In my article of 15 May 2019 I described Dr Jack Smith’s part in an expedition led and paid for by George Fenwick-Owen in China in 1911-12. Smith was hired as interpreter but, as might be expected, his medical and diplomatic skills were called upon as well. The trip was written up and illustrated by Harold Frank Wallace (1881-1962) and it is not surprising that Wallace is sometimes referred to as its instigator and leader; he was not, he makes it clear that he had been asked by Fenwick-Owen to participate.
Fenwick-Owen and Wallace left Liverpool on 19 May 1911 on board Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Ireland. They then travelled across Canada and then by sea to Shanghai. They arrived back in England in April 1912.
The actual hunting in the Qinling and Min (Minshan) mountains west of Xi’an (with the relevant parts of the various corpses prepared for the Natural History Museum in London) occupied a relatively small part of the journey as did Smith’s collection of small mammals also destined for the museum, although gazelles and birds were shot for food during the long journey to Russia. As the revolution in China that overthrew the Qing Dynasty got underway the party decided it unsafe to head back to Shanghai from Xi’An via Sichuan and the Yangtse valley as planned. Instead they headed across the Gobi Desert for the Russian border—a distance of approximately 2,400 km.
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| The route across China can be followed on a modern map. Sianfu is Xi'an |
The London press had a number of reviews of Wallace’s book and I can no better than to quote here the article in the Illustrated London News (17 May 1913) by Professor John McKendrick FRS (1841-1926), Professor of Physiology in the University of Glasgow from 1876 until 1906:
Big-Game in China. Mr. Harold Frank Wallace has given a rather misleading title to his account of a sporting journey from Shanghai to Omsk across the Gobi Desert. To call it. as he does, “The Big Game of Central and Western China“ (John Murray) is to suggest that the volume deals only' with natural history and sport, while, in point of fact, the first seventy pages deal with travel, and, after fifteen pages of sport, there arc perhaps forty dealing with other matters. Happily Mr. Wallace tells the travel story well; he was in a part of the world known to few Europeans, save missionaries, who appear to be labouring in a rather stony vineyard. The takin (Budorcos bedfordi) was the special object of the expedition : it is a near relative to the musk ox, and is found in Shensi; others of its family being found elsewhere. It is known as the rock-goat in Shensi, and as the wild ox in Kansu. Other big game secured by the author and Mr. George Fenwick-Owen, whose guest he was, include roe-deer (Capreolus bedfordi), burhel (precipice sheep), white-maned serow, “a strange beast with enormous ears like those of a roan antelope...and a long mane"; bear, and wapiti.
The country covered proved to be interesting, and the primitive people were friendly, although the revolutionary movement was about to affect several districts through which the author and his friend passed.
Dr. J. A. C. Smith, of Shanghai, who accompanied the party, was asked by the people if, when he reached home, he brought back to life the birds he was stuffing! Certain pheasants, known as machi, are trapped and reared to provide a dozen tail feathers per annum for hats; but, as a rule, the people show little inclination to preserve, and are quite content to destroy — the fate of the forests being accountable for much of the poverty that prevails in a country where peaches and eggs may be bought at the modest rate of sixteen for a penny! The revolution in China broke up the programme and brought Mr. Wallace and his friend home by way of Tibet and Asiatic Russia; but Mr. Fenwick-Owen's collection of small mammals, prepared by Dr. Smith. and consisting of sixty-eight specimens, includes seven new species, and is described by the British Museum authorities as "a most valuable supplement to the series obtained by Mr. Anderson during the Duke of Bedford’s exploration of Eastern Asia.” Certainly the story of the expedition provides good reading for, quite apart from the author’s distinct gift, it deals with an unknown country, and animals about which we have had little precise information hitherto. Photographs, drawings, maps, and appendices add to the value of the book. The cost of a six-months’ trip, starting from Shanghai, for two sportsmen, a white interpreter, and boys, is set down at £816.
Travel was by boat (up the Yangtse), train and, uncomfortably, by mule- or horse-drawn cart. Wallace’s book contains many observations on rural and urban China. Anybody who visited the old Tiger Balm Gardens in Hong Kong and saw the plaster models depicting methods of torture and execution will not be surprised at what the travellers saw as everyday occurrences or of the atrocities inflicted on the Manchus as any semblance of structure broke down at the start of the revolution. One governor was killed by being fed feet-first into a straw chopping machine. Two days before their arrival in Liangchow (now Wuwei) ‘three men—a Szechuanese and two natives—went to a big farm 40 li from the city and told the proprietor that they were revolutionaries. They said that a large body of troops was arriving on the following day who were to encamp near his farm, but that, if he would provide them with three horses and guns, they would see that he suffered no further loss. The farmer provided them with the horses and guns, but would not allow them to leave. Next day, no sign of a revolutionary army! Down came the farmer and his friends on the three impostors and marched them off to the official at Liangchow, who was a man of prompt action. Consequently, on our arrival, to parody Charles Kingsley, "three corpses lay out in the muddy streets”…
Wallace continued: ‘A favourite pastime of the district was the chopping down of telegraph poles, these being a convenient form of fuel. Ten miles of these useful articles having been demolished outside the city, telegrams were forwarded over this distance in a more or less unreadable condition by mounted messengers. Two or three men had been executed at Kanchow [Zhangye], this being the only effective deterrent. We saw one head nailed up in a wooden cage outside the walls’.
Wallace’s theme for the book was its intention to guide fellow hunters on the pro and cons of China as a place to shoot big game and of how to go about it in terms of the sort of guide to employ (i.e. Smith) and the costs involved. However, it is clear that all three participants were very keen naturalists and antiquarians as well as people watchers. Wallace’s approach took me back to early 1959 and ‘O’ level English Language. We had to précis a passage and either in the ‘mock’ or the real examination the passage were were given argued that natural history as pursued by observation and collection is really a substitute for the hunting that once perforce occupied our ancestors. Indeed as madly keen birders walk and stalk with binoculars, telescopes and cameras, the words ‘prey’ and ‘quarry’ spring instantly to mind.
The finances of the trip make interesting reading. Wallace included them as a guide to anybody wishing to undertake a hunting trip to the mountains of central and north China. The total expenditure was £816 of which £360 was paid to Smith (£60 per month for six months). The average pay of a medical practitioner in Britain in 1911 was £272 so I think it can be said that Smith did alright In today’s money, calculated from the Retail Price Index, Smith received £32,000 for his six months. However, because pay has risen to a greater extent than prices, a higher estimate is £135,000.
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| Crossing the Gobi Desert |
Harold Frank Wallace
Wallace was born in Yorkshire on 21 March 1881, the son of a physician. At the 1891 Census the family was living in Inverness-shire; he described himself as Scottish and clearly spent a great deal of time stalking Red Deer. In 1901 the family was in Chelsea. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a barrister by profession but it seems unlikely he spent much time at the bar. His life seems to have been devoted to hunting (a two-year trip round the world before the expedition to China with Fenwick-Owen), writing about hunting and travel, and painting Scottish highland scenes containing deer. His work appears regularly on the art market. After his return from China he married Elizabeth Anne Macpherson on 11 July, an occasion described at very great length by the Staffordshire Advertiser. He served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in the First World War. There is a photograph of him from 1917 or 1918 (he was commissioned sub-lieutenant in April 1917, having served as an Able Seaman and Petty Officer) in the Imperial War Museum.
His wife inherited Little Wyrley Hall at Pelsall in Staffordshire and they lived there from 1927 until his death. He served as a local magistrate from 1934. The house, over 400 years old, has appeared on television and in magazines not because of its elegance and antiquity but because of its surroundings. It is in the middle of a coalfield and the resultant workings. Country Life reported on a visit to the Wallaces in 1952: ‘The prospect westwards from the front door is terminated in the middle distance by a monumental slag-heap. Colliery workings have encroached to within a few hundred feet of the east side of the house’.
He acquired a dubious honour but one to be dined-out on. On 25 April 1938, the Aberdeen Press and Journal reported under the headline, ‘Hitler Decorates Three Britons’:
Herr Hitler has decorated three Britons with the order of the German Eagle of the Third Class in connection with the recent hunting exhibition in Berlin. They are…and Mr Harold Frank Wallace, author, artist and big game hunter.
Wallace was the Deer Controller Officer for Scotland during the Second World War.
Harold Frank Wallace died on 16 September 1962 at Wyrley Hall. Reporting his death, the Birmingham Post of 18 September recalled his visit to Berlin in 1937: ‘He recalled lunching…with Goering whose elaborate hunting costume reminded him of a little boy “playing at Robin Hood”. The article ends:
A tithe barn at his home was converted to hold a collection of nearly 200 trophy heads. There could be found one of his rarest specimens, a takin, which is a large mountain animal from Tibet, ibex, wapiti and boar. His son, Mr Hamish Wallace, said last night: ‘The trophies have become a part of Wyrley and there is no question of removing them.’ Mr Wallace said that in the past few years, who had shot many hundreds of animals, was very concerned with the preservation of wildlife, particularly in Africa. ‘He told me “I would not be interested in shotting now that so many herds have dwindled”.’
Does anybody know what happened to the Takin and other material collected in China? (Fenwick-Owen’s went to the Natural History Museum.) Are they still at Wyrley Hall?
Finally, who was George Fenwick-Owen?
Wallace in his book helpfully reproduced a whole paper by Oldfield Thomas on the mammals collected. As a result we know that Fenwick-Owen had previously donated specimens to the natural history museum from ‘French Gambia’, presumably Senegal. Thomas named a mole discovered in the montane forests by the expedition for Fenwick-Owen—Scapanulus oweni, the Gansu Mole. This mole is still the only member of its genus; it occurs only in Central China.
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| I suspect this is a photograph of Fenwick-Owen since he shot the Serow |
Fenwick-Owen appears in The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals under ‘Owen’. The Golden Takin collected is mentioned as is the type specimen of a peony and some antiquities. However, no dates of birth and death had been found. As a result of my digging around the usual sources, I can now add those dates.
George Fenwick-Owen was born on 28 December 1882. He was the son of Francis Fenwick, a banker, and Mary Matilda Owen. A note on a genealogy reads ‘Name “assumed by his mother’s royal warrant”. I have no idea what they statement means but it is possible that his name was changed to the double-barrelled Fenwick-Owen by royal licence, a common method at the time. Records show that he was schooled at Eton, leaving in 1902, and then matriculating at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1903.
When he set off for his Chinese expedition in 1911 he was 28. I have found no record of any other collecting activities after his return in 1913. In March 1914 he was married to Marion Bettina Maud Rawnsley*. The honeymoon was in Japan.
There is an interesting connexion with the world of natural history on his wife’s side. The wedding reception was held at 45 Pont Street, London, ‘lent’, the report in The Times states, ‘by Mr & Mrs F du Cane Godman’. The bride’s cousin, Eva Godman, was a bridesmaid. Frederick du Cane Godman FRS (1834-1919) was ornithological aristocracy, a founder of the British Ornithologists’ Union and still commemorated by the Godman-Salvin medal. Whether George Fenwick-Owen had any introduction to the upper reaches of natural history through the Godman connexion, to Oldfield Thomas, for example, before his marriage, i.e. at the time of his expedition to China, I do not know but it does seem possible.
On 1 October 1914, war having been declared on 28 July, he was commissioned as a subaltern in the Norfolk Yeomanry. Promotion to 1st Lieutenant followed in May 1915 and to Captain in December 1915. He was awarded the Military Cross when attached to the 12th Battalion Norfolk Regiment in Palestine. He was wounded twice, in Egypt and in the Gallipoli Campaign. The citation for his M.C. reads:
Capt. George Fenwick-Owen, Yeo. For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty during an engagement. He contributed largely by his promptness and sound judgement to the success of the operation. His initiative, courage, and good leadership undoubtedly saved many casualties among his men.
By 1924, the Fenwick-Owens were living in Knightsbridge, London but The Times of 26 February 1929 announced, ‘Captain and Mrs Fenwick-Owen have taken [i.e. are renting] Rempstone Hall, Corfe Castle Dorset, which will be their address in future’. However, the Fenwick-Owens were divorced in 1932, the year in which he married Zella Evelyn Oxley.
In July 1931 there were press reports of a gift to the Natural History Museum of specimens of two skins and a skull from bears which must have been retained when he donated the rest of his collection from China in 1912. The bear, mentioned in Wallace’s book, was said to be the ‘Blue Bear’ or Tibetan Bear usually now considered as an extremely rare subspecies of the Brown Bear (Ursus arctos pruinosus).
He may have been living in Dorset, if not at Rempstone Hall, after his divorce because he is shown as lending pictures for an exhibition in Dorchester in 1934. After another divorce in 1940 he married Denise Margaret Louise Cash (born 1914) in Suffolk in the same year.
George Fenwick-Owen died on 21 November 1971 at Woodbridge in Suffolk, leaving £1,472.
Therefore, we can the dates to the entry in the Eponym Dictionary of Mammals: 1882-1971.
*His son from this marriage was Roderic Fenwick Owen (1921-2011); obituary in The Independent here.
Wallace HF, 1913. The Big Game of Central and Western China. Being an Account of a Journey from Shanghai to London Overland Across the Gobi Desert. London: John Murray
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