A visit to stay with a distant aunt in London always included time in Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road, which held as far as I ever found the best selection of books on natural history at the time. There, in 1961, I found a new book by A.H. Booth Small Mammals of West Africa. It was in a series West African Nature Handbooks and had been published in 1960. It was at a price I could afford (not very much as a schoolboy with very little in his pocket) and I duly went through the bizarre process of paying. First, queue at the sales assistant’s counter. Hand over the book and be given a chit to take the one cashier’s counter on each floor. Queue again, pay, wait while the cash went through pneumatic tubes to a central office and the chit came backed stamped. Take the chit to the first counter. Queue gain and collect the book. Find the rackety lift surrounded by narrow grubby stairs and eventually find your way out of the shop. Amazon it was not.
On the back cover was printed the following paragraph:
Angus Booth, the author of this book, was on the staff of the Department of Zoology at the University College of Ghana. He died suddenly and tragically shortly after completing the manuscript of this delightful book. His untimely death at the early age of thirty robbed the world of a brilliant young man, already recognised as one of the leading authorities on the mammals of West Africa.
and after his own Introductory chapter:
The reader will learn with sorrow of the sudden and tragic death of Angus Booth shortly after completing the manuscript of this delightful book. He was originally appointed general editor of the series and planned himself to write a companion book on the larger mammals. His untimely death at the early age of 30 not only stopped this work abruptly but robbed the world of a brilliant young man, already recognised as one of the leading authorities on the mammals of West Africa.
And that is all I knew of Angus Booth until I started my search for the identity of Miss Waldron. I found that Angus Booth had provided 26 specimens of the eponymous red colobus to the Natural History Museum, 7 in 1956 (6 from Ghana; 1 from Côte d’Ivoire) while 19 have the admission date of 1971 suggesting they were passed to the museum some years after his death.
I then found that Angus Booth was indeed a pioneer of primatology in West Africa, his work remembered in such comments as:
Before his tragic death at age 30, Angus Booth provided some of the earliest observations on West African monkeys in a series of influential papers.
As early as the 1950s the biologist Angus Booth warned that unless sufficient protective measures were taken, this monkey would become extinct in the near future.
Angus Booth of University College, Ghana, did sophisticated studies of synecology of west African primate communities in the early 1950s. Booth surely would have had a major influence on primate field research if he had not died tragically in 1959 [sic - 1958] at the age of 30.
In his later, classic paper on the zoogeography of West African primates, Booth (1958)…
Angus Herdman Booth was born on 1 September 1927 in Ashton under Lyne Registration District, Lancashire. In 1950 he married Cynthia Pamela Mary Knight in Cambridge. Both were Cambridge zoology graduates. A daughter was born in 1954 and a son in 1957. When travelling between UK and Ghana he gave an address in Southport, Lancashire, possibly that of his parents. I can no trace of him in the 1939 Register, the emergency census. Could the family have been abroad at that time or was he simply missed out?
Angus Booth, a Lecturer at University College Achimota died on 16 March 1958 at the Ridge Hospital Accra after what a note on a conference, of which he was the original secretary, in Nature, described as a short illness and having spent six years in Ghana (i.e. appointed in 1951 or early 1952).
While in Ghana Booth appeared in several newspaper accounts describing his work on monkeys but also in this one by Craven Hill, the Evening Standard’s Zoo Correspondent, which was syndicated throughout the country and taken up by the Londonderry Gazette of 2 September 1952.
Angus Booth did not confine himself to research on the primates. Papers appeared on geckos and on mammals in general. I have appended a probably incomplete list of Booth’s publications.
The story of the Booths does not end with the death of Angus in Ghana. This is from the Kenya Institute of Primate Research website:
The idea to start a primate research centre in Kenya was mooted in 1958 when Dr. LSB Leakey was visiting Ghana. He found that his friend…Angus Booth, had died very suddenly after about nine [six] years of primate research work in Ghana, which he had carried out jointly with his wife, Cynthia Booth. Both of them had been known to LSB Dr. LSB Leakey for a long time, and both were very highly qualified Cambridge University graduates in Biology and Animal Behavior. Dr. LSB Leakey enquired of Cynthia what she planned to do now that her husband had died, and she said that she would finish off the publication of their latest joint report, and wind current research, and then she would wish to leave Ghana. After pondering the matter for 24 hours, LSB suggested the next day that she should come and continue research on monkeys with a base somewhere near Nairobi. Accordingly, at the end of 1958 she arrived in Kenya, and the Tigoni Primate Research Centre came into existence.
Writing in 1983 James G Else wrote of the establishment:
The history of the IPR is a thorny one, beset with financial difficulties and other crises. The institute began, through the urging of Louis Leakey, as a private venture of Cynthia Booth, a zoology graduate of Cambridge, who had studied primates in Ghana for ·several years. The first outdoor enclosures were constructed on her 10-acre farm at Tigoni in 1960. Many of these cages and even some of the buildings were built by Cynthia Booth and Louis Leakey on weekends, to save money.
In the early days, most of the work at what was then called the Tigoni Primate Research Centre involved collecting and maintaining a variety of primate species; research was restricted primarily to taxonomic studies. Kenyan independence resulted in a need for land for the resettlement of thousands of homeless people. Large areas of forest were cut down, resulting in the loss of habitats for many of the country's indigenous monkeys. Thus the major task of the fledgling institute was the collection of monkeys, particularly rare species. This was carried out as rapidly as the budget and construction of facilities allowed.
Eventually the need for expansion made it clear that the Institute could no longer remain a private venture. In 1968, funds from the Munitalp Foundation were used to purchase a 20-acre plot half a mile from the original location. All the outdoor enclosures and 120 monkeys representing 12 species were moved to this new site and Cynthia Booth became the salaried director. During these formative years, Dr. Leakey managed to obtain financial support from a variety of sources, including the National Institute of Health, but there was never enough money to provide for more than basic care and feeding of the monkeys, a small staff and very modest research. In 1968 NIH discontinued its support of the IPR and Cynthia Booth resigned.
The only other information I have been able to find is that Cynthia remarried and died in Australia, in 2010 aged 80.
The Book: Small Mammals of West Africa
The illustrator was Clifford Lees. The only information I have on Lees is that he was a regular and frequent contributor to the Halifax Courier on natural history, illustrated by his own drawings. He was a member of the Halifax Scientific Society. I thought the illustrations to be excellent.
As I read the text I realised that Booth had kept a number of the animals he described, including monkeys. He thanked his wife, ‘who puts up with mammals around the house, and treats them as part of the family’.
He does not mention Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus by name because in dealing with the whole of West Africa, he dealt with it as one of the four subspecies of P. badius. I suspect he still would. He wrote:
They live in large troops, often of up to fifty monkeys. Their ability to leap is quite unrivalled, and most spectacular jumps are made from one tall tree to the next. A troop of Red Colobus is rarely silent. Their high-pitched ‘kyow’, a very bird-like sound, betrays even a resting troop. Moreover, their behaviour when hunted by Man is far from cunning. Hence these harmless and beautiful creatures are in danger of becoming extinct…The young are considered impossible to rear in captivity.
In this plate from the book, it is possible to see from the coloration of the hind limbs that Lees actually shows Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus of Ghana, as might be expected.
Angus Herdman Booth’s Scientific Publications
Booth AH.1954. A note on the colobus monkeys of the Gold and Ivory Coasts. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 12, 857-60.
Booth AH. 1955. Speciation in the Mona monkeys. Journal of Mammalogy 36, 434-49.
Booth AH. 1956. The Cercopithecidae of the Gold and Ivory Coasts: geographic and systematic observations. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 9th Ser. 9, 476-80.
Booth AH. 1956. The distribution of primates in the Gold Coast. Journal of the West African Science Association 2, 122-33.
Booth AH. 1956. An annotated list of the Gold Coast geckos with key. Journal of the West African Science Association 2, 134–136.
Booth AH. 1957. Observations on the natural history of the Olive Colobus Monkey, Procolobus vera (van Beneden). Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1957, 421-430.
Osman Hill WC, Booth AH. 1958. Voice and larynx in African and Asiatic Colobidae. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54, 309-321.
Booth AH. 1958. The Niger, the Volta and the Dahomey Gaps as geographic barriers. Evolution 12, 48-62.
Booth AH. 1958. The zoogeography of West African primates: a review. Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire 20, 587-622.
Booth AH. 1959. On the mammalian fauna of the Accra Plain. Journal of the West African Science Association 5 26-36.
Booth AH. 1960). Small Mammals of West Africa. London: Longmans.
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Else JG. 1983 A national primate centre for Kenya. Kenya Past and Present 15, 35-39.
From John Oates's extraordinary book "Myth & Reality in the Rain Forest" (1999, p. 264, footnote 15):
ReplyDelete"The circumstances of Booth's death are mysterious. For many years I had heard rumors that he had died from a virus infection acquired from a monkey, but his wife, Cynthia P. Booth, informs me that his doctor did not know what his illness was; his death certificate recorded 'encephalitis', but there are suggestions that me might have been poisoned (C.P. Booth in letter to the author, 11 April 1991)."