After my article on the artist Commander Alfred Marcus Hughes appeared, Greg Davies commented:
Hughes also makes a cameo appearance in Beryl Patricia Hall's autobiography "A Hawk from a Handsaw" (1993). Hall was the doyenne of the British Museum Bird Room in the post-war III period, and a relative of Hughes.
On looking up Hughes and Hall I found that they were first cousins, once removed. Pat Hall was the grand-daughter of Hughes’s mother’s brother.
The comment also rang a bell in my neural circuitry. I was sure I could remember meeting Pat Hall but could not recall where and how. Then, looking her up to write this article, I found a photograph which provided all the answers. The date was 4 May 1972 when she received the Stamford Raffles Award at the AGM of the Zoological Society of London. I remember speaking to her briefly after the meeting when she seemed a bundle of nerves. For some strange reason on seeing the photograph I immediately remembered the coat she was wearing as being several sizes too big such that she and the coat seemed moved independently—a very weird thing to recall from the memory bank after 52 years.
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| Pat Hall receiving the Stamford Raffles Award from the President of the Zoological Society of London, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. 4 May 1972 (Annual Report for 1972, ZSL) |
Pat Hall was Beryl Patricia Hall (née Woodhouse). She was born to a wealthy family in Epson, Surrey, in 1917. She was thwarted by her parents in going to Cambridge to study maths and instead spent four years at home kicking her heels but also developing an interest in birdwatching. Thus in the 1939 Register, the emergency census, she is shown as employed on ‘domestic duties’ but also as involved in Air Raid Precautions work teaching ambulance drivers. She was determined to do something for the war effort and joined first the Womens' Legion and then the Mechanised Transport Corps, a uniformed women’s civilian organisation that provided drivers to government departments and other civilian services.
After the outbreak of war Pat Hall became engaged to John Clavell Hall, in civilian life a Winchester-educated insurance clerk. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in March 1940 and posted to the Middle East. Pat volunteered to serve overseas driving ambulances. She was first in South Africa but was then moved to Egypt. The two were married on 21 May 1941 at Suez. However, this was no happily-ever-after story. By June 1943 John Hall had fought in Crete. was a temporary Captain and had been mentioned in despatches. However later that year he was captured during the Battle of Leros in the Dodecanese Campaign. Pat further developed her interest in birds in North Africa and ended the war in Italy still driving ambulances. The MTC had been incororated into the Army during her time in Egypt and she ended the war as Sergeant-Major, with a 'Mention in Despatches', of 502 Motor Ambulance Convoy, skilled in driving, servicing and maintaining motor vehicles. Her army life ended with the release of her husband in May 1945. However, the marriage broke down and it was then that Hughes must have offered his help.
Alfred Hughes was a friend of the Norman Boyd Kinnear of the Natural History Museum. Kinnear, with no academic qualifications, had risen through the ranks of the museum world, beginning at the Bombay Natural History Society’s museum in Calcutta and continuing at the Natural History Museum in London. He had specialised in ornithology. By the time the war was ending he had been appointed Keeper of Zoology. In 1947 he was asked to take over as Director, past the normal retirement age, until a suitable candidate had been found in the post-war world. He stayed on as Director until 1950, sorting out the repair and restoration of the Museum needed after the disruption and damage caused by the War; for this he received a ‘K’.
Through that contact with Kinnear, Pat Hall was offered a post of Associate Scientific Worker in the Bird Room of the Museum. Ideally suited for those wealthy enough not needing to find paid employment, the scheme provided cheap and enthusiastic voluntary labour to the Museum. The position was paid at a rate—which did not change for ten years—of four shillings per hour, a wage which would have exceeded the average industrial pay in the 1940s. However, instead of that equating to a salary of around £800 per year, the maximum pay each year was capped at £100. Pat Hall was clearly keen to work at the Museum; she turned down a job offer from the BBC in order to work at the Museum.
James David Macdonald (1908-2002) was in charge of the Bird Room. He recognised her aptitude for the work she was doing and given her experience in Africa and her skills as a motor mechanic invited her, at her own expense, to be a member of a collecting expedition to south-west Africa that began in late 1949. The team, including Macdonald’s wife as the team doctor and cook, collected 1300 specimens of nearly 200 species during the six months in the field. After that for nearly 20 years Pat Hall divided her time between curatorial work, collecting expeditions and research based on the collections in the Museum. Her expeditions during the 1950s were to Africa. In 1953 she organised and largely funded a Natural History Museum-backed trip to what is now Botswana. Before and after an ornithological congress in Livingstone in what is now Zambia, she collected in Botswana and Angola respectively; overall she collected around 2000 specimens for the Museum. A short trip to north-western Botswana was her final experience of collecting in Africa.
Her publications during the 1950s and 60s were on African birds. Her largest was the outcome of eight years of work: An Atlas of Speciation in African Passerine Birds in 1970. Of 423 pages with 439 maps it was widely praised by reviewers. Herbert Friedmann (1900-1987) the American ornithologist who worked at the Smithsonian Institution wrote of its importance in The Auk of July 1971:
As Mrs. Hall states at the beginning of her introduction, this great series of maps constitutes the first attempt to show in graphic form, for the ready comprehension of the student, the results, "and the continuing process, of evolution in a large continental avifauna by means of plotting on one map the distribution of species believed to be immediately descended from a common ancestor." By placing closely related species on the same map it becomes evident where they overlap and where the are allopatric, and these facts give the field student indications of where to look and what to study in an attempt to assess and to interpret the past history of each of these current distributional patterns. It must be kept in mind, when using this atlas, that every existing specific distributional picture is not merely a discrete fact of local interest, but is always, and inevitably, the result of the past history of the species and of the region. This is the real, inherent interest in each of them, and each could become a valid point of departure for further study of the evolutionary vicissitudes of the particular species.
The Atlas had started as a joint effort with Reginald Ernest Moreau (1897–1970) the great amateur scientific ornithologist of his day. However, he became increasingly ill and the work fell on Mrs Hall. He died in the year of its publication.
Work on African birds was interrupted in the early 1960s. Macdonald heard of and then approached Harold Hall (no relation to Pat) an Australian philanthropist who was interested in supporting research. Harold Hall agreed to sponsor a series of five expeditions for the Natural History Museum (still labouring under the title of British Museum (Natural History)) around Australia. Macdonald was very keen to obtain more specimens for the Museum. The number of Australian specimens available within Britain had been depleted by the sale of Lord Rothschild’s collection (Rothschild was being blackmailed by a ‘titled lady’ and he needed the money) and another private collection to the USA.
Pat Hall led the third Harold Hall Expedition given her experience of collecting in arid parts of Africa. That was to the interior of Western and South Australia. She then edited the book describing the findings of all five expeditions which was published in 1974.
After the post-war recovery the Natural History Museum on its site in London was bursting at the seams with many thousands of specimens stored in unsuitable accommodation. In the mid-1960s, plans emerged to move the bird collection from South Kensington to the site of the Rothschild Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire. Pat Hall was opposed to the move on scientific grounds. It is easy to see why. She would also have had to move from Surrey to somewhere nearer Tring. She therefore decided to give up her work at the Museum in 1971. At the same time she moved from Epsom to the New Forest in Hampshire where it was noted she devoted her time ‘to friends, dogs, horses and village life’. However, retirement from the ornithological world in which she was well known came more gradually. She was in demand as an editor, speaker and organiser. What appears to have been her last job was presidency of the 4th Pan-African Ornithological Congress in 1976. That caused her particular hassles because of its move at the last minute from Kenya to the Seychelles over political problems.
It was said that the award which gave her particular pleasure was the Stamford Raffles Award of the Zoological Society of London for 1971—presented by the Society’s President, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh at the Annual General Meeting I attended in 1972. This is how the Annual Report recorded it:
The Stamford Raffles Award (awarded to an amateur zoologist for distinguished contributions to zoology) to Mrs B. P. Hall, British Museum (Natural History), in recognition of her work on the taxonomy and zoogeography of birds, particularly those of Africa. The award was a sculpture in bronze, Wild Boar, by Miss Elisabeth Frink.
It was though the final paragraph of citation for the Union Medal of the British Ornithologists’ Union that best sums up what she had achieved:
Her scientific work has already been widely recognised, by her election as Corresponding Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union, and by the awards of the Gill Memorial Medal of the South African Ornithological Society and the Stamford Raffles Award of the Zoological Society of London. It is most fitting that the Union Medal should now be awarded to Pat Hall, who has so strikingly shown that the heights of ornithological achievement can still be scaled without the benefit of formal academic qualifications and institutional backing.
Retirement saw her adding two books to the one she had written with Derek Goodwin in 1969, a book published privately of nonsense verse about their lives in the Museum, Bird Room Ballads; Alfred Hughes provided the illustrations. The next was the story of her life in the Mechanised Transport Corps, What a Way to Win a War (1978, Midas Books, Tunbridge Wells). Finally, in 1993 came A Hawk from a Handsaw (1993, privately published). I have not been able to find a copy of the latter but her obituarist for The Ibis noted that it gave her side of what proved to be an unhappy collecting trip to Angola.
I wonder if Alfred Hughes realised that in speaking to his friend Kinnear he was launching his cousin Pat Hall on a pathway to her becoming a major player in classical ornithology of the 20th century. The Hughes-Hall family axis runs wide and deep in the ornithology of Africa and Asia.
Beryl Patricia Hall died on 4 August 2010 in a nursing home at Fishbourne, Hampshire.
Prys-Jones R. 2011. Beryl Patricia Hall (née Woodhouse), 1917-2010. Ibis 153, 913-914.
UPDATED 24 January 2025
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