Who was Commander A M Hughes RN, Illustrator of Bird Books of Hong Kong, Burma and Borneo?

Birdwatchers arriving in Hong Kong in the 1960s were lucky if they could find a copy of the book by Geoffrey Herklots, Hong Kong Birds. It had been published in 1953 and was been reprinted numerous times as stock ran out. It was nothing like a modern field guide. There were relatively few illustrations and even fewer in colour. There were descriptions of the various species written by Herklots in the Natural History Museum while on home leave in Britain in 1938. His other notes had disappeared while he was interned at Stanley during the Japanese Occupation. He intended the book to pull together the notes and articles that had appeared in the Hong Kong Naturalist, a journal he had founded and which was published from 1930 until 1941. The small pen-and-ink drawings together with the colour plates, including the frontispiece of a Great Barbet, are by Commander A.M. Hughes OBE RN (Retired). Hughes also drew the cartoons for Herklots's The Hong Kong Countryside published in Hong Kong in 1951. Herklots, noted that Commander Hughes had been stationed in Hong Hong between 1929 and 1931. He had contributed plates to the Hong Kong Naturalist from its first issue in 1930. Herklots noted that the Hong Kong Government had made a grant to cover the cost of the colour plates, one appearing in each issue, for the first year of publication. Thus, even after he had left Hong Kong, Hughes continued to paint the birds he had seen there.

But who was Commander A.M. Hughes? What was his rôle in Hong Kong; what else did he draw and paint and what did he do after being in Hong Kong?

The frontispiece of Hong Kong Birds
Painted in 1933

One of the many black-and-white drawings in
Hong Kong Birds
Common Tailorbird

The first thing I discovered that an illustration of naval life that he drew is sometimes sold by art dealers. Art dealers also try to provide the dates of birth and death of the artist. However, the dates of death provided by different dealers were so broad (spanning 1931 to 2001) as to be useless. However, a date of birth of 1900 provided a good starting point for the search of the usual genealogy sites and public records, including naval service records.

ALFRED MARCUS HUGHES was born on 12 September 1900 at Brinkley, five miles from Newmarket, Cambridgeshire. He was the son of Mary Charlotte (née Harrison) and Herbert Edgar Hughes, co-founder of Mann, Egerton & Company Ltd of Norwich, motor and aircraft engineers (and, incidentally, patentee of a picnic tray), and the grandson of Sir Alfred Hughes, 9th Baronet. The Hughes Baronetcy was created in 1773 by George III for Sir Richard Hughes, a naval officer, as was the second baronet. Hughes followed the conventions of the time in attending naval training establishments for three years from the age of 13. He passed out of Dartmouth in 1916 and made his way from Midshipman and Sub-Lieutenant to Lieutenant by 1921 aged 20. During that time he served in several ships, ranging from the battlecruiser HMS Tiger to the sloop HMS Eglantine but there were no engagements with the enemy while he served in the First World War.  His superiors noted his interests in natural history and in drawing. In 1920 he had applied to join the Surveying Service. His request was granted and on 26 June 1921, Lieutenant Hughes was appointed to the lowest grade of assistant surveyor in that service.

In what appears to have been a family tradition, Hughes was admitted a Freeman of the City of London as a Member of the Worshipful Company of Grocers on 11 January 1922.

Naval records show, sometimes illegibly, his movements to various ships and places, for example a survey of the River Severn and time in Malta. The personal details range from the routine, through embarrassing and extremely embarrassing to extraordinarily embarrassing. By 1929 Hughes was a 1st class assistant surveyor and was promoted to Lieutenant Commander on 10 January 1929, i.e. shortly before his arrival in Hong Kong.

HMS Herald

The survey ship stationed in Hong Kong and active throughout south-east Asia from 1929 was HMS Herald. Ten years after Hughes left, Herald was damaged in the Japanese assault on Singapore and scuttled off Seletar. The Japanese raised her and after repair became the Heiyo. However, under that name she hit a mine and was sunk in November 1944.

Ninety-five years after Hughes began painting and drawing Hong Kong birds, it is difficult to imagine how difficult those activities were. My guess is that he confined his activities to the winter months. In the heat and humidity of the summer—and without air conditioning—paint or ink can swiftly be diluted by sweat running down the arm, hands and fingers to form an unsightly blob. Take it from somebody who was there 35 years after Hughes.

At the end of his posting in Hong Kong, Lt Cdr Hughes returned to the Britain via the USA. He travelled across the Pacific on NYK Line’s Tatsuta Maru. He arrived in San Francisco on 8 April 1931.

Alfred Marcus Hughes married Hope Frances Pritchard on 6 April 1934 in London.

The only photograph of Hughes I have been able
to find is that of his wedding in 1934 where he was
in Full Dress uniform. It appeared in the local press

Hughes was given command of HMS Fitzroy, another minesweeper, like Herald converted to a survey ship, on 1 March 1934, according to his naval records. In the capacity of captain of the vessel it was also noted that he was in charge of the survey work. He was blamed for the loss of the port anchor (‘not running more cable’). He is shown as holding the appointment until April 1936. However, a secondary source available online suggests he took command in August 1933.

HMS Fitzroy

In April 1936, Hughes became Naval Assistant to Hydrographer of the Navy, Rear Admiral John Augustine Edgell, later Vice Admiral Sir John Edgell KBE, CB, FRS (1880-1962). The Far East though beckoned. Hughes applied for a post with the Commissioners of the Port of Rangoon having been informed by the navy that he was free to apply but if successful would have to retire on the date of his leaving UK. Thus on 6th November 1936 Commander and Mrs Hughes sailed from Liverpool on board the Bibby Line ship Cheshire for Rangoon while the London Gazette recorded that he he been placed on the Retired List ‘at his own request’. That, one may surmise, was the end of his life as a naval officer but as we shall see later that was not so.

In 1937 Hughes realised that in his new job he would need a civilian ticket of Master Mariner. This, the navy arranged and sent it out to him. It was in Rangoon that he illustrated his first book on birds. Bertram Bertram Evelyn Smythies, the (reluctant) author of Birds of Burma and professional forester (1912-1999) explained how the book came about in his preface to the second edition, published in 1953:

The first edition of this book (1,000 copies) was printed in Rangoon in 1940 by the American Baptist Mission Press and sold out by the end of 1941; it was intended to be a concise guide to the birds of Burma, primarily for the use of field naturalists, to encourage the study of natural history in general and of birds in particular…

The book was originally planned in 1937 by Mr. H. C. Smith, I.F.S., who was to arrange for the illustrations, and Mr. J. K. Stanford, I.C.S., who was to write the text. Not every artist can paint life-like studies of birds from stuffed skins (by which I mean, not those examples of the taxidermist's art that you see in the show-cases of museums, but the rough skins that our average Burmese skinner turns out); fortunately there happened to be one stationed in Rangoon at the time—Commander A. M. Hughes, R.N., who was working for the Port Commission and had already done some notable paintings of Asiatic birds in Hong Kong and elsewhere in previous years.

The list of birds to be illustrated, and the lay-out of each plate, was decided by Smith and Hughes jointly, and the next problem was to secure the models; for to paint a bird you must have either a live model, or a stuffed skin, or a previous painting. Bearing in mind the fact that there is no museum in Burma whence skins can be borrowed, the difficulty of assembling models for each of the 290 birds illustrated in this book can be appreciated; some birds were painted from live examples in the Rangoon Zoo, chiefly waders and game birds; a few were copied from paintings in other books; but the majority had to be collected in the fields and the forests and the marshes, by those responsible for the book, in their spare time.

Some birds down on the list eluded us altogether, and substitutes had to be found; thus the only reason why the comparatively rare rufous-bellied hawk-eagle appears on Plate XIX is that it is a substitute for the hobby, which we could not obtain. Others, when I look at their portraits now, bring back memories of long and anxious quests, extending over a year or maybe two; there was the great barbet, not a rare bird, but a shy one, which we chased unavailingly up and down the slopes of Nattaung for a week and more without success; the greater adjutant, which fell to No. 4's, and the choked barrel on the mudflats of the Sittang estuary after days of sweat and glare in the blistering October sun; the masked finfoot, a rarity that we hardly hoped to find except by despatching a special mission to its known haunts in the flooded jungles of the Myitmaka drainage, but which gaily swam into Smith's ken, much to his astonishment, in a totally unexpected place on a back-water of the Pegu river; and there was the sad story of the argus pheasant, pride of the Rangoon Zoo, which died mysteriously in its cage immediately after its portrait had been painted and was forthwith skinned and stuffed by the artist (roast argus, it was hinted, was delicious); and the three vultures, freshly skinned and exuding a foul and sickly odour, are to this day a vivid and unhappy memory for the artist's wife, who had to endure them in the house till their portraits had been finished.

When all other means failed an appeal was made to Dr. C. B. Ticehurst, who sent out from England the skins required to fill the remaining gaps; and even when the plates had been completed there was the difficulty of keeping them in good condition in a damp, tropical climate; only constant care and attention by the artist (and frequent use of his wife's hair-drier) prevented them from being ruined by the damp. The final crisis was the outbreak of war; some of the plates were still incomplete on that date, and were only just finished by the time that the artist had to leave for England. Thus ended the first chapter in the story of the plates.

Meanwhile Mr. J. K. Stanford had been at work on the text, but the outbreak of war made it impossible for him to continue, and I was asked to take it over. I feel sure that he would have produced a more interesting book, for he is not only one of the most competent field naturalists Burma has had, but also a gifted writer, as his various books and papers (ornithological and otherwise) bear witness. However, it was a question of writing the text rapidly or shelving the book indefinitely, and I therefore took up the task on New Year’s day 1940 and finished it on the 7th October of the same year, carrying on my normal duties as a forest officer at the same time.

The rare 1st edition

The book was on sale by New Year's Day 1941, and most of the copies were bought by Europeans living in Burma, and left behind by them when they evacuated before the Japanese invasion in 1942. It is interesting to record that the Japanese collected as many as they could and shipped them off to Tokyo, where they housed them in the library of the Royal Veterinary College, later destroyed in an air raid; this information was given to Lord Alanbrooke by a brother of the Emperor of Japan, and passed on to the Bombay Natural History Society, who informed me. Not many copies were sold outside Burma, and the book became scarce after the fall of Burma.

Meanwhile, what of the precious paintings and the valuable blocks used for printing the plates (each plate is printed from a set of four copper blocks)? On the 19th February (as it turned out, only two days before the authorities ordered the evacuation of Rangoon) I visited the Mission Press ; the whole place was deserted, except for the acting superintendent (Mr. Crain) ruefully contemplating the probable loss of much valuable printing machinery; together we searched the building and found twenty-one sets of blocks stacked together in a room, but the remaining eleven sets were not to be found, and what became of them is a mystery to this day. I took away the twenty-one sets and was fortunate in getting them out to India, thanks to Lieut.-Commander E. J. Dunkley of the Burma Navy, who shipped them aboard one of his vessels. The loss of eleven sets of blocks was serious, but not irreparable, for the blocks could always be re-made from the original paintings. Where were the paintings? They were in Mr. Smith's possession, and were eventually rolled up in a bundle and taken out to India by Mrs. Smith when she left Burma by air, as part of the 30 lbs. of kit allowed to evacuees. They came to rest in a Bombay safe deposit, and the twenty-one sets of blocks were stored in my father's house in Katmandu, the capital of Nepal; and there they stayed till the end of the war…

From Birds of Burma

Mrs Hughes not only had to cope with putrefying vultures in the house and the use of her hairdryer; their daughter was born in 1939, three months before the outbreak of war and while Hughes was trying to finish the paintings. With the threat of war, retired naval officers were being recalled to service.

Hughes’s naval record begins again on 27 August 1939. He was attached to HMS Gloucester II, the shore establishment in Colombo and headquarters of the East Indies Station of the Royal Navy. However he was still based at Rangoon, responsible for Naval Control of Shipping. In May 1940 Hughes retuned to UK on the P&O liner Strathallan which had been requisitioned as a troop transport by the government. Then after a course at HMS Vernon on mines he was with HMS Badger, the shore establishment at Parkestone Quay near Harwich for duty under the Captain (Minesweepers). Then he was given his second command, HMS Corfield, a converted collier, officially designated as a ‘mine destruction vessel’. Such vessels had a large electro-magnet in the bows to trigger magnetic mines. It would appear that Corfield operated in the North Sea along the coast of Britain.

BOAC Clipper Bangor at Poole, Dorset
from here

Hughes was promoted to Commander (retired) on 12 September 1940 but the records show he continued in the actual rank of Lt Cdr for most of his work. On 17 February 1941 he was appointed Naval Assistant to the Hydrographer of the Navy (still Read Admiral Edgell). He then worked in the Topographical Section. In June 1942 her flew on a civilian BOAC flight from Poole to Baltimore on the Boeing Clipper flying-boat Bangor. His visit must have been important since seats on such flights were not allocated lightly. Could it have been connected with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch) of November 1942? In the summer of that year the US general staff opposed the plan but the sharing of topographical information on the landing sites with the USA st the planning stage could have been an important reason for his presence.

It is, incidentally, from US Immigration that we have a description of Hughes: complexion, fair; eyes, blue; hair, brown; height 5’ 11”.

In March 1943 Hughes was with the Naval Intelligence Division as Head of Section. The Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD) was based in Oxford (where his son was born in 1944). It was responsible for providing topographical intelligence for future operations.

In March 1944 Hughes was moved to India, to the ISTD station there. For administrative purposes he was on board HMS Hathi, a shore station a long way from the sea—in Delhi. In these jobs with ISTD he was in the acting rank of Commander, even though he was also Commander (retired). I suspect this was all to do with the arcane ways of the navy in matters of pay and job grading. His work was clearly important in the advances against the Japanese in 1944-45 after the tide had been turned in Burma since he was appointed OBE for ‘distinguished services in South East Asia’. In addition he was awarded the King Haakon VII Liberty Medal by the King of Norway for ‘services rendered to the Norwegian High Command during World War II. He was given ‘unrestricted permission’ to wear this foreign decoration.

Hughes was back on the retired list on 17 February 1946. But he returned to service again six years later. In September 1922 he was back as a  qualified hydrographer (‘H Charge’). His re-appointment appears to have been connected with the 19-day Exercise Mariner, the largest NATO exercise ever held, in the waters off Iceland from 16 September to 4 October 1953. The weather was atrocious. Commander Hughes reverted to the Retired List—again and finally—on 5 October 1953, the year Hong Kong Birds and the second edition of Birds of Burma were published.

In 1949 Smythies, the author of Birds of Burma, was posted to the forestry service in Sarawak. He was persuaded to produce another book, this time on the birds of Borneo. It is clear that the old team of Smythies and Hughes must have been a success because Hughes during the late 1950s produced 50 colour plates for the book, The Birds of Borneo, which was published in 1960. Smythies wrote:

I was fortunate in securing once again the services of Commander A.M. Hughes, O.B.E., R.N., as artist. He himself has written an account in the Sarawak Museum Journal No. 12 of some aspects of the task (which took four years), and of how he became very ill half-way through owing to an allergy to the D.D.T. used on the bird skins.

The book was widely acclaimed and thus Hughes illustrated three major works on birds that remained the go-to for in their areas for decades. Birds of Borneo went through a number of editions with different editors into the 1990s. Eventually, of course, as field guides they have all been superseded by more recent publications but not entirely replaced as richer and wider sources of information.

Perhaps as a result of Smythies’s being in Sarawak, in 1953 Hughes was appointed as a trustee administering the terms of the will of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak.

From The Birds of Borneo

I have found no other reference to paintings by Hughes after the publication of the Borneo book in 1960—not surprising given his reaction to handling the bird skins in the late 1950s. However, art and antique dealers sometimes offer prints of his silhouette sketches of naval life, which appear to date from 1927. Gieves, the naval outfitters, published the prints and the three, depicting the rituals of Grog, Defaulters and Sunday Rounds on board HM ships, were displayed in their premises on naval bases throughout the world and bought by a generation of naval officers. Another is First Command where the name an officer taking on that post could be added. The central colour cartoon is a depiction of a small, callow youth steering a vessel with an enormous, seasoned coxswain standing next to him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid like hitting on the the large warships shown in the background.

The only information I have on Commander Hughes after 1960 is that his son was killed in an accident in 1963, aged 19. The family were then living at Rook Cottage (a late 16th century house and now Grade II listed) in Chaldon, Surrey, a village on the North Downs. Hope Frances Hughes died in a Surrey hospital in 1984. Alfred Marcus Hughes died on 11 September 1991 in a nursing home at Leg o’Mutton Corner, Yelverton, Devon, a day short of his 90th birthday.

———————

I have copies of all Hughes’s plates for the Hong Kong Naturalist bar eight in the final two volumes  (9 and 10). I have bound copies of these volumes but the plates had been torn out. I will copy the others and put them on this site from time to time.

The first plate by Hughes published in the Hong Kong Naturalist. Volume 1, No 1, January 1930
Crested Mynah

Hong Kong Naturalist Volume, 1, No 2, May 1930
Oriental Magpie-Robin

UPDATED 6 June 2024