Who connects giant salamanders, my father’s win on a horse and my grandmother’s sewing machine?

Arthur de C. Sowerby

The answer is Arthur de Carle Sowerby (1885-1954) who I wrote about in my series on the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration of East Asia.

Sowerby was referred to in a well-publicised paper on giant salamanders which appeared earlier this year. I have not read Sowerby's original publications but he is shown as having thought there might be more than one species of giant salamander in China and also as describing the pattern of trade in live animals for human consumption.

Sowerby published those papers in 1925. Suffering from severe arthritis, he had just had to give up exploring and working as a collector in China for Robert Sterling Clark (1877-1956) an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune (my grandmother owned a much-used Singer). Clark first recruited Sowerby as naturalist for his eponymous expedition of 1908-09. As well as his interests in art, geography and natural history, Clark was a well-known race-horse owner. His famous horse, Never Say Die, won the Derby at Epsom in 1954. My father drew Never Say Die, a 33/1 outsider, in a sweepstake.

The cover of the book
Sowerby travelled well armed

Since writing the initial account of Sowerby, I have bought the book on his life written by a distant relative. The travels in China for Clark, in the days of warlords and banditti, were extremely dangerous, and he was lucky to escape with his life. By 1925, though, he was ensconced in Shanghai and publishing The China Journal. It was successful and he, with his second wife, seemed for the first time to be free from a shortage of money. He collected pottery, porcelain and books, all of which he donated to the Heude Museum when he left China in 1946.

Robert Sterling Clark

The Japanese brought this relatively affluent part of Sowerby’s life to an end. An initially successful business venture to develop Manchuria folded in 1931 when the Japanese marched in. For a time Sowerby and his wife, who were both ill, escaped internment when the Japanese took the foreign concessions of Shanghai in December 1941. When his wife died he was interned for the last eight months of the war until the Japanese surrender. After returning to Britain (where he met the then Duke of Bedford, the son of the duke who had funded the Exploration and rescued Père David’s Deer), visiting the U.S.A. and returning briefly to Shanghai, then South Africa and South America, he and his third wife obtained residency visas for the U.S.A. They settled in Washington DC for the last six years of his life.

The link with Clark though was not broken. Clark hired private detectives to investigate the state of Sowerby’s finances during his last years in Washington. As a result Clark sent money through these investigators to assist Sowerby and his wife. The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation in New York has the correspondence between Clark and Sowerby including those thanking Clark for his help. There is, however, no evidence that Sowerby and Clark ever met again or communicated other than through the private investigators.

There is more information on the Clark Expedition here, details of an exhibition held the the Explorers Club, New York, organised by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2012.

The title page of the book on the Clark Expedition

The following photographs and artwork are from the book on the Clark Expedition:

The jerboa named after Sowerby by Oldfield Thomas
now lumped into Dipus sagitta (Northern Three-toed Jerboa)

Clark (left) and Sowerby after a Christmas Day shoot for the pot

Sowerby's colour plate of the snake, Coluber dione, now Elaphe dione

                           

UPDATED 1 December 2019

Clark RS, Sowerby A deC. 1912. Through Shên-kan. London: T Fisher Unwin

Sowerby RR. 1956. Sowerby of China : Arthur de Carle Sowerby F.R.G.S., F.Z.S. Kendal: Titus Wilson.

Turvey ST, Marr MM, Barnes I, Brace S, Tapley B, Murphy RW, Zhao E, Cunnigham AA. 2019. Historical museum collections clarify the evolutionary history of cryptic species radiation in the world’s largest amphibians. Ecology and Evolution 2019;00:1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5257