A Press Cutting from 1932: Burgess Barnett, Lord Moyne and Galapagos Marine Iguanas at London Zoo

 

This photograph I came across connects three topics I have written about before:

1. Dr Burgess Barnett shortly after taking over as Curator of Reptiles at London Zoo. I have found it difficult to find photographs of him and I will add this to the article on his life and works. The article here on Barnett, incidentally, is one of the most popular on this site.
2. Lord Moyne (Walter Edward Guinness, 1880-1944) back from an earlier expedition cruise than the one in 1934-35 in which he brought back Komodo dragons. That trip was well documented but the earlier one was not. Article can be found here.
3. Galapagos Marine Iguanas. Four collected by the Moyne Expedition being handed over to London Zoo. Article on Marine Iguanas in captivity here.

I have been unable to find find the name of the yacht Moyne used in 1932 since he seemed to have owned two at the time, both were converted passenger vehicles. My guess it was the MY Roussalka since she had tanks fitted during conversion to hold sufficient diesel fuel to cross the Pacific. Many of Moyne’s records were lost when the vessel sank after striking a rock in Killary Bay, Ireland, in 1933. That may account for the lack of information. All the passengers and crew, including Moyne, escaped.

Four Marine Iguanas were brought back by Moyne. A discussion on the ZooChat forum some time ago, notes that they were mentioned in the 1933 Zoo Guide with the statement that seaweed was brought up from Cornwall to feed them. One only was noted in 1934 and all mention had disappeared by 1935. So far I have found no description of how the Marine Iguanas were kept at the Zoo. Clearly, they did not do well, as was the case with many reptiles until the last thirty years or so.

Moyne also brought a Flightless Cormorant (Phalacrocorax or Nannopterum harrisi) and five Galapagos Doves (Zenaida galapagoensis). David Seth-Smith wrote of their arrival, the first in Britain in the case of the cormorant, in Avicultural Magazine. He provides no further information though on the expedition itself. We can though deduce that Moyne visited the west coast of Isabela (Albemarle) and/or Fernandina (Narborough) since that is the only place in the Galapagos the endemic Flightless Cormorant can be found.

Finally, a few observations in the photograph. I have not been able to identify the publication. It was obviously taken in the public area of the Reptile House—the barriers remain unchanged today. It would appear though that the fronts of some of cages were of wire mesh and not glass. The photograph has an odd appearance and only after looking at it for some time did I realise that Moyne’s hands and arms seem out of place. His right hand is grasping the lizard’s tail but the one shown apparently as the left hand seems to be coming out of thin air. Has there been some heavy retouching, or even the merging of two negatives?

Dorothy Sladden (1907-1937): Ernest W. MacBride, Evolution and Eugenics. Part 4. At London Zoo

We know from the council minutes of the Zoological Society that when she died, Dorothy Sladden was working on Proteus anguinus, the cave-dwelling Olm. She must have been trying to see if she could repeat Kammerer’s experiments in which he claimed eyes developed when they were kept under alternating red light and daylight, or, possibly, at  the colour changes when they are kept in the light. Indeed this is what Zoo magazine (later Animal and Zoo Magazine) reported in December 1936 (Volume 1, No. 7, p34):

They Hate the Light
     Six odd little amphibians which never metamorphose into adult air-breathing animals are the most recent arrivals at the Aquarium. They are olms or Proteus, and they live in the perpetual darkness of underground caves and romantic stalactite grottos in Dalmatia and neighbouring countries.
     They are between eight and ten inches long and are quite white and blind, with branching gills which are coloured blood-red. They eat chopped earthworms.
     When exposed to the light they gradually change colour, becoming quite dark. If they are placed in direct sunlight they turn jet black.
     Experiments at the Zoo have shown that they resent the light and become active when it shines upon them, trying to seek a dark corner to escape from it. But a curious fact is that there is a definite time lag of four or five seconds between the first turning on of the light and the beginning of their activity.

Embed from Getty Images


E.W. MacBride had retired in 1934, presumably at the end of the year when he reached 65. He was still active on the Zoo council and must have played a part in obtaining a grant from the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR*) to support her work. It is also clear that she was continuing her work on stick insects up to the time of her death in June 1937, presumably at Imperial College. My estimate is that she moved to the Zoo (where, MacBride reported, she worked in the aquarium) sometime in 1935 since her observations on breeding Angel Fish were made in June1936.

The Zoo aquarium must have been an interesting place. The curator was Edward George Boulenger (1888-1946); he and his father George Albert Boulenger FRS (1858-1937) had examined aspects of Kammerer’s claims and were known not to believe them. E.G. had shown that Kammerer’s salamanders with different colour patterns, which were said to be the result of being kept on substrates of different colour, were more likely to be from different geographical races. So we have Boulenger, clearly not a convinced Lamarckian, an employee at the Zoo, Julian Huxley (not quite then but soon-and-desperate-to-be FRS), as Secretary, and a Darwinian, another employee but as chief executive, at the Zoo and we have Ernest MacBride FRS, arch-Lamarckist and Kammerer’s vicar on earth, a powerful figure on the Zoo Council. In the middle somewhere was Dorothy Sladden.

Angel Fish (from Wikipedia)

From her brief time at the Zoo Dorothy Sladden wrote one scientific paper, The breeding habits of the Angel Fish, Pterophyllum scalare, published in Proceedings of the Zoological Society  (A107, 187-189) published shortly after her death in 1937. She also started to write for the weekly magazine Water Life, first published in 1936. The articles appeared between April and June 1937 and can be seen in full here. Her first article was a reprise of her paper on breeding Angel Fish. It began:

Although the Angel Fish (Pterophyllum scalare) is bred in large quantities un Germany, so far little success has attended the efforts of the experts in this country. In view of this fact, the following notes on the conditions under which these fish were bred at the London Zoo may be of some interest.

Her next article, A Fantastic Toad at the Zoo, described the Escuerzo (Ceratophrys cornuta) given to the Zoo by a Mr J.J. Morris. Then she described British Adders at the Zoo:

The first warm days of spring see the re-stocking of the the Zoo’s outdoor reptiliary. Apart from the hardier species of reptiles imported from Southern Europe and obtained from a dealer, the Zoo relies on the efforts of the snake catcher of the New Forest, who annually catches several hundreds of British adders (Vipera berus) for the Society. Mr George Wateridge, successor to the New Forest’s former snake catcher, the well-known Brush Mills, has already sent thirty Adders to the Zoo…

Finally, she drew attention to A “New” Disease in Tortoises:

Among the many enquiries from pet keepers which have reached the Zoo’s Reptile House recently a large proportion deal with a very infectious disease among Tortoises which leads to blindness. The disease was first noticed in this country in 1935, among some newly imported Greek Tortoises.

I started this story because I came across her name while looking into Burgess Barnett’s departure from the Zoo in 1937. Therefore, while copying the articles she wrote in Water Life, it was fascinating to find that two photographs used to illustrate the articles, both shown here, were taken by Joan Barnett. This must be Burgess Barnett’s daughter, Joan, born in 1917, and then aged 20. My story had come full circle.

That article from the issue of 1 June 1937 was followed in the issue of 29 June by the announcement of her death as the result of a road accident. She had died two days before the date of issue of the magazine. The editor, Margery Elwin, must have been informed very quickly to get the news into print that quickly. Did she know Dorothy Sladden well? They were both about the same age, born in 1907 and 1908, both zoology graduates and both keen animal keepers with connexions to the aquarium at the Zoo. The reason I wonder is that Margery Elwin was, in her articles, sympathetic to Lamarckism but her membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the espousal of Lysenko in the years after the War is, perhaps, another explanation.

I have been unable to find any further information on Dorothy Sladden’s fatal accident. There must have been a report on the inquest into her death in a local newspaper but progress at scanning is now being done at such a very slow rate by British Newspaper Archive that I suspect it will be some time until I can find out what happened.

We also do not know whether Dorothy Sladden was a follower of MacBride or, like so many at Imperial College, even those involved with the work itself, openly or quietly dismissive of his attachment to Lamarck and Kammerer.

Finally, a plea for more information. I have been unable to find a photograph of Dorothy Sladden; if anybody has one or can point me in the direction of where I might find one I would be most grateful. I have found her mother and father (but not her) on a public family tree which covers her maternal line. I shall contact the owner, with these posts now complete, to see if there are any surviving cousins who might know more of her history.

As I said at the beginning of Part 1, this is a sad story. I hope I have done her justice in describing her contributions to the debate on how evolution happens that was raging in the early decades of the 20th Century, and have drawn attention to her skills as a zoologist who actually knew a lot about animals, real live animals.

This is her full bibliography (including the articles described above):

Dorothy Ena Sladden

1907-1937

Sladden, D.E. 1930. Experimental distortion of development in amphibian tadpoles. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 106, 318-325

Sladden, D.E. 1932. Experimental distortion of development in amphibian tadpoles. Part II. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 112, 1-12

Sladden, D.E. 1934. Transference of induced food-habit from parent to offspring. Part I. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 114, 441-449

Sladden, D.E. 1935. Transference of induced food-habit from parent to offspring -II. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 119, 31-46

Sladden, D.E. & Hewer, H.R.1938. Transference of induced food-habit from parent to offspring. III. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 126, 30-40

Sladden, D.E. 1937. Angel fish bred at the zoo. Water Life  (13 April 1937) 2, 172

Sladden, D.E. 1937. A fantastic toad at the zoo. Water Life (4 May 1937) 2, 211

Sladden, D.E. 1937. British adders at the zoo. Water Life (11 May 1937) 2, 217

Sladden, D.E. 1937. A “new” disease in tortoises. Water Life (1 June 1937) 2, 269.

Sladden, D.E. 1937. The breeding habits of the Angel Fish, Pterophyllum scalare. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London  A107, 187-189

----------------------------------

*DSIR was abolished in 1965, its major function of supporting research in UK being taken over by the Science Research Council (SRC) under the Science and Technology Act. I applied to DSIR in 1965 and my grant to go to Hong Kong came from SRC.

UPDATED: 16 June 2019

Dr Burgess Barnett and his departure as Curator of Reptiles at London Zoo

This post is the latest in the series on Burgess Barnett (29 January 2014, 30 June 2015).

In London for a day I found time to spend a couple of hours in the Zoo library to see if I could find more information on the departure of Burgess Barnett as Curator of Reptiles in 1937. The minutes of the council of the society provided the information but did not, of course, shed much light on the background to the decisions or reveal in any detail the battles that must have been going on between individuals and factions. Minutes are often an unreliable source because they were and still are so frequently massaged to veil the true picture or the reason for a difficult decision. Even when a minute is challenged by those who were present at a meeting, the tone is always biased towards those in control. It is as well to remember a key commandment of the civil servant: he who controls the agenda and the minutes has his hands on the levers of power*.

Barnett, like so many people before and since, must have been extremely upset about his treatment and his case must have contributed to the notoriety the Society gained over many decades as an unhappy place for officers and officials.

In terms of Council meetings, the Burgess Barnett affair lasted from December 1936 until March 1938. On 16 December 1936 Council endorsed a recommendation of the Garden Committee (i.e. the one responsible for the Zoological Garden or London Zoo) that: there should be two curators only; E.G. Boulenger, should be both Director of the Aquarium (his current post) and Curator of Reptiles (i.e. taking over Barnett’s job in addition to his own; before being Director of the Aquarium he had though been Curator of Reptiles); Burgess Barnett should be an Honorary Research Fellow, subject to annual reappointment.

It would probably be worthwhile reading the minutes of the Garden Committee to see if more can be gleaned about the background. However, knowing that Julian Huxley had been appointed Secretary in 1935, one can see a pattern emerging that led to Huxley’s dismissal in 1942. The question I would ask at this stage, when I suspect the answer is ‘yes’, is: was Huxley changing the management of the zoo in order to free resources for his own ‘popularisation’ as well as more ‘scientific’ foci (the two are not mutually exclusive) for the future of the society? At this time, as Joe Cain points out in his analysis of Huxley’s activities at the Zoo, he appointed two assistant curators (one of whom was James Fisher) but that these two  were not used as curatorial assistants in the Zoo itself but were employed by Huxley to further his various projects to make the Zoo a centre for ‘modern’ biology.

I should point out that the Secretary was the paid chief executive of the Society, akin to the secretary of a golf club or a permanent secretary in the civil service. It is also interesting to note that Huxley was a candidate for election to the Royal Society during 1937 and that he was elected in 1938, a distinction he was apparently more than eager to secure. Council meetings with the non-scientific menagerists like Albert Pam on one side and the comparative anatomist FRSs of the old but still politically powerful school of zoology (including two Lamarckists) on the other, with the ‘modern biology’ grandson of Darwin’s Bulldog as Secretary must have been amusing for a fly on the wall.

Barnett though had an academic champion on Council willing to fight his corner. On 21 April 1937, Professor E.W. MacBride FRS argued that Barnett should be employed in some capacity as adviser on the health of reptiles and amphibians.

There had clearly been moves behind the scenes, as well as a hostile Annual General Meeting of Fellows, because on 19 May 1937, it was agreed that there should be no part-time Curator of Reptiles (clearly a role MacBride had intended for Barnett) and Council confirmed that Boulenger would hold the two posts (but without an increase in pay).

Professor James P. Hill FRS then asked what Barnett should be paid for his duties as anatomist (he was obviously doing some prosectorial/pathological work** on the dead animals from the zoo which were never at this time in short supply) and where did all this fit in with his work on snake venoms (see my post of 29 January 2014)? In response, a sub-committee of Council was set up. It comprised: Professor James P. Hill FRS (Chair), Professor W. Le Gros Clark FRS, Richard H. Burne FRS, Martin A.C. Hinton FRS, Professor E.W. MacBride FRS.

The Sub-Committee

James Peter Hill (1873-1954, elected FRS 1913) was Jodrell Professor of Zoology, University College, London 1906-1921 and then Professor of Embryology and Histology in the Department of Anatomy until 1938. He was well-known for his discoveries in the reproductive biology and embryology of monotremes and marsupials while working in Australia and later for his work on placentation and primate embryology.

Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark (1895-1971, elected FRS 1935) was then Professor of Anatomy at Oxford, remaining so until his retirement in 1962. After service in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War, he was, for three years, Principal Medical Officer for Sarawak where he collected tarsiers and tree-shrews for study. He went to Oxford after being appointed first to the anatomy department at St Bartholomew’s Hospital medical school and then to St Thomas’s. Comparative anatomy of primates, tracing neural connections within the brain that would today fall within the ambit of neuroscience, and the phylogeny of primates, particularly, in later years of the ancestry of Man, were his main areas of interest. Zuckerman wrote a Biographical Memoir for the Royal Society which contained a devastating criticism of his views on orthogenesis and on the hominid line of evolution. He was one of the authors of the paper that exposed the Piltdown hoax.

Richard Higgins Burne (1868-1953, elected FRS 1927) was Physiological Curator at the Royal College of Surgeons  from 1912 until 1934; thereafter he worked as a volunteer at the Natural History Museum on cetaceans. He was a wide-ranging comparative anatomist working on, for example, the lamellibranchs collected during Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to the antarctic, fishes and mammals, including animals that died at the Zoo such as rhinoceroses and okapis.

Martin Alister Campbell Hinton (1883-1961, elected FRS 1934) had no formal qualifications or university degree. Starting out as a clerk in barristers’ chambers, he made use of legal hours (short) and vacations (very long—3½ months a year) to pursue his interests in palaeontology. in 1910 he was given the status of Voluntary Worker at the Natural History Museum. He was taken on to the staff of the Museum in 1921, raising to become Keeper of Zoology in 1936; he retired in 1945. A late Lamarckist, he worked on the taxonomy (he was a ‘lumper’) and evolution of rodents and whales; he was also involved in work on rodents as pests. Intriguingly, he has been implicated by some in the Piltdown hoax, most often as a secondary hoaxer.

Ernest William MacBride (1866-1940, elected FRS 1905) was Professor of Zoology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada from 1897 until 1909. In 1914 he was appointed to T.H. Huxley’s old chair of zoology at Imperial College, London; he retired in 1934. Noted for his work on showing how the bilateral symmetry of larval echinoderms turns into the radial symmetry of adults, he was another of the last Lamarckists and a supporter of Paul Kammerer. One might say he was not exactly from the same stable as Julian Huxley.

The Sub-Committee Reports

The next meeting of Council (16 June 1937) received the report that Barnett had been bitten by a venomous snake (see my post of 29 January 2014). He was described as Curator of Reptiles. However, there is a hand correction with a note to the effect that at the time he was bitten he was not Curator of Reptiles. Council also received the report of the sub-committee which recommended that Barnett should be retained for one month on research duties. The question was raised whether he would need a Home Officer licence under the 1876 Act for experiments on animals. It was decided that Barnett should be employed until 30 September 1937 (i.e. for just over three months) at a salary of £600 per annum (Boulenger was on the same pay) to continue his work on snake venom as a potential treatment for epilepsy and that the work should be directed by a sub-committee of the Prosectorial Committee comprising Hill, Burne, Le Gros Clark, E.A Carmichael and the Secretary (Huxley).

E.A. Carmichael

On this sub-committee Hinton and MacBride were no longer involved but E.A Carmichael was. Edward Arnold Carmichael (1896-1978) was Director of the Medical Research Council’s Neurological Research Unit from 1932 until he retired in 1961. He has become famous in recent years on websites for his 1933 paper with H.W. Woollard on referred pain. It was then normal practice for physiologists and physiology students to be the subject of their own experiments whenever possible. Woollard and Carmichael certainly lived up to that ethic and suffered severe pain in the process. They piled weights onto one or the other testis in order to record the degree and location of the pain. One example will suffice here: 650 grm…Severe testicular pain on the right side.

In the minutes there is a curious reference to Barnett’s ‘practice’ as in medical practice. Barnett, Huxley said, regarded his practice as a natural extension of his research. I do not know if he had any sort of conventional medical practice while employed at the Zoo or what premises he was using for these clinical trials of snake venom on epilepsy, other than those he published in collaboration with Macfarlane on blood clotting.

Claims that snake venom could be used to cure epilepsy were not new and Barnett was helping to examine the basis of some of these earlier claims. I wonder if members of the sub-committee were keen to close Barnett’s work down in the light of a report by Isidore Finkelman that appeared in the March 1937 issue of Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine (22, 572-575) entitled, Snake venom (moccasin) in the treatment of epilepsy. The findings were stark: It is concluded that venom therapy not only does not induce a refractory state to convulsive seizures in institutional epileptics but may render them more susceptible to seizures.

On 15 September, Council decided in discussing Barnett’s position that ‘no paid official of the Society should hold a licence for experiments on living animals’ thereby effectively disbarring him from any employment by the Society if he continued in his research. One cannot help wondering if this hardening was a deliberate attempt to get rid of Barnett once and for all rather than as further appeasement of the periodically vociferous anti-vivisection lobby. Joe Cain discussed the attitude of the Society in this regard in his paper on Huxley^†. Although Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell FRS, the Secretary before Huxley, had banned animal experiments on the premises and from the Society’s scientific publications, ZSL employees simply undertook the necessary research elsewhere. This hardening of apparent appeasement by Huxley (who gave up his Home Office licence on appointment to the Zoo) I find difficult to interpret other than as a measure to ensure that Barnett was sent on his way.

At this meeting Council went further:

After the discussion of the proposals of Major [Albert] Pam and Mr Burne, it was agreed that Dr Barnett should receive a special payment of £600^‡ and that he should then cease to have any official connection with the Society.

Done and dusted? Not quite

At the meeting on 20 October, the decision reached on 15 September was confirmed. However, MacBride had it minuted that in his view Dr Burgess Barnett should be re-instated as Curator of Reptiles. On 17 December 1937 MacBride attempted to re-open the case but was told by the President (Lord Onslow) that Standing Orders decreed MacBride must get support for the issue to be included as a main item on the agenda of a subsequent meeting.

MacBride did get the item on the Agenda for the meeting on 15 December and he proposed a motion to reinstate Barnett as Curator of Reptiles. The scientists on Council were split and MacBride was opposed by Le Gros Clark, amongst others, and including the Secretary (Huxley). However, management of the agenda by the official, presumably Huxley, who drew it up is clear. MacBride’s motion was low on the list; Council was running late for their lunch or tea; further discussion and a vote was put off until the next meeting. MacBride had been outmanoeuvred but did manage to insist that for the meeting in March, the item should appear early in the agenda. Relatively highly it appeared in the agenda for the meeting of 16 March 1938. However, MacBride withdrew his motion because in the meantime Barnett had been appointed Superintendent of Rangoon Zoo. Barnett was finished at the Zoo.

Barnett was only in post as Curator of Reptiles for just over four years. The new high-profile, Joan Procter-designed Reptile House by the end of 1936 had no dedicated curator. In fact had the Garden Committee recommendation been enacted in full, the zoo per se would have had just three senior staff: Geoffrey Marr Vevers as Superintendent; David Seth-Smith as Resident Curator of Mammals and Birds; Edward G Boulenger as Director of the Aquarium and Curator of Reptiles. The decision to dismiss L.C. Bushby was reversed so that the post of Curator of Insects was retained. Many questions remain, the role of Dr Geoffrey Marr Vevers, Superintendent, in the deliberations on the management structure of the Zoo, for example.

After his departure, as I showed in my post of 30 June 1025, Burgess Barnett remained on good terms with the Zoo, providing an article on his exploits in South America for the then house publication, Animal and Zoo Magazine (one of Huxley’s initiatives in popularisation), and sending specimens from Burma in 1939. Seth-Smith referred to him warmly as ‘our old friend’ in reporting the arrival of the tortoises in the October 1939 issue of the magazine.

*P. Kellner & Crowther-Hunt, N. Civil Servants. 1980. London: Macdonald.

†Cain, J. 2010. Julian Huxley, General Biology and the London Zoo, 1935-42. Notes and Records of the Royal Society doi:10.1098/rsnr.2010.0067

‡£600 was a year’s salary for a Curator. In present terms it is worth between £57,000 and £116,000; for former if calculated by the change in retail prices; the latter if calculated by the increase in pay. Advertisements in The Times for university positions offer some basis of comparison. In 1937, an Assistant Lectureship in Zoology at University College London paid £250-300; A lecturer at Aberdeen University warranted £400; a Readership in Bacteriology at the Postgraduate Medical School paid £800. I seem to remember being told that Curators at the Zoo were for a long period paid at about the same rate as a Senior Lecturer in a university and the £600 Boulenger and Barnett were paid is at that level.

**Note added 23 March 2018. A Research Fellowhsip for prosectorial work was held by Barnett from 1933 until 1937 (Cave AJR. 1976. The Zoological Society of London 1826-1976 and Beyond. Ed. Zuckerman S. Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 40, 49-66). It is not clear if these additional duties to his Curator of Reptiles post were paid.

Burgess Barnett (1888-1944) in Peru: A Magazine Account

The account I wrote of Dr Burgess Barnett (1888-1944) on 29 January 2014 created a great deal of interest. Those who read it will recall that he spent over ten years up to 1932 working as a medical practitioner for Lobitos Oilfields Ltd, a British company in Peru.

I found the following article by him, describing one of his expeditions from Lobitos, in the March 1939 issue of Animal and Zoo Magazine. For ease of reading, I have used OCR software to extract the text.

The Fox who Rode on a Mule

by Dr Burgess Barnett

Curator of the Rangoon Zoo

The hero of this story is Santiago el Zorro, and, as he cannot read even his own language, I am fairly safe in not altering his name for publication. Santi the Fox, as we will call him, is a Cholo; that is to say he is a Spanish-Indian half-breed with his home between the Andes of North'Peru and the Pacific Ocean.

  When I knew him he earned his bread, with sufficient left over for a rather indeterminate family, as a labourer on an oil well. But the butter to sweeten the bread was come by-through his remarkable knowledge of the wild life around him.

  I used to go to him if I wanted some unusual animal to send to the London Zoo and, were it beast, bird or reptile, he could infallibly lead me to it. If another cholo were ill and had no faith in new-fangled hospital treatment, he would disappear for a day or so and return to sell him whatever remedy native lore prescribed as appropriate. It might be a rare cactus from over the mountains to be made into a lotion for erysipelas, or the bitter roots of a plant like our garden zinnias, to stew into a potion for malaria. More often it would be the " in'ards " of some animal, maybe a grey fox or a skunk, for no one knew better than Santi how to obtain unorthodox "medicines" from the pampa.

I have heard it said of him that Santi was an indifferent workman and a worse husband and father, but I can make excuses for him. His spiritual home, so to speak, was not in his little clap-board house with its earthen floor and packing case furniture. Here he was wont to sit of an evening gossiping and ultimately hiccoughing over home-brewed chicha. The part of him I admired reached its highest development out of doors, during week ends. Then, as soon as he knocked off work, he would take his rifle and his burro—his two most valued possessions—and ride all through the night to the Amotape Mountains, where the country is green. As often as not he would be treasuring only a single cartridge—the limit of his purse. The early hours of Monday morning would see him home again, dirty and bleary-eyed, but happy, with a brocket deer slung over the withers of his little steed.

One day, when a little bother with the police had deprived him of the wherewithal to buy even one cartridge, he came shamefacedly on to my veranda to beg one. Instead of complying, I suggested that I should "make it all right" with his employers and that we should wander off together for a full week in the wild. The old ruffian's weathered face crinkled into a beam of delight and in a few minutes it was arranged.

Santi on his little donkey, and I on a tall, raw-boned mule might have suggested Sancho Panza and Don Quixote as we rode off side by side on our adventure. First we followed a well-worn donkey track across the near-desert, which, a few years ago, had been subjected to heavy rains. The trail was marked by a lane of gaunt, dead algorrobo seedlings which had sprung up from the dung of passing donkeys when the ground had been moist.

In the valleys and gullies there is usually a little vegetation, a few scattered plants with thick, juicy leaves and woody stems, which seem to thrive on the dew which is their only-moisture. It is here that animal life really begins. Beetles with black, ribbed elytra, sand-coloured scorpions, goggle-eyed geckos and two or three other kinds of lizards are the most obvious inhabitants. And there are many others less easily discovered. Wherever there is an inch or so of space between the powdery sand and an overhanging boulder one finds the footprints of mice. The tiny spoor is never seen in the open, and I soon had proof that the mice have to keep to sheltered runs because of the multitude of foxes.

We set "catch-'em-alive" mouse traps in these situations and scarcely a trap was unsprung by morning; but the wood and wire of the traps were usually crunched to pieces by foxes and the mice eaten. In parenthesis, I can recommend a bait of rolled oats and cheese, fried to a stiff paste with bacon fat, with a pinch of salycilic acid to preserve it. It is irresistible to nearly every rodent.

Soon we discovered that there were two species of mice. One was the leaf-eared mouse, with relatively large, conch-like ears, which one imagines must be important to it for picking up the distant padding of foxes, Later, I sent one to the Zoo, the first to be seen there, and it lived in the Rodent House for many years. The other species proved to be new to science—a bigger animal, with the longest tail I ever remember seeing on any mouse. Now, I am afraid, it is lost again to science. The year after some skins and skulls reached the National Museum, a torrent rushed through the only gorge I knew the mice to occupy and swept it bare of every living thing.

By day culebras de sol—sand-coloured, fang-less snakes—are continuously taking toll, and even before sundown owls take up vantage points on hillocks, scanning the ground below for movement. One seriously poisonous snake is found there, as I discovered very nearly to my cost. Thrusting my arm up to the elbow into what I thought was a lizard's hole, I drew out a desert fer-de-lance, which was lying in it —happily head inwards!

Though the proof may not be sufficient for anyone else, that snake convinced me that snakes are not immune to their own venom. Hoping to get it home to the Zoo, I put it, quite uninjured, into a cotton bag which I placed in my saddle-bag. Barely an hour later, when we had made camp for the night, it was stone dead, with its long fangs buried in its own body. Since then, at the Zoo, there has been proof that king cobras can kill each other with their venom, but this is the only case I know of what looks like a reptilian suicide.

Beyond the coastal zone, we climbed to a tableland, a height of some 800 feet, where although the ground is just as dry, a different flora and fauna exist. It is a country of tree cactuses, of a red-barked shrub called palo santo, which yields a sweet, incense-like resin, and of a deciduous tree which feeds a remarkable processional caterpillar.

Santi was full of native beliefs concerning this tree, which he called guattaco. Should its flowers open before the leaf-buds burst, one prophecies that rare phenomenon which, tradition has it, occurs but once in thirty years— rain! When the blossoms colour the bare branches, the natives rush to cover the still thirsty soil with little pits, in each of which they sow a few seeds of maize or water-melons in the hopes of a catch-crop. Or they even plant cotton, and it is recorded that after one deluge they gathered a harvest of cotton for three successive years.

He told me, too, on no account to sleep under a guattaco tree. All the world knew, he said, that the leaves exuded "poisonous airs" which produce boils and blotches on the skin of unwary travellers. Soon afterwards I unwittingly discovered the origin of the belief. Nearly every leaf was acrawl with the processional caterpillars mentioned above. Roughly speaking, they were "woolly bears," and as I was stowing some of them into chip boxes, I realized that the "poisonous airs" were really "poisonous hairs." When a leaf was shaken myriads of little hairs floated away to settle on exposed parts of the skin, where they set up an intensely irritating rash.

We began to cross the tableland on a sweltering afternoon. A carrion hawk rose with a snake in its talons giving vent to a mournful call, "Wah-O, Wah-O.” Santi named it a guarguao. Presently we started a pair of stone curlews, which ran away ahead of us uttering their sharp, staccato cry of alarm, "Keh, keh, keh."

The two native names are pronounced, roughly, warra-wah-o and ivarra-keh-keh. He could not suggest their derivations, but I guessed at some long dead, pre-Inca language in which warra meant a bird, with onomatopoetic suffixes to specify the species.

Two other birds of the district are worth mentioning, for though I failed to get either of them home to the Zoo, they both exhibit habits  worth recording.

Firstly there is a flycatcher of which the male is bright scarlet and black, answering very nearly to the description Darwin gives of a flycatcher on the Galapagos Islands. The nest is built in situations similar to those chosen by chaffinches in England.

The other bird is not unlike a wren and it is known locally by the Spanish name for a nightingale. When I made to explore its nest, Santi called to me to take care not to be stung. He explained that the ruisehores frequently built their nests within a yard or so of new wasps' nests, which hang from the branches like inverted umbrellas. By the time the young birds are hatched, he said, the wasp grubs are of a size to feed them, so that the parents have a regular supply of insect food to hand. Although I cannot claim to have seen the wasp grubs being filched, it is certain that the birds' and wasps' nests are usually to be found close together.

Our week in the wilds finished beyond the tableland in the Amotape Mountains. And on the last day we had a misunderstanding. I mouched away on foot after breakfast, with a camera and a rifle and let Santi go off on his own after deer, arranging that we should meet again at sunset. The shadows of the cactus trees had spread long over the mountain slopes when I returned to within a mile of camp and I had nothing to show for a tiring day except a roll of exposed films.

Suddenly, as I topped a rise I came upon three deer, a fine buck with two does, in a perfect situation for a shot. Thinking, I am afraid, less of our dinner than of displaying my prowess to the experienced old hunter, I promptly dropped the buck. But quickly as an echo a second shot rang and a doe fell. Santi sorrowfully emerged from the bosque and hoisted his quarry on to his shoulders, unutterable reproach in his attitude.

"Too soon, senor," was all he said. He was driving them towards our camp before shooting them to save himself the labour of carrying them there.

I see that the Amotape mountains are now a National Park—the Amotape Hills National Park—set up to protect an area of dry equatorial forest.

In addition, in the October 1939 issue (the first after the start of World War II) of the same magazine, David Seth-Smith in the New from the Zoos section, reported:

Our old friend, Dr. Burgess Barnett, who was formerly curator of reptiles at the London Zoo, and is now in charge of the Rangoon Zoo, has sent us some Burmese tortoises.

Burgess Barnett. Curator of Reptiles, London Zoo 1932-37. UPDATE

For my post on Burgess Barnett of 29 January 2014 I could not find a photograph of him. By chance I found one while looking through copies of Animal & Zoo Magazine (earlier Zoo & Animal Magazine) from the late 1930s. I have amended the original post. Here is the photograph from the July 1938 issue (volume 3, no 2):

Burgess Barnett. Curator of Reptiles, London Zoo 1932-37. Herpetologist, Medical Man and War Hero

Very few books on reptiles and amphibians, let alone keeping reptiles and amphibians, were published during the middle decades of the 20th century. Even when they were published they were in print for only a short time and soon disappeared from booksellers’ shelves. One day in the late 1950s I found Hardy Reptiles and Amphibians by L.G. Payne in a bookshop. It was undated but marked as the second edition. It was clearly from the early 1950s because it had a full-page advertisement on the back (paper) cover for Robert Jackson (Naturalists) Ltd at an old address. The advertisement contained the statement, We are at present importing on Board of Trade permit for resale to zoos, schools etc, but have many species, native, and bred in captivity, for sale in the open market. In other words, postwar austerity was at its height when this version of the booklet was published and the £ sterling was being protected.

Inside the front cover was an advertisement for The Terrarium, a book by Dr Burgess Barnett (Curator of Reptiles, London Zoological Gardens). I never managed to find a copy and only later did I learn that Burgess Barnett had left London Zoo in 1938 for Rangoon, so whatever its content, it was 20 years out of date when I began my interest in reptiles and amphibians. Indeed, only recently have I acquired a copy.

These old books are interesting because they show how knowledge of keeping reptiles and amphibians has advanced and at what level such knowledge was at a particular time in history. However, I was also intrigued by who Burgess Barnett was and what happened to him. As I began my recent search for information, a new book appeared which threw light on his heroic role in the escape from the advancing Japanese army through Burma in 1942. But that is jumping the gun. I shall start by describing what I have found out about his earlier life.

Burgess Barnett was born in 1888 in Camberwell, London. He was christened at St Giles, Camberwell on 10 October 1888. His parents were Horatio Frederick Barnett, a solicitor, and Isabella Jane Parker who had married at Camberwell in 1882. Horatio Frederick (a widower) and his son by a previous marriage were lodging with his future in-laws and wife at Camberwell at the time of the 1881 census.

At the 1891 census, the family of Horatio, Isabella and Burgess were living at Rydal House, The Elms, Ramsgate in Kent. Horatio was 59, Isabella 44 and Burgess 2. Both parents died in 1898 and by 1901 he was living as the adopted son at Maisey Hampton in Gloucestershire of John Lane Burgess, aged 44 and  Elizabeth Ann, aged 45. John’s mother, aged 87, a companion and a servant are also listed in the census. It surely cannot be a coincidence that the surname of those who adopted him and his own christian name were the same. Were they related or old friends of the family?

In the 1911 census he is shown as a medical student, a visitor in the house of Thomas Granville Hockridge, a general medical practitioner, of 26 Lloyd Square, London W.C. A son of the house, Hugh Granville Hockridge, was also a medical student.

His obituary in British Medical Journal (8 July 1944) shows that he was educated at Marlborough and then at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School. He qualified with the old ‘conjoint’ medical qualification, LRCP MRCS, of the royal colleges in 1915. His obituary states that he served as a house-physician at Bart’s. He was commissioned as a temporary (i.e. wartime) lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps on 12 February 1915. He was promoted temporary captain on 20 January 1918 and served until 17 August 1919.

He married in 1915, at St George’s, Hanover Square in London, Gladys. Gladys’s maiden name was also Barnett and my best estimate from the census and index of births, marriages and deaths is that she was his cousin.

Peru

We next find Barnett as a medical man working for Lobitos Oilfields Ltd, a British company, in Peru, from at least as early as 1920 until 1932. Lobitos had a refinery in Ellesmere Port and eventually became part of Burmah Oil and then BP. Searches in genealogical sites show him leaving Liverpool on 25 August on the SS Ortega (famous for escaping the German Cruiser Dresden in 1914) for Peru with his wife and two children. They can be found returning to Liverpool on 14 April 1924 on the SS Oroya with the address shown as ‘Clydesdale’, Laton Road, Hastings, by then the home of his step-father, John Lane Burgess. They returned to Peru, sailing from Swansea on the SS Lautaro on 20 August 1924, taking with them a nurse, Doris Hopkins.

They arrived back in Britain (Plymouth or Liverpool) on the Oroya in May 1928. By this time the family comprised Joan Burgess Barnett, age 10, Betty Muriel, 8, and Jack Burgess, 6 (birth registered as John Burgess Barnett in Peru). Burgess is shown leaving Liverpool for Peru without his family on 16 August 1928 on the SS Oroya.

The 1931 records also show Burgess leaving for Peru, without his family, on 15 October aboard the US Lines President Harding, with his UK address shown as 76 Elmcroft Avenue, Sidcup, Kent. His step-father had died on 25 July and he was a mourner at the funeral on 29 July, reported the Hastings and St Leonards Observer.

In Lobitos, Peru

At the start of an article on his bravery in Burma, the Evening Telegraph (8 May 1943) stated:
After serving in the RAMC in the last war, he became medical officer on oilfields in Peru, where he was able to extend his knowledge of reptiles. Similarly, his BMJ obituary states that he practised in the Lobitos oilfields of Peru, where he made a special study of snakes.

Two sources suggest that he also ran a zoo in Lobitos. First, in an interview in the Meath Chronicle published on 28 July 2010, his daughter, Betty Geraghty¹ said that he ran a zoo. Secondly, a bookseller selling some of his letters sent from Rangoon to a niece states that he ran a zoo in Peru. The second source could of course be derived from the first. There is a zoo in present-day Lobitos (now a major surfing venue) and I wonder whether Burgess Barnett was involved in some way in starting a small zoo there. Certainly he was collecting specimens and sending or taking them to London.

The Evening Telegraph (6 June 1932) reported on his arrival to take up his post at London Zoo:

…he told a reporter how for eleven years he has spent all the time he could spare searching for strange and often dangerous reptiles in the jungles and deserts of South America…“To get into forest country we had to go six days’ mule ride across the desert, about 100 miles journey”, he said. He declined to admit that there were any dangers. “Of course, pumas would come and eat our meat at night sometimes, but they never touched us. Then we had to send the mules back at once—vampire bats used to suck their blood…I have bought home with me two rare fer de lance snakes. They are very interesting little beasts—specially adapted to desert life and very poisonous…”

Specimens were sent or brought to London. Whether the ones in the Natural History Museum arrived via the Zoo, I do not know but H.W. Parker named the newly described species, Barnett’s Lancehead Bothrops barnetti Parker, 1938, after the collector of the holotype and paratypes.

The Times has a number of reports of his gifts of reptiles, mammals and birds. It reported on 13 March 1926 that he had given snakes, an Andean Condor and a coot, and on 14 August of the same year, three Tsuchdi’s Coral Snakes, a Townsend’s Amphisbaena and six Peba armadillos.

London Zoo

The Times (11 December 1932) announced his appointment at the Zoo:

Curator of Reptiles at the Zoo

Miss Joan Procter’s Successor

Dr Burgess Barnett, a corresponding member of the society, has been appointed Curator of Reptiles to the Zoological Society, and will take up his appointment next May [1932] on his return from Lobitos…For many years Dr Barnett has devoted his leisure to living reptiles and amphibians, and has sent as gifts to the society a very large number. On his visits home he was a frequent visitor to the Reptile House and often assisted the late curator, Miss Joan Procter, in the handling of dangerous snakes in the laboratory…The council of the society were anxious to get a curator who was not merely a scientific specialist, but who would carry on the late Miss Procter’s work on the lines she originated. It was with special pleasure that it was found possible to obtain the services of Dr Burgess Barnett, as the late curator, a few days before her death, told the secretary of the society that she would be quite content if Dr Barnett were to succeed her.

The Evening Telegraph (6 June 1932, see above) expanded on this:

Dr Burgess Barnett, the new curator of Reptiles at the London Zoo, has just arrived in this country. He flew from Amsterdam with a three-foot crocodile [presumably a cayman], the first to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. In his baggage were a monkey, a gaudily coloured toucan, a few foxes, and several very poisonous snakes…”It is far too early yet to talk about new plans at the Zoo. I have got to settle down first and get used to the weather”.

A press cutting from December 1932
(Added 29 September 2020)

At the Zoo, as well as reporting on the collection to Society meetings, on the addition of the Marine Iguanas shown above from the Galapagos, for example, his activities made the national and local newspapers. He also wrote articles for magazines. Lurid accounts of his exploits with venomous snakes filled the press. The Nottingham Evening Post of 10 February 1934 provides one example:

Cobra’s Deadly Poison

Zoo Attack Foiled by Glass

A black cobra, which has the habit of spitting venom with deadly accuracy, [sic] at the eyes of anyone who excites its anger, arrived at the London Zoo yesterday. It was one of the specimens in a collection of reptiles presented by Mr St Alban Smith, a resident of the Malay States. A keeper, wearing goggles and armed with the nooses which are used in dealing with dangerous snakes, ushered the black cobra into its den. The moment it was free it looked round for a victim and saw Dr Burgess Barnett, the Curator of Reptiles, standing not six feet away. At once there came a spurt of venom, but Dr Barnett only laughed—for there was a sheet of plate-glass between him and the angry snake. “It was an excellent shot,” he said afterwards. “If there had been no glass to intercept it the poison would have caught me in the eye and I should have been blind for months.”

A report in The Times on 13 February 1934 was headed, Reptile Skins, Beauty and Commercial Value, and continued:

An exhibition of reptile skins was opened yesterday at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington, by Lieutenant-Colonel DJ Colville, Parliamentary Secretary to the Department of Overseas Trade…The exhibition, a description of which was given in The Times of February 9, illustrates modern uses of the skins of snakes, lizards and crocodiles.

Barnett fired off a letter to The Times (17 February):

Sir,—The exhibition of reptile skins now being held at the Imperial Institute has for its object the further popularizing of these skins for fancy leather and the increase in the trade in them within the Empire. Already hundreds of thousands of reptiles are killed annually for their skins, and there would appear to be a danger of disastrously disturbing the balance of life if their collection increases or continues unregulated.

He went on the argue the beneficial role of snakes in eating rodents but ended up by scoring an own goal for the reptile side:

On the other hand, much good might result if the expedition would popularize the use of leather from such poisonous snakes as cobras and Russell’s vipers. It is usually dangerous to interfere with the balance of nature in any way, but as these snakes are responsible for many thousands of deaths annually in India they probably do more harm than good.

Barnett’s letter, suggesting that the trade should be regulated provoked a long response from a Richard S Forman, Secretary of the Reptile Skin Marketing Committee, arguing, spuriously, that the activities of skin importers would help to maintain, if not to increase the supply in the wild. He continued:

But in any case Dr Barnett must surely agree that there are vast tracts of country where no restrictions are wanted, the Amazon Delta, for example, the forest of the upper reaches of the Amazon and other parts of Brazil, the immense stretches of uncultivated land in Nigeria, and the jungles of Java and Malaya; here there are thousands of square miles with a huge reptile population and no cultivation at all.

Supporting Forman’s view was Lt-Col R.H. Elliot, formerly of the Indian Medical Service, with whom Barnett was actually collaborating on the potential uses of snake venom to treat epilepsy.

The whole exchange provides an interesting insight into the mindset of individuals to the natural world in the mid-1930s. Then, as now, trade associations wrote to The Times, their letters full of unsubstantiated statements and oozing with vested interest. Now, as then, they should be ignored.

This strange report from Cornishman of 28 November 1935 must have caused the moustaches of the more knowledgeable Fellows of the Society to twitch a little:

Radio Charms Cobras, Pythons and Boa Constrictors at London Zoo Before Large Audience

Radio sets have now reached such a state of perfection that snakes can be charmed by broadcast. This was demonstrated before a large audience on Friday, in the Reptile House at the Zoo, when deadly cobras, harmless pythons, and a small boa constrictor were charmed by oriental music received on a new Philco high-fidelity set. The demonstration was held under the strict supervision of Dr Burgess Barnett, MRCS, LRCP, FZS, Curator of the Reptile House at the London Zoo. When snake charmers’ music came through the set with amazing true-to-life reproduction the cobras did their famous Dance of Death. Later when the cobras were taken away the pythons and boa constrictors wrapped themselves lovingly around the set.

This public relations rubbish must have been syndicated because the Nottingham Evening Post had published the same story on 26 November.

The Times (10 June 1937) reported:

Dr Burgess Barnett…was bitten yesterday by a South African night adder while examining a recently-arrived consignment of snakes. The bite might have proved fatal if Dr Barnett had not known how to deal with it, as a bite from that particular species may cause death in a few minutes. Dr Barnett, however, cut the wound immediately and applied potassium permanganate crystals. Dr G.M. Vevers, the Zoo superintendent, arrived with serum, which was injected, and Dr Barnett was taken to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases as a precaution.

This episode was expanded in the later report of his escape from Burma by the Evening Telegraph on 8 May 1943:

Dr Barnett’s job of handling thousands of reptiles was reputed to be the most dangerous in the country. Every day he faced agonising death—but only once did he get badly bitten. That was on the eve of his retirement on being appointed superintendent of Rangoon Zoological Gardens. A South African night viper, one of the deadliest of all snakes, bit him as it was being unpacked on arrival from Cape Town. Dr Barnett was in hospital for a week.

Telephone directories for the period show the Barnetts living at three addresses in Edgware.

Snake Venom

While at the Zoo, Barnett developed his interest in snake venoms and their potential use as therapeutic agents. Important research was done with Robert Gwyn MacFarlane (1907-1987, FRS 1956) which really set off the latter off on his successful career in haematology and later as the author of brilliant biographies of Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming.

Macfarlane’s biographical memoir for the Royal Society, written by Gustav Born and Sir David Weatherall (Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1990, 35, 211-245) reads:

In 1934 he learnt from the Professor of Physiology at Bart’s, Hamilton Hartridge, that snake venoms affect the way the blood clots. This led Gwyn to the Zoological Gardens in Regents Park where he met the Curator of Reptiles, Dr Burgess Barnett, who seems to have been instantly fired by Gwyn’s enthusiasm. He agreed that, together, they should explore the effects on blood coagulation of venom from a large number of poisonous snakes in the Zoo. Thus started one of the most productive areas of Gwyn’s research.
In  reading Gwyn’s own account of his early activities in this field there is no doubt that extracting venom from snakes did not come easily! Writing about this period many years later he recounts that he developed a genuine aversion to snakes and often had nightmares about them. However, he and Barnett managed to collect venom from about 20 different species, made appropriate dilutions, and tested them on haemophiliac blood to see if they shortened the clotting time. The venom of the first group of snakes tested, colubrines including kraits and cobras, turned out, if anything, to be anticoagulant. On the other hand, the vipers included several that had quite a marked coagulant effect; crotaline snakes were sometimes coagulant, sometimes not. But the one venom which stood out was that of Russell’s viper, which at a dilution of 1:10000 clotted haemophiliac blood in 17 seconds. In fact, in subsequent experiments Gwyn showed that Russell’s viper venom ha a measurable effect on haemophiliac blood at a dilution of 1:10000000, or more². He was very excited by these early results because it appeared that this venom might be a useful local haemostatic for controlling haemophilic bleeding. Initially it was used in a 1:10000 solution and seemed to be effective in stopping surface bleeding. It was then tested on a haemophilic patient who needed a tooth extraction and appeared to prevent much of the expected bleeding. This approach was used successfully and formed the basis for an important paper in the Lancet in 1934³. The venom was later produced commercially by Burroughs Wellcome under the name of Stypven.

Stypven is still used in a diagnostic test for disorders of coagulation. Stypven Time is the time taken for blood to clot in the presence of Stypven; it is used to investigate deficiencies of clotting factor X.

A fuller account of the trials on patients described in the Lancet paper was provided by Barnett as the sole author⁴:

As well as this work, Barnett published a letter offering to help those interested in the reported beneficial effects of snake venoms on epilepsy. This was at the instigation of Lt-Col R.H. Elliot, formerly of the Indian Medical Service, who did not consider sufficient notice was being taken of trials in other countries. Barnett’s letter was published with that from Elliot in British Medical Journal, 8 December 1934.

Leaving the Zoo

His obituary in BMJ mentions that he resigned from the zoo after five years (i.e. 1937) in order to devote his time to further research on snake venom and it application in medicine. Where he did that research I have not been able to determine. Was it with MacFarlane, or with Burroughs Wellcome?

Barnett was clearly having problems at the Zoo. The Times of 1 May contained an account of the annual general meeting of the Zoological Society:

Protests at Zoo Meeting

…Lieutenant-Colonel WPC Tenison moved the rejection of the annual report, and made a protest against the fact that notices of dismissal had been given to Dr Burgess-[sic]Barnett, curator of the Reptile House. The dismissals were on “grounds of economy”, according to the council of the society. When the motion was put to the vote the voting was equal. Lord Onslow, who presided, then gave his casting vote against the motion and declared it lost. Lieutenant-Colonel Tenison then moved that the matter should be further considered by the council of the society, and this motion was carried…

‘Further consideration’ must have taken place because Bushby remained in post for many years. Did then Barnett resign before he was pushed out or had he seen the writing on the wall? The only clue to why he took this course of resignation is in a paper by Joe Cain on Julian Huxley (Julian Huxley, General Biology and the London Zoo, 1935-42. Notes and Records of the Royal Society doi:10.1098/rsnr.2010.0067) One footnote reads …1937, when the unrelated matter of the employment of Dr Burgess Barnett (curator of reptiles) was active…. It might be worth reading the minutes of the Council Meeting on 15 September 1937, on p. 8, together with the accounts of earlier meetings in ZSL Archives, to see what was going on.

[Note added 9 February 2020: On reading Solly Zuckerman's autobiography, From Apes to Warlords, it would appear that money was tight in 1937 when Barnett's post was proposed for abolition. However, and presumably as a result of the protests by Council members, the newly vacant position of Prosector was not filled. The money saved was used to fund Barnett's continuation in his job. As noted though, he did not stay for long.]

These stirrings were of course all going one at the time of warfare between the opponents and supporters of Huxley as Secretary that culminated in the latter’s dismissal in 1942. The Council of the Society resorted to the trick they used so often of simply abolishing the position. It would be interesting to know where Barnett stood in the spectrum of support for Huxley.

From ZSL's Amnnual Report for 1937 it would appear that Barnett parted company from ZSL on good terms:

Dr. Burgess Barnett continued his researches on the medical properties of snake venom, and on his leaving the Society's employ, was given a grant of £600 with the aid of which he is prosecuting them further during the present year.

Animal and Zoo Magazine
July 1938 (volume 3, No. 2)

Rangoon Zoo

Nature, 19 March 1938, had the following news item:

Dr Burgess Barnett, who was curator of reptiles at the London Zoological Gardens in 1932-37, and since then has been doing research on snake venom, has been appointed superintendent of the Zoological Gardens at Rangoon. Dr Barnett will take up the new post in June.

The Times expanded:

Dr Barnett said last night that a new reptile house was being built at the Rangoon Zoo, and he intended to continue his experiments with snake venom and its application to medical practice. He also hoped to establish what might be called a snake farm, for the collection of venom of different kinds…The Rangoon Zoo, he said, was not large, but was an old-established one situated in the Victoria Park, and was notable for having housed the sacred white elephant which was taken by the British Army in the Burmese war of the last century.

I can find no information on his time at Rangoon Zoo (rebuilt after the war and still, it would seem, going strong with over 2 million visitors a year).

He wrote the section on snake bite for Index of Treatment (12th edition 1940, edited by R Hutchison and H Hilton, Bristol: John Wright).

His daughter, Betty, in the article in the Meath Chronicle, indicates that the whole family went to Rangoon. Burgess decided to stay when the family left in the face of the Japanese advance north.

Two days before the Japanese army entered Rangoon, Andrew Martin (see below) quotes an army chaplain who approached the zoo. It is likely (see below) that Barnett had not been at the zoo for some time:

Fortified by a report that all animals of a dangerous nature had been destroyed, we made our entry only to discover that some were very much alive and outside their cages! There was a very tense moment when it was discovered that a ‘tree trunk’ was really a crocodile, and a ‘rope’ hanging from a tree was a full-sized boa constrictor. There was also an orang-utan loose in the town, handing out a nice line in assault and battery to anyone who crossed its path.

Retreat from Burma

Flight by Elephant by Andrew Martin (London: Fourth Estate, 2013) describes the rescue of those escaping the advancing Japanese in 1942 by a route through the Chaukan Pass into Assam. Barnett was a member of one of those parties.Tens of thousands—British, their Indian servants and workers, Chinese—set out to escape to India but only a few hundred attempted the route through the Chaukan Pass.

In the description of his letters for sale (see above), it is stated that in order to make his own contribution to the war effort, Barnett accepted in 1941 a position of Principal Medical Officer to the Burma-China railway that was being constructed at the time. He was located at Lashio near the Chinese border. He organised a series of hospitals along the route for the 20,000 plus Chinese and other workers employed to build the line. Whether he had joined up with Sir John Rowland, the head  of Burma’s railways and his new boss, there, while the latter was trying to organise the evacuation of his staff or when the Chaukan route escape party formed in Myitkyina in early May I do not know. However he came to be there, he was designated Sir John’s medical officer for the trek north by ‘The Railway Party’ through their chosen route, the Chaukan Pass..

An advance party got through the pass and a rescue mission was set up, headed by Gyles Mackrell (1888-1959), a tea planter and fighter pilot (awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) in 1919 for services in India). The evacuation and reception of evacuees was largely organised and executed by the tea planters of Assam and their workers. The conditions for both trekkers and rescuers can only be described as horrendous. The Chaukan Pass had only been crossed a few times. It involved not only jungle, with the attendant leeches, malarial mosquitos and sand flies but wide, deep river crossings during the monsoon, major hill climbs and constant heavy rain. In short, it was thought to be impassable at that time of year.

The remoteness and difficulty of passing through the Chaukan Pass can be seen on the Google Earth view of the area. It is worth looking at the area shown in the map in Flight by Elephant to see how difficult the terrain is and the size of the rivers they had to cross.

The party, including a young child and a pregnant woman, made slow progress and came near to starvation. Other parties caught up with and sometimes passed the Railway Party and Barnett treated their bites, wounds, fevers and dysentery. Leeches were a major problem. Rowland was removing between five and six hundred leeches from his own body—every day. I expected sympathy for a couple of attached leeches in Borneo and three last year in Sr Lanka. I had proper calico leech socks; the Burma evacuees had only rotting clothing and disintegrating boots or shoes.

The Railway Party could not get across the Tilung Hka River. Eventually, air drops of food from an RAF Dakota, reached them. The party split several times, leaving Barnett each time with those who could not move in the conditions or get across rivers in spate. Barnett’s condition was also deteriorating.

Before the final push to get the whole of The Railway Party, Mackrell had been forced to withdraw. He went to his house in Shillong. While there he visited Barnett’s family who were by that time also living in Shillong. He promised the family that he would get him out.

Mackrell then organised another mission. Meanwhile, Sir John Rowland had split his group and his sub-group went ahead and succeeded in reaching safety with the help of the army. The final group—Barnett’s—of around 25 (now comprising civilians as well personnel from the various defence forces including an officer in the Royal Engineers and Gurkha soldiers) was left.

On 2 September the Aberdeen Journal contained a report on refugees in Burma:

A final attempt will be made to wean from the perilous Tibet [!] border, the balance of Roland’s [sic] party, which was not rescued by soldiers, and another party headed by Burgess Barnett, formerly of the London Zoo.

Mackrell’s men and elephants got them all out.

On Sunday 11 October, Mackrell and Barnett drove to Shillong. Makrell dropped Barnett at his house and waited:

The noise from the doctor’s house…”sounded like a football match”. He thought he might have to go in and “rescue him all over again” (Flight by Elephant)

Gyles Mackrell was award the George Medal for his acts of bravery⁵. The citation (London Gazette, 29 Jan 1943) reads:

Gyles Mackrell, Messrs. Octavius Steel and Company, Calcutta

Mr Mackrell, while in charge of the elephant transport, heard that a number of refugees were attempting to reach Assam over the Chaukan pass. In appalling weather he led his elephants by forced marches over a route hitherto considered impracticable. At great personal risk and after several vain attempts he took them across the flooded river, the bed of which consisted of shifting boulders. He thus rescued 68 sepoys and 33 other persons who were facing starvation. Without medical assistance he fed and doctored them until they were fit to proceed. He fell ill with severe fever, but remained behind and was responsible for saving the lives of over 200 persons. Mr Mackrell showed the highest initiative and personal courage, and risked hardships which might easily have proved fatal.

Remarkably, Mackrell carried a 16 mm cine camera and recorded some of the happenings during the rescue. Cambridge University now has his documents and films. The university has put the film on YouTube. It is essential viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLMj-zG2Vmc

Mackrell possibly filmed Barnett as he emerged in the final party. However, since I have not been able to find a photograph of Burgess Barnett, I cannot look for him in the film..

Unfortunately, the author of Flight by Elephant, got Barnett’s name wrong. He is referred to throughout the book and in the index as Dr Burgess-Barnett, a double-barrelled surname.

Barnett’s bravery and devotion as a ‘medical man’ did not go unrecognised. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) (London Gazette, 7 May 1943). The citation reads:

Burgess Barnett MRCS LRCP, Principal Medical Officer, Burma China Railway Construction. Dr Burgess Barnett was a member of the party which evacuated from Burma via the Chaukan Pass and was one of the last dozen men to be rescued from Tilung Hka. Although he is an elderly man he elected to remain with the remnants of the party until the end. He thus secured to them the medical attention they all so sorely needed. Dr Burgess Barnett’s conduct throughout this long and difficult march over uninhabited country, in the most trying conditions of the monsoon, was worthy of the best traditions of the medical service.

Barnett was widely known in the British press from his time at the Zoo. His escape and subsequent honour were widely reported.

Death

Sadly, Burgess Barnett lived for only eighteen months after his rescue. He died on a tea estate in Dooars, Bengal, on 9 April 1944, aged 56. His death was widely reported in the British press (an obituary in The Times on 19 June, for example) and attributed to heart failure. The catalogue describing some of his letters to a niece (see above⁶) shows that on 6 May 1943 he was considering taking a tea-garden medical practice about 100 miles east of Darjeeling. His final letter sent on 15 February 1944 suggests that he had done so. It was sent from Matelli, Jalpaiguri, Dooars, North Bengal. Matelli is in the heart of tea country near the Bhutan border.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Burgess Barnett’s Book, The Terrarium

I have scanned The Terrarium. A copy in .pdf format can be downloaded from my other blog which is concerned with the development of wild animal husbandry, particularly of reptiles, amphibians and birds:

http://waicblog.wordpress.com

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Betty married Michael Geraghty, who travelled to Burma to work as an engineer, four weeks after meeting him in 1942. He enlisted in the Royal Engineers rising to the rank of  Lieutenant-Colonel in the Burma Army. One daughter was born in Darjeeling in 1943, another in Shillong in 1945 after which they travelled to England and settled in Ireland. Betty became Secretary of the Burma Star Association, the organisation to remember and support those who drove the Japanese back through the jungle of northern Burma—the ‘forgotten’ 14th Army commanded by the great General ‘Bill’ Slim—and, like her father, was appointed MBE for her services. Betty Geraghty, née Barnett, died on 10 January 2011.

2 Barnett, B.; MacFarlane, R.G. 1934. On the relative potency of certain snake venoms to coagulate haemophilic blood. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 104 977-978.

3 MacFarlane, R. G.; Barnett, B., 1934: The haemostatic possibilities of Snake Venom. Lancet Nov, 3: 985-987.

4 Barnett, B. 1935. The haemostatic uses of snake venom. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 28, 1469-1472.

5 Mackrell’s GM and his DFC sold for £8000 at auction in 2010.

6 Meridian Rare Books, London.

Last Updated 12 February 2024