A Victorian Naturalist's Odyssey: The Life and Times of Professor John Henry Salter Dsc (London) 1862 - 1942

By Dr. Gilbert Clark

This tale is of a scholarly man, whom I was privileged to know. He passed through the last decade of his life as I passed through my teens.

He had seen the British Empire reach its zenith, a period when no value was placed on wild-life conservation. Big game hunting having been approved of in the highest echelons of society. Birds had suffered badly and amongst them in the UK was the Red Kite. By 1870 it had virtually been wiped out except for a few pairs in the fastnesses of rural Wales.

Having entered Wales in 1891to joint the Botany Department of the University, Dr Salter heard of their parlous plight and in 1893 bent his shoulder to the wheel.

All this gave scope for expanding a simple biography into the Life and Times of Dr Salter: hence the title Odyssey. It also allowed me to show how an interest in natural history can lead to the most unexpected places and into the company of people from all walks of life in both war and peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479772247

Dr. Gilbert Clark

Born in the village of Llanbadarn-Fawr, Cardiganshire in 1921. Educated at the village school atop Primrose Hill, and there really were primroses all the way!   Ardwyn County School, Aberystwyth 1932-39   University of Wales, Aberystwyth BSc 1946   Royal Navy Lt (A) RNVR, Observer, Fleet Air Arm 1941-45    Welsh National School of Medicine, Cardiff MB BCh 1951   General Practitioner, Mid-Glamorgan 1952-90 Married in 1951 to Megan Llewellyn Jones who died in 2010. Two children and four grand-children. 

Book preview

Part 1

Chapter 1

Halcyon Days

(1862–1908)

Suffolk to Cardiganshire

From his early boyhood, JHS took pleasure in wandering the lanes and fields of his native Suffolk. His home village of Westleton lay hard by Minsmere which is today the flagship of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ nature reserves. The house of his birth still stands I’m told, and what a world he entered into. It was the world so wonderfully described by Flora Thompson in her epic Larkrise to Candleford.

1862 was the second year of the American Civil War and found Queen Victoria in the twenty-fifth year of her long reign. JHS always declared firmly that he was a mid-Victorian.

Viscount Grey of Fallodon, he who warned the nation as World War I loomed, ‘the lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’, and who gave us ‘The Charm of Birds’, was also born in that year.

Great Britain was leading the world in every sphere and the British Empire was sweeping to its zenith. It was only five years after Charles Darwin had published his work, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection and three before Gregor Mendel, Abbot of Brunn (Brno), produced his original treatise on plant genetics. Rudyard Kipling was three years his junior, and Mahatma Ghandi five. It was also the year in which John Hanning Speke, one of the first Britons ever to explore Uganda established that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile. Africa was still ‘The Dark Continent.’

Palmerston was prime minister at his birth and Winston Churchill at his death. He was to live through the reigns of Victoria, Edward V11, George V, and into that of George V1. Not to mention Edward V111 whom he dismissed with disdain as ‘that poor weak foolish young man in the grip of his American adventuress,’ Mrs Simpson.

In the world of science, the secrets of the atom were yet to be revealed. It was not until 1895 that J. J. Thompson described the electron, and Roentgen the X-ray.

In his early years, the first unusual sound that he heard was the booming of the Bittern in the Suffolk marshes. In his old age, it was the fluctuating roar of the engines of German bombers, high and unseen in the night sky, as they passed over Cardiganshire en route to devastate Liverpool.

These facts have been paraded forcefully to anchor him firmly into his niche in Mid-Victorian England. They represent one end of an arc of time sweeping into modern days against which we can follow and allow of comparison between then and now, reminding us that we are travelling not only through the ‘Life’ but also through the ‘Times’ of Professor John Henry Salter. Times which saw monumental changes in social, political, educational, and scientific affairs on a scale not previously dreamt of. The spread of the railway network was virtually complete in the year of his birth. This development had disturbed the Duke of Wellington so much, that he is said to have declared that it was not altogether in the best interests of the nation, in that it ‘allowed the lower orders to move about too freely.’ He spoke with foresight, and unrealised arrogance!

This mobility combined with the development of free compulsory primary education, followed by further education in grammar schools, plus universal suffrage, had by the end of the decade following World War I, virtually swept away the semi- feudal system which had endured for centuries, and saw the squirearchy ‘wither on the vine.’ The College by the Sea at Aberystwyth, founded in 1872, was one of the many new institutions operating in the late nineteenth century and contributing to that enlightenment.

Of his early childhood he was to write:

My first recollections of birds go back to about 1867 and are forever connected in my mind with Westleton’s lanes and hedges and far stretching sandy heaths. It was probably in the spring of 1876 that I had a deserted greenfinch’s nest given me and that I found a red-legged partridge’s nest on the Coastguard Hill in Dunswick, the bird flying off her eggs, ever so many of them, close to me. I remember the robin’s nest we found, deep down amongst garlic and bluebell leaves on a bank in Fence