Monkeys in late Victorian London. An astonishing number arrived at the Zoo

 Although difficult to quantify, anybody who has read Hannah Velten’s Beastly London or Leonard Robert Brightwell’s The Zoo Story, will realise that in the years before the First World War, Britain was awash with exotic animals imported for sale as pets or exhibition by travelling showmen as well as by the comparatively few zoos. For example, Brightwell wrote of London Zoo:

A steadily increasing flow of exhibits poured in from all sources, princes, hunters, dealers and even schoolboys. The animal trade may for one reason or another gradually change its centre of activity. Liverpool has always been one such base of its operations, but in [Abraham Dee] Bartlett’s time the Mecca was in the notorious Ratcliffe Highway, now the eminently respectable St. George’s Road, East, a stone’s-throw from Tower Bridge. The writer has vivid memories of dealers in this quarter, great names that vanished quite suddenly during the Edwardian era. There on the skirts of dockland the great Jamrach and his equally famous rival Hamlyn kept their crowded shops with crazy stable-yards behind, These stables were old warehouses, three stories high and packed with animals of every kind. When a lion roared the whole of one of these aged and rotten buildings rattled in a manner threatening instant collapse. But some spectacular deals were made here, and there are endless stories told of these kings of zoological commerce…

When I totted up some of the numbers of animals that arrived at the Zoo in the 12 years between 1883 and 1895, I was astonished to find over 1,300 individual primates of 166 species (using the identifications and taxonomy of the time). That is a rate of arrival of more than two per day, week in week out, year in year out. Numbers varied from a single Gorilla and one Aye-Aye to over 100 each of Crab-eating Macaques and Rhesus Macaques. The vast majority were presented by private individuals.

With primate arrivals running at over a hundred per year, a demographer is not not needed to point out that the available accommodation would soon be full to the brim and that many of the animals would not have reached their expected lifespan of, in many cases, several decades. Without looking at the records for each year, some will have gone to other collections while some will have been killed as they became unmanageable (the K.B.O. often left unexplained in reports but an abbreviation of Killed By Order). We do though know that the death rate of primates in the indoor accommodation of the time was high. Tuberculosis was, just as in the human population of London, endemic and an improvement in housing and care was the aim of the incoming Secretary in 1903, Peter Chalmers Mitchell.

There was a joke about old-style zoology; a zoo was just a place to keep animals until they could be studied properly—when dead. The Zoological Society’s Prosector throughout the period in question was Frank Evers Beddard FRS (1858-1925). Beddard was Prosector from 1884 until he retired in 1905. He had the responsibility of dissecting suitable specimens and, guided by a set of rules established by a committee, for distributing specimens and parts of animals to interested parties, including university departments, museums and medical schools. He also hosted scientists who wished to work in the prosectorium. Even as late as the 1950s there were disputes as to who was to receive priority in the distribution of specimens. How such matters were decided  on a day-to-day basis when Beddard was in charge is not clear. As well as specimens in whole or in part going to the destinations mentioned some skins went to taxidermists including the famous Edward Gerrard. Details of who got what and when were kept in a book now in the archives at the Zoo.

Important scientists worked in the dead house, as the prosectorium was usually called, and there is a strong case to be made for the view that the only scientific use for an animal in the Zoo was when it was dead. Earlier in the 19th Century, Richard Owen the great anatomist, anti-evolutionist and parasite on royalty, had discovered the parathyroid gland—in an Indian Rhinoceros. Clinicians worked there too. For example, the neurologist Wilfred Harris (1869-1960) applied because he needed to study the brachial plexus of a monkey in order to determine the components of the Vth cranial nerve. His aim was to change surgically the innervation the muscles of a young child who suffered from local paralysis caused by poliomyelitis. After his retirement in 1935 Harris returned to the Zoo to make a systematic study of the brachial plexus throughout the vertebrates, including the Giant Panda. He produced a book on that one topic.

Another visiting worker in the Prosectorium was Peter Chalmers Mitchell. In 1903 he was appointed lecturer in zoology and botany at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. His research at the zoo was on the anatomy of birds, particularly of the alimentary canal. Again, he had plenty of specimens at his disposal. I will return to the Beddard-Mitchell relationship in a future article.

Monkeys were still coming into London in considerable numbers in the decades after the First World War. Hamlyn’s Menageries Magazine, published by the importer and dealer John Hamlyn, make fascinating reading since the issues show the numbers of animals he, and sometimes his remaining rivals, had in stock or were being shipped. For example, in January-June 1919, he received 426 primates (some just described as ‘monkeys’). By then Jamrach’s had ceased trading but other dealers were on the scene. George Chapman, with premises on Tottenham Court Road, apparently bought out the Hamlyn business after John Hamlyn’s death in 1922. Chapman was a major supplier of primates and other animals (a final Thylacine, for example) to London Zoo including the  >100 Hamadryas Baboons for Monkey Hill in 1925.

The old records also show why the breeding records were so poor and why self-destructive behaviours were so common in zoo monkeys. Many, perhaps most, had been hand-reared in their country of origin, kept as house pets and then passed on when their owners could not cope with them. They did not know what they were when they arrived. They were simply crazy, mixed-up monkeys who may not even have recognised others of their species. Psychopathies, poor nutrition and infectious diseases were the norm in these unfortunate animals kept in the 19th and much of the 20th century.

The old Monkey House at London Zoo demolished early 1920s
There was no outdoor accommodation

Opened in 1903 this house was replaced by present Reptile House in the mid-1920s

Brightwell LR. 1952. The Zoo Story. London: Museum Press.

Felger EA, Zeiger MA. 2010. The death of an Indian Rhinoceros. World Journal of Surgery. DOI 10.1007/s00268-010-0603-4 

Nieman, E. 2001. Wilfred Harris (1859-1960). In, Twentieth Century Neurology: The British Contribution, edited by FC Rose. Singapore: World Scientific

Velten H. 2013. Beastly London.  London: Reaktion.

Zoological Society of London. 1896. The Vertebrated Animals Now or Lately Living in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London. Ninth Edition. London: Longmans Green.