Which descendant of Richard Owen, great anatomist, royal favourite and wrong’un, worked at the University of Hong Kong in 1957-60?

Richard Owen

Richard Owen (1804-1892) the brilliant comparative anatomist but odious man was a celebrity of the Victorian era. But more than that, having given talks on natural history to Queen Victoria’s children, he became a royal favourite to the extent that he was given the lease on a grace-and-favour basis of a house, Sheen Lodge in Richmond Park. He lived there until his death, the house passing from to his son’s widow and then to her daughter, Olive Caroline Owen (1874-1959) who lived at the house with her mother and her own family. She married Francis Frederick Ommanney in 1897. It was her son, the great-great-grandson of Richard Owen who provides the link with the University of Hong Kong since he, Francis Downes Ommanney (1903-1980) was Reader in Zoology and Director of the Fisheries Research Unit in 1957-1960.

Francis Downes Ommanney

Francis Downes Ommanney, universally known as ‘Dick’, was already well-known author on his arrival in Hong Kong having produced a number of autobiographical accounts of his early life and travels. His early life at Sheen Lodge was covered in The House in the Park (1944). The family could not stay there because reading between the lines the grace-and-favour lease given to Richard Owen was one, common at the time, for three generations with the Sheen Lodge (later so badly damaged in an air raid in 1944 that it had to be demolished) having to be returned to the Crown after the death of Dick Ommanney’s grandmother in 1920.

Dick Ommanney’s legacy in Hong Kong was his last autobiographical travelogue, Fragrant Harbour (1962), which described Hong Kong and his life there. It was required reading for newcomers to the university like us later in the 1960s. To those in the know the offer to lend the book came with a caveat; we were advised to take part of the story with a pinch of salt. The publishers had advised the inclusion of a romantic episode and that the attachment to a bar girl, best summed as an academic in the World of Suzie Wong, was fictitious but with a grain of truth. Fictitious in that Ommanney was in his own circles known for his homosexuality but based on a possible friendship with the bargirls of Wanchai since some university staff along with some of their wives were known to frequent—on a drinks and people-watching basis—the bars and to talk at length with the momma-san.

Sheen Lodge, Richmond Park

Because Ommanney was an established and well-thought-of writer his life and works are covered on a number of websites. In short, after a spell as an office boy in the City of London, he graduated in zoology from what is now Imperial College, London in 1926. Then, for three years, he was Lecturer in Zoology at Queen Mary College, London. The next 10 years saw him on the staff of the Discovery Expedition, working both in London on the collections, at whaling stations in South Georgia and Durban and on the Royal Research Ship Discovery Il. For his service in Antarctica he was awarded the Polar Medal in Bronze in 1942. Ommanney Bay on the north coast of Coronation Island in the South Orkneys was named after him in 1933.

The first year of the Second World War saw him as an inspector on board a whale factory ship. But he soon joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and on 17 June 1940 was a temporary (i.e. war-time) Lieutenant, RNVR. In October 1943 he qualified for meteorological work. He served in the Mediterranean and in the North Atlantic. His book, Flat Top, describes life on board an escort carrier on an arctic convoy to Murmansk. Editing work for the British Council was followed by two years with the Mauritius-Seychelles Fisheries Survey and then six years in Zanzibar and Singapore with the Colonial Research Services. During this time he was also a member of The Royal Navy Volunteer Supplementary Reserve. Then, at the age of 54, came Hong Kong.

Ommanney had a flat
in this block of 12
3 University Drive

Ommanney was allocated university accommodation in a small block of flats in what was then known as the University Compound. Five years later we lived in the same block. Built in the early 1950s to a design by a Swedish architect Ommanney did not like his flat since the design was too noisy for him as his amah and her friends and relations came and left through the only door which opened directly into the living room. He also thought the block ugly. We disagreed—the flats had two wide balconies which looked over the harbour, Kowloon and the mountains beyond—and if that block which was demolished in the 1970s was thought to be ugly by some university residents, as he wrote, you should see what replaced it.

Ommanney’s service in Hong Kong ended after one ‘tour’ (then of two years seven months followed by five months of home (i.e. UK) leave. The Fisheries Research Unit was an administrative anomaly. It had been established in its post-war form in 1952* and housed in the Northcote Science Building within the Department of Zoology. It comprised a head—who, like Ommanney, held a university post—and research officers paid by the Hong Kong government. The head gave a few lectures a year to senior undergraduates who needed four years to complete an honours degree but it had a budget and requirements that far exceeded that of its host department. In UK, fisheries research was and still is done by scientific civil servants, probably because the decisions on fishing quotas are highly political and do not necessarily follow the scientific advice. In 1960 the fisheries research unit was transferred to the Hong Kong government and entirely to its premises in Aberdeen.

In Fragrant Harbour, Ommanney described how he was informed of this change and of how he was informed he was to have no part in the unit’s future.

My research unit was a non-teaching department of the University, which felt towards it rather like a hen sitting on a duck's egg. In 196o the Government acquired a new ship, larger and more powerful, and trebled the financial grant to the research unit. The University then felt that it had hatched out a duckling. It had under its wing a non-teaching department which was costing more than all the science faculty departments together. The Government decided to remove this incubus from the University and absorb it into its own body. I and all my staff would then become civil servants. But my days in Hong Kong were already numbered, for the cloud now filled my sky. The telephone rang in my office one day. The Vice-Chancellor wished to see me.

He occupies a pleasant spacious room in the main building and from its windows you can see the blue stretch of the harbour filled with ships and ferries shuttling to and fro, the two crowded cities facing each other across it and the peak of Tai Mo Shan against the sky. The Vice-Chancellor is an Australian, an ex-soldier and a man of letters. He is not one to beat about the bush.

“I don't know whether I have good news for you or bad,” he said. "The Government don't want to take you on. Unfortunately, your age…”

Ommanney was 57 in 1960 and the retirement age for expat civil servants was then 55.

Dick Ommanney’s replacement as Director of Fisheries Research was Derek Bromhall (1929-2021) who was already the senior research officer in the unit and another interesting and energetic character who hit the headlines in two entirely different biological threads of his future career. But more of him for another article.

Fragrant Harbour was the list of his autobiographical travelogues. After Hong Kong Ommanney lived in a house ‘Ashleigh’ in the hamlet of Weekmoor near Milverton in Somerset. There he wrote a number of popular books including The Fishes in the Life Nature Library series, Life Nature Library Young Readers: The Fishes, Lost Leviathan, Animal Life in the Antarctic, A Draught of Fishes. Collecting Sea Shells. 

Another book, Frogs, Toads and Newts, written for children, won an award in 1974 as the best informative book for young people. Interviewed at home for the Bristol Evening Post of 24 October 1974, he said:

I was persuaded to write this book for children by my very old friend Dr. Gwynne Vevers, assistant director of science and head of the aquarium at London Zoo.

Francis Downes Ommanney, remembered as a private and shy man—and very different in nature compared to his great-great grandfather—died aged 77 on 30 June 1980 in a care home in Surrey. He was buried in Arbroath, Scotland, on 11 July joining his mother who had died there in 1959.

*G A C Herklots as Reader in Biology (and head of department) had established fisheries research in the 1930s along with S.Y Lin. The field station at Aberdeen was destroyed along with all the library, papers, specimens and records while other material in the then new Northcote Science Building had also been destroyed. In 1946 he wrote a letter to Nature requesting replacement copies from anybody who could help.