced zoology course. He wrote: 'Naturally I was a Lamarckian like my professor'. Another, Thomas Arthur Manly Nash who worked mainly on Africa and became the expert on the tsetse fly, agreed. The third, an Egyptian, remained neutral. But all these students faced a oncoming problem. Internal examinations for a diploma were set by MacBride and Cannon. After the final year though they all sat for the London honours degree:
…and here was an agonising dilemma. If a question on evolution were set, as it almost certainly would be, would it be set by MacBride or by one of his opponents? What was a poor student to do who only wanted to please the examiners?
Ommanney’s time with MacBride was coming to an end; his final year was to be spent with the entomologists on the top floor. He passed the college finals ‘with flying colours’ and ‘over 95% marks’. It was he wrote, ‘the first real success of my life’:
…’My dear boy!’ said MacBride, ‘a masterly paper! My heartiest congratulations. You will go far.’
The next year dampened Ommanney’s enthusiasm for entomology. The year after that saw him in the job of Assistant Lecturer at the East London College, later Queen Mary College, on the Mile End Road. He was paid £300 a year:
The zoology department of the East London College was fairly new in those days and was housed in a corrugated-iron building tucked away behind the college near some tennis courts and overlooking the back-yards of a long row of little black houses. It contained a lecture room, a laboratory and several other smaller rooms, including one all for me with a large desk and a work bench along the window, so that I felt very much coming up in the world.
The majority of the students to whom I dispensed my so recently acquired learning were first year medicals doing elementary zoology. They had to do a preliminary biology course at the college before going on in their second year to the medical course at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. In the cause of medical science, and so perhaps in that of suffering humanity, these boys and a few girls, mostly from the east end of London, eviscerated each year several dozen earthworms, crayfish, dog-fish, frogs and rabbits. While they did this I walked up and down the laboratory behind their bent backs and occasionally helped them on by applying a needle or a scalpel myself, hoping not to make their confusion worse confounded by doing so. Sometimes, indeed, the butchery was so frightful that the only thing to do was to sacrifice another earthworm or frog in the cause so that a fresh start might be made.
I did not really like teaching very much and found it difficult to get into the minds of the young men peering in sad puzzlement or faint, amused scorn at the mangled specimens pinned out in their dissecting dishes…I am afraid I found most of the students rather dull and slow-witted. Some of them were plainly uninterested and unable to understand why a course in elementary biology should be necessary as a preliminary to medicine…
I suppose it would be churlish to ask how many of these incompetent dissectors (and do not ask me how I ran out of patience while digging out the cranial nerves of my school dogfish) made it into the Royal College of Surgeons.
Ommanney had only one academic colleague, the senior lecturer in charge of the tiny department, John Henry Dobb*. He only attended on three mornings a week; he also lectured at a polytechnic institute in the West End of London. Dobb confessed to knowing little zoology and yet Ommanney noted he had the reputation of being one ‘of the finest, most successful and most experienced teachers of elementary zoology in London’. There was, however, a problem; a large and embarrassing problem. Dobb was a loud, confrontational anti-semite. He hated the Jews—and they constituted half his class. He often launched into a tirade at the top of his voice while students were waiting in the lecture theatre. Ommanney wrote:
For some mental or psychological trauma, acquired perhaps during the First World War, in which his only son had been killed, had implanted in his mind an idée fixe which, in the course of years, had grown into the proportions of a mania. He believed, with all the conviction of which a simple man is capable, that all the evils of the world without any exception, both temporal and spiritual, must be ascribed to a single basic cause, a worldwide Zionist plot. To the machinations of world Jewry he attributed every misfortune in modern society, the last war, mounting unemployment, the rising cost of living, high income tax and any other circumstance you might like to mention….
These cracked beliefs took the form of a continuous outpouring of racial hatred which, ten years later, the most ardent Nazi could hardly have surpassed. Every Jew, it appeared, was guilty from Lord Reading and Lord Rothschild to the humblest bespectacled student in the zoology practical class.
Ommanney found that in his classes the Jews and the Gentiles got on fine. But when standing in for a sick Dobb, he found the lecture theatre occupied in a peculiar way. All the non-Jews were in the front rows, there were then empty benches until the back benches had all the Jewish students. When he asked what was the reason he was told Dobb had instructed them to be so segregated. Ommanney told them to sit in alphabetical order from the front. Things came to a head when Dobb returned and exploded at the revised seating. The whole thing ended in a melée with Dobb sat upon by two Jewish students who were, in turn, pulled off by two of the Gentiles. A full brawl developed and then those made to sit at the back went off to report the whole affair to the Principal.
Ommanney was reluctant to join in a condemnation of Dobb since he was normally friendly and helpful. Those running the college treated Dobb leniently, seeming to recognise he was hopelessly adrift, but on written instruction from the Principal Ommanney’s seating arrangement was imposed. Within a year Dobb retired and died a few years after that.
London Adventures and Family Life
Very slowly, after becoming a student at Imperial, Ommanney was persuaded into taking part in student social life. Living in London his social circle spread and even for a while became a deb’s delight; he was obviously if not perhaps to his dancing partners ‘safe in taxis’. He also describes happenings in his family. His father became odder and odder, the family fortunes thus declined further while the standard of housing they could afford plummeted. He also started to have homosexual encounters and it is clear that he participated, if sometimes more an observer than an active player, in what would now I supposed be called the gay scene in London, with its meeting places and meaningful phrases. He described one gathering place as a large tea-room not far from Piccadilly Circus. Around five pm but not at any other time the “men of a certain character” made their entrance via a raised dais, nicknamed the ‘Lily Pond’. Other venues were the promenade at the back of the dress circle of the Alhambra Theatre and the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, a pub with which I became familiar when in need of a break from meetings of the Society of Endocrinology being held in the old Middlesex Hospital Medical School in the late 1960s and 70s.
Ommanney also commented on the change in meaning or acceptance into daily use of terms between the 1920s and the 1960s; ‘camp’ and ‘send up’ were two examples he gave. It is also clear, though perhaps Ommanney did not realise it, that ‘man-about-town’ has en entirely different meaning now compared with the 1920s. Then it referred to those ‘men of a certain character’.
That chapter of The River Bank ends with:
In my case at any rate few permanent relationships resulted from my casual contacts, though I still count among my friends a few people whom I met all those years ago. Usually telephone numbers and addresses were exchanged. My temporary friend smiled, shook my hand and faded into the blurred and dusty picture which is the memory of troubled youth.
Moving On: The Discovery Committee Expeditions
Ommanney became disillusioned and discontented. He could see no escape from the emptiness and lack of direction. He had completed three years and the prospect of starting all over again on the standard ‘types’ of the zoology course for first M.B. students depressed him. Because he find time on his hands he had early on asked MacBride for advice on a research project that he could do. But nothing of value emerged from the conversation. MacBride had moved on to next year’s brood. He did get a topic from D.M.S. Watson at University College: the development of the ear in the frog. That involved rearing tadpoles through metamorphosis but like many before and since he found that they died in the final stages. Although making piles of serial sections he never took to the task and he abandoned it, unable at the end to remember what the problem was he was meant to be solving.
Then he saw a job advertised in The Times. It was to join the scientific staff of the Discovery Committee which used Scott’s old ship for research expeditions in the Antarctic. He applied, supported by a glowing reference from Dobb, not thinking he stood a chance of being successful. But he was and off he went to South Georgia for the season, then in the southern winter to Durban to continue working on whales and then back to South Georgia. He returned home in summer 1931 to find the ‘Lily Pond’ and the Alhambra still in full swing and a further decline in his parents’ fortunes. Two further trips, each of two years, to the Antarctic followed. Between the cruises and until war broke out in 1939 he worked on specimens collected in the Natural History Museum, passing each day the statue of his great-grandfather. In 1938 he also headed north in a trawler and all these activities were the topics of the books which made his name as an author.
Dick Ommanney’s legacy that of a writer rather than as a zoologist. However, I suspect that he was a much better zoologist than he considered himself to be. And MacBride was probably right. Ommanney did go far but not in the way that either expected.
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| A website about the Ommanney family provides the following caption: From The River Bank. Back L to R: Francis Downes Ommanney, Francis Frederick Ommanney, Rupert John Ommanney,Theoroda Ommanney. Front L to R: Olive Ommanney (nee Owen), Olive Mary Ommanney and Lorne Currie. The wedding was that of Olive and Lorne (2 September 1904 - 29 May 1941) on 29 August 1929. FDO had just heard of the success of his application to join the Discovery II. 'I went down to Mary's wedding with excitement and adventure before me and new a joy and hope almost as great as, though different from, hers.' |
*I can find no trace of a John Henry Dobb that matches the dates and details, nor of a son killed in the First World War. Perhaps Ommanney was using a pseudonym.
