The man who named Miss Waldron's Red Colobus was Robert William Hayman of the Natural History Museum in London. Although his dates were not known at the time of writing of the Eponym Dictionary of Mammals in 2009, I see somebody must have found them since they do appear in articles online.
Hayman is an interesting case study of the organisation of science in Britain in the 20th century and of how it was possible for boys to rise to a position of leader in the field without being admitted to the full status of ‘scientist’.
Robert William Hayman was born on 11 November 1905 in Fulham, London, the son of James Hayman, a cheesemonger and then provision merchant born in Otterton, Devon, and his wife Eleanor Louise. He was one of nine children. The family lived at 6 Crondace Road, Fulham. Hayman was educated at Harwood Elementary School and then, from September 1917 until 22 December 1920 at Latymer Upper School.
On 29 December 1920, when the title of the establishment was British Museum (Natural History) and it was still controlled by the classicists of the Bloomsbury edifice, the London Gazette announced that Hayman, aged 15, was appointed ‘without competition’ as Boy Attendant. In the 1921 Census, a few months after he began work, possibly on 1 January 1921, he is living at home in Fulham and shown as working as an ‘articulator’ at the Museum with Asst [Assistant] in brackets. In other words he was preparing skeletons for exhibition. The Census return also showed that he was in part-time education, probably some form of evening classes. In 1924 the London Gazette announced promotion to Attendant, again without competition.
The announcement of the most junior of jobs (male sorting clerk in the Post Office, for example) illustrates just how seriously employment at any level in the Civil Service was taken. Attendants did the menial jobs. In 1928 for the more senior and capable Attendants a new grade was introduced, Technical Assistant. It was the latter who were encouraged to take on curatorial duties.
Hayman must have been highly regarded because we find him travelling First Class to Mombasa in January 1930 on board the SS Adolph Woermann. The Smithsonian in Washington DC has information on what he was up to:
Photographs of a 1930 expedition to Uganda, Eastern Belgian Congo [Democratic Republic of Congo], and the Sudan to collect zoological and botanical specimens for the British Museum of Natural History. Approximately 240 photos, mostly labeled, on front and verso. A newspaper article about the expedition tipped in. Descriptions detail a combination of location and subject matter. Photographs depict terrain (coast lines of lakes and rivers), vegetation, specimens collected (wart hogs), candid images of local staffing (i.e. gun bearers, porters) and hunters, group portraits of "half-pygmies" from Ruwenziri mountains, members of expedition (some identified),and specimen preparation…
It was as a result of collecting during that expedition that his name was given to a species of tree mouse but Dendromus haymani is now considered a synonym of another species.
By 1935 Hayman was being given responsibility for working through collections in order to identify hitherto undescribed species and subspecies, and to name them. In his paper on the Lowe-Waldron collections he thanks Martin Hinton (1883-1961) for giving him the opportunity. Hinton was Deputy Keeper of the Zoology Department at the time and shortly to become Keeper.
In the 1939 Register (the emergency census of 29 September just after the outbreak of war) shows Hayman was living at 16 Hackbridge Park Gardens, Sutton, Surrey, with another employee of the Natural History Museum and the latter’s sister. His occupation is shown as ‘Civil Servant Technical Work’ and in red ink has been added ‘Natural History Museum’. He was also a Volunteer in the Fire Service.
Hayman was also involved in the evacuation of preserved specimens from London to caves at Godstone, Surrey in 1941/42. He must also have taken part in the evacuation of dry specimens to a number of country houses from 1940: The mammals ended up in: Huntercombe Place (later removed to Aston Rowant, Oxfordshire; Herriard Park, Hampshire; Red Rice, near Andover, Hampshire, and then Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire; Theddon Grange and then Clatford Lodge, Hampshire; Althorp Park, Northamptonshire; Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire; How Caple, Herefordshire; South Warnborough Lodge, Hampshire then to Swallowfield Park, Berkshire; Weston House, Bagshot, Hatton Hall, Ashney, Charlecombe, all at Bagshot and all all houses on Sir John Ellerman's estate. The logistics of doing all that in wartime do not bear thinking about.
Hayman can be seen from reports to have been active in various natural history societies around London and East Anglia.
In the postwar years Hayman was co-author of a number of major papers on mammals that were published from the Museum and is particularly remembered for his work on bats. The size of some of these works is remarkable. For example, the two volumes of The Families and Genera of Living Rodents written with the reclusive shipping line owner and devoted voluntary worker at the Museum, Sir John Reeves Ellerman (1909-1973) and George William Charles Holt (1897-1975), another technical assistant, ran to 1417 pages.
As well as these large works, Hayman commented more widely on issues of identification and taxonomy. One amusing example, published as a letter to Nature in 1957 (Rabbits in Africa, 179, 110) was the claim that the Rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus, had been found living successfully living ‘within two degrees of the equator” in Central Africa—an account incorporated into the 1956 book on the rabbit by Harry Thompson and Alastair Worden in the New Naturalist series. The person who set that hare running (in a rare case of both literally and metaphorically) was Geoffrey Douglas Hale Carpenter (1882-1953) in a 1925 letter to Nature. Carpenter, a medical man and entomologist, became well known for his work on mimicry and the book he wrote with E.B. Ford in 1933. Carpenter claimed to have found a well-established colony of rabbits at Masindi, Uganda. Hayman wrote to put the record straight:
In 1928 Capt. C.R. S. Pitman, then game warden of Uganda, collected a series of rabbit-like animals at Masindi. He described them as being abundant along grassy roads at night. The specimens formed the basis of the description by J. St. Leger of a new lagomorph under the name Lepus marjorita. The characters of skin and skull separated it clearly from other hares and rabbits. Later, St. Leger raised the new species to generic rank, Poelagus, on the basis of skeletal characters. Later, St. Leger reported another race of P. marjorita from south-west Sudan, near the Belgian Congo border, and Hatt has recorded it from north-east Belgian Congo on the evidence of specimens collected in 1912. Superficially there is a resemblance to the European rabbit; but closer examination shows that its characters are perfectly distinct.
In view of these facts, it seems that Hale Carpenter's report of European rabbits in Uganda was based on a misidentification of Poelagus marjorita, and this misleading claim should now be rejected.
Nature in 1953 carried the following news:
The Zoological Society of London, at the request of the Colonial Office, arranged a study-leave course during the month of September for selected members of the Colonial Service in Africa; those attending came from game, veterinary and forestry departments. The course was designed to help the members of those services who wish to do some serious work on the African fauna, particularly the mammals, but need some assistance and guidance in setting their steps in the right direction.
The course consisted of lectures, demonstrations and practical work; it included instruction on elementary anatomy and physiology, reproductive cycles, parasites, classification, ecology and the techniques of field-work. Prof. E. C. Amoroso (Royal Veterinary College) and Mr. R. W. Hayman (British Museum (Natural History)) collaborated with the Society's staff: it is hoped that similar courses will be arranged in future years.
Hayman was elected an honorary Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1963.
In 1947, those employed in the Natural History Museum were assimilated into the ‘Scientific Civil Service’. The senior staff (Keepers etc) were placed in the Scientific Officer Class, while the Technical Assistants were in the Experimental Officer Class. It was virtually impossible to move between the two classes. Thus, while being indistinguishable in terms of scholarship from a Scientific Officer, Hayman remained in the Experimental Officer class until he retired. However, what was remarkable about him was the seniority he achieved within that four-point class.
In his history, The Natural History Museum at South Kensington, published in 1981, William Thomas Stearn (1911-2001) wrote of Hayman (while getting his birth date wrong by two years): ‘…who joined the Department in 1921 as a Boy Attendant and who retired in 1967 as a Chief Experimental Officer’. A Chief Experimental Officer was a very rare beast indeed. Career Grade was two grades below (Experimental Officer) and promotion even to Senior Experimental Officer was difficult and unusual. Hayman must not only have been very highly regarded within the Museum itself but also by those on the external promotion and grading panels that controlled the promotion system.
Had Hayman retired 4 years later he would have found himself a Scientific Officer when the two classes were merged in 1971 as a result of the Fulton Report. He would have found himself a Principal Scientific Officer, the career grade for the former Scientific Officer Class.
Incidentally, it is somewhat paradoxical that dead animals in British museums are looked after by Curators under the direction of Keepers while live animals in zoos are looked after by Keepers under the direction of Curators. The opportunities for solecisms by an unsuspecting visitor to the museum world are great. I was told the story of an animal dealer who took some frogs to the Museum to be identified. While there he reported to his friends ‘a bloke came in and said he was a Keeper. He had a lovely suit on. I don’t know how he could afford that on a keeper’s wages’.
ROBERT WILLIAM HAYMAN FLS died on 25 February 1985. He was then living at 71 Mill Street, Ottery St Mary in Devon, eight miles from where his father was born.
Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2009. The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hayman RW. 1935: On a collection of mammals from the Gold Coast. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.1935, 915-937.
Wheeler A. 2000. The zoological collections of the British Museum (Natural History) - evacuation of the collections during the war years 1939-1945. Archives of Natural History 27, 115-122.
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