ࡱ> \^[  =bjbj 4R`_`_5  8< ;&&&&&J;L;L;L;L;L;L;$=e@p;p;&&;ccc&&J;cJ;ccV$%P(Jd% 6;;0;p%x@(@%%@z*cp;p;d;@ X H: The Boyd Alexander Collection of British Birds David Streeter Boyd Alexander was born at Great Swifts, Cranbrook, on 16 January 1873, the twin son of Lieut-Colonel Boyd Francis Alexander and Mary Wilson. He was educated at Radley and during the school holidays developed his interest in ornithology making a study and collection of the birds of the neighbourhood. Indeed, Norman Ticehurst, in his obituary of him published in British Birds records that at the age of ten he was already keeping a naturalists diary. He joined the rifle Brigade in 1893 and was promoted to Lieutenant in 1902. In the spring and autumn of 1896, in company with his friend and taxidermist John Springett he carried out a detailed study of the migration and nesting habits of the birds of the coastal area around Lydd and Rye, sleeping in a tent on the beach, the results of which were published in three papers in the Zoologist. The following year saw him leading a scientific expedition to the Cape Verde Islands and in 1898 he embarked on his first African expedition to the Zambezi and Kafuk Rivers. His most significant journey was his participation in an expedition by boat across Africa from the Niger to the Nile in the company of his younger brother Captain Claud Alexander. Claud died of fever in 1904, the expedition finally returning to England in 1907 having surveyed the shores of Lake Chad and large parts of eastern Nigeria. The account of the expedition is fully described in his book From the Niger to the Nile. Boyd Alexander returned to Africa in 1910 to promote peaceful understanding in French Equatorial Africa but on April 2nd. was murdered by natives in the village of Ilarne. His body was later recovered by French soldiers and buried next to his brother at Maifoni in Northern Nigeria. ---------- In 1945 Herbert Alexander offered his brothers collections of African and Kent and Sussex birds to the Natural History Museum (then British Museum (Natural History)). The Museum accepted his collection of 5,500 African birds which are now incorporated into the Museums collection at Tring. However, it was unable to accommodate his local collection and Herbert Alexander, an Old Cranbrookian and long-serving Cranbrook School governor who lived at Wilsley House, Cranbrook, offered it to a grateful School in 1948. Sometime after arriving at Cranbrook as a pupil I eventually managed to run the bird collection to earth on the top floor of Barham House where it occupied two locked rooms. This was indeed a treasure trove for a young budding ornithologist. However, even to my untrained eyes it could fairly be described as unloved. The collection was displayed in five large wall cases and a number of free-standing individual cases. There was little attempt at a taxonomic order, the labelling was almost non-existent, many of the specimens were badly faded and some were damaged. Furthermore, it was obvious that the collection was rarely visited. There was, however, a catalogue written in long-hand in a faded brown, leather-covered account book. Largely through the good offices of my house master, the extraordinary C H C Osborne, I was eventually given the job of honorary curator. One of the first tasks that I set myself was to produce an updated edition of the catalogue. The original catalogue had been made by Colonel Cheeseman of Tilsden, Cranbrook in 1911, a year after Boyd Alexanders death. The catalogue is now in the possession of the Cranbrook Museum. My catalogue brought all the specimens into a taxonomic order and was prefaced by a biography of Boyd Alexander and an introduction to the collection. I have to confess that the biography appears to have been written in a style that would be judged as remarkably mature for a seventeen-year-old. Unfortunately, intervening years have completely obliterated from my memory the source of the piece. There were certainly books by and about Boyd Alexander in the school library and my guess is that they would have included the Memoire in Boyd Alexanders Last Journey by his brother Herbert Alexander. To me, one of the most exciting things about the collection was the number of rare birds that it contained, including first British records and several first records for Kent. Among these were the first British records of a Madeiran Fork-tailed Petrel, Oceanodroma castro, taken at Littlestone in December 1895 and a pair of Black Larks, Melanocorypha yeltoniensis, which the catalogue records as taken at Lydd in 1907. On the other hand, one cant help being struck by the remarkable deficiency of some very common species. For instance, there is no Robin, Blackbird, House Sparrow, Jay or Wren. The Black Larks, which were mounted in a separate case, were in a poor state of preservation. Clearly, for such significant specimens it was important that they were rescued before they disintegrated beyond recovery. The most famous taxidermists in the world were Rowland Ward of 167 Piccadilly, so with the audacity of youth I wrote to them to enquire whether they would be prepared to remount our Black Larks. Whose authority I sought or how much it cost and where the money came from I have no idea, but the birds were indeed duly remounted by the firm more used to dealing with the big game trophies of the rich and famous! Up to this time, unlike some other counties, Kent had no county field club or natural history society. This omission was rectified in 1955 by the formation of the Kent Field Club by a group of professional and amateur naturalists based on the Maidstone Museum. I was encouraged to join this new body and used to cycle to Maidstone on Sunday afternoons to join their meetings and field excursions and so got to know the museum staff. They were naturally interested to hear what we were doing to revitalise the bird collection and were free with much good advice. One subject was the control of museum pests which resulted in my ordering a can of p-dichlorobenzene which I liberally sprinkled among the birds; not something that I suspect would be approved of today due to its possible carcinogenic properties. The collection had always been opened up for Speech Day so I was keen to have it clean and smartened up for the summer term. Happily, the Natural History Societys report in The Cranbrookian for the Easter Term 1955 announces that, The new catalogue of the Boyd Alexander collection of birds is now complete and the collection will be open on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons during the summer term. I left the following year and so ended my association with the collection. ---------- In later years the collection was little used by the school and was eventually moved to the Cranbrook Museum three years after its opening in 1973. In 2003 it was formally transferred to the Cranbrook and District Local History Society. My reacquaintance with the collection first came about four years ago after an interval of some 57 years. The majority of the birds are now displayed in nice purpose-built wall cases with the original individual cases arranged around the rooms with the White-tailed Eagle, shot in Wadhurst Park on Boxing Day 1889, taking centre stage. However, there had obviously been some changes. Most significantly the collection seemed smaller than I remembered it. Fortunately, the museum still has Colonel Cheesemans original 1911 catalogue as well as a copy of my own 1955 catalogue. However, there is now a more recent catalogue made by the then curator of the museum, Andrew Saunders, in 2005, two years after the museums formal acquisition of the collection. On comparing the two most recent catalogues I find that mine lists a total of 510 birds (which in effect is the same number as in the Cheeseman original) whilst Andrew Saunders has a total of 303. In other words, the collection appears to have lost some 207 specimens since the move from the school. By a careful examination of the catalogues and the collection I can now see how this has come about. Boyd Alexanders excursions to Rye and Lydd in the 1890s in the company of his friend John Springett, especially the 1896 visit, resulted in a bag of particularly large numbers of waders, many of the same species. For instance, there were in the collection 9 Grey Phalaropes, 13 Sanderlings, 10 Dunlins, 8 Kentish Plovers (now extinct as a British breeding species) and so on. Looking at the collection it seemed clear that it was among those duplicates that most of the culling had occurred. This was confirmed when I noticed that the wader section of the museums copy of my catalogue had been annotated with individual specimens being designated K or D, which I interpreted as keep or dispose and that on checking I found that those designated D were indeed no longer in the collection. In addition to the waders quite a number of duplicates of the smaller passerines have also been thinned out, especially among the finches and buntings. So the collection has been reduced presumably in order to accommodate it in its new quarters and the specimens chosen to be culled were selected from the large number of wader duplicates arising from Boyd Alexanders trips to the coast and from among the passerines where p.8there were also a number of duplicates. None of the rare species are among the two hundred or so specimens that have been lost but it would be interesting to know what happened to those that were disposed of. p.8 I have already mentioned how excited I was by the numbers of rare species that the collection contained, many of which had been published in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists Club. Even so I remember that I couldnt help but wonder about the coincidence of some of the rarer records. One that I remember particularly struck me was the extraordinary coincidence of a Melodious Warbler and an Icterine Warbler appearing in the same Burwash garden on the same day in April 1897. What I didnt know at the time was that the unusually large numbers of rarities that were being recorded from a relatively restricted area of the East Sussex-Kent coast had long attracted the attention of the contemporary ornithological world. Many of the specimens had passed through the hands of a St Leonards-on-Sea taxidermist, George Bristow, who prepared the skins before passing them on or selling them to collectors. In particular the countrys leading ornithologist, Harry Witherby, the founder and editor of the journal British Birds, had become especially concerned. The need to establish an authentic British list for the new edition of the Handbook of British Birds led in 1962 to a special edition of British Birds devoted to what had become known as the 'Hastings Rarities'. This consisted of two papers: a statistical analysis by J.A.Nelder and a paper on the acceptability of the contentious records by Max Nicholson and James Ferguson-Lees. Nicholson and Ferguson-Lees concluded that there was no positive reason to believe that a total of 542 records from the Hastings area (a radius of 20 miles from Hastings pier) that were either shot or found dead between 1892 and 1930 were acceptable. Many of the specimens had found their way into private and public collections. I have checked the Boyd Alexander catalogue against the list in Appendix A in the Nicholson and Ferguson-Lees paper and find that the collection includes 18 of these excluded Hastings Rarities. The list includes the Black Larks which were deleted from the British list (but were subsequently added back to the British list in 1984). The 18 species are listed in an Appendix held at Cranbrook Museum.. To this should be added the Sabines Gull as all other records for the species recorded during the relevant period from the Hastings area are included in the list. There is of course no suggestion that Boyd Alexander was in any way complicit in a fraud. Those who acquired the specimens had no reason to believe that they had been acquired in any way other than that claimed by their supplier. Neither, it has to be said, is there any direct evidence that Bristow was involved in fraud, although the great majority of the Hastings rarities were prepared by him or passed through his hands. The Introduction to the 1955 catalogue ends, Boyd Alexanders name will always go down in history as an explorer, but it must be remembered that his great passion was ornithology, and it was this passion that stimulated him on all his expeditions. It is good that the fruits of that passion are now displayed in the place where it was first born and was nurtured. REFERENCES Alexander, Boyd (1907) From the Niger to the Nile. London: Edward Arnold; Alexander, Herbert (1912) 'Memoire' in Boyd Alexanders Last Journey. New York: Longman Green; Bircham, Peter (2007) A History of Ornithology. Collins (NN); Cheeseman, (1911) Catalogue of Boyd Alexander Bird Collection. Private ms; Nelder, J.A. (1962) A Statistical Examination of the Hastings Rarities. British Birds 55: 283-298; Nicholson, E.M. & Ferguson-Lees(1962) 'The Hastings Rarities' British Birds 55:299-384; Saunders, A. (2005) Boyd Alexander Collection of British Birds. Catalogue. Cranbrook Museum ms; Streeter, D. (1955) The Boyd Alexander Collection of British Birds. Catalogue. Cranbrook School ms; Ticehurst, N.F. (1910) Boyd Alexander Obituary. British Birds, 4; 34-36. My grateful thanks to Peter Allen for help and for the suggestion that I write this article, and to the Museum Curator, Rod Dann, for assistance and reminiscences. Professor David Streeter, MBE, President of the Sussex Wildlife Trust, is the former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex.     .=KLMNOwy0    0 0 0 0 0oq 0·whNGz5CJaJh0BhbMZCJH*aJh0BhotLCJaJhQhbMZ6CJaJh0BhbMZ6CJaJhO$CJaJh0BhbMZCJaJh>hWhbMZCJaJhQhbMZ56CJaJhotLhbMZ5hQ56CJaJhotLhbMZ56CJaJ.LMNO   &'  ac  !"$$'gdP8$a$gdNGzgdbMZgdQ$a$gd>$a$gdbMZgdotL00%&'BKVNNNNNN   NN]wN`h0Bh0BCJaJhbMZCJaJh0BhbMZ6CJaJh0BhotLCJaJh0BhotL5CJaJhNGzhbMZ5CJaJh0Bh9CJaJhO$CJaJh0BhbMZCJaJ?`acNNac   !!!!!"""""###$$$$$%%%&&&''''''h0Bh95CJaJh0BhbMZ5CJaJhNGz5CJaJh0BhNGzCJaJh0BhbMZ6CJaJhbMZCJaJhNGzCJaJh0BhbMZCJaJh0Bh9CJaJ@''-- -!-"-22S6T677n9o9z9;<<\=]======gd0BgdR0U$a$gdyGhgd* gdvtggdbMZ''((()))***+++*,J,K,L,M,,,,,--- -!-"-#-'------...///0<0000!101111111122#2$2C2D2·hyGhCJaJh0BhbMZ6CJaJh* CJaJh0Bh9CJaJhvCJaJhNGzCJaJhvtgCJaJhLFRCJaJhLFRhLFRCJaJheCJaJh0BhbMZCJaJ=D22222223333344444i55555555S6T6666777777888n9o9p9y9z99999999999hR0UCJaJhR0UhbMZ6CJaJhR0UhbMZCJaJh0Bh0BCJaJh0BhbMZCJaJhyGhhyGhCJaJhH_CJaJhyGhCJaJh0BhbMZ6CJaJh0Bh9CJaJh0BhbMZCJaJ599999 :::$:':;:>:V:d:e:::::::; ; ; ; ;;;;?;@;U;V;W;d;e;g;o;p;;;;;;;G<V<e<f<l<<<<<<<<<Źh0BCJaJhR0UhbMZ5CJaJhR0UhR0UCJaJhR0UhR0U6CJaJhR0U6CJaJhR0UCJaJhR0UhbMZ6CJaJhR0UhbMZCJaJhotLhbMZCJaJhotLCJaJ9<<<<[=\=]=u=v=w======================̾h3Wjh3WUh-B*CJ^JaJphhbMZB*CJ^JaJph!h2Ph2PB*CJ^JaJphh2PB*CJ^JaJphh2PCJaJh2Phc8:CJaJh0BCJaJhc8:h0BCJaJhc8:h0B56CJaJ========gdR0U21h:pw|. 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