As I showed in a previous article in this series, it was not Willoughby Lowe and Fannie Waldron who brought the first specimens of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus to the Natural History Museum in London. The two specimens Herbert George Flaxman Spurrell (1877-1918) brought or sent to London in 1912 were recognised as belonging to the same taxon after or while those from the Lowe-Waldron expeditions of 1933-34 and 1934-35 were being examined.
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| Herbert Spurrell |
Spurrell was an interesting character. I get the impression that he was another of those individuals who qualified in medicine but was not that committed to clinical practice, using the profession instead as a passport to being a naturalist in interesting places as well as to cogitate and write on evolution and human behaviour..
Herbert George Flaxman Spurrell was born on 20 June 1877 in Eastbourne, Sussex. His father was an architect in practice in the town. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford, with clinical studies at the London Hospital. He qualified in 1907 with the Oxford MB BCh degrees having already become an Oxford MA. The age of 30 seems very late to qualify, creating the impression that he was not that eager and very much fitting the image of the ‘perpetual student’ doing other things of greater interest. Indeed he wrote two novels (as Herbert Spurrell) after writing one work of non-fiction (see below).
Out of the Past was published Greening & Co in 1903. One reviewer from Eastbourne, the author’s home town was gushing:
The volume consists of three tales of a character so baffling, and dealing with an atmosphere of romance se archaic, that it is difficult—almost impossible—to assign to them a definite classification under any of the ordinary heads of fiction. Yet they are all vivid, full of stirring action, and palpitating with the passions of humanity—which, whether now, or in the neolithic period, have always been, and, we may take it, will alway be, the same…It is impossible to analyse these stories; they must be read and accepted for what they are—paleological romances of a buried age. They are unique, masterly and dramatic; and to fiction readers in search of novelty and excitement we can recommend them with the fullest confidence.
At Sunrise: A story of the Beltane, from the same publisher in 1904. Reviews were mixed:
The author has taken for the scene of his story the wilds of Dartmoor and for period the first century of the Christian era, when England was in the hands of the Romans. The hero is a Britain [sic] prince, who, carried a prisoner to Rome, and has there imbibed some of the civilization of the empire. He contrives to escape, and is brought by a merchant back to his native land. The plot is slight and unostentatious, and turns in the main on the love affairs of a Roman general and a native princess…The author writes in a pleasant and easy manner, knows well how to retain the interest of the reader, and shows considerable descriptive power.
There were no further novels.
In 1901, by which time he had the Oxford BA degree, he was clearly interested in the animal world. The National Archives has a copyright application form from him for a photograph of an Aesculapian Snake—a fitting species for someone pursuing medicine as a career.
The 1909 Medical Register (which would have been compiled in 1908) shows his address as 285 Corfield Street, Bethnal Green in London. Shipping records show he arrived in New Orleans on 24 October 1908 on a ship from Barbados, on which he had earned as passage as the ship’s doctor. He was going to Tulane University where he spent a year as Assistant Professor of Physiology. He was joining the former Oxford don Gustav Mann (1864-1921) who had moved there in the same year as Professor of Physiology. Mann was born in Darjeeling and graduated in medicine from Edinburgh. He moved to Oxford and was remembered thus:
McNalty…says that Mann was a German who lectured in a Teutonic accent, was dark, of middle height with a bushy moustache and thick-lensed spectacles. He was regarded as a wayward genius with an astonishing capacity for work. Mann reduced his diet to maintain his weight at seven stones, allowed himself only four hours of sleep per day and his mattress in the laboratory was an Oxford legend. But as a practical histologist he was regarded as the best of his time.
Mann also worked as an analyst for oil companies but in 1916 resigned from Tulane and went to work as an analyst and doctor in Tampico. Nature published a short obituary after his death in 1921 described his departure from Oxford as a ‘grievous loss to the progress of histology in this country’ but ended with the possible reason:
…Too volatile to be largely productive in the ordinary way, his "Physiological Histology" is often the most thumbed book in laboratories where section cutting is taken seriously, and many grateful pupils will lament a real master whose determination to get himself disliked led him into so many troublous adventures.
It is not surprising that Spurrell followed Mann to New Orleans. In 1901 Spurrell had written iwhile still a medical student, his first book, The Commonwealth of Cells, which he dedicated to ‘My esteemed friend and tutor, Gustav Mann MD etc’.
I cannot help but wonder why he did not stay in medical research. Whatever the reason we then find him travelling to and from the Gold Coast (Ghana) from 1909 relatively frequently. He was with his parents, by then living in Exeter, for the 1911 Census on 2 April. It was also in 1911 that his fourth book, Patriotism: A Biological Study (George Bell & Sons, London), was published.
It was from the Gold Coast that he began taking or possibly sending live animals to London Zoo and dead ones to the Natural History Museum. He was already a Fellow of the Zoological Society. Spurrell’s medical obituarists (and those copying them for Wikipedia) clearly did not understand that such a fellowship was not bestowed by a Society for some worthy deed. The use of the term ‘Fellow’ for ordinary membership has given endless trouble over the years but which probably resulted in subscriptions from London’s wealthy wishing to indulge themselves in the supposed cachet of a postnominal combined with—until the middle of the 20th century—exclusive access to the Zoo on Sundays.
From 1910 until his death, Spurrell recorded his address as the Royal Societies Club, a gentlemen’s club in St James’s, with ‘travelling’ in parentheses. That club continues to be confused online with the Royal Society Club, an entirely different kettle of fish of which this writer happens to be one of the fish. I have not been able to find what sort of medical work Spurrell was doing in the Gold Coast. From the place of collection of animals for the Zoo it would seem that he must have been in Dunkwa for much of the time. In view of his later employment in Colombia, it is possible he worked as a doctor for one of the mining companies. Whatever the nature, Spurrell was awarded the Diploma of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1912.
Lists of the animals brought back by Spurrell for the Zoo are contained in ZSL’s Annual Reports for 1909, 1910, 1911 and 1912 (see below). For those ‘donations to the collection’ he was awarded the Society’s Silver Medal in 1914, along with three others.
Donations to the Zoo continued when he moved to Colombia in 1912 or 1913 (described in the Annual Reports of 1913 and 1914). There we can find what he was doing. He was based in Andagoya in the Chocó region. He was clearly working as the medical officer for a mining company since that area is a major source of platinum and gold. In a ship’s passenger list he gives as his contact a fried, F. W. Leighton. Frederic William Leighton (1893-1943) can be found in genealogical searches. He was a mining engineer, trained in metallurgy and assaying who was born in Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire. He died in Medellín, Colombia but was living in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Leighton had married Bertha Eraerts in 1916.
While in the Gold Cost and Colombia, Spurrell brought or sent hundreds of specimens to the Natural History Museum, concentrating in Colombia on reptiles, amphibians and fish. George Albert Boulenger who worked through the collections and described the new species had a field day.
In October 1913 Boulenger wrote a paper in Proceedings of the Zoological Society describing the first collection brought back from Colombia:
Dr. Spurrell, to whom the Zoological Society is indebted for so many interesting additions to its collection of Reptiles, has now transferred his activity as a collector from West Africa to South America. The series of beautifully preserved Batrachians and Reptiles brought together by him during the first few months of his stay in the Choco, Colombia, and presented by him to the British Museum, is one of great interest and shows how much remains to be done in the exploration of that part of South America.
His job in South America seems to have ended around the end of 1915. He can be found in shipping records leaving Cartagena, Colombia on board the SS Carrillo bound for New York, where he arrived on 4 February 1916. On this manifest are particulars of his height (6’ 1”) complexion (fair), hair (brown) and eyes (grey). He is also recorded as being en route to London.
This is where the story gets more interesting. In his profile for the Royal Army Medical Corps appears the following:
On his return from Colombia in 1915, Herbert was sent abroad by the Government on a secret mission…
Apart from the fact that his return was in early 1916 and not 1915, I have found no indication of what this secret mission was. However, shipping records show that he returned to New York very quickly after returning to UK on 4 February. He left Liverpool on 18 March 1916 on the Cunard’s Glasgow subsidiary company’s Anchor Line’s SS Tuscania (torpedoed in 1918 by a German submarine with the loss of American troops bound for Europe). This must have been the secret mission but what was he doing? Was it something to do with gold or platinum? Who sent him? What did he achieve?
Because he brought two reptiles back from the USA we know that he must have reached London Zoo by 3 May. Therefore, whatever he did for the government in the USA it happened in April 1916. He may have bought the two reptiles for the Zoo but if he found them, they both occur in and around Texas. Was his mission there?
On 23 August 1916 he left for Sekondi and the familiar territory of the Gold Coast. His RAMC profile says he was Temporary Medical Officer at Obussi [Obuasi], another major gold mining town. On 1 June 1917 he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Spurrell’s final book, back to non-fiction, Modern Man and his Forerunners was published by G. Bell & Sons of London in 1917, a couple of months after joining the RAMC; he had written the book between 1912 and 1916. It was well received in a review in Nature of 6 September but less so, despite agreement with the author on some important points, by the anthropologist, Alfred Cort Haddon, in Eugenics Review who considered some of the arguments on the development of social systems ‘facile’.
Spurrell arrived in Egypt on 23 November 1917. The Royal Air Force was founded on 1 April 1918 and Spurrell is shown as being attached to the RAF, serving on its medical board in Egypt, a function he had presumably undertaken for the Royal Flying Corps. He was promoted to Captain in June 1918 but then died of pneumonia at No 19 General Hospital, Alexandria on 8 November, three days before the Armistice. He was 41. He is buried at Alexandria (Hadra) War Memorial Cemetery.
Herbert Spurrell’s name lives on in a number of eponymous species. The list is shorter than it was in the 1910s and 20s as some have been lumped into other species with priority over the specific name. Examples are Scops spurrelli lumped into Otus icterorhynchus, the Sandy Scops Owl; Graphiurus spurrelli into Graphiurus lorraineus, Lorraine's African Dormouse; Kinosternon spurrelli into K. leucostomum, the White-lipped Mud Turtle
A number of eponym’s have survived these taxonomic revisions either in the scientific name or the common name. Examples are in the Eponym Dictionary of Mammals, of Reptiles and of Amphibians. Examples are: Spurrell’s Free-tailed Bat, Mops spurrelli; Spurrell’s Woolly Bat, Kerivoula phalaena; Chestnut Long-tongued Bat, Lionycteris spurrelli; Colombian (Butterfly-head) Coral Snake, Micrurus spurrelli; Spurrell’s Worm Lizard, Amphisbaena spurrelli; Spurrell’s Leaf Frog, Agalychnis spurrelli; Condoto Stubfoot Toad, Atelopus spurrelli.
A fish named for him from West Africa, Fundulopanchax spurrelli (now, it seems, F. walkeri spurrelli), as well as insects, represent some of other specimens Spurrell donated to the Natural History Museum.
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| Spurrell’s Free-tailed Bat © Jakob Fahr, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) |
ANIMALS DONATED TO LONDON ZOO
The following is a list of the species donated to London Zoo by Herbert Spurrell. A current common name and scientific name are given instead of the originals.
AFRICA
Crested Porcupine Hystrix cristata
Small Sun Squirrel Heliosciurus punctatus
White-spotted Fire-footed Rope Squirrel Funisciurus pyrropus leucostigma
Lorraine's African Dormouse Graphiurus lorraineus
Campbell's Mona Monkey Cercopithecus campbelli
Bosman’s Potto Perodicticus potto
Two-spotted Palm Civet Nandinia binotata
Bay Duiker Cephalophus dorsalis
African Wood-owl Strix woodfordii nuchalis
Fraser’s Eagle-owl Bubo poensis
Congo Serpent Eagle Dryotriorchis spectabilis
Lizard Buzzard Kaupifalco monogrammicus
African Green-pigeon Treron calvus sharpei
Forest Hinge-back Tortoise Kinixys erosa
Banded Leaf-toed Gecko Hemidactylus fasciatus,
White-lipped Skink Trachylepis albilabris
Senegal Chameleon Chamaeleo senegalensis
Spotted Blind Snake Afrotyphlops punctatus
Emerald Tree Snake Hapsidophrys smaragdina
Yellow-throated Bold-eyed Tree Snake Thrasops flavigularis
Smith’s African Water Snake Grayia smithii
Forest Vine Snake Thelotornis kirtlandii
Western Bush Viper Atheris chlorechis
Western Green Mamba Dendraspis viridis
Gaboon Viper Bitis gabonica
Rhinoceros Viper Bitis nasicornis
Forest Cobra Naja melanoleuca
Six-barred Panchax Epiplatys sexfasciatus
COLOMBIA
Spotted Worm Lizard Amphisbaena fuliginosa
USA
Texas Horned Lizard Phrynosoma cornutum
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| Gliding Tree Frog Agalychnis spurrelli Gatomoteado, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
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