To complete what I have to say about Joan Procter, I want to turn to what was then—and still is—regarded as her most important scientific investigation.
Deemed too chronically ill to be a university student, Joan Procter came to the attention of George Albert Boulenger at the Natural History Museum because of her enquiries about reptiles. He invited her to join him as an unpaid assistant when she left school in 1916. At the Museum she soon established a reputation for her work and when Boulenger retired in 1920 she took charge of the reptiles and received ‘a small stipend’; she was then 23.
She worked and published on a wide range of species as well as producing drawings, paintings and models for display cases. Her best known scientific work was that on the Pancake Tortoise published in 1922. She was able to do this work because Arthur Loveridge was sending specimens to the Museum from Tanganyika. His account of how he got the tortoises and why they were so sensational was published in his book, Many Happy Days I’ve Squandered first published in 1944 in USA and 1949 in UK.
From Tabora I went to Dodoma, in central Tanganyika, the chief town of arid and desiccated Ugogo. It is a region that has always had a fascination for me. You never know what you will encounter on the leopard-haunted kopjes which relieve the flat monotony of the thorn-bush plain on which the township lies.
It was while scrambling over a kopje one evening that I came upon a strange-looking tortoise. The reptile was lying dead at the foot of a precipitous rock, some forty feet in height, near the summit of the hill which rose at least five hundred feet above the plain. From the flattened and fragmentary remains I concluded that the tortoise had been crushed by a falling rock and was of a species unknown to me. As Salimu and I examined it together we discussed its appearance, and I urged him to be on the lookout for more since he was free all day whereas I had only two hours each evening in which to go hunting. When a few days later he returned triumphant with a living example, I was much elated, for I recognized it as similar to the dead one and rightly assumed that it was a Tornier’s tortoise (Testudo tornieri), then considered the rarest of East African species and about the only one which I had not found. During succeeding evenings we located two further batches of the reptiles in crevices or beneath rocks but despite redoubled efforts found no more during the three weeks in which I was stationed at Dodoma.
The reason for the flattened appearance of these tortoises was now apparent; they could squeeze beneath rocks or into fissures which afforded them greater protection from hyenas and other carnivores than a strong shell could. Not only is their shell reduced to the thinness of stout paper but it is full of holes or fenestrations. Of these the largest is a great diamond-shaped opening that occupies most of the central portion of the lower shell or plastron. In such areas the creature is protected only by its handsomely patterned black and yellow, “tortoise-shell” shields. So soft and thin are the fenestrated bony plates forming the shell that it is a simple matter to squeeze the tortoise between finger and thumb.
The tortoise takes full advantage of this flexibility, as I soon found on trying to remove one from beneath a boulder. It inflated its lungs sufficiently to obtain additional purchase against the roof and floor of its retreat and, bracing its strongly clawed feet—some of the claws were over half an inch long—used them as struts so as to render its extraction extremely difficult. This can be accomplished eventually by gently and persistently working the reptile to and fro when you happen to be able to get a grip. I spent an hour, Salimu helping me, in dislodging three of the tortoises from a fissure into which they had clambered. Their flattened shells have a further asset; they enable them to right themselves quickly when they fall upon their backs, as must happen fairly frequently to tortoises living on rocky kopjes. Several times I have come across an unfortunate leopard tortoise (Testudo pardalis babcocki) which had slipped as it climbed some rock and fallen back so that the deep and convex shell lodged between two boulders. The poor tortoise, being unable to turn over, had perished miserably.
The agility of these light and long-clawed pancake tortoises was revealed when I put them in an enclosure surrounded by wire netting; about six inches of the wire was buried in the ground, leaving a fence two and a half feet high. While this was adequate to restrain Bell’s box tortoises (Kinixys belliana belliana), my pancake friends scoffed at it; they clambered up the netting to the top, where they balanced precariously for a fateful moment before toppling over to one side or the other. Nothing daunted if it was the wrong side, they would try again with such persistence that several succeeded in escaping. It was the same when they were put in a deep box; again and again, despite frequent falls, they climbed up in the corners in an almost incredible fashion. To my surprise I found that these tortoises from Dodoma could swim, though opportunities to practise the art must be rare in so arid a region as Ugogo. Had they been water tortoises like the familiar leathery flapjacks (Amyda spp) of the southern lakes and rivers or the fossilized Archelon of the Upper Cretaceous of North America, one would have explained their shell reduction as an adaptation to an aquatic life where a measure of lightness might facilitate swimming.
Duly labelling each of my half dozen tortoises Testudo tornieri, I shipped them off to the British Museum, where they arrived some months before I did. When at last I walked into Dr. G. A. Boulenger’s office, almost his first question was an inquiry as to what treatment or preservative I had employed to soften my tortoises and render them flat for packing! When I explained that they were naturally soft and that I had brought a pair back alive as a present for the London Zoological Gardens, he was amazed, declaring that they were the most interesting reptiles that had reached him during a lifetime devoted to herpetology. “What is this name Testudo tornieri?” he asked as he turned one of the reptiles over and over and glanced at its label. I gave him the reference and then and there he compared my series with the figures and description of Tornier’s tortoise. Finding them different in several minor respects, he asked if he might describe them as a new species (Testudo loveridgii) before the Academy of Science in Paris, of which he was president that year.
The announcement received considerable attention and the late Lord Rothschild urged me to get him a pair upon my return to East Africa. There seemed little likelihood at that time of my ever being within many hundred miles of Dodoma, but a year later the opportunity occurred for me to send Salimu. I told him not to spend more than a month and, whether successful or not, promised him his wages in addition to a bonus equivalent to one shilling for each tortoise he could find. Of course I was to pay his fare to and fro. He bargained for his wife’s fare also, and I conceded that. From our previous experiences both of us thought that these tortoises were extremely rare, so I was not surprised to learn that when he presented my letter of introduction to the provincial commissioner at Dodoma, the latter guffawed on reading it and said to Salimu: “So you’ve come to look for tortoises. Well, you’ll not find any here, for I haven’t heard of or seen one in all the years I’ve been here.”
Ten days or so later Salimu was back at Kilosa with a broad smile and sixty tortoises. Naturally he was pleased at making nearly two months’ extra pay in so short a time. “However did you manage to find so many?” I inquired. It had taken him the best part of three days to find the first, he said; then he showed it to the local tribesmen, offering them a few cents for any they brought him. Obviously the assumed rarity of the species was due largely to its secretive ways, for who would think of looking for tortoises beneath rocks? Yet it is there that they spend most of their time, emerging to feed only in the early morning.
It was in January that Salimu made this journey and found eleven under a single flattish boulder, where it is not unreasonable to assume that they were æstivating, for January and February are the hottest months in central Tanganyika. Yet it was in late January and February that mating took place among my captives, and the single egg was laid in July or August; one of these eggs was buried beneath a rockery in the enclosure. The fact that only a single egg is laid, an observation corroborated at the Philadelphia Zoo by Messrs. Conant and Downs, is eloquent testimony to the success of the adaptations which have rendered life so secure for the pancake tortoise that it has no need to lay a large number as do so many members of the order Chelonia. The eggshell is very thin and brittle and unusually elongate, for though it is only an inch or so in width it is from if to i| inches in length.
The hardiness of the pancake tortoise is attested to by the fact that, though it was midwinter when I took the first pair to Europe and they had to live in unheated trains and houses for over a week, one of them survived in the London Zoo for eight and a half years. During much of the journey they subsisted on bread and jam, for I had nothing else to offer them. Salimu’s numerous captives throve on lettuce or tender cabbage leaves, and one that I surprised on a kopje at Tabora was busily engaged in nibbling grass.
The sequel to the capture of the big series, intensively studied first by the late Dr. Joan Procter and in part by Dr. Otto Wettstein, was the latter’s discovery that Tornier’s original specimen was abnormal but might be matched by individuals in my series. Thus all represent one highly variable species now known as Malacochersus tornieri, for its many peculiarities justified the creation of a new genus for its reception.
Arthur Loveridge (1891-1980) at the outbreak of the First World War had just been appointed at the age of 23 as Curator of a new museum in Nairobi, Kenya. He was born in Penarth, near Cardiff, in Wales. His father was an ‘Ironmonger and Ship Furnisher’ who had been born in England; he mother was born in Ireland. Keen on natural history he had always wanted to be a museum curator. He had done a year as a student at University College Cardiff before getting a job at the University Museum in Manchester. He moved to the National Museum of Wales when he seized on the opportunity of the job in East Africa.
Carl Gans (1923-2009), who new Loveridge and who appears again as an important player in Part 2 of this story, wrote a splendid obituary on Loveridge. In it, he wrote:
The spectacular difference between Loveridge and other enthusiastic boy-naturalists was his total commitment to the pursuit of natural history as a career. In 1914, at the age of 24, he applied for the curatorship of the Nairobi Museum, advising in the application that he had over 300 cases of natural history and anthropological specimens and over 250 jars of “spirit-preserved” reptiles. He noted proudly that he was prepared to handle techniques of mounting and preserving all of his captures, described his complex system of registration and collecting numbers, and referred to an 80-page catalog, with short descriptions of all specimens, all typed by himself. Even his handwriting was small and meticulously formed with little change between top and bottom of pages or successive sheets. Field notes and labels (as well as his many letters) alike were beautifully readable.
The reason he was in that part of German East Africa first called Tanganyika after it was ceded to British control and now part of Tanzania is that he joined the East African Mounted Rifles and fought the German troops there. He collected specimens throughout this period, sometimes even while under fire. Specimens were stored in jars and bottles ‘liberated’ (in the British Army’s sense of the word) from the enemy. The war ended and after a time back in Nairobi he became Assistant Game Warden of Tanganyika in 1921. However, his location soon shifted.
As well as the British Museum and London Zoo, Loveridge sent specimens to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, as well as amassing his own private collection. In 1924, Thomas Barbour, of that museum and with a very large private income, bought Loveridge’s collection for Harvard with one stipulation—Loveridge should come too. That he did and for 33 years he was at first assistant to Barbour and then Curator. He is said to have written his popular books because the pay was meagre for a curator who was not also a Harvard professor.
Stories of Loveridge’s curatorial habits abound, of a drawer labelled ‘string too short to use’, of books and specimens having to be returned to their particular place each night and chairs left properly arranged. Alfred Sherwood Romer (1894-1973) at the Museum from 1934 and Director from 1946 labelled Loveridge the “Demon Curator”.
Loveridge made five expeditions to East Africa, each lasting for a year, between 1926 and 1949. When he retired in 1957 he and his wife moved to a spot about as remote as anywhere in the world, St Helena in the South Atlantic. He made other expeditions, had trips to London and carried on working, and corresponding—slowly via the St Helena mail ships. He died there in 1980, aged 88.
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| I found this press photograph of Arthur Loveridge with his wife, Mary, taken on his retirement from Harvard |
Part 2 to follow considers what Joan Procter did with Loveridge’s specimens and the question of ‘inflation’.
Anon. Loveridge, Arthur (1891-1980). 2014. In, Contributions to the History of Herpetology, Volume 1, revised and expanded. Edited by Kraig Adler, pp 111-112. (Contributions to Herpetology 30, Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles).
Gans C. 1981. In Memoriam: Arthur Loveridge. Herpetologica 37, 117-121.
Loveridge A. 1949. Many Happy Days I’ve Squandered. London: Scientific Book Club.
Williams EE. 1982. Arthur Loveridge—A life in retrospect. Breviora No 471, 1-12.
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