Dry Storeroom No. 1 (44 page)

The dodo (
Raphus cucullatus
)—a reconstruction using swan feathers

The real wrongdoers have been persons associated with the Natural History Museum, but not on the staff—conmen who abused a privileged position to dupe the curators and researchers. The worst by far was Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, who died at the ripe age of ninety in 1967. Adventurer, soldier, ornithologist, big-game hunter and spy—he had the kind of biography that makes one blink in disbelief.
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He was as striking in person as his life history would suggest: a natural soldier, erect in posture, chiselled features under a short beard, an imperious and charismatic mien coupled with a penetrating intelligence. He was given to wearing distinctive clothes: one of my elderly colleagues remembers playing table tennis with Meinertzhagen, who was dressed in a black cloak that flew around him “like the very devil.” He was aristocratic and well connected—he even went for childhood walks with Charles Darwin. His passion was birds, and nobody doubts that he was highly skilled as an ornithologist. His postings in Africa and the Middle East allowed him access to rare species, and since he was also an able hunter his collection of skins grew rapidly. In 1954 he presented his collection to the Natural History Museum—an enormous gift of twenty thousand skins. He also had an interest in lice, and presented another collection of about half a million of them mounted on glass slides and in spirit bottles. The Trustees approved Meinertzhagen as an Honorary Associate, a title given to few amateurs, as a measure of their gratitude for the receipt of his collection. No doubt the fact that he was a “toff” did him no harm at all in those snobbish times. Thereafter, he could stride around the Museum as if he owned the place. I regret that I am just too young to have met him, for he was one of those rare people who impress themselves on others within a few seconds. Such people should, perhaps, be fenced off from their fellows from an early age since little good ever comes of such charisma.

Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen survived with his reputation undiminished and died a hero. Seventeen years after his death, his scientific history began to unravel. There were many early indications of untrustworthiness that had been ignored in the aftermath of his generous gift. He had been under suspicion of purloining specimens some years beforehand—there had been a partially successful attempt to ban him for a time from the “bird room.” When the extent of his duplicity was revealed at last it cast a cloud over much of his published research. He had stolen specimens from other museums and incorporated them into his collection, and then claimed to have recovered the specimens from new localities. In astonishing examples of sang-froid, he even took specimens from the Natural History Museum’s own collections, relabelled them, and then presented them back to the institution with a flamboyant bow. Thanks to careful research by Robert Prys-Jones, the original status of specimens was reconstructed. For example, consider the Blyth’s kingfisher (
Alcedo hercules
), which Meinertzhagen claimed from two specimens from Burma. It transpired that both specimens had been stolen—one from the Whitehead Collection at the Natural History Museum, the other from the Owston Collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York—and both were really from Hainan Island, China, where they should have been.

The labels tell the story of Meinertzhagen’s deception on an owlet specimen.

As Prys-Jones and others dug into Meinertzhagen’s collection, more and more bogus examples were discovered. It began to seem appropriate that one of the animals he really
did
discover was an African giant hog (
Hylocheorus meinertzhageni
). The problem with the whole collection is that many specimens are perfectly genuine, but careful research work is needed to establish which ones. The type specimens of the Afghan snowfinch (
Montifringilla theresae
) are undoubtedly authentic, to take just one example. This species is named for entomologist Theresa Clay, thirty-three years Meinertzhagen’s junior, who was his “companion” latterly, and who had catalogued the insect collections he had presented to the Museum. They lived next door to one another at 17 and 18 Kensington Gardens with a passage connecting them. The more one finds out about Meinertzhagen, the more dangerous he seems. It was said that he killed a native assistant while in India, an incident that was covered up as a death from plague. Theresa Clay, I should add, was a charming woman who I am sure had no conception of her lover’s dark history. Others had seen his character more clearly from the first. Lawrence of Arabia said of him in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(1926) that “he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of Good.” Meinertzhagen had been an effective spy in Palestine during the First World War, and the business of spies is duplicity. It is hard to construe his motivation for zoological fakery as anything other than a love of mischief and confabulation for its own sake. He could have enjoyed an unsullied reputation had he wished to. He was what novels of his time would have described as a cad and a bounder—and the most dangerous of his kind, one gifted with a luminous personality.

Another figure broke the rule of trustworthiness without which scientific research cannot operate. Arthur Kingsbury died the year after Meinertzhagen. He was a solicitor and amateur mineralogist who during the middle decades of the last century built up a reputation for finding astounding specimens in the field, especially in localities in Cornwall. It was all most extraordinary: a group of mineral enthusiasts would be grubbing around on a spoil heap for some interesting species, when Kingsbury would suddenly wave around a stunning specimen of the object of desire—quite the best ever to have been discovered from the locality. He dressed distinctively in old-fashioned, colonial gear in the field, complete with knee breeches, and became something of a legend. His abilities were attributed to a miraculous sixth sense about where the good specimen lay hidden—and nobody asked awkward questions. Well, scientists don’t make things up—it’s against the rules. After he died his widow sold the collection to the Natural History Museum. The first misgivings about authenticity began to emerge in the 1980s. Collectors who had not been in thrall to the Kingsbury mystique began to complain that they could not duplicate his results from certain localities in spite of their most diligent efforts. Eventually George Ryback was employed to undertake a detailed investigation. The earlier specimens in the Kingsbury Collection were respectable, having been mostly acquired from other collections. But many of those that had astonished his fellow collectors in the field were “plants”—they were from well-known localities elsewhere in the world, and Kingsbury must have had them secreted on his person, only to whip them out at the right dramatic moment. Detailed mineralogical studies showed that a gold specimen (Reg. No. 1965, 83) said to come from Porthcurnick Beach, near Portscatho in Cornwall, actually came from Kanowna, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The occurrence of native gold atop manganese oxide crystals is thoroughly characteristic of the latter locality. Then there was a green fibrous malachite specimen that Kingsbury claimed to have found at the Driggith Mine in Cumbria, but which was identifiable as having come from Zellerfeld in the Harz Mountains of Germany. This list went on and on.

Oddly enough, I believe I can understand Kingsbury’s motivation rather better than I can Meinertzhagen’s. When I was a student I had one day on a field trip during which I genuinely had a “magic hammer”: every locality yielded its treasures instantly to my most cursory tap. My fellow students were half admiring, half envious. The don in charge took notice of me, eventually nodding significantly at me when we arrived at a new locality and indicating that he would not have long to wait for me to find a diagnostic fossil. It was a good feeling (it didn’t last) and I can understand how somebody might want to get a reputation for omnipresent luck. However, the whole scientific endeavour relies on truthfulness. Scientists are not supposed to make mistakes, though almost every scientist will have done so once in their career. Mistakes can be corrected, admitted to and even forgiven. But deliberately to mislead is the ultimate sin in science. It is the fact that both Kingsbury and Meinertzhagen died unexposed that really rankles. It also remains true that such duplicity is rare, and that the integrity of the collections is preserved by frankly admitting to the bad hats and mountebanks.

There were greater threats to the collections than the activities of charismatic fraudsters: two world wars. During the First World War the main threat to the collections seems to have come from the government itself, which several times tried to purloin the space for its own purposes, notably to house huge numbers of clerks in 1918. The Natural History Museum never entirely closed, and provided solace and entertainment for convalescent troops; it continued to have about half a million visitors a year throughout that war. William Stearn discovered an entertaining faux pas by the Speaker of the House of Commons. In 1916, during one of the attempts to close the museums (Bloomsbury, the Tate Gallery, the Science Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Wallace Collection were also included in the plan), the politician spoke in a disparaging manner of “deciphering hieroglyphs and cataloguing microlepidoptera,” the implication being that all real men were out there in the trenches doing useful stuff. He could not have picked a worse example. Hermetically sealed tins of army biscuits destined for troops in all corners of the Empire proved to be full of maggots when they were opened. An entomologist at the Natural History Museum, John Durrant, was called in by the War Office—and the maggots proved to include the larvae of three species of flour moths, all of them belonging to Microlepidoptera. The Speaker was also one of the Principal Trustees of the Natural History Museum, so he should have known better. The Museum contributed to the war effort in a dozen ways ranging from the treatment of body vermin to advice on which wood to use for aircraft. As in every other institution in Britain, most of the younger men saw active service and many did not return to their benches.

Specimens had to move to safety during the Second World War; a large snake moves to a storage facility deep under Surrey.