Extreme traveller of the early C20th

John Fulton Barr as a young man

A small collection of papers of John Fulton Barr (1868-1954) has just been catalogued and is now available for reader use. Barr qualified in medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1891. According to the donor of the papers, after the relatively tame postgraduate enterprise of going to Paris to study ophthalmology, Barr then joined in the Klondike Gold Rush, an episode in his career sadly not covered by the diaries and other items we hold.

Early in 1900, like so many of his compatriots, he sailed from England to serve in the Boer War. This period of his life is covered by three diaries (PP/JFB/A.1/1-3) and nearly 100 black and white photographs showing a very wide variety of aspects of the life he encountered in South Africa. There are also a couple of postcards from him to a Miss Isabelle Carmichael of Kilmalcolm, Renfrewshire. These materials form a welcome addition to our already significant holdings relating to the war in South Africa, 1899-1902, a topic of continuing interest to researchers.

Following this episode, Barr went to Japan, and was involved in a business venture - a salmon cannery - on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia. Over the years he made several expeditions into this wild volcanic region. Even these days this area presents huge challenges for the traveller because of its inaccessibility and rugged terrain, although a tourism industry is developing. His surviving diary 1907-1909 describes his travels in Japan, China, and Russia and his expeditions into Kamchatka

There are frustratingly no diaries for the period from 1909 until 1917. Thus, although Barr was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the RAMC in August 1914, we only have an account of his war service from November 1917, along with a little, mostly official, correspondence. He was discharged from service in 1919, taking a position as surgeon on one of the ships repatriating chinese labourers after the War, in order to return to Asia.

After further travels in the Far East, and also trips to North America, the Baltic and Australia, Barr returned to the UK.  According to the Medical Directory he held a few hospital medical officer posts in Scotland, before establishing himself in Unstone, Derbyshire (near Sheffield), where he continued to reside after his retirement from practice c. 1940, and to keep up his diaries. He continued to take extended periods of travel: apart from fairly frequent trips to Scotland (mainly Gelston) and a couple to Ireland, he went to South America in 1924 and South Africa in 1932, revisited Japan in 1939, and visited Sri Lanka in 1940, as well as going to Wengen, Switzerland, on  several occasions during the 1930s.

John Fulton Barr in the 1940s

There is a complete run of his diaries covering his career and travels from 1917 until 1948, although according to the British Medical Journal Barr did not die until 1954.

This collection, though small, offers considerable riches to the researcher, adding to our existing treasure-trove of unpublished travel writings as well to our extensive holdings on War, Medicine and Health, and illuminates an unusual and enterprising medical life-course.

A life on (or under) the ocean wave - World Oceans Day

When we think of planet Earth seen from space, the chances are that we think of the colour green. Our planet occupies the comfortable middle ground between the searingly hot silver clouds of Venus and the cold red deserts of Mars: the so-called “Goldilocks Zone”, not too hot and not too cold, in which water can exist in liquid form and sustain life.

Our view as land-dwellers is a biassed one: to a disinterested alien, the main pecularity of our planet would probably be the large amount of blue in its colour-schemes. The presence of liquid water covering much of the planet's surface is a function of our delicately-poised position in the Goldilocks Zone. Yet, to a land-species like us the ocean is a foreign, sometimes threatening environment, on which we often turn our backs: we treat it as an obstacle, as a food-source to plunder rapidly before returning to land, or at worst as a vast sewer into which we can dump all our various wastes and fondly believe that they vanish. World Oceans Day, taking place in 2011 on June 8th, is an annual attempt to redress this balance; accordingly, today we will seek to highlight some sources in our Library relating to the oceans.

Where humankind goes, sickness and injury follows: so the expansion of Western trade and exploration in the past few hundred years has been tracked by medical men and women, accompanying the voyagers. The richness of our holdings relating to travel is a recurring theme in this blog: our regular talk on Around the World in 100 Years highlights these. We can do no more today than splash in the shallows. Some examples: within the archives department, our manuscript diaries and notebooks allow you to

- follow Harry Hayter Ramsdale on his long journey to Australia in the emigrant ship Clifton, in 1861-1862: in the course of the journey Ramsdale is pressed into service as the ship's medical man when the regular surgeon cuts his throat before they are even out of the English Channel, and subsequently delivers a child on board which he suggests should be named after him. We also share his melancholy reflections when, later, a child dies on board and is buried at sea: "I always think that when buried in our native country we do not altogether lose our friends but when buried at sea everything is apparently gone ... to become the prey of fishes or perhaps rot in the bottomless or serve as a football to every wave." (MS.5324);

- lie at anchor in the Straits of Magellan with the naval surgeon Henry Piers, whose journal of a voyage from Britain to Canada on HMS Satellite in 1856-1857 is held as MS.6110: “Our anchorage at 'Sandy Point' was so close to the shore - within half a mile I should think - that we could distinctly hear noises resembling the croaking of frogs &c. and the ripple breaking on the shore...”;

- cruise the Indian Ocean and the shores of Australia with another naval surgeon, Fleetwood Buckle, who records the coastline in a series of delicate watercolours in his journals, part of a large archive held as MSS.1395-1404 and 5656;

- take notes on the natural history of the oceans with John Temperley Gray as he travels on a P&O ship backwards and forwards between Britain and India, at one point pasting the wing of a flying fish into his notebook (MS.5875)

- in the first years of peace after the Napoleonic Wars, voyage to Madras on the East India Company ship the William Miles, whose young surgeon gives us a detailed description of the ceremonies involved in "Crossing the Line" to the southern hemisphere, which turns into the nineteenth-century equivalent of a wet T-shirt competition:

“Neptune’s Car (in the shape of a blazing tar barrel) was thrown overboard last evening at dusk, and had a very fine effect… Neptune and Amphitrite went in procession round the quarter deck in their car, attended by Triton and their attendants – chief judge, barber, physician, etc. etc. all appropriately costumed... When the procession was over, the Chief Judge came to the gang way and read out the names of those who had not before obeyed Neptune – and one by one they came up and were delivered over to one of the attendants to be blindfolded – after that they were placed upon a chair and the barber got his lathering brush (a mop) and dipping it into a bucket of a delightful mixture of pitch, grease & other highly odoriferous materials, bedaubed the poor fellow’s whole face most plenteously; then taking his razor made of a barrel iron hoop, scraped it all off very carefully not sparing the foundation on which it lay. The next process he had to undergo was the ducking – for this he was carried to a large tub, and soused & soused & soused again – they then dried him with a large swab, & dismissed him.... When the shaving was over the Captain came out and ordering a bucket stood at one of the ports and belaboured us all with water, as long as he could stand…. The ladies seemed to enjoy the fun very much – in the very midst of their laughing, the Captain went round at one of the ports with a bucket of water, & threw it among them all as they stood in the cuddy, looking thro’ the windows laughing at us – few of them escaped a good wetting...Every one seemed to enjoy the ducking very well, and the ladies more than the men.” (MS.7114)

These, of course, are all land-dwellers' perspectives. What lies below the surface of the oceans was, until recently, as much a mystery as the dark side of the moon: oceanography as we understand it only begins in the nineteenth century. One of the first scientific expeditions to explore the deep ocean was that of the Challenger in 1872-1876, after which the Challenger Deep - the deepest point on the earth's surface, the very bottom of the Marianas Trench - is named. The Challenger expedition shed much light on what lies beneath the deep oceans that cover so much of the earth's surface. It was not, however, universally applauded. One of our odder collections is the papers of the doctor and naturalist George Wallich (MSS.4962-4970). Wallich had served as naturlist on an earlier expedition, that of HMS Bulldog in 1860, which surveyed the Atlantic seabed with an eye to the laying of a submarine telegraph cable but brought back natural history data as well. His papers seethe with a sense of grievance, that his priority in observation is being stolen by academic scoundrels: Sir Charles Wyvill Thomson (1830-1882), naturalist of the Challenger expedition, for instance, is always nick-named 'Weevil'. His notebooks cover matters such as ocean circulation and marine life, but more and more are given over to what he describes as "Dark Chapters", the tale - in various coloured inks with copious underlinings - of the injustices done to him. Frightening and mysterious things live beneath the sea but none of them, Wallich might mutter darkly, as frightening and mysterious as scientific plagiarism and deceit. If you want to immerse yourself in Wallich's mounting sense of persecution, watch the rites of Neptune on the William Miles or share in any of the other oceanic explorations in the Wellcome Library, please set sail for the Euston Road.

Images:
1/ Ascension Island, from the papers of Fleetwood Buckle (MS.1395).
2/ Parsee hats observed in Bombay, and a description of a Remora caught off Suez, from the notebook of John Temperley Gray (MS.5875).
3/ and 4/ "Dark Chapters", from the papers of George Wallich (MSS.4965-4966).

Wellcome to the South Pole

Last Sunday, BBC2 broadcast The Secrets of Scott's Hut, a documentary which featured presenter Ben Fogle journeying to Antarctica, to observe the work of a team of conservators, attempting to preserve the hut of the explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. The hut acted as both accommodation and research centre during Scott's attempt in 1911 to reach the South Pole. It was then abandoned, leaving behind 10,000 items: the everyday and scientific materials of Scott and his men.

We've written before of the connection between Burroughs Wellcome & Co (BW&Co) - the pharmaceutical company co-founded by Henry Wellcome - and Scott's Antarctic Expedition, so it was nice to see within a few minutes of the documentary, Fogle and two conservators unpacking a surving medicine chest, which included Burroughs Wellcome & Co products.

More BW&Co chemicals were visible on screen when the documentary discussed the role of Herbert Ponting, the photographer on the Expedition. To illustrate the importance of Ponting's role, Scott's hut even had a dedicated dark room set outside for Ponting to develop his photographs. And there on the shelves of the dark room... developer supplied by Burroughs Wellcome & Co.

The Wellcome Foundation Archives held in the Wellcome Library include more details on the role Burroughs Wellcome & Co played in this and many other expeditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The Secret of Scott's Hut is available on the BBC iPlayer to viewers in the UK until Sunday April 24th.

Images:
- Medicine bottles in Scott's hut. On the right is Burroughs Wellcome & Co 'Tabloid' Liquorice Compound Powder, to soothe upset stomachs. Taken from this BBC Slideshow.
- Advert for 'Tabloid' 'Rytol' showing Herbert Ponting, official photographer to the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910, developing a plate with 'Tabloid' 'Rytol' in his dark-room in the hut featured in the documentary (WF/M/PB/25/01/10).

Pole to Pole with the Wellcome Library

The latest issue of Wellcome News - the Wellcome Trust's quarterly magazine rounding up its latest activities - contains an article based on material from the Wellcome Library, exploring the involvement of Henry Wellcome's pharmaceutical company with the last Antarctic expedition of Captain Robert Falcon Scott. The article is also available through the Wellcome Trust's website.

Such material is actually - to pardon the pun - the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our collections relating to the Polar regions, as this Sources Guide shows. This is just one of the many guides which exist to provde detailed thematic guidance to our archive collections. Readers with an interest in these regions are also advised to search on our catalogue for more items of interest, such as - perhaps - this illustration of the launching of the first balloon within the Arctic Circle (taken from Edward Daniel Clarke's Travels in various countries of Europe, Asia and Africa (1820-1823):

Travel Writing Sources Guide

Given the restrictions on air travel of late, it is perhaps timely to flag up a new guide to unpublished Travel Writing in the Wellcome Library’s collections.

Arranged by geographic region, the guide gives an overview of relevant manuscript material in our collections. It’s one of a series of thematic sources guides designed to assist users of our archives and manuscript collections to identify material of particular relevance to their research.

The Travel Writing sources guide covers records of travel dating from the 18th–20th centuries, generally in diary or journal form which contain descriptions of journeys, places and experiences.

These records were kept by all manner of practitioners of medicine and the travels described are equally wide ranging, including journeys of exploration, touring holidays and the experiences of naval surgeons. Most corners of the globe are covered: from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica and from the East to West Indies.

As well illustrating the breadth of our collections, the sources guide acts as a first step in carrying out research into our archives. For more detailed subject searching, you can run keyword or subject searches in the Archives and Manuscripts on–line catalogue, from which material can be ordered for consultation in the Rare Materials Room.

And if your horizons stretch further than our travel writing guide, a full list of our other archives and manuscripts sources guides is available from the Wellcome Library website.

Image above is an illustration of Ascension Island, from the travel journals of Naval surgeon Fleetwood Buckle (MSS.1395-1404).

Wellcome in Space

Over the last few weeks, there have been many commemorations in the media of the 40th anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the moon. We thought we would add to this by flagging up an item from our collections. So – what’s the connection between the Wellcome and this lunar scene?

Shown here is the packaging for the Wellcome drug company’s product, ‘Marzine’, which was used as a precaution against travel sickness. Ships from the Apollo Space programme carried the product, and – as illustrated - the company later utilised this fact in the design of its packaging.

'Marzine' wasn’t the only Wellcome product used in the US space missions: 'Actifed' - for the relief of nasal congestion - was also widely used, as was 'Neosporin' (to clear up bacterial infections of the eye). Indeed, on one mission in the 1970s, Skylab carried a medical kit which included seven products provided by Burroughs Wellcome Co (USA).

It’s rather fitting that the exploration of space in the mid twentieth century utilised Wellcome products, given in the late nineteenth century, Burroughs Wellcome & Co medicine kits were essential components of many expeditions to the farthest flung corners of the Earth - Stanley, Scott and Shackleton all set forth with the company's products.

(The 'Marzine' packaging is a small part of the Wellcome Foundation Archive, which consists of material relating to the Wellcome drug business. As a result of flotations and mergers, the Wellcome drug business itself is no longer in existence. A summary of this is available).

Item of the Month – February 2009

A toast in Abyssinia. Wellcome Library no. 667946i

It could be said without fear of contradiction that wherever you are in the Wellcome Library you are never more then ten feet away from a reference to Aristotle, the Virgin Mary, Queen Victoria or the River Nile. The Nile features in many roles: as the channel whose flooding fed the civilization of the ancient Egyptians; as the waters which supported the infant Moses and thus enabled the exodus of the Jews from Egypt with momentous consequences; as a place for research into schistosomiasis with the aid of a floating laboratory commissioned by Henry S. Wellcome; or more frivolously as the holiday resort of Europeans and North Americans such as Florence Nightingale, the Prince of Wales, William Osler, and the many others who enjoyed the views from the Nile dahabeeyahs.

Many references involve the obsession with finding "the" source of the Nile, exemplified in the Victorian expeditions of Sir Samuel Baker, and John Hanning Speke. There were however earlier explorers of the source of the Nile, one of the most distinctive being James Bruce of Kinnaird (1730–1794), whose many massive volumes Travels to discover the source of the Nile in the years 1768–73 (1790) weigh heavily on the Library's shelves. Their pages record the political and tribal history as well as the fauna, flora, and natural features of the regions which Bruce, disguised as a Syrian savant and physician, passed through in his quest for the fons et origo of the river. They also include a report on the Abyssinian custom of eating raw beef cut from living cattle.

Among the Bruce of Kinnaird documents in the Wellcome Library is an unusually large etching (above). It shows Bruce at his moment of triumph in November 1770, when he and his Greek assistant Strates reach a fountain at Gisha in Abyssinia, regarded by the locals as the sole source of the Nile. Bruce described it as "an island of green turf which was in the form of an altar … I stood in rapture over the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it". To mark the occasion, Bruce and Strates raise a coconut to drink the Nile water to the health of King George III of Great Britain and to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (the champion of the Greeks against the Ottomans).

The print must be exceptionally rare, for it is mentioned neither among the likenesses in Bruce's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry nor in the recent biography of Bruce by Miles Bredin, which does however describe the episode [1]. Another impression in the British Museum bears lettering which records the date 1793 and the names of the authors: the composition was attributed to Richard Morton Paye (1750-1821), and the etching to none other than James Gillray (1756–1815), the well-known caricaturist. In support of that surprising attribution, the fuzzy etched lineation is similar to Gillray's caricatures: a specialist history engraver would have used bolder and thicker lines to differentiate between the principal figures and the background. It is nevertheless strange that this work is not included in Thomas Wright's list of works by Gillray "not belonging to the province of caricature or satire" [2].

This heroic history picture of the Scottish explorer at his moment of glory in Africa must be one of Gillray's least-known works. It deserves to be drawn to the attention of historians of Nile exploration, matters Abyssinian, and Scotland.

[1] Miles Bredin, The pale Abyssinian: a life of James Bruce, African explorer and adventurer, London: HarperCollins, 2000, pp. 160-163

[2] Thomas Wright, The works of James Gillray, the caricaturist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1873, appendix pp. 372-374, 'Works, not belonging to the province of caricature or satire, executed by James Gillray as an engraver'