In my previous post on Chinese species of pika I mentioned that Thomas’s Pika (Ochotona thomasi) had first been described in 1948 by the Russian zoologist A. I. Argyropulo in memory of Oldfield Thomas of the Natural History Museum in London. Thomas himself had named the Tsing-ling or Qinling Pika, Ochotona syrinx, in 1911.
Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas (1858-1929) was elected to the Royal Society in 1901. Along with several other museum workers of the time he had no university degree. He was extraordinarily prolific. He was author of 1,090 publications and proposed 2,900 new names for genera, species and subspecies.
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| Oldfield Thomas Painting by John Ernest Breun Courtesy of the Natural History Museum London |
Nearly 90 years after his death, his obituaries shed light on a very different world. For the Royal Society his memorial memoir was signed, appropriately for such a rôle, ‘R.I.P.’ Those were the initials of his colleague and friend, Reginald Innes Pocock FRS.
Pocock wrote that Thomas was always known by his third name, Oldfield. Indeed, he appears without the first two names in official records such as national censuses. In 1876, after school, he got a job as a clerk in the British Museum (Natural History), as it was then known, when it was still physically part of the British Museum in Bloomsbury. He attended T.H. Huxley’s lectures and in 1878 was transferred to the zoological staff as an Assistant. He was greatly disappointed though when Albert Günther, Keeper of Zoology, moved him from invertebrates to be put in charge of mammals. He stayed with mammals and at the grade of assistant for the rest of his life despite every effort made to get him to accept a senior post.
I will not dwell on Thomas’s work at the museum other than to point out that he was responsible for introducing the American system of collecting for a museum, one begun by Clinton Hart Merriam (1855-1942) on the mammalian fauna of North America. That involved the large scale collection of specimens in order to throw light on such topics as geographical variation. The cost involved in such intensive collection was much greater than that needed to finance the steady trickle of specimens from overseas expeditions and residents. Fortunately, for Thomas, the financial problem was solved by his marriage.
In 1891 Oldfield Thomas married Mary Kane Clark, the daughter of Sir Andrew Clark, Baronet, President of the Royal College of Physicians and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Clark had become one of the most fashionable physicians in London. When he died in 1893, he had made a fortune and Mrs Thomas became a very rich woman. The Thomases had no children but they used her money to support the museum by recruiting an army of collectors overseas (recruited from local residents, colonial officials and big game hunters, for example) and a number of volunteers and paid visiting scientists to work on the mammal collection with Oldfield.
The extent of the family fortune can be judged by his legacy, also used to support the Museum. As a widower, at probate he left £44,000, the equivalent of about £2.6 million today, even after his support for many years of what would now be called his own research programme. As well as his solicitor the other executor of will was another friend and fellow mammalogist, Martin Alister Campbell Hinton FRS (1883–1961); Hinton wrote the Thomas’s obituary for Nature.
This is what Pocock wrote for the Royal Society:
Since I knew Thomas intimately throughout the greater part of his industrious life, perhaps some personal impressions of him, written with as little bias as a close friendship of forty years permits, may be of interest. I joined him as a colleague at the Natural History Museum late in 1885. At that time, when he was verging on 30, he was like the average young Englishman of the period who had been brought up in a well-ordered household of gentle people, had found his level at a public school, learnt the bad taste of self-advertisement and acquired the quality implied by the expression "fair play”. But his mind was rather of the practical and methodical than of the intellectual or aesthetic type ; and he had profited only to a small extent by the educational system then practised. He had no appreciation of literature, classical or otherwise; and neither then nor subsequently did the perusal of imaginative prose, novels or poetry give him any real pleasure or satisfaction, his reading, such as it was, being restricted mainly to the newspaper, an occasional magazine or volumes of travel. His disposition was eminently sociable. He preferred conversation and argument to books; and aversion to solitude, a curious trait in his character was evinced by his liking for the presence of someone, if only a clerk, in his room when he was hard at work, and by his invariable choice of an occupied carriage when travelling by train. He liked music in a measure; but his faculties in that direction were not of a high order. In no sense of the word was he artistic. He could neither draw nor paint, nor tell a good picture from a bad one. It cannot even be claimed for him that he was a naturalist in the broadest sense of the word. Beautiful scenery or a night of stars had no special attraction for him, and he was bored by the sea, unless there was shipping to watch, a boat to sail or fish to be caught from a smack. He was uninterested in the geology of the countryside, knew next to nothing of its flora, and very little of its fauna.* As a field naturalist he was rather a collector than an observer. But collecting was, I think, mainly, if not solely, a pleasurable pastime to him when it served the definitely practical purpose of providing for himself or his colleagues specimens which he knew would be useful for work.
I have dwelt at some length upon Thomas’s limitations with regard to interests and pursuits because of the important bearing they had upon the latter half of his life. But while still a comparatively young man he was at no loss for recreations. He had an innate proficiency for games, both outdoor and indoor, involving accurate adjustment of eye and hand, like cricket, lawn tennis and billiards. He was also a keen Volunteer in the Artists’ Corps, and a very tolerable marksman. Lacrosse and golf he also played for a short time ; but the game best suited to his temperament was croquet, which he was happily able to keep up to within six months of his death, spending most of his summer afternoons at Roehampton and devoting his holidays to tournaments at Bournemouth or similar south-coast resorts.
In 1891 he married Mary Kane, the daughter of the late Sir Andrew Clark. She was a charming lady of the Victorian type, a good amateur pianist and artist, with literary tastes and orthodoxly religious, his complete opposite in many ways. Unfortunately they had no family; and his wife’s inheritance of a small fortune a few years later placed Thomas in a position of complete independence of the struggle to make both ends meet, to which most scientific men are subjected, thus freeing him from the necessity of supplementing his income by popular writing or lecturing and enabling him to refrain from seeking higher distastefully administrative appointments at the Museum to which his seniority entitled him.
To fame and social advancement Thomas was supremely indifferent. Well aware of his own limitations, he was entirely without conceit, never tried to impress by pretentions of any kind and was generously appreciative of ability in others. He was also mentally alert, gifted with a fund of shrewd common- sense and penetrative ability in reading the characters of his friends. Great determination in carrying through any project that interested him was another of his attributes, and lie would never allow himself to be led by specious arguments into a course of action he did not approve. These qualities made him a valuable member of the Council of the Zoological Society, on which he actively served many years after his first election to it in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Within a few years of his marriage he began to worry about his health. Troubled by heart palpitations and other symptoms of illness he did not understand, and knowing the physical debility of his family, he gave up all games involving exercise, gradually drifted into the condition of a confirmed invalid, and was so obsessed by the conviction that he had only a few years to live that, when he went to the Argentine for his health, he feared he might never come back to resume his duties at the Museum. This depressing state of mind was fortunately in a measure relieved by a course of treatment which he followed after a consultation with the late Dr. Haig. Of the greatest value to Thomas was the assurance he received that the adoption of a mainly vegetarian diet would at once make a change for the better, and perseverance with it perhaps work a permanent cure. Instilled with this new hope, Thomas entered upon the new dietary regime with the tenacity of purpose characteristic of every scheme he embarked upon; and was so impressed by the verification of Haig’s prediction that he tried to induce all his friends to follow his example in the matter of food.
It is only fair to point out that his ardent advocacy of this course was based upon the benefit he derived from it, because most of his friends and acquaintances regarded him unjustly, if kindly, as a hypochondriacal crank. Thomas became, it is true, a confirmed valetudinarian, absorbed in the study of his health as affected by diet, reducing himself at times to the verge of starvation, undergoing daily a course of massage and becoming more and more averse to physical exertion of any kind. Probably the distraction and anxieties of children and an interest in literature or art would have prevented the lapse into this deplorable state of mind. Deprived of these, he was hard put to it to find home occupations and, instead of reading, would sit doing some manual work, like knitting, or later in life listening to the wireless. His wife, upon whose company and attentions he was very dependent, unfortunately predeceased him. For a time after her death he carried on his work as before; but as the months went by, he missed her more and more, and finally when he ceased to be interested any longer in his zoological work and showed unmistakable signs of mental derangement, few of his friends were surprised that he died by his own hand in June, 1929.
He left the bulk of his own and his wife’s fortune as a collecting fund for the Museum ; and shortly before his death he paid for the installation at the Museum of a much-needed lift for the use of the official staff. This was completed and formally opened in May, 1930.
*I learn, however, from Mr. M. A. C. Hinton, who was more intimately associated with Thomas during the last fifteen year’s of his life than I was, that, when he was about 50, he began to take an interest in trees and in the heavens. A humorous remark he once made about the stars is worth repeating as characteristic of his type of mind :—“What a pity it is we cannot collect them !”
In 1990 a memoir, bibliography and index to the names of animals proposed by Oldfield Thomas was written by John Edwards Hill (1928-1997) and published by the Museum.
Hill recorded that Thomas wrote letters to newspapers and magazines:
His pragmatic outlook characterises his suggestions for an easily made ear-plug for soldiers in the firing line, that pedestrians should use the road and footpath in a disciplined fashion to avoid collisions with traffic or with bearers of advertising sandwich-boards, or his proposal after the First World War that the German Fleet should be sunk in such a way and position that the wrecks would provide a breeding ground for fish. Interested in the merits of simplified spelling, he also enthused over starvation as a cure for influenza, and advocated the learning of Braille by the sighted as an aid to sleep: in this way it was possible to read in bed in a darkened room, or with arms, hands and book or magazine in the warmth under the bed linen. He had pronounced views on 'legalised suicide' as a form of euthanasia that eventually he was to carry to their logical conclusion.
It is hard to believe today that suicides—illegal and judged immoral at the time—were not talked about in polite society and it is certain that no explanation was offered to junior staff of Thomas’s death. It is not surprising that rumours spread that Thomas’s office—kept locked for some time—was the place he had killed himself. Hellen Pethers in a 2015 blog post from the museum finally sorted out what had happened. Thomas shot himself at home (46 Edwardes Square, Kensington), not in his office. He was cremated and his ashes buried with his wife at Uxbridge Cemetery where their eroded gravestone can be found.
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| Oldfield Thomas's photograph and signature for the Royal Society |
Hill JE. 1990. A memoir and bibliography of Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas, F.R.S. Bulletin, British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series 18, 25-113.
Pocock, RI.1930. Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas—1858-1929. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 106, i-v.
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