In a book published in 1979 about events zoological of the late 1940s I came across a pithy quotation about how to define a species that got to the crux of that never-ending and impossible-to-end debate.
The discussion between Leonard ‘Leo’ Harrison Matthews (1901-1986), Ronald Lockley (1903-2000) naturalist and author, and Alastair Worden (1916-1987) veterinary surgeon and Professor of Animal Health in University College, Aberystwyth, took place in 1946 on the island of Skomer where they were studying seals and collecting their livers for Alan William Davies (b. 1913) who was working on their Vitamin A content. That morning they had caught a vole in the Longworth trap Matthews had put out the night before. After commenting on the tameness of the voles—this wild vole one sat on Worden’s hand and ate a crumb before grooming its coat—the conversation turned to the taxonomic status of Skomer’s vole. Matthews ended his comment:
But whatever is right it can only be a subspecies. We ought to try Mouse Chaworth-Musters’ test—put them together and let them sniff each other’s bottoms: they’ll know if they are the same species all right.
This concept of what a species is—recognition by another individual as of the same species—seems far more sensible than those in vogue which seem to me to be akin to the drunk searching for his key under the streetlamp rather than further up the road where he lost it on the grounds that only under the lamp could he see.
But who was Chaworth-Musters? I thought he must be a scion of the Chaworth-Musters family of Nottinghamshire whose doings filled many column inches of the several newspapers published daily in Nottingham in the mid-20th century. He was—and in the position of that dying breed of gentleman scientists who did not need to work for a living.
James Lawrence Chaworth-Musters was the youngest son (of eight children) of John Patricius Chaworth-Musters of Annesley Hall in Nottinghamshire. He was born at Annesley on 1 July 1901. After Rugby School, where his main interest out of hours was natural history in the field, he was admitted to Caius College, Cambridge, as a preclinical medical student. However he gave up that idea and switched to geography which became a lifelong interest.
While still a young man Chaworth-Musters inherited an estate at Surnadal on the west coast of Norway. He spent summers there for many years studying mammals and birds both locally and more widely. For example, in the 1930s he ringed birds on the island of Utsira, arguing that birds migrating from Siberia to Britain would refuel on the Norwegian island. As a result he added considerably to the Norwegian bird list.
He was not the only member of the Chaworth-Musters family to have an interest in geography in natural history. One notable example is his grandfather’s brother. Charles Musters was on board HMS Beagle, when she left Plymouth on 27 December 1831, serving as a Volunteer, 1st Class (i.e. a boy intending to be an officer). However, he did not return; he died aged 14 on 19 May 1832 at Bahia, Brazil, possibly of malaria. Charles Darwin greatly regretted the loss of ‘my poor little friend Charles Musters who had been entrusted by his father to my care, and was a favourite with every one’.
From the late 1920s James Chaworth-Musters worked at the Natural History Museum in London on the systematics of mammals; not surprising then his nickname, ‘Mouse’. However, his life as a gentleman scientist was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939. At the time he was in India but travelled to Bergen as British vice-consul. He was working when the Germans arrived in April 1940. As they entered the front door he left by the back and headed east across the mountains on skis. However the German advance cut off his escape route and so he turned back to the coast. There he persuaded a fisherman, Edvin Nore from Bryggja by Måløy to take him and two British soldiers who had been hiding in a nearby village to Shetland. Norwegian sources suggest he was already working as a British agent as well as vice-consul in Bergen, that he reached the coast at Nordfjord and left Måløy on 10 May. Indeed, his rôle in the Special Operations Executive was far greater than suggested in his obituaries. My guess is that he was already working for one of the secret agencies that were constituted into SOE. Is it stretching the imagination foo far to suggest that his expeditions in the 1930s might not have been concerned solely with natural history and geography? Other British zoologists are now known to have been reporting their observations in foreign parts to the intelligence services.
Chaworth-Musters was said by Norwegian sources to have been the major player on the British side in the first sabotage measures in occupied Norway. He started irregular warfare in Norway as soon as could after he reached Lerwick following his escape across the North Sea. A few weeks after his return, twelve men set off for Western Norway to set up an arms dump and sabotage key infrastructure needed by the Germans. He also acted as a liaison officer between SOE and the Norwegian Government in exile in London. Communications between the Shetlands and Norway were maintained by fishing vessels, or craft disguised as such, crossing during the winters between Lerwick and Norway—the ‘Shetland Bus’ carried agents, commandos, matériel and refugees.
Formally, he was commissioned as Lieutenant (Special Branch) in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve on 4 March 1941.
Chaworth-Musters in the uniform of a Lt RNVR
Chaworth-Musters later co-founded Kompani Linge, or Norwegian Independent Company 1, that celebrated group of Norwegian commandos who amongst other exploits sabotaged the heavy-water plants that could have been used by Germany in the development of nuclear weapons. Chaworth-Musters was also responsible for spotting Norwegian refugees who would be suitable for sabotage missions in Norway. All of the things he did must have been helped by the fact that he spoke the Surnadal dialect ‘like a native’.
Norway recognised his contribution to the British-Norwegian cause. He was awarded the King Haakon VII Liberty Medal—Norway’s War Medal. I suspect that few of his colleagues and friends at the Natural History Museum knew any detail of what he had got up to in the war. Not the done thing.
In 1946 he went back to the Natural History Museum where for a short time he held a paid post as temporary Assistant Keeper to help with the task of post-war reconstruction.
Sir Terence Morrison-Scott (1908 –1991), who before becoming Director of first the Science Museum and then the Natural History Museum, had spent his earlier career in the latter working on mammals alongside Chaworth-Musters, wrote in Journal of Mammalogy:
As a systematist his knowledge was deep and his critical judgement extremely sound. He belonged to the 'lumpers,' as indeed do all good modern workers, and all his work was directed in an uncompromising manner to defining the species. The genera and subspecies interested him not a bit—it was the fundamental thing, the real thing, the species.
He published very little, unfortunately. This was due in part to a restlessness which made him intolerant of paper work; he had the details of his subject in his head and it was merely a bore to write them down when he could be better occupied in new research. But perhaps it was due chiefly to a passion for truth and a feeling that once a thing is published it cannot be retrieved. The thing had to be exact and perfect before being committed to print. There is much to be said for this outlook and if the badly served fare of some workers had been more carefully prepared the systematist of today would not be suffering from such indigestion. But he took far too modest a view of himself and it is a great pity that he did not publish more. His 'magnum opus' was a checklist of the Palaearctic mammals, for which he has left a great deal of manuscript. Apart from the systematic interest of the work, its publication will prove of great value on account of the remarkably erudite research on type localities which he put into it. There will be some difficulty with his handwriting which was paradoxical in being at the same time very neat yet almost illegible.
Morrison-Scott noted his various expeditions and:
He was a very successful collector of birds and mammals and his study skins, of mammals at all events, are among the best in the Museum.
Hampton Wildman Parker (1897-1968) another colleague at the Natural History Museum expanded in an obituary for Nature on Chaworth-Musters’s expeditions: a Norwegian expedition to Jan Mayen in 1920 (Norwegian sources say 1921); Cyrenaica, now part of Libya, in 1926; Greece in 1931; USSR in 1936; Morocco in 1937; Afghanistan in 1939.
Morrison-Scott continued:
As a man he was in many ways a paradox. In personal appearance he was Bohemian and disregarded many conventions. Yet with it all he was at heart a country squire and a strong traditionalist. In spite of his usual dress there was, in its leather case in his room at the Museum, a top hat, ready for use on formal occasions. And the narrow, plainly knitted strips of material which he habitually wore as ties were not, as might have been imagined, badges of his unconventionality. They were what schoolboys of his day wore; he was used to them and he liked them and he still wore them. And they were in a way the key to his character, for he was very much a schoolboy in his heart. He would fly all sorts of conversational kites which would lead casual, or pompous, acquaintances to think him a bit eccentric, or even a bit of a fool. How mistaken they were, and what very good value his company was to the discerning.
Morrison-Scott had begun his obituary with:
James Lawrence Chaworth-Musters died unexpectedly in London on April 12, 1948, at the age of 46. He was apparently in good health, and in the best of spirits, and filled with enthusiasm for what he referred to as his 'magnum opus.'
The Chaworth-Musters magnum opus never made it into print. However, his work was incorporated into Morrison-Scott and J.R. Ellerman’s Checklist of Palaearctic and Indian Mammals*. The book was dedicated to the memory of their late friend and colleague and in the Introduction the authors wrote:
Our late friend and colleague, James Lawrence Chaworth-Musters, had spent much time latterly on the synonymies of the species of Palaearctic mammals, and in particular had devoted much patient research to the type localities and dates of publication of species described in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the time of his death, in April 1948, he had nearly completed this work for the Insectivora and done much of the Chiroptera and Rodentia. His executors kindly placed his manuscript cards and foolscap sheets at our disposal, and we have made free use of the data referred to above. His death was a most untimely and unfortunate loss to the Museum and to his friends and colleagues.
Chaworth-Musters is commemorated in Norway. After his death Surnadal municipality bought his property there and turned it into parkland and a museum. A memorial plaque was unveiled in 2004. Wikipedia Norway has a biography (in Norwegian).
At Nottingham University, his drawings of whales and plants from Norway are held in the family archives.
Finally, he does have an animal species named after him. It is not a mouse, as has been reported. It is not even a mammal. It is the Paghman Mountain Salamander, Afghanodon mustersi, discovered by Chaworth-Musters in Afghanistan and named by Malcolm Smith† (1875-1958) in 1940.
For Chaworth-Musters’s incisive view on what constitutes a species, though, we rely on the Matthews anecdote from Skomer in 1946.
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| The Chaworth-Musters Family's house at Surnadal, Norway |
*Sir John Ellerman (1909-1973) was another gentleman zoologist working at the Natural History Museum alongside Chworth-Musters, mainly on rodents. He also ran the eponymous shipping line and was sometimes said to be the richest man in England.
†By this time Malcolm Smith was also a gentleman zoologist working at the Natural History Museum. He had been the British Embassy’s doctor and physician to the royal family in Siam.
Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2013. The Eponym Dictionary of Amphibians. 2013. Exeter: Pelagic Publishing
Ellerman JR, Morrison-Scott TCS. 1966. Checklist of Palaearctic and Indian Mammals 1758 to 1946. 2nd Edition. London: British Museum (Natural History).
Morrison-Scott TCS. 1949. James Lawrence Chaworth-Musters. Journal of Mammalogy 30, 95-96.
Parker HW. 1948. Mr. J.L. Chaworth-Musters. Nature 161, 755.
Smith MA. 1940. Contributions to the herpetology of Afghanistan. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 11. 5, 382-384.
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