How good at keeping and breeding animals was London Zoo in the 1950s? The fellows’ rebellion and the search for historical data

In my last post I described how data had been gathered to investigate the breeding record, survival of young and rates of mortality at London Zoo up to 1957. What is not apparent from the bland title of the paper is the political battle that was being waged in public within the membership of the Zoological Society of London, and that the data presented were part of the defensive ammunition in that battle.

The Zoological Society of London is unusual in that its ordinary members were—and are—called ‘Fellows’. One of the privileges enjoyed by Fellows was exclusive access along with their guests to London Zoo on Sunday mornings. However for this and other privileges the subscription was only £3 a year and in the mid-1950s had not been raised since 1832. The soon-to-be Sir Solly Zuckerman became Secretary in 1955, having been assured that troubles earlier in the 1950s had gone away. He soon discovered that all was not well. He found that ‘many fellows simply regarded the Zoo as a convenient, if unusual social club’ and that the subscriptions did not make up the loss of gate money from the public on Sunday mornings. In short, the fellows were being subsidised by the Society which was contrary to the Society’s status as a charity. To put the figures into some sort of perspective, the annual subscription would, in 2021, be the equivalent of two adult entry tickets to London Zoo. Given that entry to fellows and a guest was virtually unlimited and that the full economic cost of providing a restaurant and grounds for the exclusive use of fellows had not been taken into account, the force of the Zuckerman case is blindingly obvious.

The rebellion by some fellows was one of a number of the years against its own administration. It was brought about by the decision to open the Zoo to the public on Sunday mornings from 3 November 1957. The following months saw a rebel group formed and a long legal action against the Council of the Society. The details have been explained a number of times and I will not go into detail except to note that an initial ruling against the Society by an ancient judge which seemed crazy at the time and even crazier now was overturned by the Court of Appeal. Council and Zuckerman had won; the rebels were routed.

There is little mention in Zuckerman’s memoirs of the leading rebels but both the initial and final leader are worthy of a mention because their backgrounds in some respects are similar. The instigator was Henry Cobden Turner (1888-1970), usually referred to as a retired Manchester businessman. He was an electrical engineer and head of Salford Electronic Instruments (SEI). He and his team there either invented or co-invented the proximity fuse which proved invaluable against such targets as the V1 flying bomb; they were also involved in the development of radar. Turner was known to fight for what he thought were his rights. In the 1950s he formed a professional and personal friendship with Professor R.V. Jones CH FRS (1911-1997), then Professor of Physics in Aberdeen but earlier the key player in the ‘battle of the beams’, as described in his book Most Secret War. Turner’s letter to British and U.S. governments seeking financial recognition for the proximity fuse are held in various archives. Jones in a 1972 book review described what happened:

In a few cases, further research will be required before a definitive account can be given; for example, one of the principal originating teams of the proximity fuse, that at Salford Electrical Instruments under the late H. Cobden Turner, is not mentioned. This is a pity because Cobden Turner, as unrewarded a patriot as any I know, could have told a remarkable story (he did in fact receive a modest share of the proximity-fuse award made by the Royal Commission on Inventions; but in the expectation of receiving more had already over-committed it to the presentation of a stained-glass window to his minister-son-in-law's church).

In one of those infuriating ‘I wish I’d asked him that if only I’d known’ moments I corresponded with R.V. Jones and had lengthy conversations by telephone in the couple of years before he died. I would really like to have known if Turner had discussed his role in the Zoo rebellion with him.

Because Turner, having started the rebellion at the Zoo, lived in the north of England and was not on hand to lead the attack, leadership passed to another head of an engineering company, this time based in London. Reginald John Knowles (1898-1962) was awarded the Military Medal as a private soldier in the East Surrey Regiment in 1917; he had also been Mayor of the London Borough of Hendon in 1951-52. It was Knowles who took the ultimately doomed legal action against the council of the society and it was Knowles who was ordered by the court to pay half the costs; he apparently failed to do so. Israel Sieff and his brother-in-law Simon Marks then running Marks & Spencers picked up the hefty bill.

The gripe of many of the fifty or so rebel fellows was I noted earlier about their loss of privileges, especially Sunday-morning opening. However, there was another complaint not about privileges for fellows but about the performance of London Zoo as a zoo. The Times of 5 December 1957 reported on the meeting of the rebels:

     …during which several Fellows, in­cluding a former councillor of the society and Mr. George Cansdale, ex-Superintendent of the Zoo spoke regretfully of what they called a *grave deterioration" in standards. 

     Mr. Cansdale. who was asked to resign from his post as superintendent in 1953. and who is now associated with two com­mercial zoos emphasized at the outset that he had no ulterior motive in attending the meeting. 

     He went on: “The London Zoo, which was regarded as outstanding not many years ago, is to-day regarded with contempt by some of the foremost zoologists in the world. The management is grossly inefficient, breeding results are appal­ling, and in general conditions have sadly deteriorated.” 

     By Continental standards, Mr. Cansdale declared. “the London Zoo is very heavily overstaffed at all levels, from keepers right to the top. The council could achieve a saving of not less than £20,000 a year by proper economies.” 

     Mr. Turner, who said he had last year gone round the world inspecting zoos in India. Africa, and Australia, described the London Zoo as “now in the eighth or ninth place," instead of being, as it was once, the best in the world. The condition of the gardens and animal houses should be improved, he said, by spending the money raised, first, on the animals them­selves; secondly, on those who looked after them; thirdly, on the layout of the gardens: and fourth, on the secretariat.
     Mrs. D. Pinto-Leite, who said she had worked for more than 11 years in the zoo. began by genially informing the company “I only know about apes.” She had been a Fellow since 1910. The condition of the zoo now compared with those days was *appalling." she said. “I have no confidence in anyone there, from the management downwards, except a few of the keepers—and the animals."
     She was followed by Mr. A. Tabelin, who said he had visited the zoological gardens for 10 years. You go there todav and you find empty cages and animals in the wrong cages," he said.

The Council and Zuckerman clearly interpreted George Cansdale’s intervention as a continuation of the war with Leo Harrison Matthews FRS, who was not only Scientific Director but also running the Zoo with the help of just a secretary. It appears that it was Matthews who delivered the earlier ultimatum to council that Cansdale must be removed from office—a topic I will return to in a future post.

At the AGM of the society on 15 January 1958, Zuckerman launched attacks on Turner and Cansdale, neither of whom was present. He dealt with the question of Sunday opening and indicated that the subscription would be raised to £10. However, I suspect that after two years in post, Zuckerman was aware that the Zoo was in the doldrums but was not prepared to admit it to the rebels. Indeed Zuckerman’s proposals were the first steps in his plans for recovery. The gulf between the interests of fellows who were scientists and those who were later categorised as ordinary fellows was exposed by letters to The Times. The big guns came out in force in support of Zuckerman’s changes. One letter was signed by Sir Gavin de Beer FRS, director of the Natural History Museum, Carl Pantin FRS in Cambridge, Peter (later Sir Peter) Medawar FRS and John Zachary Young FRS, both of University College London, on behalf of over 150 zoologists who were fellows of the society.

Zuckerman did take Cansdale’s claims about breeding results and mortality seriously. It seems inconceivable that these performance indicators had not been a matter of regular report. Although Cansdale complained about the competence of the figures on mortality notified to fellows after Zuckerman’s blast at the AGM, he himself does not seem to have improved the collection of data while Superintendent. Nevertheless, two people were given the job of extracting as much meaningful data as was possible from the historical records. The first was Eric Hayton Ashton (1926-1985) a member of Zuckerman’s department of anatomy in Birmingham and one of his first B.Sc. students there.  The second was Gwynne Vevers, Zuckerman’s pre-war student at Oxford and since 1955 curator of the aquarium at the Zoo. They sifted through the records and came up with a series of tables and graphs. Figures on breeding on mortality are difficult to interpret because it depends not only on the quality of care but also on the balance of naturally long-lived and short-lived animals in a collection. However, the general trends were clear and their paper was published in early 1959. The main conclusions can be quoted from the summary:

• Apart from the period during the Second World War when the numbers of vertebrates dropped sharply, the collections have, since the mid-1930s, fluctuated around a level of some 5000 exhibits. The numbers of species and subspecies have, during the past seven years, varied slightly around an average of approximately 1200.
• Mammals now account for some 30 per cent of the total exhibits, birds for 60 per cent while reptiles and amphibians comprise 10 per cent. Approximately 90 per cent of the mammals and birds exhibited are from wild species.
• The birth rate in the collections as a whole now stands at 14 per 100 exhibits. The corresponding value for wild species is 11.8. These figures are among the highest attained during the periods for which records are available.
• More than 90 per cent of the animals born in the menagerie during 1957 survived to the end of the year. The average survival rate for the past three years is higher than at any time since the opening of Whipsnade Park in 1931.
• The mortality rate for the entire vertebrate collections stood, during 1957, at 21. This figure is less than at any time either before or after the Second World War. 

Zuckerman clearly could not resist adding a foreword which explained the reason for the study and stressed its main conclusions:

When trying to discover what substance there was to a number of state­ments about mortality and birth rates in the Society’s collections, to which wide publicity was given in the National Press, I made a preliminary analysis of the vital statistics of Regent’s Park and VVhipsnade. The results of this analysis, which were incorporated in the Report of the Council of the Society for 1957, showed that, contrary to view that mortality rates are now rising and birth rates falling in the Regent’s Park Gardens, the reverse is the case. Since this was only a preliminary analysis, I suggested to Dr Ashton and Dr Vevers that they might undertake a more detailed study of the Society’s vital statistics. The results are incorporated in the present paper…

     …The index which stands out most clearly as a mark of the Society’s progress in the field of animal husbandry, which we can justly claim is subject to stricter and stricter scientific control as every year passes, is clearly that of mortality, which gives a measure of the health of our animals. This index fell steadily from the beginning of the century until the early 1930’s, and then showed a tendency to rise through the Second World War, and the post-war years. To-day it is declining steeply, a change which reflects not only the value of the new hospital and pathological services which we brought into operation three years ago, but also the increasing use of modern clinical methods in the care of our animals. We do not know, and it is possible we shall never know, the natural longevity of most of the animals in our collection. We can only go on hoping, therefore, that this index will continue to fall. 

The results were further publicised by an article in New Scientist.

Below is the graph from the paper showing mortality rates. However, the figures were open to several interpretations. For non-domestic animals at London, the mortality rate for mammals had in general fallen since the Second World War to 29%, for birds it had fallen slightly to 21% but for reptiles and amphibians it had risen sharply to 67%. It was only when data from wild and domestic species were combined and figures for Whipsnade (with an entirely different balance in the collection) were included that the mortality rate in 1957 was calculated at 21%. For non-domestic species at London Zoo it was 29% and had changed little since 1946-48.

       

Any propaganda value to be derived from the paper by Ashton and Vevers was not needed. It was published around the same time, and the article in New Scientist a few weeks after, the Court of Appeal gave its judgement in favour of the council.

Those reading this article will have realised by now that while this longitudinal study showed a bumpy but steady improvement with time, there was no comparison made with other zoological collections in Britain or the rest of the world. In management speak there was no benchmarking.

Finally I add the wry note that while George Cansdale was concerned about the competence of the figures on mortality he should try finding the figures now. The anti-zoo lobby together with the news media always on the lookout for bad news have caused zoos to stop publishing these figures in their annual reports. In the zoos of the 21st century, oozing with political correctness and sickening anthropomorphism, animals must be seen as dying at a ripe old age or of some incurable condition. After the great advances in husbandry and veterinary care from the 1960s, I feel sure that performance has increased markedly in the best zoos of the world but I can find no data to confirm or refute that view.

…And if you think that was the end of the Society’s troubles you would be wrong. Zuckerman’s continuation and reinforcement of the practice of packing its council with powerful friends and supporters from the great and the good backfired spectacularly after his long spell as Secretary and then as President.

Ashton EH, Vevers HG. 1959. The numbers of exhibits, births and deaths in the menagerie at Regent’s Park: 1835-1957, and in Whipsnade Park 1931-1957. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1959, 489-514.

Ashton EH, Vevers HG. 1959. The vital statistics of zoo populations. New Scientist 5 (26, 16 April 1959), 

Donovan B. 2005. Zuckerman: Scientist Extraordinary. Bristol: Bioscientifica

Jones RV. 1972. Review of The Challenge of War by Guy Hartcup. Electronics & Power, October 1972, 366.

Zuckerman S. 1988. Monkeys, Men and Missiles. London: Collins.

Burkhardt and Vevers: Family Links in the Early 20th Century

Late last year James Ritchie contacted me after reading my articles on Colonel Valentine Burkhardt (12 April 2016) and Dr Gwynne Vevers (4 October 2016) in order to point out that members of the two families were close friends in the years before the First World War.

I was fascinated to read your article on Val Burkhardt—he was my grandmother's cousin. My grandmother's mother, Marie-Beatrice Siordet (nee Caldwell) was the younger sister of Annie Claudia, Val Burkhardt’s mother. Thank you for your research which has greatly expanded my knowledge of this interesting man. I also note that you have written about Gwynne Vevers and I wondered if you knew of the link between the Vevers family and the Burkhardts?  It is through my great uncle Gerald Caldwell Siordet. Briefly, Siordet was at Clifton College with his cousin Val and then went up to Balliol where he met and became great friends with the Herefordshire artist Brian Hatton. After Oxford, Hatton and Siordet shared a studio in South Kensington. Gwynne's father Geoffrey Vevers [1890-1970] was a medical student and a cousin of Hatton (their mothers were sisters) and the three of them socialised in London just prior to the first war. Hatton and Siordet were subsequently killed in the war. Val B visited the site of Hatton’s death in Egypt and wrote to Siordet about it.

More details can be found in the book by the late Celia Davies, Brian Hatton. A Biography of the Artist (1887-1916) published by Terence Dalton in 1978. However, the book is worth reading for more than those details. It is a fascinating account of Hatton’s early years and his development as an artist. It is as enjoyable and informative of life in Britain the thirty years up to the First World War as Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece.

Brian Hatton was killed on 23 April 1916 in the Battle of Katia, 25 miles east of the Suez Canal. Fifty Royal Engineers, plus a detachment of Worcestershire Yeomanry 180 strong sent to guard them, were sinking a well when they were attacked by 2-3000 Turkish infantry who came across them. He left a wife and baby daughter.

Gerald Siordet was in France when he heard the news. He then wrote to his cousin Val to ask for any more information since Burkhardt was then serving in Egypt. The then Captain Burkhardt replied on 27 September 1916. In the reply (the full text is in the book) Burkhardt stated that he was having a better memorial than the few sticks  and the bottom of a biscuit tin bearing an illegible inscription he found including a separate one for ‘2 Lieut Brian Hatton Worcester Yeo, A fine artist and a gallant soldier’. In a footnote to the letter, Celia Davies noted that after the war the Yeomen were reburied at Kantara on the Suez Canal.

Gerald Caldwell Siordet, artist, poet, critic and one-time tutor to Aldous Huxley was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry on the Somme in 1916. He was killed on 9 February 1917 leading an attack on a Turkish position in Mesopotamia (now Iraq); his body has never been found. Val Burkhardt’s letter to him had ended: ‘I hope you are not for Mes[o]pot[amia]’.

Brian Hatton in his London studio (from here)

Gerald 'Jack' Caldwell Sioret (from here)

Geoffrey Marr Vevers (1890-1970) when Superintendent,
London Zoo
(Animal & Zoo Magazine December 1938)

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

Gwynne Vevers in 1981

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glen Alty, near Girvan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are Gwynne Vevers’s papers on Ailsa Craig:

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

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