She published no papers on endocrinology and yet she was the mentor of pioneering endocrinologists who, in turn, disseminated research and teaching in this then burgeoning field in many parts of the world. She also almost fell victim to a partially successful attempt by a British university to remove and disbar married women from employment. But who was this zoologist who, for a while, was a U.S. citizen?I first heard of the retired lecturer at the University of Liverpool from John Guest Phillips (1933-1987; FRS 1981) and Alan Wright (both Liverpool graduates) in Hong Kong in 1966. John had raised money from the Nuffield Foundation for a research unit in comparative endocrinology in the zoology department of which he was head. I remember the line, ‘…she started everybody off’. Only recently have I uncovered just who some of the ‘everybody’ were, the circumstances of her near-miss dismissal by the university and something of her sad and hidden private life.
Readers of Lord Solly Zuckerman’s (1904-1993; FRS 1943) autobiography From Apes to Warlords 1904-46 (Hamish Hamilton, 1978) cannot fail to have noticed his praise of Mrs Bisbee:
My last year [1924] at Cape Town University [as a preclinical medical student] was a busy one. Mrs. Ruth Bisbee, an exchange lecturer in zoology from Liverpool University, had come that year to Cape Town, and for the first time in my life I learnt what it was to be lectured to in an inspired way, and what a fascinating field of study zoology is. She encouraged me in my ambitious idea of carrying out a comprehensive enquiry into the baboon, and my dissections and other research went on apace.
Zuckerman’s work on baboons led directly to his work with Sir Alan Parkes on the menstrual cycle and its endocrine events, and in turn, to the launching and financing of a new journal in 1939 (which Zuckerman edited for many years), and then a new society, the Society for Endocrinology in 1946.
But Mrs Bisbee’s support of Zuckerman did not end in Cape Town. He wrote of his overspending:
My conscience suffered no twinges when I borrowed from friends, even from Mrs. Bisbee, whom I occasionally saw on her visits to London. She knew only of the scientific work I was doing, not the way I spent the rest of my time (I am happy to say that in the end I returned to her what I had borrowed)…
In addition to cash, Mrs B was also involved in the ‘hard editing’ of his papers and book that is so essential for a young scientist:
As each chapter [of his book on the social life of monkeys and apes] was finished I sent it for comment to Mrs. Bisbee at Liverpool University. She is the R.C.B. to whom the book is dedicated…I had already sent her the manuscript of my paper on the skull of the chimpanzee. She was tireless and ruthless in her criticism. Draft after draft of the chapters would come back scored through, marked with alterations, and often with sarcastic comments. On one occasion I could bear it no longer, and literally started to weep with frustration. But that was the way to learn…
At Liverpool, Mrs Bisbee supervised students in research in endocrinology. Horace ‘Harry’ Waring (1910-1980), who went on to become the doyen of environmental physiology and endocrinology in Western Australia, did seminal work on the origins of X-zone of the mouse adrenal for an MSc thesis. He noted that she originally suggested the work while helping and criticising throughout. Similarly, James ‘Jimmie’ Munro Dodd’s (1915-1986; FRS 1975) biographical memoir for the Royal Society records:
It was also while at the University of Liverpool that James Dodd first became interested in comparative endocrinology, through the teaching of a remarkable lecturer on the staff called Ruth C. Bisbee, whom he described as quite the best lecturer he ever encountered. It is noteworthy that a majority of the group of scientists that made Britain the centre of development of comparative endocrinology were contemporaries, and many received their undergraduate training at Liverpool in this period.
Ian Chester Jones (1916-1986) (Dale Medallist of the Society for Endocrinology in 1976) was also encouraged by Mrs Bisbee initially in genetics (see later) and then in endocrinology to work, as with Waring, on the mouse adrenal. Chester Jones built up his own research group in Liverpool and then moved to Sheffield, taking John Phillips with him†.
The importance of Mrs Bisbee in fostering endocrinology in its early days is clear. But who was the ‘remarkable lecturer’? With the help of genealogical search sites, old newspapers and material held in the archives of the University of Liverpool I have found something about her as well as the tribulations of being a female university scientist in Britain in the first half of the 20th century.
Ruth Culshaw Bamber was born on 30 November 1889, the elder of two daughters of a gamekeeper at Lathom, near Ormskirk, Lancashire. Records show she was educated at Burscough Bridge Methodist School from the age of five. She lived in Burscough, also near Ormskirk, for most of her life. The next record is of her graduating from the University of Liverpool, 17 mlles from home, in 1912 with an ordinary degree. The honours degree was an extra year and she graduated with a 1st in 1913. That was followed by an MSc in 1914. The PhD had not then been introduced in British universities and even when it was there was considerable opposition; in Liverpool it was called the ‘phantom doctorate’. Miss Bamber was appointed lecturer in 1915. Until 1919 zoology in Liverpool was called ‘natural history’ and in that year (see below) she was (re)appointed as ‘lecturer in zoology’.
In those early years, Miss Bamber worked closely with Sir William Herdman FRS (1858-1924) the marine biologist and oceanographer, and with his daughter, who worked in the department as a volunteer. She worked on occasion at the marine laboratory at Port Erin on the Isle of Man, an activity restricted by access to shipping in the First World War; she was Edward Forbes Exhibitioner there in August 1915, working on tubularians. An early task in her career was working on fish collected from the Red Sea in an exercise of classical zoology. In doing so she described two new species, the Ornate or Winged Pipefish, Halicampus macrorhynchus, and the Small-Fin Worm Eel, Neenchelys microtretus, for which she erected a new genus and a new family, the Neenchelidae. There is no clue in these early years that she would lead her students—and herself—into pursuits of burgeoning and more important biological topics.
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| Halicampus macroehynchus Bamber 1915 Nhobgood Nick Hobgood, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0> via Wikimedia Commons |
In 1919 her life changed but perhaps not in the way she expected.
In April 1918 George Allen Bisbee, aged 34, applied to the US Government for a passport; he intended to visit France and Britain for the YMCA, starting in June. On 24 September when he had to register for the draft, he was secretary of the American YMCA in Liverpool; he requested exemption from serving in the US army because he was a ‘regular pastor in charge of a church’. It was in Liverpool that he met Ruth Bamber and the next record is of her sailing for New York from Southampton on 3 September 1919 as a first-class passenger on board the White Star Liner Adriatic. Tellingly, the records show she intended the USA to be her permanent residence. She married George Bisbee on 13 September in Manhattan, the day the ship docked in New York. However, something clearly went amiss because Ruth Bamber (travelling under a British passport) was back in Liverpool on 2 October; she had travelled alone, listed as a ‘housewife’, on Cunard’s chartered ship Orduña from New York on 23 September—two weeks after her marriage.
It is highly unlikely, judging from the passenger lists and shipping records, that she ever met George Bisbee again. He was a school teacher and then qualified as a lawyer; he appears not to have remarried and died in California in 1963.
The reason for her appointment twice as a lecturer, in 1915 and then in 1919 is unclear. It is possible that the first was a temporary appointment for the length of Herdman’s tenure of the chair. Or she could have resigned as was required of a woman at marriage but, wishing to remain on the staff, re-applied for her own job. However, given her initial intention to marry and remain in the USA, her application to have her old job back may have come as she returned to Liverpool from her 10-day stay in the USA. Whatever the reason and intention, she was appointed lecturer in zoology in 1919.
Back in Liverpool at the age of 30, being married to, but separated from, an American and being known as Mrs Bisbee brought two problems: nationality and eventually continued employment. In 1919 a woman marrying an American became a US citizen and the former Miss Bamber clearly believed she had renounced her British nationality. By 1924 the marriage had been annulled (the actual date has not come to light) and she travelled to Canada for the British Association meeting in Toronto as an American citizen. In 1925 she applied for and was granted renaturalisation as a British subject.
Despite what was clearly a rapid separation and eventual annulment, Ruth Bamber remained known as Mrs Bisbee. It is difficult to appreciate a hundred years later how separation, divorce and, perish the thought, annulment were perceived in 1920s Britain. Scandalous, shameful and unmentionable just about sums it up. In the Methodist world she inhabited (she became superintendent of the Burscough Methodist Sunday school) any revelation of her private life would have been taboo. Indeed Mrs Bisbee did not report to the university the fact that after her marriage was annulled she was no longer a married woman. As a result she came to be included in an infamous incident of the 1930s.
In 1933 the vice-chancellor persuaded Liverpool university’s council that on marriage a woman’s tenure would be ended automatically. Glossed over in the official history was the decree that married women already on the staff would be obliged to resign and reapply for a post which might not exist or be at a lower grade. The national outrage that followed is outwith the scope of this article. However, records in the university archives show that Mrs Bisbee did resign as instructed in 1932 but then withdrew her resignation when it was revealed that she was not actually married. Others who were married were treated shabbily; one woman was given a temporary contract for a year at a lower grade. The whole affair became a cause célèbre and the university was forced to reverse its policy in 1934. Even then one downgraded woman was told that if she applied for her old job she would not get it. The vice-chancellor responsible sailed on to become, as Sir Hector Hetherington, the principal of Glasgow University where a building is named after him*.
After 1919 and the retirement of Herdman, Mrs Bisbee’s research activity changed. Leonard Doncaster FRS was appointed to the chair of zoology. He was a geneticist working on some of the unexplained phenomena of inheritance including the tortoiseshell coloration in cats. With coat colour determined by one autosomal gene and one co-dominant gene with two alleles on the X chromosome, the tortoiseshell phenotype should not be occur in male cats. However, sometimes (around 1 in 3000) a male tortoiseshell appears. Nearly all of those are sterile. However, even more rarely a fertile tortoiseshell male is born. Doncaster was suggesting the sort of mechanism that might be at play to account for male tortoiseshells when he died only a year after moving to Liverpool from Cambridge. Mrs Bisbee took up and continued Doncaster’s research, working with Emma Catherine Herdman (1899-1953) who, like Ruth Bamber, had taken a master’s degree in her father’s old department. Catherine Herdman was a lady of independent means** and worked as a volunteer in the zoology department and then, from 1930, as honorary lecturer until her early death from scleroderma.
Catherine Hardman and Bamber, who always published with her name as, ‘Ruth C. Bamber (Mrs Bisbee)’, the style, used in university staff lists well into the 1980s—which reduced the chances of a correspondent committing the solecism of addressing a Mrs as Miss or a Miss as Mrs—published their work on cats (kept in a cattery at the university) in a series of papers published between 1922 and 1933. During their studies they acquired from a breeder a fertile male tortoiseshell called ‘Lucifer’. Although their research did not finally establish the genetical and developmental bases of tortoiseshell males, they did examine and eliminate many possible explanations and one, the suggestion of an extra bit of X chromosome, came very close to the state of present knowledge of an additional X chromosome. The discovery of the XXY condition in some human males came 25 years after Bisbee and Herdman. XXY accounts for the occurrence of the rare tortoiseshell male cats that are sterile. The likes of the fertile ‘Lucifer’ are now attributed to the very rare events of chimaerism and mosaicism. The frustration of not being able to provide at the time a definitive explanation for tortoiseshell tom cats or for such anomalies as the appearance of a few white hairs in black cats, where black is recessive, is evident in their papers, in comments made by Mrs Bisbee to newspapers and in her talk to the British Association meeting in South Africa in 1929 in which she questioned a key tenet of Mendelian genetics.
Mrs Bisbee and Catherine Herdman regularly attended British Association meetings, including those held in Toronto (1924) and Cape Town (1929). Their interest in cat genetics—not just in the tortoiseshell—attracted publicity and the attention of cat owners and breeders. Newspaper reports show they also worked on the Manx breed where the length of the tail varies upwards from and including zero. Newspaper reports and other records also show that Mrs Bisbee was an active member of the Liverpool Biological Society, the Liverpool Naturalists’ Field Club; she was also a Fellow of the Linnean Society.
Doncaster’s successor in Liverpool, William John Dakin (1883-1950), although remembered for marine biology, also did some genetics research, on abnormalities in domestic chickens. Mrs Bisbee also became involved, investigating a form of inherited dwarfism; the results appeared as a letter in Nature.
Interest in genetics extended to the determination of coat colour in other mammals. Before Ian Chester Jones turned to endocrinology under Mrs Bisbee’s guidance she had him working on the roan coloration of dairy shorthorn cattle. She was also acknowledged for advice in research on congenital tail deformity in pigs.
Mts Bisbee did have her detractors. The wife of a former colleague, herself an undergraduate and postgraduate student in zoology at Liverpool, told me that women had a much harder time than the men. The latter, she assured me, had ‘only to smile nicely’ for preferment; she had one by-then well-known endocrinologist in mind as an exemplar of Mrs Bisbee’s perceived bias.
Because knowledge of her role in promoting endocrinology is now limited to finding acknowledgement of her instigation and interest in published papers and because only those available online show in searches, it is difficult to be certain of when her interest in endocrinology blossomed to the point where she could point postgraduate students to research in that subject. With work on the adrenal published by Robert Roaf (1913-2007) showing experiments that began in early 1932, it would seem that endocrinology replaced genetics as her main interest in the early 1930s. There also seems little doubt that the topic that excited her interest was the X-zone of the mouse adrenal, discovered in the 1920s; both Waring and Roaf were launched into studying its origin in the mouse and to search for evidence of its existence in the rabbit, respectively. Roaf, incidentally, was the son of Catherine Herdman’s sister and the professor of physiology at Liverpool; he became an orthopaedic surgeon and later returned to Liverpool to the chair in that subject.
During the Second World War, Mrs Bisbee’s interests in endocrinology and genetics extended into cancer research. A PhD student, Vera E Jones, worked on the formation and disposal of haemosiderin in the uterine wall of mice after the placenta breaks away during parturition. She found that in a strain of mice highly prone to mammary cancer the haemosiderin, which is confined to phagocytic macrophages, is formed more slowly and disposed of much more slowly. Vera Jones was awarded her PhD in Liverpool in 1944. She went on to work at the National Institute for Research in Dairying at Shinfield. In 1945 she joined the Gerontological Research Unit in Oxford working on endocrinology.
Mrs Bisbee retired from the university in 1955 as a lecturer, the same grade as she was appointed in 1915. The last reference to her work and the only one concerned with endocrinology I can find was in the Cheshire Observer of 23 January 1954. She gave a ‘talk on glands’ to a local Women’s Institute.
Ruth Culshaw Bamber (Mrs Bisbee) died on 7 January 1970, aged 80. She was then living at an isolated house, occupied by her sister’s family, near Kendal in Westmorland, now Cumbria.
Mrs Bisbee’s scientific legatees fostered the study of endocrinology in many parts of the world, from Hong Kong in the east to California in the west. They have served the Society for Endocrinology as officers and editors. Perhaps we should do more to commemorate an important figure from a time when it was not the done thing to be listed as a co-author of a student’s paper even when the topic and direction was not the student’s. If anybody deserves to be remembered as the foster mother of the science of endocrinology in Britain, that accolade should surely be awarded to Ruth Culshaw Bamber (Mrs Bisbee).
†Which makes Mrs Bisbee my ‘scientific grandmother’ in a succession of research students:
Mrs Bamber ▶︎ Ian Chester Jones ► John Guest Phillips ► MP
*Sir Hector Hetherington, as principal of Glasgow University, was chairman of the board of my research institute from 1936 until 1961. Delving into the archives one day in the early 1980s I came across minutes and correspondence on employment and accommodation matters. I remember being shocked, even allowing for employment practice at the time, about his attitude to a female member of staff and his enquiries into the domestic abilities of a wife before agreeing to the housing of an employee on site. Had, I known what I know now I would have realised that he had previous form.
**Catherine Herdman adopted three children (two boys and a girl), all of whom took the surname Herdman
Kelly T. 1981. For Advancement of Learning. The University of Liverpool 1881-1981. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Sumpter JP, Follett BK. 1991. James Munro Dodd. 26 May 1915-15 December 1986. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 37, 128-147.
Acknowledgement of Mrs Bisbee in published papers
Brooksbank NH. 1958. Congenital deformity of the tail in pigs. British Veterinary Journal 114, 50-52.
Chester Jones. I. 1947. The inheritance of red, roan and white coat colour in dairy shorthorn cattle. Journal of Genetics 48, 155-163.
Jones VE, 1947. A comparative histological study of haemosiderin in the uteri of mice of cancerous and non-cancerous strains. Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 88, 479-490.
Roaf R. 1935. A study of the adrenal cortex of the rabbit. Journal of Anatomy 70, 126-135.
Waring H. 1935. The development of the adrenal gland of the mouse. Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 78, 329–366.
Papers published by Mrs Bisbee:
Bamber RC. 1915. Reports on the marine biology of the Sudanese Red Sea, from collections made by Cyril Crossland, M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S. XXII. The fishes. Journal of the Linnean Society, Zoology 31, 477–485.
Bamber RC. 1922. The male tortoiseshell cat. Journal of Genetics 12, 209-216
Bamber RC. 1927. Genetics of domestic cats. Bibliographia Genetica 3, 5-52.
Bamber RC, Herdman EC. 1927. The inheritance of black, yellow and tortoiseshell coat-colour in cats. Journal of Genetics 18, 87-97.
Bamber RC, Herdman EC. 1927. Dominant black in cats with its bearing on the question of the tortoiseshell males—a criticism. Journal of Genetics. 18, 219.
Bamber RC, Herdman EC. 1928. The problem of the tortoiseshell male cat. Zeitschrift für induktive Abstammungs- und Vererbungslehre. Supplement 1, 387-390.
Bamber RC (Mrs Bisbee). 1930. Segregation. Report of the 97th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, South Africa—1929, pp 333-334.
Bamber RC (Mrs Bisbee), Herdman EC. 1931. Two new colour-types in cats. Nature 127, 558.
Bamber RC, Herdman EC. 1931. The incidence of sterility amongst tortoiseshell male cats. Journal of Genetics 24, 355-357.
Bamber RC, Herdman EC. 1932. A report on the progeny of a tortoiseshell male cat, together with a discussion of his gametic constitution. Journal of Genetics 26, 115-128.
Bamber RC (Mrs Bisbee). 1932. An inherited abnormality in Rhode Island Red poultry. Nature 129, 762.
Bamber RC (Mrs Bisbee). 1933. Correlation between white coat colour, blue eyes and deafness in cats. Journal of Genetics 27, 407-413.
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