History of the Golden Hamster: 6. Golden Hamsters kept in Scotland at the turn of the 20th Century

All the captive Golden Hamsters up to the 1970s were descended from a single litter collected by Israel Aharoni near Aleppo in 1930. That statement is correct but I was surprised when I learnt of a colony of Golden Hamsters being kept in Britain for thirty years until around 1910.

Seven years ago, I was scanning the magazines in W.H. Smith’s and noticed in a now-defunct but then I think new monthly, Small Furry Pets, an article by Dr Karl Shuker on the history of the Golden Hamster.

I was particularly interested in one paragraph:

Nothing more emerged regarding this newly-described species until 1879, when some live examples were brought back to England by James Skene, who had been working in the diplomatic service in Syria. These thrived and bred for 30 years…Then in 1910 the last generation of progeny descended from those original specimens died without breeding, and the golden hamster once again sank back into obscurity.

I was so intrigued that I bought the magazine and kept a copy of the article.

The only reference online to the hamsters brought back by James Skene was to an article written in 1992 by Chris Henwood, a noted keeper and writer on small rodents, for the now-defunct British Hamster Association:

So now if you take the old story as the truth then little was heard of the Golden Hamster for almost exactly 100 years. Wrong! In fact a group of unknown number was brought from Syria to the UK by James Skeene. He had been British Consul to Syria and on his retirement in 1880 returned to Britain. I can sadly find no reference that he wrote anything about the species in general or his animals in particular, and if anyone can help with this area I would be very grateful. It does however appear that they bred in this country at least until 1910 when the last individuals appear to have either died or been destroyed (perhaps on the death of Skeene?).

4th edition of Reynolds's
booklet

Only when I obtained the paper by the late Rolf Gattermann and his colleagues on the collection and ecology of Golden Hamsters in the late 1990s did I get any further information. They listed the collections (dead and alive) over the years, and for 1880 listed Skene, with the information having come from a book published in 1954 by H.W. Reynolds and published by the Zoological Society of London.

I could not find a copy of Reynolds’s book (really a booklet since it is only 32 pages) for sale. But the ZSL Library has two copies and their superb service to Fellows soon had a copy on my desk. This is what Reynolds wrote:

A single preserved specimen, without any particulars recorded, is in the Beirut Museum, and I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Rosslyn Bruce D.D., F.L.S., for the only other authentic record of specimens being found in the last century. According to Dr Rosslyn Bruce, his grandfather, James Henry Skene, of Rubislaw—who was for many years Consul-General at Aleppo, caught and bred a large number of Golden Hamsters and upon his retirement, in 1880, he brought back to Edinburgh a number of live specimens which were shared among is family and friends. This stock is understood to have bred in captivity for some thirty years, then the strain died out.

In this story we have three people of interest:

James Henry Skene (1812-1886)

Skene was a soldier, writer and diplomat. He served in the 73rd Regiment of Foot (later and eventually incorporated into the Black Watch). He sold his commission to settle in Greece, travel and write books on the region. His wife, Rhalou, whom he married in 1832, was a Fanariot. According to the family history, ‘He eventually became attached to the services of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, English [sic] Ambassador at Constantinople, and for his services during the Crimean War was appointed Vice-Consul at Constantinople, and afterwards Consul-General at Aleppo, from which office he retired in 1880, and died at Geneva on 3rd October, 1886’.

Skene’s daughter, Jane, was the mother of Rosslyn Bruce*.

Rosslyn Bruce (1871-1956)

Bruce is listed as a clergyman and a naturalist but I suspect that is the wrong order of precedence of his interests. He was in many ways the epitome of the old CofE wealthy parson. He had many interests—including hoaxes—and clearly enjoyed pulling the wool over the eyes of church authorities. He was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of Canon Lloyd Stewart Bruce and Jane Skene, one of eleven children. After divinity at Oxford (he was secretary of the Union but lost an election for the presidency to the evolution-denier Hilaire Belloc) he became a curate in Soho where he campaigned for better living conditions for children whose parents were on the stage and for the education of mothers in the care of babies (still necessary 120 years later).

His family controlled the living at Clifton in Nottinghamshire and Bruce was installed as rector there. (This story has many of the elements of an Anthony Trollope novel.) He broke his leg while fox hunting, an episode recounted in detail in the Nottingham Evening Post of 22 October 1907. A year later he married Rachel Gurney, a member of the banking family immortalised by W.S. Gilbert in his line from the judge (‘and a good judge too’) in Trial by Jury on how he had become a wealthy lawyer ‘by falling in love with a rich attorney’s elderly ugly daughter‘: ‘at length I became as rich as the Gurneys…’

From Clifton (later the site of the largest council housing estate in Europe) he moved to Edgbaston, Birmingham in 1912. During the First World War he went on Noel Baker’s humanitarian mission to the Balkans and served as chaplain to British troops in France.

In 1923 he became rector at Hustmonceux in East Sussex—and stayed there. The obituarist for The Times (21 January 1956) clearly thought he should have risen higher in the church hierarchy given he background and education. However, he clearly upset the upper reaches as newspaper explained:

He did much to beautify the ancient church of Herstmonceux, and fancifully explained how supernatural agencies had introduced new embellishments, for which the necessary faculty had not first been obtained from higher ecclesiastical authority. Such unorthodoxy of behaviour stood as a barrier to preferment that his abilities and devotion undoubtedly deserved.

The obituary went on to praise the gaiety of his company and his ‘deep love of all fellow creatures’.

Bruce’s interests emerge in the penultimate paragraph:

Rosslyn Bruce’s lifelong pastime was the care and breeding of animals. Horses, monkeys, birds, mice, rats, iguanas, snakes, dogs, ferrets, even bears and an elephant all passed through his cherishing hands. He was known as the greatest expert on smooth fox terriers, and bred several champions. He judged at dog shows far  and wide. One of Queen Victoria’s pets was a Skye terrier from his kennels.

Local press reports show that he gave talks about his animals kept in Nottinghamshire, Birmingham and Hurstmonceux and other animals can be added to the list: canaries, lovebirds, pigeons and a tortoise in his study; kangaroo, porcupines, racoons, chameleons, eagles and fleas. He told the Sussex Agricultural Express that his ambition as a boy was ‘to become the proprietor of a menagerie’.

His winding-up the church hierarchy extended to the news media. He told a reporter he had bred green mice—and the story, in modern terminology, went viral.

Rosslyn Bruce (centre) in 1916

Bruce appeared in the newspapers for another very sad reason that still resonates from 1912. Bruce’s sister, Kathleen, married Robert Falcon Scott—Scott of the Antarctic—and it was Rosslyn who informed the world in February 1913 that Kathleen, en route to New Zealand to meet the returning Terra Nova Expedition, had been informed of her husband’s death on the trek back from the South Pole.

There can be no doubt that the Reverend Doctor Bruce knew what he was talking about when he told Reynolds about the hamsters brought back to Scotland by Skene in 1880. I am still curious about the family and friends who kept the hamsters and how Bruce knew they had died out around 1910. Certainly, a number of the Skene family lived in Edinburgh (and helped bring up the eleven siblings of the  Bruce family after their mother, Jane, died in 1880, and their father in 1886).

Skene had many relatives and descendants. Do any of them know anything more or of anything written about his hamsters? And did Bruce himself have any of the offspring of Skene’s hamsters?

Harold William Reynolds (1907-1966)

UPDATE: Comments below have been used to update the text below.

1st Edition

I have not been able to find out much about Reynolds, the author of the hamster book who was told of Skene’s hamsters by Rosslyn Bruce. Local newspapers show that he was secretary of a fanciers’ hamster club for the midlands and north of England and in 1949 was living at 7 Milford Road, Walton-on-the-Hill, Stafford. He and other fanciers imported ‘panda’ hamsters—a black and white colour form—which had first been bred in the U.S.A. He always appeared in print, as was usual then, as H.W. My impression, from the emphasis on the suitability of hamsters for keeping in schools, is that he was a schoolteacher. However, I found on his marriage certificate that he was a civil servant.

I have found no trace of him after 1950. The fourth edition of his booklet, Golden Hamsters, was published by the Zoological Society of London. The first edition, though, he published himself in 1948 as ‘Belvedere Booklet No. 1’. The website of a hamster breeder in Cambridge states:

Mr Reynolds was a member of the earliest hamster clubs in the UK and held the show prefix ‘Belvedere’ for his animals—which was also the name of his house.

His book obviously sold well to run to four editions. But why was the 4th and last, in 1954, published by the Zoological Society of London and not by Reynolds himself? My guess is that the booklet was useful to recommend to those seeking advice from the Zoo on hamsters during the hamster craze. Why Reynolds revised but did not publish the last edition remains unknown.

U.S. Version

I have just found on eBay’s U.S. site, an American edition of the book with the same text but more photographs. It was published by a Milo G. Denlinger in 1950 and printed in the U.S.A.

Reynolds published a second booklet, ‘Belvedere No. 2’, also in 1948. It was entitled Bishop the Hamster and Other Tales.

Edward Hindle provided an introduction to booklet No. 1 and provided a short review for the Autumn 1948 edition of Zoo Life. His introduction, written when he was Scientific Director at the Zoo, takes us back to the reason I began writing this series in the first place:

I received two pairs of these animals from Dr. S. Adler in the following year, and built up a stock maintained first at Hampstead and subsequently in my department at the University of Glasgow From the outset I had no difficulty in breeding them and was able to distribute specimens to any one interested. The London Zoological Gardens received a few pairs shortly before the war, which bred so prolifically that they were put on sale, and helped to make the Golden Hamster known to a much wider public.
Their rapid increase in general popularity dates from the end of the war and now they seem to have become thoroughly established as a domestic pet. 

UPDATED 23 October 2025

*Francis Rosslyn Courteney Bruce at birth; Rosslyn Francis Courteney at death.

Reynolds HW. 1948. Golden Hamsters. 1st edition. Stafford

Reynolds HW. 1954. Golden Hamsters. 4th edition. London: Zoological Society of London

Reynolds HW. 1950. Golden Hamsters. USA: Milo G Denlinger

Skene WF (editor). 1887. Memorials of the Family of Skene of Skene. Aberdeen: New Spalding Club

History of the Golden Hamster: 2. Syria, Palestine and London

In 1985 Michael Ross Murphy (1945-2018) wrote an account of the capture and domestication of the Golden Hamster. All hamsters of this species in captivity from the 1930s until the 1970s were descendants of the original stock, and most still are. He did not, however, deal with the reason hamsters were brought to Britain or with what happened before they became commonplace in zoos and as household pets, a topic I dealt with in Part 1.

I will not go into great detail but the original hamsters were collected in 1930 at the request of Saul Adler during an expedition to northern Syria led by Israel Aharoni (1882-1946). Adler wanted to try hamsters from the Middle East for his research on kala azar, an often fatal disease caused, in that part of the world, by the protozoan parasite Leishmania infantum. He was using Chinese Hamsters (Cricetulus griseus) from the Far East but was unsuccessful in getting them to breed; new stock had to be imported and, moreover, were susceptible to Pasteurella infection.

Aharoni got his local guide, Georgius Khalil Tah’an, to talk to the local sheik. The latter hired labourers to dig holes in a local wheat field. Eventually, having destroyed the crop in much of the field, they found, eight-feet down, a complete nest comprising a mother and her eleven young.

What happened next could have been predicted by anybody who has kept rodents; the mother started to eat one of her young. Georgius saw this happening, removed the mother and killed it with cyanide. Now there were ten. Amazingly, Aharoni and his wife succeeded in hand-rearing the rest of the litter (reportedly, by Adler, on a meat diet). Then the ten escaped. All but one were recaptured. Now there were nine. The nine were handed over to the animal house at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where both Aharoni and Adler worked. The animal house was run by Haim Ben-Menachem, a member of the para-military Haganah and who, on the foundation of Israel, became Director-General of the Ministry of Posts. He made a terrible mistake in putting the animals in a cage with a wooden floor. Hamsters gnaw. Five of the nine escaped. Now there were four: one male and three females. One female was apparently killed by a male in the first attempt at breeding them. Down to three.

Ben-Menachem, though, saved the day. He found a method of introducing the male to the female that did not result in one killing the other, and the pair produced young.

Adler in his first paper using Golden Hamsters gave the timing and circumstances of some of these events. The hamsters were handed over to the parasitology department July 1930 (although one paper gives that as the date of collection) and the first litter was born on 18 August. Sufficient young had been born by October because on 20 October Adler used two in his experiments on Mediterranean Kala Azar.

The population of captive Golden Hamsters soon grew. Within a year they had 150.

The arrival of Golden Hamsters in London was 1931 but this is where Murphy got it wrong. They were certainly brought to London by Adler and two pairs were given to Edward Hindle (1886-1973). Hindle was, Murphy wrote, ‘of the London Zoological Society’. But Hindle was not at London Zoo at this time. From 1928 until 1933 he was Beit Research Fellow in Tropical Medicine at the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research. Like Adler he was a parasitologist who also worked on kala azar. Indeed he had led the Royal Society’s Kala Azar Commission in China in the 1920s. Adler was a successor to Hindle in that role. The Golden Hamsters were a research gift from a parasitologist to a parasitologist. As Adler’s brother made it clear in a letter to The Times on 27 January 1973, Adler and Hindle were close friends. Adler said he ‘smuggled’ them into Britain in his coat pockets. However, there was then no restriction on bringing rodents into the U.K. so the story may have been embroidered a little.

But the two pairs were not the only hamsters brought to London. Adler, in a letter to Nature in 1948, stated he had brought some for the Medical Research Council (presumably the National Institute of Medical Research, NIMR) and some for the Wellcome Bureau, ‘where Dr E. Hindle succeeded in breeding them’. That probably explains the dual authorship of the paper on breeding and growth of the Golden Hamster published in 1934 (by which time Hindle had moved to the NIMR) in Proceedings of the Zoological Society (now Journal of Zoology). His co-author was Hilda Bruce* of NIMR who later discovered the pheromonal and eponymous Bruce Effect.

Adler does not state whether it was on the same trip that he took animals to Nattan Larrier in Paris.

But Saul Adler was not simply a foreign scientist visiting Britain in 1931. He was British. He was born in what is now Belarus but his parents and family had migrated to Leeds in 1900 when he was five. Scholarships took him to Leeds Central High School and the medical school of the University of Leeds. With medical qualifications obtained in 1917 he immediately joined the Royal Army Medical Corps from the university’s Officer Training Corps. He served in Mesopotamia until July 1920. Liverpool’s School of Tropical Medicine saw him next after which he worked as a research assistant in Sierra Leone. Then, in 1924, he was appointed to the Hebrew University—and he stayed there, as Professor of Parasitology—until his death in 1966.

His research in the Second World War took a similar turn to that of Goodwin (see Part 1) in assisting the effort to protect and treat Allied forces against tropical diseases including leishmaniasis. ‘For services to the Forces’ he was appointed O.B.E. in January 1946. In 1957 he was elected to the Royal Society, and his biographical memoir details the range and depth of his interests not only in many aspects of parasites and their hosts but in Charles Darwin, for example. He not only translated the Origin into Hebrew but hit the headlines by proposing in 1965 that Darwin’s debilitating illness was Chagas Disease, caused by a South American protozoan parasite.

I do like this story from Biographical Memoirs:

Although Adler had a remarkable memory he also had a reputation for absent-mindedness. The following story, although probably apocryphal, is an amusing illustration. One day, while wandering through Jerusalem, he got into a quarter with which he was unfamiliar. Almost anyone in Jerusalem would know him, so he stopped a passer-by and asked him if he could direct him to the street where Professor Adler lived. The individual addressed looked at him in some astonishment and said: ‘Daddy, don’t you recognize me?’

During the late 1930s Golden Hamsters were sent to other countries from Jerusalem and from London. Murphy found no earlier reports of animals in the U.S.A. before I.J. Kligler, Professor of Microbiology in Jerusalem, sent a batch in 1938. There was a pet hamster craze in the U.S.A. in the 1940s and early 50s, just as in Britain after the War.

Edward Hindle FRS was an interesting character with wide zoological interests and activities. In the interests of brevity I will discuss him in another article.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that the hamsters Adler obtained were not the only ones collected by Aharoni in 1930. Murphy mentioned the fact that three old females were captured on 27 and 29 April 1930 and deposited in the Berlin Zoological Museum. The timing is right for them to have been collected at the same time as Adler’s animals. Was one the mother killed by Georgius Khalil Tah’an, i.e. the direct ancestor of all the domesticated hamsters? And were the other two collected dead or alive?

In Part 3 I look at Golden Hamsters collected before 1930 and after 1970.

*Hilda Margaret Bruce (5 April 1903 – 2 November 1974) 

Adler D. Professor E. Hindle. The Times, 27 January 1973.

Adler S. 1948. Origin of the Golden Hamster Cricetus auratus as a laboratory animal. Nature 162, 256-257.

Anon. 1973. Professor Edward Hindle. The Times. 24 January 1973.

Adler S, Theodor O. 1931. Investigations on Mediterranean Kala Azar. II.—Leishmania infantum. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 108, 453-463.

Bruce HM, Hindle HM. (1934). The Golden Hamster, Cricetus (Mesocricetus) auratus Waterhouse. Notes on its Breeding and Growth". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 1934: 361–366.

Garnham PCC. 1974. Edward Hindle. 1886-1973. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 20, 217-234.

Murphy MR. 1985. History of the capture and domestication of the Syrian Golden Hamster (Mesocricetus auratus Waterhouse). In, The Hamster. Reproduction and Behavior. Edited by HI Siegel. New York: Plenum Press. Murphy covers the early literature including papers and book by Aharoni written in Hebrew.

Shortt HE. 1967. Saul Adler 1895-1966. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 13, 1-34.

History of the Golden Hamster: 1. Another fine mess and Wikipedia gets it so wrong

Some time after Len Goodwin (Leonard George Goodwin CMG FRS) died in 2008, I was greatly surprised when I read the sub-heading of his obituary in the Daily Telegraph: 'Expert in tropical diseases whose research accidentally introduced the pet hamster to Europe'. I was intrigued because I was pretty sure I knew the history of the Golden Hamster (Mesocricetus auratus) and the story of its first breeding from the progeny of a mother caught near Aleppo and its introduction in Britain as a laboratory animal that then made its way into zoos, to private individuals and to the pet trade. And it all happened before Len Goodwin’s work with hamsters.

The obituary went on:

One unexpected by-product of Goodwin's research was a new pet craze. The Syrian hamster is the most common type of hamster kept as a pet; and in an interview recorded for Oxford Brookes University Medical Sciences Video Archive, Goodwin claimed that all those now on sale in Europe are descended from that first colony bred in Euston Road.

Well, that was true but there is no indication that Goodwin himself was responsible for their appearance in the home. He began working with hamsters after they were first kept as pets. However, the story gets elaborated even more by the time it reaches Wikipedia:

Goodwin's attempt at refining the index by testing the drugs on European hamsters failed because they were already resistant to Leishmaniasis; instead he got a scientist in Jerusalem to send him some Syrian hamsters to test the drugs on.

That last sentence is, of course, is absolute nonsense. But whoever wrote the current Wikipedia entry on the domestication of the species also has it wrong.

The story was corrected by Goodwin’s obituarist, Max Blythe (1939-2017), for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (sadly, behind a paywall and anybody searching still sees the incorrect information on free-to-view websites):

Goodwin introduced the Syrian or golden hamster into drugs testing after finding that European hamsters, which German pharmacologists had used in assaying anti-leishmaniasis compounds, were slow in developing the disease. It was later sometimes claimed that pet golden hamsters originated from the laboratory colony that Goodwin established. As Goodwin pointed out, however, his breeding stock came from the zoologist Edward Hindle*, who in turn had received his from the original laboratory colony bred for Saul Adler, professor of parasitology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from a wild litter found at Aleppo. The domestication of golden hamsters began with Adler.

Even though the correct story was and still is well known and well documented, a number of popular and scientific authors have got it wrong in the past. For example, some, including The Times (24 January 1973) in its obituary of Hindle, had Edward Hindle himself collecting the animals near Aleppo. Adler's brother had to write to The Times (27 January 1973) pointing out the error. One scientist even thought Golden Hamsters had been introduced by Sir Hans Krebs, the biochemist!

Adler brought two pairs to London for Hindle from his laboratory stock.

I knew of Golden Hamsters being kept as pets in Britain in the late 1930s but in order to check I searched the British Newspaper Archive as well as The Times for information on hamsters in zoos and in the home. It was in the late 1930s that Golden Hamsters first appeared in press reports as household pets. Hindle gave a pair to London Zoo in 1932, as The Times reported on 23 April. By 1936, another press report stated the hamsters ‘have propagated so rapidly that surpluses are to be sold’. Hindle took some hamsters to Glasgow when he was appointed Professor of Zoology there in 1935. Belfast Zoo in Northern Ireland received some from him March 1938. There are press reports of Golden Hamsters as pets dating from 1937 in Edinburgh and Chichester and a shop in south-west London advertised them for sale in 1938 at six shillings and sixpence per pair (about £19 in today’s money). The Golden Hamster had also reached pet-keeping books by 1939. In the first edition (1939) of Animals as Friends and How to Keep Them by Margaret Shaw and James Fisher (both of whom worked at London Zoo at the time) there is information on the Golden Hamster including a photograph of the animal by Wolf Suschitzky (1912-2016).

All this was before Len Goodwin worked on hamsters. That came in the Second World War. Max Blythe again:

By 1942 his value as a pharmaceutical protozoologist secured his release from the tank corps just days after call-up. Soon afterwards he had a major part in research leading to the anti-leishmaniasis drug sodium stibogluconate, or Pentostam. With the German drug Stolustibosan no longer available and leishmaniasis a problem among troops invading Sicily, Wellcome chemists took up the challenge of synthesizing a similar organometallic pentavalent antimony compound. Goodwin undertook the screening of the numerous versions they created, eventually finding a British equivalent of Stolustibosan, which was trialled on American servicemen after initial testing on hamsters. Pentostam proved a timely addition to the wartime drugs arsenal and went on to widespread peacetime use.

But It was really after the war that Golden Hamsters became the pet to have. There was a craze in the U.K. and in the U.S.A. The latter appears to have been rather late on the scene since the first recorded importation, again as a laboratory animal, was in 1938, according to Michael R. Murphy who has written an account of the capture and domestication of the species.

There have been other errors and misinterpretations on their introduction to Britain—the subject of Part 2, to come later.

Len Goodwin (centre)
Wellcome Collection CC BY

     

*Edward Hindle (1886-1973, FRS 1942)

Anon. Leonard Goodwin. Daily Telegraph 14 January 2009.

Blythe M. Goodwin, Leonard George (1915–2008). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Jan 2012; online edn, Sept 2012

Murphy, M.R. 1985. History of the capture and domestication of the Syrian Golden Hamster (Mesocricetus auratus Waterhouse). In, The Hamster. Reproduction and Behavior. Edited by HI Siegel. New York: Plenum Press.

UPDATED: 28 October 2019