William Rowan—Pioneer of Photoperiodism. 2. The Biography

I have enjoyed reading the late Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley’s (1937-2008) account of William Rowan’s life, from its beginning, in 1891 at Basel in Switzerland, as the son of a railway engineer from Northern Ireland and a Danish mother, to the end, in 1957, at home alone in Edmonton, Alberta.

Marianne Ainley covered all aspects of Rowan’s life in detail. Since there is available online what is essentially a précis of her 378 page book I will not repeat the basic information other than to say that Rowan had become obsessed with the idea of getting to western Canada while at Bedford School. He was inspired to travel, study, draw and photograph the wildlife, by visits to the school by Richard Kearton, showing his brother Cherry’s photographs of birds, and by Ernest Thompson Seton who talked about the large mammals of Canada and the USA. Rowan’s widowed mother held and the pursestrings and was eventually persuaded and she arranged for him to be a ranch pupil with a British family in Alberta. Thus Rowan was in Alberta for a first time in 1908, to the less than comfortable world of a ranch pupil but travelling first class on his mother’s insistence. He returned to Britain in 1910 where he crammed for matriculation to London university. He then returned to Canada, doing the odd job in Winnipeg while roaming and photographing the country and its wildlife. He was persuaded both by friends in Canada and family to take the place at University College London; he then had to find his own fare for the voyage.

The Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) was one of two
species used in early experiments on varying daylength*

Thus began Rowan’s the zoological career but in describing it Ainley left a number of unanswered questions while missing clues that could have led to explanations of events. Some of Ainley’s interpretations are amusingly wrong while others are completely out of touch with life, the university scene or science in the early years of the 20th century. On a general note I often find accounts written by historians of science to be unsatisfactory simple because those historians have not been steeped in the discipline or of how practitioners within that discipline lived and operated. Similarly, conventions of the time are often judged through the lens of the present. Thus it was not at all strange that Mrs Rowan was left at home to do the housework and look after the children. Nor was it, or is it, odd that Rowan in following his many interests neglected to give his wife and children his full attention. The response of most of my scientific acquaintances to that statement would be, ‘Yes…and?’

Rowan clearly enjoyed studying zoology and botany, particularly the field work involved, while failing intermediate physics twice. He also wrote popular articles and took photographs while a student. With the course uncompleted he, like many of his fellow students, enlisted in the 14th (Reserve)  County of London Battalion of  London Scottish Regiment, a month after the declaration of war with Germany. However, Private Rowan became ill during his first long leave, during which time he returned to the labs at UCL. He had bouts of illness throughout his life. His leave was extended and the army then discharged him as ‘no longer fit physically for war service’. He had served 1 year, 68 days when he returned to civilian life in November 1915. With the family fortunes, which were held mainly in French stocks and shares, declining because of the war, Rowan spent a year in pursuing energetically his interests in natural history, while worrying about getting a job such while considering lecturing and taxidermy as possibilities. In October 1916 he returned to UCL for his much delayed final year. He graduated in 1917 with Third Class Honours, six years after he had begun life as a student.

Although not commenting specifically on the class of his honours degree, Ainley argued that Rowan never really got the hang of doing exams and that Bedford School was more interested in producing sportsmen than learned gentlemen. While later in the century, a ‘third’ would have been a bar to further life in a university, this was clearly not the case at the time.

Rowan spent a over year teaching at Eastby and at Bedales, a public (i.e. for non-British readers, a non-state, fee-paying, private school) school in Hampshire. Then came the offer of several jobs and his acceptance of one of them, assistant in the Department of Zoology at UCL, in effect an assistant lectureship including responsibilities within the departmental museum. He had, however, through a contact, applied for a new post in the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Keen to return again to Canada, its wild places and its wildlife, he amassed a great deal of support for his application from leading British zoologists:

[J.P>] Hill stressed Rowan's qualifications in zoology, his wide knowledge of ornithology, his artistic talent, his excellence as a lecturer, and his "driving power and considerable organising ability.” Oliver wrote about Rowan's resourcefulness as a naturalist and his knowledge of bird protection. Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, secretary of the Zoological Society of London, praised Rowan's aptitude for fieldwork and his capacity for executive work.

He was offered the post in Winnipeg and therefore had to resign from the UCL job before he had started.

A month before he left for Canada in October 1919, Rowan married Reta Guenever Mary Bush whom he had met while she was an art student at the Slade. From their arrival in Quebec, they made their way to Winnipeg. After a short time in Winnipeg, Rowan was recruited to the University of Alberta by Tory. The pay was better with a promise of a chair in the offing.

Rowan’s work on the importance of changing daylength as the trigger for migration was done on a shoestring and his ‘Restless Energy’, the title of Ainley’s biography, meant that had had lots of other activities in hand, often out in the wilds of western Canada, in addition to starting a department from scratch including gathering and preparing specimens and posters. He worked at home, in the lab (such as it was) and in the field for virtually every hour of every day. However, it is obvious that he seemed unable to prioritise, leaving his daylength experiment to a helper over a crucial period, for example.

His friends in UK to whom he complained about Tory’s animus, lack of funding and lack of appreciation of his work in Canada really could not understand why Rowan stayed in Alberta. Indeed after his death Julian Huxley stated that ‘Rowan was one of the best experimental zoologists of the 20th century. But why, with all his talents, did the fool have to bury himself in Alberta?”

The American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) played
a major part in migration experiments in the wild** 

Given his association with Huxley it seems anomalous that he, at one stage in his life, was supporting Lamarckism and hoped that with his crow experiments in which birds were exposed to different daylengths ‘he may be able to adduce some evidence in support of the Lamarckian concept of evolution’.  Although, as Ainley remarked, belief in Lamarck was not unusual amongst confused zoologists of the 1920s, the year the newspapers reported this, 1931, is interesting and Ainley seems to have missed the significance. In 1931 Rowan was persuaded by his friends to apply for the chair of zoology at McGill. He assembled a body of supporters in Britain and the USA. Amongst them was Ernest MacBride, a previous professor of zoology in McGill and now at Imperial College in London. MacBride, as I have recounted here was both an ardent Lamarckian, denying the existence of genes or mutations, and extreme eugenicist. MacBride has been described as Lamarck’s last disciple on earth and it cannot have done Rowan any harm in MacBride’s eyes to be seen as a Lamarckist. However, whether or not Julian Huxley, one of those responsible for the great synthesis of genetics, development and morphology in Darwinian evolution, got to know of Rowan’s statements I do not know. Despite the enormous level of support, Tory managed to kill off any chance of Rowan getting the McGill chair. In Alberta he stayed.

With the level of support given by leading zoologists in Britain and his international reputation, I find it odd that Ainley made no mention of a missing accolade. William Rowan was not a Fellow of the Royal Society. Had he been proposed but not elected? Or had his putative proposers not been able to garner enough support for a proposal to be made?

One might have thought that once the active, local, torment of Tory had disappeared off the scene and that once he finally made it to full professor (1931) he would have had a relatively untroubled existence in Alberta, even if money remained in short supply for his research. However, as he got closer to retirement long-standings members of his own department—whom he had backed relentlessly for advancement and better pay—turned against him; a demonstration of ‘no good turn goes unpunished’.

Given the explosion of interest in the photoperiodic control of reproduction that followed in Rowan’s wake it is noticeable how poorly or insufficiently appreciated in their own countries were some of its most successful scientists, ‘Jock ‘Marshall is one example; Don Farner (1915-1988) another.

By the time of Rowans death in 1957, the world of photoperiodism had moved on to the role of day length in controlling the onset of reproduction, rather than migration, and to the burgeoning field of neuroendocrinology.  Rowan’s work was known about but no longer referred to. For example, in three long reviews of aspects of environmental control of reproduction in birds and the physiological mechanisms responsible for a symposium I organised in 1973, Rowan did not get a mention.

Despite my qualms, some of which I have pointed out, Marianne Ainley made a great contribution to our knowledge of William Rowan. She, herself, had a remarkable life history. Born Marika Veronika Gosztonyi in Budapest in 1937, she  escaped from the Russian tanks advancing to put down the revolution of 1956 by walking along the railway line into Austria. From there she was able to reach an uncle in Sweden. In 1958 she moved to Canada and worked as a technician and research assistant having studied chemistry in Budapest for four years. A keen birdwatcher, she changed tack completely and became a research assistant in the history of science. In that field she obtained an MSc and then a PhD at McGill on the history of ornithology and avian biology in Canada. She was then at Concordia University and finally, as a full professor at the University of Northern British Columbia. She retired in 2002 and died of cancer in 2008.

I leave William Rowan in the words with which Marianne Ainley introduced Restless Energy:

WILLIAM ROWAN has been considered a Renaissance man, a man of integrity, a famous biologist, a flamboyant showman, a challenging teacher, and often a nuisance. His work as a scientist has been highly regarded by biologists all over the world, and his experiments have been covered in numerous zoology textbooks. Who was this scientist? What was he like as a person, a family man, a colleague, a friend? Why was he so well known to contemporary scientists, and why do we still find written references to his scientific work while, apart from anecdotal descriptions about his escapades in the field, little is known about the details of his life?

Convinced that William Rowan was an important subject for a biography, I went to Edmonton in July 1985 to see the environment where he lived and worked; to talk to the people who knew him as friend, teacher, and colleague, and who admired him as a world-renowned scientist, highly respected wildlife artist, and outstanding conservationist. Inevitably, other facets of his character came to light: his integrity, his kindness, his egotism, his unfailing need to criticize mediocrity, his ability to inspire others, his love of beauty and of nature. I learned of his exquisitely designed conservation stamps, Christmas cards, and hand-painted menus; of his great skill as a self-taught sculptor and musician, and as a builder of model sailing boats and a unique single-gauge model railway. I found that he had been well known as a radio personality, and as the man who tried to make crows fly the wrong way. Nearly thirty years after his death, William Rowan was still very much alive in Edmonton, and even those who had never set eyes on him could tell a few choice stories about his escapades. Indeed, as I gradually discovered, Rowan was an unusual individual — a Renaissance man in Alberta.

*https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dark-eyed_Junco,_Washington_State_02.jpg

** CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2310490

Ainley MG. 1988. Rowan vs Tory: Conflicting views of scientific research in Canada, 1920-1935. Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 1, 3-21.

Ainley MG. 1993. Restless Energy. A Biography of William Rowan 1891-1957. Montreal: Véhicule Press.

Houston CS. 2009. In Memoriam: Marianne G Ainley, 1937-2008. The Auk 126, 699.

 

William Rowan—Pioneer of Photoperiodism. 1. His persecutor

 It must have been during a lecture at Sheffield that I first heard of William Rowan—the man who established the importance of change in day length in controlling reproduction and migration in animals. From that work in the early decades of the 20th century the science of photoperiodism grew, particularly in birds, the organisms Rowan had worked on. I also learnt that day that Rowan had succeeded under the most difficult of circumstances and that he had been badly treated in Canada where he worked.

Sixty-odd years on I have now read a biography of Rowan published in 1993.

The culprit who treated Rowan badly, even persisting with that animus when Rowan had achieved international fame for his research, was the founding president of the University of Alberta, Henry Marshall Tory (1864-1947), who took it on himself as a mathematician to decree the nature of proper zoological research as wholly laboratory based. He forbade fieldwork—an order Rowan ignored by working in his own time. Tory had been desperate to recruit somebody who could teach biology in 1919. A new medical building and an intake swelled by veterans of the First World War needed a zoology department since just as in Britain at the time, many medical students were unable to study biology at school and an elementary foundation, i.e. remedial, course mirrored that throughout the medical schools of the British Empire.

Henry Marshall Tory

Rowan’s biographer, the late Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley (1937-2008) skewers Tory’s reputation as an academic and research funding organiser and administrator, not only for his personal treatment of Rowan but also his short-sighted motives, his later leadership of what became the National Research Council of Canada and his disdain for the biology.

Born in Nova Scotia, Tory was a graduate of McGill University in maths and physics having begun his course at the age of 22. His mother was intent on her son becoming a Methodist minister and he then obtained a degree in theology, and spent two years in the church. In 1893 he jumped ship and became a lecturer in maths at McGill. To assist the setting up of a new physics department, Tory was sent to Cambridge for two terms to learn how things were done by the big boys. He thus became involved with two departments and worked his way up the academic ladder and doing administrative jobs for the university in setting up outstations, in British Columbia, for example, that in turn, became independent institutions.

In 1905, the new province of Alberta was formed and decided it needed its own university. The various accounts I have read state that Tory was appointed President in 1907. I found this rather odd since most universities in the Empire would have had either a Vice-Chancellor or Principal, following English or Scottish usage, respectively, for its chief executive position. McGill until recently had a Principal á la Glasgow and Edinburgh, before succumbing to the American and inaccurate usage of ‘President’ for the post.

There is no doubt that Tory was successful in building a new university from scratch. From his initial appointment of five academic staff in 1908 and admitting 32 students, Tory left in 1928 a university with five faculties, in modern buildings with 1,600 students.

Tory clearly regretted his appointment of Rowan almost as soon as he had made it. Indeed he went so far as to write to University College London to enquire if his degree was real, despite the fact that Rowan had continued to an MSc. The fact that Rowan did field work was anathema to Tory, which I suggest says more about Tory than it does Rowan who was equally at home with all aspects, approaches and techniques of zoology of the time.

Even when Tory had moved on to manage Canadian research funding  he continued to prevent Rowan from getting grants even though he had already obtained funding from American foundations and the Royal Society in London and his research was strongly supported by leading British zoologists of the time, Julian Huxley and James Peter Hill FRS (1873-1954) of UCL being two of them. Marianne Ainley wrote:

…Rowan submitted a major application to the NRC, but applied nowhere else. This was an error that he soon came to regret. After a decade of teaching and working under adverse conditions, Rowan must have realized that in Canada money for all but practical research was always scarce. He may not have known, however, that this was because Canadian science had been “guided by an entrepreneurial scientific ideology,” brought to this country by the original Scottish settlers.“ In the late 1920s, this “entrepreneurial ideology” still influenced the funding of Canadian science. Rowan often mentioned the lack of government money for basic biological research in his correspondence with Taverner, but, in his enthusiasm and naivety, Rowan paid no heed to the well-known fact that all the scientific departments of the federal government (the Geological Survey, Experimental Farms, and the Biological Board) had been established with practical aims in mind. In Canada, utilitarian science was supreme, and the NRC was no exception.

In early I930, Rowan joined the ranks of'Canadian scientists who continued to encounter discouragements and difficulties and even indifference to pure research. Tory’s presidency of the NRC further exacerbated the already difficult situation many scientists faced across the country, Tory was renowned as a vocal advocate of applied research, a firm believer in the usefulness of science. He was later described as a man “tended to favour the practical short-term problems that would make a noise; among the long-term projects, he favoured those with a staggering pay-off, preferably in tens of millions of dollars.” Tory’s attitude towards science exemplified the prevailing Canadian one. Unfortunately for Rowan, Tory was in a powerful position where he could prevent the funding of basic research and promote the projects of his choice, mostly those that involved applied research. A careful perusal of the list of projects funded by the NRC from I920 to 1935 shows, however, that some basic research was funded, particularly in Tory’s area, the physical sciences.

Tory also denigrated Rowan personally at this time even though it was Rowan who was putting Canada in general and the University of Alberta in particular on the map for world-famous and highly respected biological research. Ainley unearthed a letter written by Tory in 1932 and continued:

“During the last two or three years I was in Alberta I gave very little attention to Rowan due to the fact that only elementary work was done in the department” In fact, Tory’s last years in Edmonton (1925 to 1928) coincided with those of Rowan’s most intense research activity. And while Rowan carried out his early experiments during his spare time in his own backyard, nothing could long remain a secret in a small, closed, university community. Ironically, it was during this period that Rowan’s research on the effect of daylight on the reproductive organs of birds put the University of Alberta on the scientific world map. From Tory’s letter it is evident, however, that he continued to consider only laboratory work as real science, and chose to disregard Rowan’s pioneering investigations and subsequent fame. By ignoring Rowan’s ornithological research and the enthusiastic recognition given it by members of the larger scientific community, Tory could maintain that “only elementary work was done” in the university’s zoology department. For Tory, Rowan “had reached his limit” as both teacher and researcher. By taking this attitude,

Tory could with a clear conscience prevent Rowan from being funded by the NRC, and later destroy the younger.man’s chances for academic advancement.

But Tory did not finish there. He damned Rowan’s chances of getting the vacant chair of zoology at McGill. Despite glowing references from his supporters in London, Edinburgh and the USA, those responsible for the important took more notice of Tory who had been asked to provide an opinion. Ainley again:

…Tory replied: "With regard to Rowan, I find it a little difficult to write about him because I am afraid that what I have to say will not be of any great help to him in securing an appointment at McGill." Tory wrote, Rowan "got a B.Sc. from the University of London... on a semi-war basis," and informed Currie that he, Tory, had not been impressed with Rowan as a scientist, because Rowan "would not stick to the laboratory." Tory recalled he had told Rowan that "his only hope of becoming a competent zoologist and of proving his right to the headship of the department... would be by taking up some special line of work and sticking to it until he had proved his position as zoologist." Tory added, "Unless Rowan has completely changed since I knew him I would not consider him at all capable of ever organizing such a department or of drawing to it men who would be zealous for work.”

By contrast, Julian Huxley thought Rowan ‘a rare combination of fieldworker, systematist, general zoologist and experimentalist” who would make an excellent head of department.

I would argue that Ainley hit the elongated metal fastening on the cranium when she concluded that Tory was a product of the Scottish tradition. Here, I suggest, Ainley missed a trick. I suspect there were other influences at play. Tory clearly saw physics as superior in every way, as physicists so long have done, to the other pursuits that seek to explain and to exploit knowledge of the natural world. In McGill with Tory in the physics department was no other than Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937; later Lord Rutherford). It was Rutherford who is alleged to have said ‘all science is either physics or stamp collecting’. While there have been attempts to argue that Rutherford did not mean it quite like that, there is no doubt that if reflected a common view from the Age of Physics.

My view of Tory is perhaps summed by a line in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, first performed in 1889.  The King of Barataria had become a  ‘Wesleyan Methodist of the most bigoted and persecuting type’.

With the tune of the Grand Inquisitor firmly fixed as an earworm, I will leave Tory and return to William Rowan himself and his biography by Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley to another article. But I least I know now how he was badly treated. 

Ainley MG. 1988. Rowan vs Tory: Conflicting views of scientific research in Canada, 1920-1935. Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 1, 3-21.

Ainley MG. 1993. Restless Energy. A Biography of William Rowan 1891-1957. Montreal: Véhicule Press.