Animal and Zoo Magazine 1936-41. Part 3. Margaret Shaw interviewed F. Shaw Mayer on collecting birds-of-paradise in New Guinea

My eye was drawn to an article in the first issue because it described Fergusson, an island in the d’Entrecasteux group north west of New Guinea which we visited in 2014.

MARGARET SHAW worked on the magazine and in this, her first article, she interviewed Frederick Shaw Mayer (1889-1989), the Australlian collector, ornithologist and aviculturist

who has famous for his work with birds-of-paradise. Mayer supplied zoos and rich private

collectors in Britain with live birds and museum with dead ones (failures of the former making specimens for the latter) and he had arrived in London in 1936 with a Grey-breasted, now known as Goldie’s, Bird-of-Paradise (Paradisaea decora). Then known only from a skin collected in 1882 by Andrew Goldie, Mayer spent four months waiting for accessible trees to bear fruit on which these birds feed before getting his local assistants to set snares. The birds-of-paradise have been and still are killed for ceremonial dress, and the natives of Fergusson, Mayer reported, killed them with spears or set hand-pulled snares.

Mayer based himself at the village of Taibutu (later called Saibutu, on the southern slope of Mount Maybole) at a height of 1000 feet. The first adult male caught and brought to him was killed by a snake (its skin is in the Natural History Museum). It was the only other adult male caught that he brought to London.

He also collected the Curl-crested Manucode, Manucodia comrii (then called Comrie’s Manucode), the bird we saw and heard while walking back to the village from the hot springs during our morning in the lowlands of Fergusson.

Goldie's Bird-of-Paradise
Found only on Fergusson and Normanby
islands

From Fergusson, Mayer made further collections in the mountains of Papua New Guinea (including the Blue Bird-of-Paradise, Paradisaea rudolphi, Princess Stephanie’s Astrapia, Astrapia stephaniae), and one of the sicklebills. He travelled to London with his specimens by porter to the coast and then by ship. He left New Guinea with with over 70 live birds and he arrived in London with the same number. He also had specimens of birds and mammals for the British Museum. An attack of malaria left him so weak that he had to cable the Zoo for a keeper to be sent out to Port Said to help him care for the birds on the rest of the journey.

But then he was, as Margaret Shaw reported, off again.

Indeed, the South China Morning Post of 26 March 1937 had an article on Mayer. He and another collection of birds destined for London and Paignton zoos were occupying two rooms and verandahs at the Great Eastern Hotel in Hong Kong awaiting passage on P&O’s Soudan. This time he had been in New Guinea for six months and it was his ninth collecting trip there. G.A.C. Herklots was invited to see the birds while they were at the hotel.

Approaching Fergusson in 2014. The low clouds are steam from the
hot springs

Animal and Zoo Magazine 1936-41. Part 1: Everything about animals

The cover of the first issue, Jane 1936

This is the first of a series of articles on a monthly magazine published from 1936 until 1941 under three evolving titles. It was a joint venture between Odhams Press, the publishers, and the Zoological Society of London, under the subtitle, ‘Official Organ of the Zoological Society of London’.

The magazine presents a fascinating insight into the popular and scientific zoological world of the 1930s because it spans the whole world of animals: in zoos, farms, the wild, museums, labs, art, literature, race course, stable, veterinary surgery and as pets. The first issue, under the title Zoo was June 1936. From March 1938 it was Zoo and Animal Magazine and from May 1938, Animal and Zoo Magazine. The final issue was in June 1941, publication having become impossible because of the wartime paper shortage. After the war, publication was not restarted and the Zoo launched a different style of magazine under a new title.

Animal and Zoo Magazine (I will use that longest-lasting title) was the brainchild of Julian Huxley who had been elected Secretary in 1935. It was part of his ill-fated attempt to modernise the Society, broaden its relevance and appeal across the whole spectrum of those interested or those that should be interested in animals, from the academic biologist to the child in the classroom or at home. It was very likely opposed by the old guard of Council members, the menagerists and cranky academics, who eventually saw him off. The coverage of the magazine, of which he was advisory editor, was a reflection of Huxley’s determination to cover the whole of animal life with articles drawn from a range of top scientists and professional writers.

The editor was Hugh Pilcher. I have been able to find very little about him but I suspect he was born in Eltham, Kent, in 1904 and died in 1965. In 1932 he was writing articles for the weekly general magazine, The Passing Show, another Odhams title. After the war, he can be found as a journalist variously working on such daily newspapers as the Daily Herald (owned by Odhams), Daily Mail and the Daily Express (he was lobby correspondent of the last named in 1957). He was also political correspondent of Forward, a Labour Party-supporting magazine.

There are some what by modern standards anthropomorphic horrors; fictional short stories or serials of brave wolves and the like appear in most issues alongside really useful and informative factual articles and snippets.

Picking an issue up for the first time I could not help being struck by the amount of information it contained. There was a lot to read and very few modern magazines can claim to need more than ten minutes to absorb the entire content.

The magazine was well illustrated with photographs (often in the wild and often demonstrating what could be achieved with the cameras of the day), diagrams and maps.

Below are the contents of the first issue:

Before going on in future articles to consider the contributors and some of the subject matter, I should point out that Julian Huxley wrote a three-page introduction to the first issue. After describing the relations between the human species and other animals, he wrote:

In this article I shall try to set down the main aims of the magazine. The title itself tells a story. We call it Zoo because it is the organ of the Zoological Society of London. 

The Zoological Society, with its 8,000 fellows, is the most influential body in the country concerned with animals in general. It does not exist merely to exhibit captive animals in its gardens. It also exists to promote the scientific study of zoology and to stimulate a general interest in animals. It is restricted to the field of animal life, but within this field it has a threefold aim—science, education, and entertainment. 

It need not wait for people to come to the Zoo. By means such as a magazine it can take the Zoo to the people. It can do more than this; it can interest them in animals which can never be exhibited in captivity, and in aspects of animal life which cannot be properly brought out in Zoological Gardens, however well organized. 

That is why the Zoological Society is sponsoring this new venture—because it feels that in doing so it is more adequately fulfilling its aims and objectives…

Lough Ine (Hyne) before Kitching and Ebling: Louis Renouf

Louis Renouf (from Kearney*)

The first to develop Lough Ine (or Hyne) in southern Ireland as a marine biological research station was Louis Percy Watt Renouf (1887-1968) while he was Professor of Zoology at University College, Cork between 1922 and 1954. The whole story is told in Terri Kearney’s book*. During the late 1920s and 30s Renouf promoted Lough Ine as a place for visiting research workers, having succeeded in erecting first a packing case and then, in 1928, an old army hut as a laboratory. He attracted some big names in British biology including Nellie Eales (1889-1989) and Julian Huxley, who published the work he did there on regeneration in the polychaete, Sabella, in 1933.

I came across an article in Zoo magazine (soon to be renamed Animal and Zoo Magazine)(Volume 2  (3), August 1937) which also contained a map of Lough Ine. Renouf was a regular contributor to the Zoological Society of London’s magazine (Huxley, as Secretary, was Advisory Editor) and was listed as a patron of the ‘Zoo Club’ run by the magazine and the Society; he was described as ‘President of the Guild of Catholic Biology’ and appears to have been one of that church’s adherents who was trying from the inside to persuade the catholic hierarchy that evolution was something they should not oppose; in modern parlance he was an accommodationist.

Animal and Zoo Magazine, June 1938 (3(1)) contained brief biographies of contributors between June 1937 and June 1938. Here is Renouf’s entry (the editors or printers omitted his initial ‘L’):

With the arrival of the Kitching-Ebling expeditions each summer from the late 1940’s there appear (from the brief summaries of the archived letters between Kitching and Ebling) to have been tensions with Renouf over finances and between Renouf and University College, Cork. It appears that Kitching bought land on the lough for a hut to overcome the problem of paying what he thought were excessive fees to use the facilities provided by Renouf. My impression is that Ebling and Renouf remained on fairly friendly terms, with John Ebling writing Renouf’s obituary for the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Renouf had been elected in 1936).

Whatever, the difficulties Renouf’s efforts at Lough Ine were completely overshadowed, scientifically and organisationally from the early 1950s by the Kitching-Ebling show.

There is no doubt though, that it was Renouf, who was told of Lough Ine and its potential on his arrival in Cork in 1922 who worked under difficult conditions—financial, political and geographical—to get Lough Ine up and running as one of the places for marine biology.

Lough Ine was designated as Europe’s first Marine Nature Reserve in 1981.

Julian Huxley (centre right) at Lough Ine in 1933 (from Kearney*)

* Kearney T. 2011. Lough Hyne. The Marine Researchers - in Pictures. Skibereen Heritage Centre. Obtainable from here.

Ebling FJG. 1969. Louis Percy Renouf BA, Dip Agric (Cantab), DSc (Nat Univ Ireland). MRIA. Yearbook of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1967-68, 54-55.

Wolf Suschitzky, contributor to Animal and Zoo Magazine in the 1930s, has died aged 104

It is difficult to imagine that a photographer whose work appeared in magazines nearly 80 years ago was alive until a few weeks ago. Wolfgang Suschitzky, the famous cinephotographer and photographer, died on 7 October 2016, aged 104.

Eamonn McCabe's photograph of Wolf Suschitzky
used in the Daily Telegraph obituary of 9 October

 I shall have a lot more to write about Animal and Zoo Magazine published as ‘the official magazine of the Zoological Society of London’ by Odhams from 1936 until it was forced to close by wartime newsprint shortage in 1941. It was part of the attempt made by Julian Huxley, the paid secretary of the Society, to bring the Society and the Zoo into the 20th Century.

Suschitzky fled Austria after the nazi takeover and arrived in London in 1935. His website shows how he became involved with photographing animals at London and Whipsnade:

     …Suschitzky took his first photographs of animals before the War, when working on a series of zoo films as an assistant cameraman. The keepers would cut holes into the wire fencing and accompany him into the enclosures. Things did not always go smoothly: “I had to grab the camera and run for it when a kangaroo attacked me at Whipsnade, and I only just made the fence. But on the whole, the kind of animal photography which I do is fairly peaceful work.” 

     The great appeal of these pictures – they were published in magazines, such as Animal and Zoo Magazine or Illustrated, and later as books and series of postcards – is due to the fact that his photographs are animal portraits, rather than zoological specimen pictures showing four legs and a tail.

Suschitzky's front covers

His obituaries state that Suschitzky’s first interest was in zoology but that he forsook it for photography. He achieved great distinction in both cinephotography (including Get Carter, the 1971 classic from which Tyneside struggles to recover from its bleak depiction) and still photography. His photographs, the series along the Charing Cross Road for example, show that he was, like many zoologists, a people watcher.

His animal photographs from the early years in London were exhibited in 1940. He continued to photograph animals and collaborate with Huxley. Their book, The Kingdom of the Beasts, was published in 1956.

An article from Animal and Zoo Magazine
January 1941 illustrated by Suschitzky's
photographs

Gwynne Vevers: Connecting Ailsa Craig, two Ayrshire families, the Bismarck, Ultra secrets, marine biology and London Zoo

Gwynne Vevers in 1981

When I mentioned to Gwynne Vevers at a Zoological Club dinner in 1978 that I was moving to Ayrshire he became very excited. ‘My granny was from Girvan’, he said, ’And I did the first wildlife survey of Ailsa Craig—surprisingly, there are slow-worms there’.

There was much more—very much more—to Gwynne Vevers than met the eye. An urbane, amiable and clubbable man he was from 1955 Curator of the Aquarium at London Zoo. He combined this job with being responsible for scientific meetings and publications at the Zoological Society of London. Although we all knew of his role, for which he was awarded a military MBE, in finding the German pocket battleship Bismarck during its breakout to reach the Atlantic, his more general and sustained activity in British intelligence only really became more common knowledge with the publication in 2004 of a short biography by Adrian Desmond in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

When scanning a batch of Animal and Zoo Magazines, I was surprised and delighted to find a two-page map in the July 1938 issue describing the survey Gwynne had talked about. The text box on the map reads:

Bird Island
Animal map of Ailsa Craig compiled by H.G. Vevers and James Fisher and drawn by Ronald Lampitt1
     Ailsa Craig is a great lump of granite that sticks up in the middle of the Firth of Clyde for more than 1,100 feet. It is only just over twice as broad as high, and is less than 2½ miles round.
     Every spring for the past three years we have visited the island to study its animals. This map is the result of our investigation in early April 1938. Our main task was to count the gannets, and we found that there were 5,387 breeding pairs. Ailsa Craig is one of the largest gannet colonies of the twenty or so in the world.
     As it is possible to walk round the whole of the coast at low tide and to climb the upper slopes, we mapped out many other inhabitants of the rock, though we could not make accurate counts of all.—H.G.V. and J.F.

The centre-page spread in Animal and Zoo Magazine, July 1938

Not only was his grandmother from Girvan, the nearest town on the mainland to Ailsa Craig, but Gwynne was born in Girvan in November 1917. He was, in fact, connected to Ayrshire families on both his mother’s and his father’s sides. His father, Geoffrey Marr Vevers (1890-1970) was the son of Henry Vevers (1822-1901) and Ada Mary Keay (1867-1913). Ada Mary Keay was the daughter of Robert Keay (1839-1904) and Amelia Kerr Milne Marr (1844-1922). Amelia was the brother of Charles Kerr Marr (1855-1919) who bequeathed his fortune made in the coal export business to further the education of the townspeople of Troon. Marr College, now a secondary comprehensive school, in Troon was  one outcome. The other was the C.K. Marr Educational Trust which still provides bursaries and grants for tertiary education and beyond to students resident in Troon nearly 100 years after his death.

But who was the ‘Granny from Girvan’? His father’s first marriage was to Catherine Rigby Andrews of Girvan. I am confused as to the time and place of this marriage. In the Scottish registers it is recorded as 23 November 1915 at St John’s Episcopal Church, Girvan. However, the marriage is also shown in the English registers, this time in Paddington, London, in the fourth quarter of 1914; a civil followed by a religious ceremony perhaps? Catherine Rigby Andrews (1889-1971) was born at Union Bank House, Girvan, the daughter of David Andrews, solicitor and bank agent, who had died shortly before the marriage in Scotland, aged 77. Catherine’s brother, Walter, a Captain in the Indian Army, also died in 1915 in Mesopotamia. Her mother, and Gwynne Vevers’s grandmother, was Catherine Rigby Wason; she died, aged 78, at 10.57 pm on 30 January 1932 at 2 Golf Course, Girvan. There is an additional note that her usual residence was Glenalty, or Glen Alty, a house in Barrhill, a village inland from Girvan, the home of the Andrews family since at least 1901.

Glen Alty, near Girvan

When he started the surveys on Ailsa Craig he was an undergraduate at Oxford; he graduated in 1938, the year of the final survey. However, during this period he also started working for British intelligence. He led undergraduate expeditions to the Faeroes in 1937 and Iceland in 1939. During both he reported to Admiralty intelligence on the German ships which were surveying deep-water channels. As a research student between 1938 and 1940 he began his research at Oxford on the control of coloration and growth of the feathers in Lady Amherst’s Pheasant. Interrupted by the war, he completed the analysis at Plymouth and was awarded the Oxford D.Phil in 1949.

He was, like a number of his Oxford contemporaries, both a field naturalist and a lab worker.

He was commissioned as a probationary Pilot Officer in the Administrative and Special Duties Branch of the Royal Air Force in January 1941. He must have got to work quickly because he organised aerial reconnaissance of the ice floes in the Denmark Strait to plot the deep-water channels. When Bismarck broke out to the Atlantic to attack convoys in May, Gwynne predicted the route she would take. The destruction of H.M.S. Hood in the Denmark Strait, the frantic pursuit as Bismarck made for Brest, her crippling by the Fleet Air Arm and eventual sinking by the big guns of the Royal Navy are embedded in naval history.

The only clue I had of his later work in the war came from his telling me that while in Germany he was not allowed to fly. He knew too much to risk being shot down over enemy-occupied territory. Only with Adrian Desmond’s biography did the reason become clearer: Gwynne was an ‘Ultra’ insider. He, with his boss, another zoologist, Wing Commander Frederick Stratton Russell FRS, handled the air intelligence from Bletchley Park. They assessed the significance of the decrypted messages and distributed the findings to the R.A.F. The obituaries of Gwynne by Solly Zuckerman, nor the Royal Society’s biographical memoir of Russell contain any clue as to their roles in ‘Ultra’.

His gift for languages including all those of Scandinavia, German and Russian (put to great use in the publishing world in later years) must have opened up roles for him in intelligence within Germany as the allies advanced. Desmond notes that near the end of the war he was hunting down Bernhard Rust Reichsminister for Science, Education and National Culture, who committed suicide a few hours before Vevers caught up with him. My guess is that he was more secret service (MI6) than R.A.F. There were rumours on his continuing role in intelligence and Desmond notes…’Vevers's covert intelligence gathering, which was to last for several decades. His roving life as a zoologist proved perfect cover; even as late as 1970 he was being debriefed after a zoological trip to Rangoon’.

At the end of the war, Russell (later Sir Frederick) was appointed Director of the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. He took Gwynne Vevers with him to Plymouth as Bursar. This job seems to have been a mixed scientific/admin post, the latter mainly entailing the care of visiting scientists. In addition to completing his D.Phil thesis on material obtained before the war, he started research in marine biology, particularly on animal pigmentation. He also devised an underwater camera that was used to investigate marine life and the sea floor as well as to search for lost submarines by the U.S. Navy.

In 1955 he was recruited by Leo Harrison Matthews FRS, then scientific director as well as responsible for running both London and Whipsnade zoos, recruited Gwynne to run the aquarium at London and to run the scientific activities of the Zoological Society including its publications. This he did until retirement in 1981. He also kept a close eye on standards in the sadly defunct Fellows’ Restaurant. He tried to keep it in line with the top London restaurants and it was one of the places  in London to meet for lunch. He entertained those of us who were organising symposia for the Society there, and I remember ‘Gip’ (G.P. Wells FRS, son of H.G. on one adjacent table) and David Attenborough being entertained after presenting a Bell Bird, on another.

It was at Plymouth that he began to publish his own popular books beginning with The British Seashore. To these he added translations into English from eight languages on a variety of natural history subjects. In all, around one hundred books appeared for twenty-four publishers. Zuckerman wrote: ‘I never did fathom how Gwynne was able to discharge his duties to the Zoo, and also carry on writing and preparing radio and TV programmes’.

He kept his interest in animal coloration and published The Nature of Animal Colours with his friend Harold Munro Fox (London: Sidgwick & Jackson) in 1960.

A stalwart of the Savile Club he also served the Linnean Society as Zoological Secretary and as Vice-President.

I found it hard to imagine Gwynne, the amiable and urbane inhabitant of Regent’s Park and the Savile, as a field naturalist on Ailsa Craig or the Faeroes in the 1930s, let alone in the 1960s. But there he was, a member of Royal Society expeditions to the Cook and Solomon islands in 1965 and 1969.

Gwynne compartmentalised his life, perhaps an attribute of the perfect spy. Few knew of his succession of four wives (James Fisher, his fellow surveyor of Ailsa Craig, was best man at his first, in 1942) or, as Desmond put it, of ‘other, less formal liaisons’.

His laid back style could be deceptive. At first acquaintance (1968 in my case), he could seem semi-detached from the happenings around him but I soon fond that he missed nothing. His knowledge of the ins and outs of often vicious zoo politics stretched back to the times when his father was superintendent and he had the run of the place as a boy. By the time he retired in 1981 he knew where all the bodies were buried.

Gwynne Vevers died at his home in Bampton, Oxfordshire on 24 July 1988.

So, how did the survey of Ailsa Craig come to appear in Animal and Zoo Magazine in 1938? At that time James Fisher, Vevers’s friend and collaborator on Ailsa Craig, was Assistant Curator at the Zoo, put there by the Secretary, Julian Huxley, as part of his ill-fated attempt to reform the Zoological Society. As part of his job, Fisher was contributing articles, and the work on Ailsa Craig was a natural subject for the magazine.

Ailsa Craig from Culzean, 14 miles (22 km) away

These are Gwynne Vevers’s papers on Ailsa Craig:

Vevers HG. 1936. The land vegetation of Ailsa Craig. Journal of Ecology, 24, 424-445.
Vevers HG, Fisher J. 1936. A census of gannets on Ailsa Craig, with a new method of estimating breeding-cliff populations. Journal of Animal Ecology 5, 246-251.
Vevers HG, Fisher J., Hartley CH, Best AT. 1937. The 1937 Census of gannets on Ailsa Craig; with notes on their diurnal activity. Journal of Animal Ecology 6, 362-365.
Vevers HG, Fisher J. 1938. The 1938 census of gannets (Sula bassana) on Ailsa Craig. Journal of Animal Ecology 7, 303-304.
Fisher J, Vevers HG. 1943. The breeding distribution, history and population of the North Atlantic Gannet. Journal of Animal Ecology 12, 175-213.
Fisher J, Vevers HG. 1944. The breeding distribution, history and population of the North Atlantic Gannet Sula bassana. Journal of Animal Ecology 13:49–62.
Vevers HG. 1948. The natural history of Ailsa Craig. The New Naturalist. A Journal of British Natural History 1, 115-121.

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1Ronald George Lampitt (1906-1988) was a professional artist who worked for a number of magazines, illustrated many books and designed posters for railway companies.