Frank Wall: Army Medical Officer and Snakeman of India

I first heard of Frank Wall in the 1960s, in John Romer’s checklists of Hong Kong amphibians and reptiles (see my recent post here). I later heard of his publications on Indian snakes but until I read his potted biography in that wonderful series, Contributions to the History of Herpetology, nothing else. I have now found a more material on his life. Herpetology was an area in which his profession coincided with his interest in snakes. Military authorities have long had great concern about venomous snakes and the treatment of snakebite

George Wall—Frank Wall’s father

Frank Wall dedicated his book on the snakes of Ceylon to the memory of his father, George Wall, reproducing in full the obituary in the Ceylon Independent. A great deal of background to the life of Frank can be gained from the roots his father established in England and in Ceylon and to the wide interests of George in matters scientific as well as in commerce, politics, engineering, journalism and the life of the people of the country of what is now known as Sri Lanka but still to stamp collectors and tea drinkers as Ceylon.

George Wall, who was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, now part of Greater Manchester, on 21 December 1820, was the son of a Methodist New Connexion minister*. Employed from the age of 18 in Manchester by Joseph Whitworth, the great engineer and he of the eponymous screw thread, George Wall became ill in the dank of Manchester and sought employment in warmer climes for the sake of his health. He moved to Ceylon in 1846 as manager of a group of estates belonging to the Ceylon Plantation Company around Kandy. Coffee—not tea—was the crop then being grown and his fortunes rose. In 1854 he founded George Wall & Co, dealing in coffee and the management of estates. In 1870 Ceylon exported 45 million kilograms of coffee and Wall’s company made a lot of money. But then came disaster. The firm foundered in 1879 as coffee rust fungus wiped out the plantations. The fungus reached Ceylon in 1875 and by 1889 production was down to 2 million kilograms. In under 20 years most coffee plantations had been destroyed.

George Wall did not spend his entire time in Ceylon during the time his company was active. He returned to Manchester in 1859, becoming a partner in Sir Joseph Whitworth’s company, where he took a large part in the manufacture and testing of the small arms that made the company so famous. He left for Ceylon again in 1863. His obituary for the Royal Astronomical Society noted that he had observatories at his two residences and ‘devoted much time and expense to astronomical studies’ but that his reduced circumstances after his firm crashed in 1879 and failing eyesight prevented continuation of these activities.

Not knowing the detailed political history of colonial Ceylon I find it difficult to estimate his impact on decisions taken there or in London. He had two spells as chairman of the chamber of commerce in Colombo and represented the colony at the parliamentary enquiry into the affairs of Ceylon in London. He was chairman of the planters’ association and a member of Colombo’s municipal council. He clearly found himself, along with other planters and businessmen, at odds with the colonial government in which he had served a term on the legislative council. He was clearly very active in the abolition of a grain tax (for which he was awarded the gold medal of the pro free trade Cobden Club), in distributing rice from his mills during a famine and in such projects as the breakwater for Colombo harbour, all of which were said at the time to have been of great benefit to the local population. He wrote articles and pamphlets under the pseudonym ‘Speculum’ and edited the Ceylon Independent from 1889 until his death, in London where he had travelled for treatment, on 18 December 1894.

Memorial fountain to George Wall in Colombo (Google Earth)

Apart from his other major interests, George Wall was an amateur botanist, with a particular interest in ferns, publishing two works on the ferns of Ceylon in 1873 and 1879. He was a fellow of the Linnean Society. Botanical interest in the Wall family—George had thirteen children by two wives—was continued by one son, Arnold, who served as Professor of English in Christchurch, New Zealand, for decades.

George Wall is the epitome of that great wave of amateur (in the best sense of the world) interest in natural history that swept Victorian Britain and which resulted in lasting work of great scholarship in many parts of the Empire.

Frank Wall

Frank Wall was born in the relative cool of Nuwara Eliya, the hill town still favoured by holidaymakers from Colombo, on 21 April 1868. He appears in a list of boys educated at Harrow School on Wikipedia but I do not know if that list was compiled from school records; I suspect not. He is listed in the 1881 Census as a pupil at Totteridge Park School while the 1891 Census shows him living there as a medical student. In the meantime he began his medical education at the Ceylon Medical College in Colombo. The Times of 9 April 1890 shows he passed part II of the old conjoint diploma of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons in anatomy from Mr Cooke’s School of Anatomy and Physiology in London. Cooke’s private school—the activities of which were the cause of frequent complaints by neighbours—was often the recourse of those from the regular medical schools who needed extra tuition in order to pass the anatomy exam. Wall qualified from the Middlesex Hospital medical school, MRCS LRCP, in 1892. In 1893 he was accepted by the Indian Medical Service. whereupon he trained for a year at the Army Medical School at Netley. In 1894 he left for India and was commissioned in the IMS as a Surgeon-Lieutenant on 29 January 1895.

Wall served as a medical officer with a number of regiments across the Indian subcontinent, including Ceylon and Burma. He was officially part of the Madras Presidency IMS establishment. He was promoted Surgeon-Captain in 1898 and Major in 1907. It was as a Captain that he served in the expeditionary force during the Boxer Rebellion, as I described previously in relation to the snakes of Hong Kong; he received the China War Medal for service in 1900.

Frank Wall in 1919
from here

Advanced to Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel in 1914 and to the substantive rank in 1915 he served in France and Belgium from October 1914 until December 1915; he was Mentioned in Despatches twice in that year. Malcolm Smith, fellow medical man and herpetologist, states in an obituary that Wall’s CMG, awarded  in 1915, was for work at Boulogne, the site of the military hospital complex in France. 

Wall then served in Mesopotamia (Indian Expeditionary Force D) from January 1916 to May 1917. He was appointed Assistant Director of Medical Services (i.e. head of medical services for an army division) in January 1917. Promotion to full Colonel came in January 1921 and then, in 1923, he was appointed an Honorary Surgeon to the King, denoted by the postnominal KHS, until his retirement on 5 March 1925.

Captain Frank Wall married Margaret Georgina Cusse, the daughter of a farmer, in Wiltshire on 30 June 1903. A son, Frank William‡, was born in Bangalore, a major army cantonment, on 9 April 1904. Smith noted that he married Mildred Constance Evans in 1924. There are records from around 1911 onwards to suggest that Margaret Georgina was resident in England while Wall was in India. The probate notice for Margaret Georgina, who died in 1933, states that she was the wife of Frank Wall. However, it would appear that Wall and Margaret had divorced since a family history of the Evans family indicates that Frank did indeed marry Mildred Constance in 1924. Mildred, born in 1873, sailed from Liverpool on 1 August 1924 bound for Colombo on board Bibby Line’s SS Yorkshire. The family history on ancestry.com compiled by Brian Kent (Mildred was his paternal great-aunt) suggests Frank and Mildred were married in Colombo or Nuwara Eliya, which explains why I have been unable to find a record of the marriage in UK records. 

Snakes

Malcolm Smith was clearly well acquainted with Frank Wall and his work on snakes. He wrote:

Wall’s interest in the snakes of India began as soon as he reached that country. In 1895 his name appeared in the list of members of the Bombay Natural History Society and it was in connection with that Society and as a regular contributor to its journal that he came to be recognized as the leading authority in India on the snakes of the country. His first article appeared in 1897, his last in 1925. A complete list of his writings will be found in my volume on the snakes of India and Indo-China (1943) in the fauna of British India series. All together they number 88. Most of his writings consisted of short notes or articles on Indian snakes, dealing with their structure and habits and with taxonomy; but Wall never wrote unless he had a good point to make, and he did not waste words in expressing himself. He took infinite pains to verify his facts, and whatever he recorded is accurate. As a writer he had an easy and lucid style. 

His larger works include The Snakes of Ceylon; The Poisonous Terrestrial Snakes of our British Indian Dominions, a small volume that ran into four editions; and A Popular Treatise on the Common Indian Snakes, This last work, which was published in serial form, is beautifully illustrated in color. It is a great pity that this valuable and interesting series of articles was never brought together and issued in book form. 

Wall’s attitude toward the study of ophiology was many-sided. He tackled the problem from every point of view, not only observing his species in the field, but dissecting them in an attempt to correlate structure with function, and keeping them in captivity to learn more about their ways and modes of life. Wherever he went, he collected. By offering small rewards to the natives he induced them to hunt for him, and in that way many thousands of snakes passed through his hands. Every specimen was critically examined. He made careful notes, and it was upon his notes and his excellent memory that he relied for his identifications and for what he pub­lished. His collection of skulls, all prepared by himself, is a very complete one. Every genus and every common species is represented, often by several specimens. After his retirement he presented this collection, together with his voluminous notes, to the British Museum (Natural History). To the Museum also came the types of all new species described by him, as well as many other specimens illustrating characters of particular interest. 

Wall’s work on snakes, although not his interest in them, ended when he left the country. He was not a Museum worker. His one contribution to pure systematics, namely, A Handlist of the Snakes of the Indian Empire, was, he told me, the most boring piece of work that he ever undertook. His interest was in the living creatures, and when these were no longer avail­able to him he turned to other activities to occupy his time. But his work in India will not soon be forgotten. It is due to him more than any other man that our knowledge of the habits and distribution of Indian snakes.

Malcolm Smith described Wall’s donation of specimens to the Natural History Museum in London. An article in a 2016 issue of Hornbill, the magazine of the Bombay Natural History Society, states that Wall also distributed specimens to many museum in India, ‘especially in the Natural History Section of Prince of Wales Museum of Western India,  Mumbai’.

Typical pages from Wall's series on Indian snakes. The plates were by John Green of London

    

The many-sided attitude to Wall’s study of snakes is evident in his book on the snakes of Ceylon published in 1921. Incidentally, the full title is Ophidia Taprobanica or The Snakes of Ceylon, Taprobanica being derived from the ancient Greek name for the island. Thus he wrote of all aspects of each species. For example, for the python, P. molurus, he has sections as follows: names in Tamil and Sinhalese; Synonymy, History, Identification, Coloration, Habits (haunts, disposition, strength, striking posture, nocturnal or diurnal, hibernation, progression, hissing, sloughing); Food;  Thirst; Breeding (the sexes. method of reproduction, season, period of gestation, period of incubation, number of eggs in the clutch, the eggs); Growth (before hatching, early life, maturity, maximum length, longevity); Parasites (ectozoa, entozoa); Lepidosis; Dentition; Distribution. That one species accounts for 31 pages. The only point I would make in addition to those made by Malcolm Smith is that he had correspondents throughout India, Burma and Ceylon who sent him specimens.

I have found litte by contemporary authors on Frank Wall. However, this Wall story, which shows his interest and venomous snakes and the treatment of snakebite, from the blog of Frederic Alois Friedel:

…here is some background: my father, Alois, a German clock maker and “horologist,” who migrated to Asia to set up navigational stations for ships, was imprisoned during WW I, in a British POW camp in Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat†. At the time it was a fairly rural place, surrounded by jungles. The camp had a snake problem, and one of the leading herpetologists at the time was called in to conduct research. Colonel Frank Wall was a member of the Bombay Natural History Society and had published a number of scientific articles and books on snakes…Col. Wall needed an assistant, but none of the British guards were willing to touch snakes. Then he heard about a “crazy German POW” who, he was told, was handling reptiles with equanimity.

So Wall recruited Alois to be his assistant. Together they studied the four poisonous snakes of the region and in fact developed the first anti-venoms against their bite (they injected horses with small amounts of snake venom, until they were immune, drew their blood and centrifuged it to get the serum, which was used to produce the antidote).

Smith noted that a complete list of Wall’s publications was included in the former’s book in the Fauna of British India series. A  more complete list was compiled by Simon Campden-Main for the Smithsonian Institution in 1969.

Retirement

One of ‘other activities’ to which Malcolm Smith referred was genealogy. In his will, Wall left typescript copies of a book he had compiled, Wall of County Derby, on the family from 1539 to 1930 and another on Wills of the Wall family in Lichfield, Staffordshire, to the Reference Library in Derby. The librarian noted that neither bore a date but wondered if Wall had left them to the library because he had used it while compiling the information.

Wall and Mildred retired to England, first to Tonbridge in Kent. In 1939 they were living at Hill Rise, Quarry Hill Road; they employed a resident housemaid. By 1944 the Walls had moved to 30 Milton Road, Bournemouth. Frank Wall died, aged 82, on 19 May 1950 in a nursing home. Mildred died on 16 October 1955 at a nursing home in Cornwall.

Mildred Wall; Frank Wall’s sister, Rowena, Duchess of Somerset; Frank Wall. At Bradley House, Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire, the seat of the Duke of Somerset. Late 1920s. Rowena married Edward Hamilton Seymour in 1881; he became 16th Duke of Somerset in 1925 on the death of his distant cousin, the 15th Duke who died without issue. From Brian Kent’s family tree on ancestry.com.

Frank Wall in 1935

*not as stated in Wikipedia quoting the same source (!); confirmed by parish records. His date of birth is as given in the parish records and not a day earlier (20 December) as in his obituary for the Royal Astronomical Society. Nor have I found any evidence that he was educated at Harrow, again as stated by Wikipedia—does that article confuse him with his son who was a Harrow boy.

‡Frank William Wall (1904-1970) married Thelma Geraldine Lightbody, Wall’s second wife Mildred’s niece.

†I suspect the author is mistaken in the location. The internment camp for German civilians was at Ahmednagar (in Maharashtra), not Ahmedabad (in Gujarat).

Anon. 1895. [George Wall obituary notice]. Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society 55, 202.

Anon. 2014. Wall, Frank (1868-1950). In Contributions to the History of Herpetology (Volume 1, revised and expanded), Edited by Kraig Adler, pp 71-72. Society for the Study of Reptiles and Amphibians.

Anon. 2016. Frank Wall. Pioneer snakeman of India. Hornbill (July-September 2016), 14.

Campden-Main SM. 1969. Bibliography of the herpetological papers of Frank Wall (1868-1950), 1898-1928. Smithsonian Herpetological Information Services: Washington DC.

Crawford DG. 1930. Roll of the Indian Medical Service 1615-1930. London: Thacker.

Smith M. 1951. Frank Wall, 1868-1950. Copeia 1951, 113-114.

Wall F. 1921. Ophidia Taprobanica or The Snakes of Ceylon. HR Cottle Government Printer, Ceylon.