Ronald Strahan: Zoologist in 1950s Hong Kong

When I was writing about A.J. (‘Jock’) Marshall I found that he had visited Hong Kong in 1957 and that he had some correspondence with a ‘Don?’ there. But who in the University of Hong Kong was Don with a question mark? I eventually realised that it was not a ‘Don’ he was writing to and visiting but ‘Ron’ and that Ron was Ronald Strahan (1922-2010), a fellow Australian, in the Department of Zoology.

From here

Somebody must have mentioned after we arrived in Hong Kong in 1965 that Ron Strahan had been a member of the Department of Zoology but we didn’t realise he had lived in the same block of flats, possibly the same flat, until some months later when we found his old packing cases half filling the cage for such goods allocated to us in a block of university flats. In Hong Kong, unless the subject of a passed-on story of a notorious episode (J.Z. Young’s visit as external examiner, for example, provided several) once you were gone you were gone.

I do not know when Ronald Strahan arrived in Hong Kong (the various obituaries and short autobiography do not help) but he was certainly there in 1954 because Bernard ‘Bunny’ Mellor (1917-1998)—for most of his time between 1946 and 1974 the Registrar—showed in his history of the University a photograph of a pantomime in that year in which Strahan appeared:

Ronald Strahan left Hong Kong in 1961 for a senior lectureship in the University of New South Wales. He became well known in Australia as Director of Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney—a job he took over in 1967 and ran in difficult circumstances—and, later, for his books, on Australian mammals, for example, some written and illustrated with his second wife, the artist, Pamela Conder.

On his time in Hong Kong he wrote:

The Zoology Department, which had been sacked during the war, was not very well equipped, so I undertook research that needed little gear. I worked for a while on the water relations of a local toad, Bufo melanostictus, and its tolerance of saline water, which could explain its prevalence on offshore islands - in contrast to the local newts which appeared to have a distinct population on each island.

I was struck by the number of Hong Kong cats with short or kinked tails and read that this deformity was found from South-east Asia to Japan but with a peak in South China. I made a study of the vertebral column of the dozens of stray cats that were euthanased by the RSPCA each week and found that deformed tails were only the outward sign of internal aberrations - hemivertebrae, cervical and abdominal ribs, and variation in the number of precaudal vertebrae. The situation called for some genetic analysis and the University could provide ample accommodation for a good number of cats. With guidance from E.B. Ford in Oxford and J.B.S. Haldane in London, I mapped out a breeding strategy that should throw some light on the genetics of the condition but came up against an immovable obstacle: the RSPCA would provide me with as many dead cats as I required (cats that they had killed) but no live animals from which to breed. That, in their view, was vivisection. Another dead end.

It is clear that the correspondence between Jock Marshall and Ron Strahan must have concerned Marshall’s revision of the classic but by then extremely dated textbook by Parker and Haswell, the 7th edition published in 1962. My impression is that Marshall, in attempting to polish his credentials in classical zoology, as explained in his biography, landed himself with a great deal of work for little benefit since J.Z. Young’s Life of Vertebrates had supplanted volume 2 of Parker and Haswell. However, I digress. Marshall thanked Strahan, as well as a number of others, for assistance in reading and criticising sections of the manuscript.

Strahan himself on that subject:

My friend, A.J. (Jock) Marshall had undertaken to revise Parker and Haswell’s “Textbook of Zoology” and asked me to handle the chapter on the Agnatha (lampreys, hagfishes and fossil ostracoderms). Embarking on a review of the literature on hagfishes, I soon found out that much of it was scrappy, contradictory and ancient. So I spent my first sabbatical at the Swedish Academy of Science’s marine laboratory at Kristineberg, where hagfishes could be kept alive and underwater television could be employed to watch their in their deep-water habitat. Hagfishes are the most repulsive of vertebrates but they are fascinating relics (together with lampreys) of those that dominated the oceans in the Silurian. I studied a range of aspects of their life, from behaviour to anatomy, physiology and anatomy, in several visits to Sweden and in shorter periods in Japan, California and England.

One of Strahan's many diagrams drawn for Marshall's edition of Parker & Haswell.

Strahan’s short account, A Zig-Zag Career, of his life (published in Australian Zoologist in 2003) can be found here, with obituaries here and here.

Mellor B. 1980. The University of Hong Kong. An Informal History. Volume 2. Hong Kong University Press.

Parker, TJ, Haswell WA. 1962. A Textbook of Zoology Volume II. 7th edition, revised and largely rewritten by AJ Marshall. London: Macmillan.