Walking amongst monkeys and Theodore Roosevelt’s policy: ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’

With foreign affairs dominating the news for the first half of the year, now interrupted by incessant coverage of the self-inflicted local difficulties facing the UK government, the doctrine of ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ had many an airing. That has always been my motto when walking past groups of habituated or feral monkeys which have the reputation of sometimes attacking passers by or stealing food from their bags or hands. I have wondered in the past if the dictum arose in a part of the world that had to deal with monkeys as well as with evil individuals of another primate species.

When I looked it up, I found that its noted adopter and promoter, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the USA from 1901 until 1909 as well a keen and very well-read amateur zoologist and natural historian, had indeed identified the proverb as having originated in West Africa: 

I have always been fond of the West African proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."

The last time I had the opportunity of Roosevelt’s dictum was walking in the New Territories of Hong Kong where large bands of macaques (the origins of which I have discussed previously here) gather to await picnickers, walkers and joggers. At the start and end of a popular walk along a water catchment where monkeys tend to gather close to and on the path, there are piles of sticks gathered from the trees and shrubs, picked up and then discarded by walkers and joggers.

The following short video is of a large troupe of monkeys—around 50 individuals—on a popular path along a water catchment near the Jubilee Reservoir in the New Territories of Hong Kong in December 2017. When we first saw them they were descending a steep hill, covered in concrete at lower levels, to reach the path. They had to paddle through the trickle of water in the catchment and quite clearly did not like getting their feet wet. Later, they lined the path for about 100 yards. I had the ideal implement for the day—a walking pole was my big stick.

Enthusiasm is not enough. Who said that about research?

I never met Sir John Gaddum. He died in 1965, shortly after ill-health forced his retirement, three years before my arrival at the Institute of Animal Physiology at Babraham; Richard Keynes had succeeded him as Director. Many if the pharmacologists Gaddum had appointed were still around and stories of his seven years at the Institute, as well as earlier in Edinburgh, abounded. Most of them concerned his indecisiveness, especially in approving minor expenditure during a time of relative plenty. I read more about Gaddum a couple of years ago while writing a biographical memoir on Len Goodwin. Gaddum was a customer (‘the untidy Dr Gaddum’) at the shoe shop Len’s father managed and there were interactions of the two pharmacologists later in life. William Feldberg (1900-1993) wrote Gaddum’s biographical memoir for the Royal Society; he included 26 notable quotations from Gaddum’s works. Many are concerned with pharmacology and its ramifications but three are of particular note and I wish I had seen them sooner when I was in a position to deploy them with effect.

On research: Enthusiasm is not enough.

It is usually a waste of time to acquire a new research tool and then look around for problems to which it might be applied. 


It will probably always be more important to try a thing out than to argue about it.

Impossible as it is to offer advice to anybody setting out in science in the 21st century by those who operated and survived in the 20th, these three Gaddum quotations are tenets that are timeless.

from Report for 1964-1965, Institute of
Animal Physiology, Babraham, Cambridge
London: Agricultural Research Council

Feldberg W.S. 1967. John Henry Gaddum 1900-1965. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 13, 57-77.

Who was the photographer of British Amphibians and Reptiles, Walter S. Pitt?…continued

Walter S. Pitt’s photographs were used to illustrate Malcolm Smith’s seminal book, The British Amphibians and Reptiles published by Collins in the New Naturalist series in 1951. Pitt’s photographs also appeared in magazines on aquaria and there is mention that he was the recipient of one of first four Amazon sword plants to be imported into Britain. He was a member of the Zoological Photographic Club which led me to suspect he might have been a gifted amateur photographer. But I could found nothing further. I asked if anybody had information in a post on here on 22 February 2018. A couple of days ago the President of Bath Photographic Society contacted me to say our W.S. Pitt was unlikely to be the W.S. Pitt—the only possibility I could find—who was a member of that Society in 1888. Today, by chance while looking for somebody else, I found that Walter S. Pitt was a member of the Avicultural Society and that his address was listed. A search in ancestry.com soon showed who he was.

Walter Sydney Pitt was born on 19 November 1900 at 15 Portland Place London. His father was a physician, a consultant at Guy’s Hospital. Walter Pitt became a solicitor in the city (Pontifex, Pitt and Langham of Holborn Circus). He lived in Surrey at ‘Wildwood’, Silverdale Avenue, Walton-on-Thames. He died on 21 February 1983. It appears that he and his wife, Muriel Evelyn Gillard, had no children.

Confirmation that this was the Walter Pitt I was looking for has also appeared since I did the searches in 2018. On eBay at present is a clipping from a 1946 issue Rural Affairs Magazine. The caption to the photograph shows that Pitt won second prize (and £2) in a photographic competition for a photograph of a Greater Black-backed Gull alighting on a rock. From the caption the details of the camera he was using are given. It is described as an Exacta 2¼ x 2¼ fitted with a 8¼ inch Cooke Aviar lens. The film was Ilford HP3  and the exposure 1/1000th second at f/4.5*.

Having identified Walter Sydney Pitt as a gifted amateur photographer, aquarist and aviculturist, the question now is, do his original photographs which illustrated so famous a book, survive anywhere?

Finally, some of the colour plates by Pitt from Malcolm Smith’s book. The newts were photographed in an aquarium, another photographic skill acquired by Walter Pitt.

*The camera is interesting. The negative size shows that is must have been an Exakta 6x6, a camera that only became available in Germany a week or so before the outbreak of war. My guess is it came to U.K. with a serviceman some time in 1945 and that Pitt was trying it out. The lens was a famous Cooke Aviar 210 mm lens made for large format cameras by Taylor, Taylor & Hobson in Leicester. The Exakta’s roll film would have captured just the centre of the image projected by the lens, thereby increasing its apparent focal length. Some special fitting must have been made to adapt the lens to the lens mount of the Exakta. At the time of Pitt’s photograph, the rating of Ilford HP3 film was the equivalent of approximately 250 ASA. In order to use the shutter speed he did (to capture the bird in flight) it must have been a bright if not fully sunlit day when he encountered the gull.

 

Herbert M. Evans. The story of a biographical memoir and the art of implication

Herbert McLean Evans (1882-1971) was a big man, literally and metaphorically, in American biological research. His biographers wrote of him:

He was interested in everything which was going on in biology, in embryology, endocrinology, physiology of reproduction, nutrition, genetics, the history of science and medicine and the collection of books. Nothing was too large for him, nothing too trivial, if it threw light upon the central question--the pursuit of truth and the biology of man.

H.M Evans
from Amoroso and Corner

Evans was a pioneer in the study of the anterior pituitary gland and its hormones. However, he is now best remembered eponymously for a relatively minor biological discovery he made in 1914. The effects of dyes made largely by the German chemical industry on biological tissues and processes was a major activity in searches for ‘magic bullets’ against disease. One dye studied by Evans as a tissue stain was found to bind strongly to proteins in the plasma and could therefore be used to measure human blood volume in health and disease. As a result it was sold by Eastman Kodak as ‘Evans Blue’. Evans Blue is still widely used to study such topics as the permeability of blood vessels and for locating lymph nodes.

Evans after spending time at Johns Hopkins medical school (where he graduated in medicine without, it was said, stepping foot into a hospital) and in Germany, in 1915 he was appointed to the chair of anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley where he remained, with periods elsewhere, until he retired in 1952. As was typical of the time—and for most of the rest of the 20th century—there were visits and close links between biomedical scientists in the USA and those in Britain. Evans was therefore well known to early British endocrinologists and he elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1951. After he died his closest friend on this side of the Atlantic, Geoffrey Wingfield Harris (1913–1971) volunteered to write his biographical memoir and made a few preliminary notes. However, Harris died a short time later. The job of writing the memoir then fell to George Washington Corner (1889-1981) from the USA, also a Foreign Fellow elected in 1955, and ‘Amo’ (Emmanuel Ciprian Amoroso, 1901-1982) who knew Evans and his reputation. Corner was in many ways ideally placed. He had been appointed by Evans to a position in at Berkeley in 1915 and had spent separate years working in London and Oxford.

The job of co-author gave Amo some anguish and a lot of hard work. Corner’s contribution was largely that he published as a biographical memoir for the National Academy of Sciences leaving Amo to add more. The narrow office Amo occupied as a visitor at Babraham (mine previously and one I had been delighted to ‘lend’ him) was full of cigar smoke for weeks on end as he wrote about Evans using his usual thick-nibbed blue felt-tip pen and managing only to get a few lines onto each page. One of the problems faced by Amo was that Evans was hated by a large number of his contemporaries in the USA and a form of words was needed to mark but not dwell on that aspect of his career.

The history of the scientific advances in the many topics Evans worked on also proved difficult to write. One day though, when he must have been nearing the end, Amo emerged on the lookout for somebody to tell of a eureka moment. He caught the late Jim Linzell and I in the corridor as we headed for the coffee room. ‘I’ve got it—it just came to me—the words that all those who knew Evans and his reputation will understand, without the rest of the world knowing and us saying outright that he was a devil for the women’. The rest of the world reading the very long memoir might though have been given some inkling that something else was to follow after the mention of his first, second and third wives and the ‘domestic infelicities’ that required him to sell his first antiquarian book collection in order to reimburse the family trust funds of the first.

I had no idea whether the words Amo read out from his draft that afternoon nearly 50 years ago had made it into the final version of the biographical memoir. When I thought of it a few weeks ago I found that they had. This is what he had written:

…but his influence always, extraordinary, is still active. Only those who have known him and worked with him or under him can realize the extent to which this is true.

Amoroso EC, Corner GW. 1972. Herbert McLean Evans 1882-1971. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 18: 82–186. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1972.0005

Corner GW. 1974. Herbert McLean Evans 1882-1971. Biographical Memoir, National Academy of Sciences 153-192.

Yao L, Xing X, Yu P, Ni Y, Chen F. 2018. Evans Blue dye: a revisit of Its applications in biomedicine. Contrast Media & Molecular Imaging Volume 2018 Article ID 7628037 https://doi.org10.1155/2018/7628037

The Critically Endangered Chinese Pond or Yellow Terrapin. Hong Kong in the 1960s

I noted when I reviewed the new book on the freshwater chelonians of Hong Kong that the Chinese Pond Terrapin, Mauremys mutica does not appear. Those that were once found there were classified as Introduced because Hong Kong was said not to be within its known range. However, that is clearly not now the case, judging by the distribution map shown in the IUCN Red List (where it is called the Yellow Pond Turtle). I suspect that it should be considered as having been extirpated in Hong Kong by collection and habitat loss but occasionally restored if not sustainably by the release of captive specimens from the food markets.

In the wild this species has suffered a catastrophic decline in numbers over the past few decades. An 80% fall in three generations across Vietnam and China was IUCN’s estimate in 2018. It is now marked Critically Endangered. The Wikipedia article (which has a dreadful photograph of a stuffed specimen in Japan) provides a list of references which illustrate both the complexity of what might not be a single species and of difficulties of conservation through captive breeding and release of stock from farms. The species, along with many others, is farmed in China and there are examples of all sorts of weird hybrids turning up in captivity and in feral populations.

Mauremys mutica (then known as Clemmys mutica) was a regular in the wet markets of Hong Kong in the 1960s. The one I show here (photographed on the roof of the now-demolished Northcote Science Building of the University of Hong Kong) was bought in a Kowloon market by a lecturer, whose name I am still trying to remember, at what was then Hong Kong Baptist College, in 1966 or early 1967. She then released it in the wild in the New Territories.

The account in Karsen, Lau and Bogadek’s second edition of Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles published in 1998 described what was then known:

May be regarded as introduced. As an indirect result of the pet trade and traditional medicine trade, occasional specimens escape or are released. One specimen was found on Cheung Chau, having almost certainly escaped from a nearby temple where numerous species of terrapins were kept. Additional specimens were found in the vicinity of Shing Mun and Tai Tam Reservoirs, Sai Kung and Shek Kong areas. It is doubtful whether this species is part of Hong Kong's native fauna since these records lie outside the historic range, and there has been a recent surge in records in areas frequently visited by people.

All sorts of questions spring to mind. Did the ones released ever breed? Have they now all gone? It is perhaps worth noting that in the areas mentioned, Red-eared Sliders, the ubiquitous pet terrapin and also farmed in China for the human food market, are now commonplace. Have they outcompeted these as well as other native-to-China if not native-to-Hong Kong species?

Dire straits is the only description I can think of for status of the chelonian populations of China.

A Field Guide to the Turtles of Hong Kong by Adam Francis. 2022, ISBN978-988-74587-2-2

A welcome package from Hong Kong arrived. It contained the new, short (75-page) book on the freshwater chelonians of Hong Kong. This volume, written and self-published by Adam Francis, complements his earlier volume on the snakes of Hong Kong which appeared in 2021.

The book is aimed at helping and encouraging those who look for reptiles in the wild—an increasingly popular activity in Hong Kong, with both books spin-outs from the author’s YouTube channel SnakeID TV, a must watch for anybody interested in Hong Kong wildlife, and its associated website, hongkongsnakeID.com. Like the book on snakes this one is lavishly illustrated even if the printing of the photographs is, to my eyes, too dark.

The book is a leap forward from the nearly 25-year old second edition of Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles by Karsen, Lau and Bogadek. There are two reasons for this. The first is the vastly increased number of field observations and photographs. The second is that it covers the increasing numbers of introduced species that have appeared in the wild.

One example of the leap forward in knowledge is the case of Mauremys (formerly Ocadia) sinensis - the Chinese Stripe-necked Terrapin. The standard story (in the Karsen, Lau & Bogadek book) stated that the only specimen known from Hong Kong was a single individual dug up from a dried-out pond in Stanley Internment Camp during the  Second World War. There was also a possible sighting in the wild in 1980. By contrast, Francis writes that they are found all over Hong Kong in nearly every freshwater environment. However, I have re-read Geoffrey Herklots’s account in which he described and drew the individual found in Stanley and I suspect his story has been misinterpreted because he actually wrote of this species as ‘less common’ than Reeves’s Terrapin. In other words it was known from Hong Kong before the one from Stanley turned up to feed a hungry internee in Stanley.

Throughout, Mauremy sinensis has been considered an Introduced species in Hong Kong, a classification maintained by Francis. However, Hong Kong is within its known range and the IUCN Red List has it tagged as ‘Extant and Introduced’ in Hong Kong. My best guess is that it is native to Hong Kong but was reduced to very low numbers by collection for human consumption.

The problem of deciding what species are native to Hong Kong is an old one. That is because there is a long history of live freshwater chelonians being imported for human food and for traditional Chinese medicine. Some of these, as well as some individuals caught locally, escaped or were released. The trade in China has been boosted by farming but, overall along with severe loss of habitats, has done so much damage that a number of species are now classified as Critically Endangered or Endangered. In more recent years, there has also been trade in pet chelonians, with the late 20th century worldwide boom in ‘baby turtles’ from the USA being evident from the presence of large numbers of Red-eared Sliders in the ponds and lakes of public parks and reservoirs. A walk down the fish and pet shops on Choi Tung Street in Kowloon, presents a bewildering display of young chelonians of many different species from all parts of the world and it is hardly surprising that adults are released into bodies of freshwater, or in the case of tortoises, to the forests and parks. Some surprising additions to the Hong Kong fauna have appeared; the Elongated Tortoise (Indotestudo elongata) is one example.

Adam Francis provides information for the identification of 17 species. Of these he marks 11 as Introduced (including Mauremys sinensis, mentioned above). including 3 from North America, and 1 from Africa. Of the native (or at least those in which Hong Kong would be included as part of their natural range or forming a relatively small extension) 6 by Francis’s reckoning, 7 by mine. 4 are classified by IUCN as Critically Endangered, 2 as Endangered and 1 as Vulnerable. What an enormous decrease in wild populations there has been in the past 50 years. In the 1960s, all the native species were for sale in large numbers in the markets of Hong Kong.

One species that does not get a mention in the book is Mauremys mutica or Chinese Pond Terrapin. Although recorded in earlier years and sold in the live food markets, it was regarded, again, as Introduced. However, the current distribution map in the IUCN Red List shows that Hong Kong is well within its natural range. Has it now disappeared (even if from Introduced individuals) from Hong Kong? It has declined throughout its range to the extent it is now also classified as Critically Endangered.

In recommending this book to anybody interested in Hong Kong reptiles or chelonians in general, it does come with a few problems for the British English-speaking world. The title, A Field Guide to the Turtles of Hong Kong, would suggest it concerns marine chelonians. ‘Freshwater Turtles’ would signify its coverage even if freshwater turtles to Brits are terrapins (ironically an Algonquin word adopted in British usage for ‘water-tortoises’). In the book, the common names used for some species include ‘terrapin’ while others include ‘turtle’, for example, Chinese Striped Terrapin; Beale’s Four-eyed Turtle.

One real error is the eponymous Reeves’s Terrapin which is shown throughout as ‘Reeve’s Terrapin’. John Reeves (1774-1856) who sent the specimens to London and worked largely in Macau as Inspector of Tea for the East India Company, might be be rotating in his grave.

The arrangement of the book also seems rather strange. The plates come first while the ‘introduction’ (which includes a section on poaching and protection) is at the end. It would also have been useful to have a list of synonyms which would make looking for or cross-referencing earlier publications easier.

The book costs HKD 220 (approximately £23). I have only seen it for sale by booksellers in Hong Kong and the author’s website (with the latter restricted to batches of ten).

Herklots GAC. 1951. The Hong Kong Countryside. Hong Kong: South China Morning Post.

Karsen SJ, Lau M W-N, Bogadek A. 1998. Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles. Second Edition. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council. ISBN 962-7849-05-7

Mavis Gunther: infant feeding and the great personal tragedy in her life, the death of her husband, the zoologist Rolfe

This is a story that for me began in the early 1970s. At a meeting, as I recall of the Society for Endocrinology, I was approached by a little old lady. She had been sent to talk to me by Alfred Cowie, later to become a good friend, whom I learnt later she regularly badgered for information on the endocrine control of lactation. She said to me something along the lines of, ‘All these people are poisoning all the infants in Britain by making up milk too strong. You know something about milk osmolality and tonicity and things, don't you?’. She explained that some mothers and helpers crammed as much baby formula (already too rich in sodium) into the supplied measuring scoop as possible in the belief of the more food the better. When mixed with the correct volume of water, the milk would have a much higher osmotic concentration and possibly lead to dehydration as well as having a long-termdeleterious effect on a newborn’s kidneys. Thus began a short experiment in which I crammed as much baby formula into a measuring scoop as possible to see just how overconcentrated the milk could be made*.

Mavis Gunther at a symposium at the
Ciba Foundation, London, 1965

The little old lady was Mavis Gunther and I use the term in the sense that in all sports and any card game it is wise to beware of the little old lady because at tennis you will soon be 6-0 down, at golf all her putts will drop and at cards or any board game you will be toast. Mavis asked pertinent questions, did not suffer fools, especially her fellow clinicians and other health professionals, gladly and had trenchant views on obstetric practice and the care of infants. She was frustrated by the attitude of of her fellow physicians and, realising that knowledge of lactation had very rarely come from that source, that is why at meetings she sought out those who were studying lactation funded in Britain, like most of mammalian reproductive biology, as part of agricultural research.

As a result of our contact and conversation I asked her to give a paper on human lactation and infant feeding at a symposium I organised for the Zoological Society of London in November 1976. She was then 73 and I think that was the last time we met.

Shortly before she sought me out, Mavis had written a book, Infant Feeding, published by Methuen in 1971. She then produced a revised edition for a paperback published by Penguin in 1973. It was highly influential and her views on mother-infant interactions are still referred to today. I remember reading it at the time but in the 1990s when I was extolling Mavis’s virtues and searching for a copy of the cover with which to illustrate a lecture, I could not find a second-hand copy. I had to borrow a copy from the National Lending Library. The difficulty of getting hold of the book was mentioned by participants when I talked about Mavis at a seminar organised by the Wellcome Foundation in 2007. Was it because so many copies had been sold and held onto or had the print-run been insufficient to meet demand? However, a couple of weeks ago I found a copy of the Penguin edition for sale and paid the £4.56 including postage. It has only taken 49 years.

By now those who know anything about reptiles will be asking the question that I asked 50 years ago. Was she related to the German-born Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther FRS (1830-1914) of the Natural History Museum in London? ‘Yes’, she replied, ‘He was my late husband’s grandfather’. Only recently have I discovered that her husband, Eustace Rolfe Gunther (known as Rolfe), to whose memory her book was dedicated, was a zoologist and that his death was an utterly tragic event amongst all the tragedies in wartime Britain.

Mavis Gunther (née Carr)

However, before turning to Rolfe, I must return to Mavis’s life. She was born Mavis Hilda Dorothea Carr on 17 June 1903 in Bromley, Kent. She was educated at Bedales School and then Cambridge for pre-clinical medicine, graduating in 1925. She qualified at the Royal Free Hospital, then in the centre of London in 1928. In 1929 she married Rolfe. In 1935 she was co-author of a paper on the genetics of epiloia (now known as tuberous sclerosis) a rare condition. She was in the Research Department of the Royal Eastern Counties Institution for the Mentally Defective in Colchester working with Lionel Penrose (1898-1972, elected FRS in 1953). She had young children, born in 1930, 1933 and 1937. Described as being in general practice in 1939 Register (an emergency census), the Medical Directory for 1940 indicates that Mavis did a number of medical jobs around London, covering activities from antenatal clinics to mental disease. She was a local councillor in the late 1930s but resigned immediately after the death of her husband.

Within weeks of Rolfe’s death in 1940, she and the children left Liverpool on board Canadian Pacific’s R.M.S. Duchess of Atholl which crossed the Atlantic unescorted after having arrived in convoy carrying Canadian troops. An article behind a ludicrously high paywall which I have only seen in part, indicates that a posthumous letter from her husband urged her to seek safety for the children in Canada. Friends apparently invited her to work in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Toronto; while there she was supported by the the Banting Research Foundation for research in human lactation. Some of her work she described in a paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Mavis’s daughter reported that they were in Canada for four years. Sometime before 1946 she joined Robert Alexander McCance’s (1898-1953; FRS 1948) famous team in Cambridge and its equally famous mission to Wuppertal in Germany after the end of the war. McCance knew food had been and would be short in Germany and that various experts could study the effects of undernutrition and to help the local population. As one of the experts with previous experience, Mavis Gunther studied the volume and composition of breast milk.

At some time she was awarded the M.D. degree by Cambridge.

It appears that Mavis was a member of the Medical Research Council’s staff but I have not been able to find if this employment began with the Wuppertal mission or earlier. We do know though that in 1948 she was seconded the University College Hospital, London, where she was given accommodation and facilities. She expanded a clinic for women with problems breastfeeding and it was recalled: ‘Mavis Gunther used to go round the women each day talking to them about breastfeeding and breast problems. She was known, perhaps irreverently, to many of the students as "The Breast Queen", but her work in her gentle persuasive way was invaluable to the mothers in the days when formula feeding was not very reliable. She helped thousands of babies in the first weeks of their lives and is remembered with affection by women who had their babies during her reign’.

The journalist Katharine Whitehorn (1928-2021) in her Foreword to Mavis’s book wrote of her experiences in the maternity ward of University College Hospital:

Into this overheated atmosphere there came only one voice of utter kindness and sense: the Breast Lady, who came calmly round and sorted us all out, and got a great many of us happily established at breast feeding who could never otherwise have managed it.

At some stage she must have moved from obstetrics to paediatrics and to a lecturer’s position. I think she must have retired from University College around 1972. I only remember writing to her at her home address in Esher, Surrey.

Mavis Gunther collaborated widely in pursuit of improving infant feeding and understanding the problems faced by mothers and infants, while gathering the evidence on which advice should be based. She was no breast-feeding zealot, arguing that mother’s must be free to choose breast or bottle depending on their individual circumstances. She published research on a number of topics including allergies to milk, the possible causes of ‘cot death’, comparisons of breast and bottle feeding, colostrum and milk as a source of antibodies, mastitis, sore nipples, human milk composition, the use of mineral additives in milk formula from different manufacturers and breast pumps. In obstetrics she studied the transfer of blood between baby and placenta immediately after birth. She stressed the importance of considering the mother and child as a unit, and to be supported as such. She argued that the behavioural initiation of breast feeding is not an instinctive process and that the mother needs some degree of instruction either by observation during life and/or by the help of family, friends, doctors and midwives. She based part of that argument on following up early observations on Chimpanzees in captivity by contacting London Zoo and learning of their experiences in the 1930s and early 1940s which suggested that only those brought into captivity late succeeded in breast-feeding their young.

At the 1976 symposium at the Zoo I mentioned above, she described her contacts with Geoffrey Marr Vevers (1890-1970) who, with a human obstetrician, described the birth and rearing of the baby chimp ‘Jubilee’ (named for George V’s 25 years on the throne) in 1935. Vevers, was then Superintendent and like Mavis, medically qualified. Listening was Geoffrey Vevers’s son, Gwynne (1916-1988) who amongst his numerous responsibilities at the Zoo had overall charge, wonderfully delegated, of scientific meetings and publications.

Mavis Gunther died on 30 June 1997. She was buried alongside he husband, at Heacham, a town in Norfolk, not that far from where Rolfe was killed, where his parents had a house, and where he was born.

Rolfe Gunther

Eustace Rolfe Gunther

In order to describe the tragic events which led to Eustace Rolfe Gunther’s death, I have drawn on an account given by his daughter, Rosalind, for the Dictionary of Falklands Biography. According to an article in a village magazine recording her death in 2021, aged 90, she did so because the records are closed until 2040 and she believed there had been an official cover up. Indeed, the reports of the inquest in the local press are perfunctory. I have also drawn on the obituary written by Alister (later Sir Alister) Hardy, who worked closely with Rolfe, and my own delvings into the happenings in a Norfolk village. This is what Rosalind wrote:

…As a member of the Territorial Army he was called up at the outbreak of war and commissioned 2nd Lt in the 72nd Anti-aircraft Regt RA. In May 1940 he was stationed near North Walsham in Norfolk. When approaching Barton Turf on foot to check that someone was not signalling to the enemy at sea he called at a cottage to read his map and obtain directions to the suspect house. The resident, a Special Constable, directed him on foot, cycled to the house by another route and borrowed a gun from the newly armed Home Guard. Gunther reached the house. The Constable returned with some further Home Guard members and after asking Gunther to hand over his gun, accidentally shot him in the upper leg.

Rolfe Gunther bled to death in Norwich hospital on 31 May 1940.

The local newspaper’s account of the inquest carried no detail of the examination of witness, just the conclusion of the local coroner: ‘died from a gunshot wound caused by a rifle Inadvertently discharged’. 

It does not need much deductive power to envisage the reaction in the first year of the war of the Special Constable to the appearance of an armed officer with a German surname at his door purportedly looking for a potential German spy. It may not have crossed his mind that the last thing a German spy might do would be to use a German surname. A Special Constable, for those readers not in the U.K., is a part-time, unpaid voluntary police officer. I discovered to a degree of amazement that the tiny village of Barton Turf had three special constables in 1939 but it really does seem like the whole affair was covered up since, war or no war, whichever one of the three got things so wrong, should have been charged with manslaughter.

I can see why there were other unanswered questions. For example, why was Rolfe, an officer in a searchlight regiment (not anti-aircraft, as indicated above) investigating somebody suspected of signalling to the enemy of sea? And by his action might not the zealous constable have tipped off the suspect that he was under investigation?

To add to the tragedy, Mavis was called by the police and drove to the hospital; when she arrived Rolfe had just died.

Hardy for an obituary in Nature wrote: ‘In 1937, distressed by Great Britain's unpreparedness for war, Gunther joined the territorials as a sapper and was commissioned a year later. On inquiry about the best use a man of his training might be, he was advised to enter the searchlight service, and his keen powers of observation were of particular use in training spotters’. His territorial unit was the 30th (Surrey) anti-aircraft battalion of the Royal Engineers (later transferred to the Royal Artillery), the unit in which, by coincidence, my father served from 1941). Gunther was commissioned in the 72nd Searchlight Regiment, Royal Artillery, in February 1939.

Hardy in the obituary and in another I suspect he also wrote for The Times, praised his friend and colleague Gunther highly:

Educated at Winchester and Caius College, Cambridge, he was appointed as zoologist in 1924 to be one of the original members of the scientific staff of the Discovery Committee set up by the Colonial Office to investigate the resources of the antarctic seas, particularly in regard to the factors, biological and physical, governing the great whale fisheries of those waters. 

It was my privilege to be closely associated with Gunther on the R.R.S. Discovery on her voyage of 1925-27, on the smaller ship R.R.S. William Scoresby, and afterwards in the joint authorship of an extensive report upon the ecology of the antarctic plankton. He was a man of sterling qualities. Working with him day and night, often under the difficult conditions presented by the Southern Ocean, one was continually impressed by his deep sense of duty, his devotion to his work, and his tireless energy. His enthusiasm was always combined with a scrupulous regard for accuracy: both in the field and the working-up of data. After working at the nets and water-bottles for thirty-six hours on end, except for odd moments snatched for hurried meals, it was only the fear of being inaccurate in the readings and recordings, not fatigue itself, which persuaded him to rest. He had a love of the sea and the open life; he was a real deep-water oceanographer, with the determination to bring back results. 

In 1931 on the R.R.S. William Scoresby, Gunther led a highly successful expedition to investigate the Peru Coastal Current (sometimes called Humboldt's Current) and published in 1936 a comprehensive report on its physical, chemical and biological aspects. Later he again visited the Antarctic on a whale-marking expedition to study migrations, and made valuable observations on the swimming and breathing habits of whales (a paper now in the press). Much of his time before the War was spent in working on the material collected during a trawling survey, partly carried out under his direction, on the extensive banks lying between the Falkland Islands and South America. It is to be hoped that all the work he put into this will eventually be published. 

In addition to his wide interests in zoology and oceanography, Gunther was always delighted to record any unusual natural phenomenon ; his recent letter in NATURE on the ice storm in Wiltshire is an example of this. Colour and scenery were a great joy to him, and he did splendid water-colour drawings, both sea and landscape, as well as accurate colour studies of marine animals. Many will treasure his privately printed "Notes and Sketches made during two years on the Discovery Expedition". 

It was characteristic of Gunther's capacity for work that his long leave after the 1925-27 expedition medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, on should have been spent in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge, undertaking researches on the fatty and vitamin content of plankton (published in collaboration with G. Collin, J. C. Drummond [later Sir Jack who also died in tragic circumstances] and T. P. Hilditch). His published work, while extensive, is no real measure of his industry. He was always being attracted by side branches which he felt it his duty to explore, and only when he had carried them a long way did he realize he was being taken too far from the main issue; reluctantly they were put on one side for some later available time--alas, now no more. 

…He has been a worthy upholder of the tradition set by his father, his grandfather, Dr. A.G.L.G. Gunther, F.R.S., and his great-uncle, Prof. W.C. Mcintosh, F.R.S. 

In 1941 Eustace Rolfe Gunther was posthumously awarded the Polar Medal in Bronze for ‘good services between the years 1925-1939 in the Royal Research Ships “Discovery II” and “William Scoresby”'

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Amongst the many people I have met Mavis Gunther was one of the most memorable—and one of the most worth remembering.

*About thirty years later I met a paediatrician at a meeting who knew of this work and I asked him if  overconcentration had proved to be a problem. He said no, the infant could cope. However, I now find that there have been cases of dehydration linked to overconcentrated baby formula and I see all sorts of warning about making up the powders properly.