5
E.B. Ford and Butterflies5
As an introduction to Professor E.B. Ford FRS, Fellow of All Souls, author of what many consider to have been the best butterfly book ever written, it is impossible to better Miriam Rothschild’s account of her first meeting with the great man. The two shared various academic interests and it was natural that, on visiting Oxford some time in 1956, Dr Rothschild (then Mrs George Lane) should wish to call on Ford to pay her respects. Ford suggested that she came to his office in the zoology building at about 11 o’clock the next day:
‘I duly did so, knocking on his door punctually as the clock struck. After a moment’s silence there was rather a plaintive long drawn out cry: “Come in!” I opened the door and found an empty room. I looked round nervously – not a soul to be seen, but an almost frightening neatness pervaded everything. Each single object, from paper knife to Medical Genetics, was in its right place. Each curtain hung in a predestined fold, and you felt that if a slight breeze or an unexpected earth tremor had disturbed one of them, it would have automatically resumed its rightful position. An unkind fate seems to have decreed that I share all my rooms with Typhoon Agnes: the sight of all this distilled essence of neatness and order took my breath away. I stood there, probably with my mouth open, trying to reconcile this vacant room with that ghostly cry – had I dreamed it? – when suddenly Professor Ford appeared from underneath this desk like a graceful fakir emerging from a grave. Apparently he had been sitting cross-legged on the floor in the well of his writing table, lost in thought, but he held out his hand to me in a most affable manner. His explanation for this rather startling welcome was: “My dear Mrs Lane – I didn’t know it was you.” I’m sure Henry Ford won’t mind me saying that the really distinguished butterfly people are usually a trifle eccentric, and you never have to ask a great man for an explanation. But only the great men find time to sit and think.’
Miriam Rothschild. Dedication: Henry Ford and Butterflies in The Biology of Butterflies (1984)
This meticulous sense of order, raised at times to a level approaching preciosity, is a vein that runs through all Ford’s written work and, still more, his recorded sayings. Many scientists today might envy the opportunities granted to E.B. Ford to sit and think. His whole working life, spanning seven decades, was based at Oxford. His administrative burdens were, for the most part, light; he had no wife or children to occupy his time; he never watched television and rarely read the newspapers. Rarely did his scientific work involve lengthy technical preparation or the use of complex laboratory equipment; on the few occasions when it did, he left the operation of ‘the engine’ to assistants. To an extent seldom found today, but not unusual in an earlier generation of academics, his was a science based on the observation of nature and on pure intellect. The stability of his life enabled him to plan ahead with precision, and this gave his work a shape, and a logical progression. In the preface to his magnum opus, Ecological Genetics, published in 1964, Ford revealed that ‘This book was planned in 1928, and in considerable detail. At that period I believed it would be necessary for myself and others to work for a quarter of a century before it could be written. I was over-optimistic; more than thirty years were in fact needed.’ It was largely as a spin-off from the great undertaking of his life – the demonstration of genetic theory in the field – that he wrote the two books for which he is most widely remembered: the New Naturalist volumes on Butterflies and Moths.
Edmund Brisco Ford (1901-1988) with four (jacketless) New Naturalist titles on the shelf behind him. (Photo: John S. Haywood)
An account of E.B. Ford might usefully begin with his name. His initials stand for Edmund Brisco, but he usually signed his letters E.B. Ford, and evidently disliked the name Edmund. To most friends and colleagues he was ‘Henry Ford’. A natural assumption would be that his nickname was borrowed from the American motorcar mogul, but Ford’s close friend John Haywood denies this. Evidently Henry was a family name which gradually became his adopted cognomen. To students and other inferiors he was ‘the Professor’, and a few have referred to him as ‘E.B. ’, though I suspect that the latter is no more than a book-name, like some of the rarely used fanciful names given to species of Lepidoptera. Because most New Naturalist readers know him as E.B. Ford, he will so remain in these pages. Calling him Henry would be an assumed familiarity of which he would certainly have disapproved.
The earliest and perhaps the most important of the influences on E.B. Ford was his father, the Rev. Harold Dodsworth, rector of Thursby, a village near Carlisle. The Fords were a Cumberland family descended from an eighteenth century baronet. E.B. Ford had a familial connection with Charles Darwin, who had married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood (of the pottery family). Another connection was the Briscos of Crofton, from whom Ford owed his unusual second name. Ford once claimed that his line had made a habit of marrying their cousins, explaining that one reason why he had not married was that there were no cousins left for him. The Fords were evidently one of those close-knit country houses, where sisters, cousins and eccentric bachelor uncles all lived under the same roof. Near the end of his life, Ford recalled that ‘We lived in one of the family houses [the Manor House at Papcastle, near Cockermouth] until I was ten. The long front was of the William and Mary period, though parts of the house were much older. It was built on the views of a Roman fort on the hill above, and Roman coins and pottery were constantly turning up in the garden’ – to which Ford attributed the start of his life-long passion for archaeology. Ford was born there on St George’s Day, 23 April 1901. His father was an educated man, a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford. Ford describes him as ‘an outstandingly good speaker, and very much a figure in society’. There were strong ties of affection between the male Fords. Late in life, E.B. Ford enjoyed nothing more than to talk about his father, and also his uncle, a church organist, to whom he owed his taste for classical music. Of particular interest to us, of course, is that Harry Dodsworth encouraged his son to collect butterflies. E.B. claims though that this was a matter of the father following the son, not the other way round: ‘[My father] was not a naturalist and had never collected Lepidoptera. When I started to do so, on 27 July 1912 [aged 11], he almost at once was delighted to join me, and we gradually developed our entomological studies together: each starting without previous knowledge.’ (Ford 1980; Note the characteristic Fordian precision about the date.)
The butterfly-collecting expeditions of the Fords père et fils had results of importance for the history of science. By then, Harry Dodsworth had moved from Papcastle to the rectory at Thursby, and among the local collecting grounds were a few damp fields at the edge of woods near Great Orton, an area long known to collectors for its isolated population of the marsh fritillary. One collector had left detailed notes over 36 years on the mysterious changes in abundance of this butterfly, from its appearance in ‘clouds’ to seasons when hardly a specimen could be found. The Fords decided to continue this work, beginning in 1917 when ‘We had to work for several hours each day to obtain a few specimens.’ Seven years later, however, the butterflies were back in enormous numbers, ‘a dancing haze in the few fields they occupied, and one could catch several specimens with a single stroke of the net’. We now know, of course, that these fluctuations are due to parasitism, to which the marsh fritillary is prone. What especially interested the Fords was that the sudden increases in numbers were accompanied by an equally dramatic outburst in variation. In ‘normal’ seasons, the wings of this pretty insect are fairly uniform in pattern, and of much the same size. After the explosion in numbers in the mid-1920s, however, it was hard to find two specimens alike, and the more extreme departures from the norm were in fact deformed, in some cases so much so that they could hardly fly. An ordinary collector might have blessed his luck, bagged a large number of them and exhibited them proudly in his cabinet as ‘aberrations’. But Ford’s natural curiosity had been stimulated and refined by his growing interest in heredity. He realised that the butterflies had taken advantage of an opportunity for evolution, and that evolution could therefore take place much more rapidly than Darwin had supposed. By 1930, the Fords had collected enough information to write a joint paper for the London Entomological Society: the landmark, ‘Ford and Ford, Fluctuation in Numbers and its Influence on Variation in Melitaea aurinia’. In his New Naturalist book, Butterflies, E.B. Ford depicts some of these specimens on Plate 39. They have as good a claim to being ‘historic butterflies’ as the Camberwell beauty and Bath white on Plate 1. The point was that such work of world importance was well within the province of any amateur collector. What the Fords had done was to open people’s eyes to the scientific possibilities lurking behind the fun of a collecting expedition. They continued their marsh fritillary work until 1935. Harry Dodsworth died in 1943, and E.B. Ford dedicated Butterflies to the memory of the father ‘with whom I collected butterflies for thirty years’.
E.B. Ford, equipped for the field in the early 1970s. (Photo: John S. Haywood)
The marsh fritillary story has taken us ahead of the tale. E.B. Ford’s schooling at St Bees in Cumberland leaned towards the classics, perhaps following in the steps of his father. However, his extra-curricular interests were already pulling him in the opposite direction, towards experimental science: ‘Working on archaeology introduced me to cultivate the habit of deduction from my own observations, a habit I began to apply in a scientific direction through collecting Lepidoptera. As a result I had begun evolutionary studies before going up to Oxford. I was a convinced Darwinian. I had read On the Origin of Species in bits, as a boy, but was indirectly rather than directly influenced by it.’ In 1920, Ford went south to his father’s Oxford college to study for a degree in classics. At some early stage he decided to switch to the zoology course, but herein lay a problem. Wadham was not a science-oriented college, and Ford evidently had to arrange his own tuition. He managed to persuade men of the calibre of Gavin de Beer and Julian Huxley to give him private lessons. He did not think much of the zoology school, which then specialised in comparative anatomy and embryology, and had turned its back on field studies. Late in life, he recalled that As an undergraduate I could not find any naturalists who were geneticists (or the reverse). I wanted to study the genetics of wild populations..... I was troubled because though zoology seemed orientated towards evolution, evolution did not seem to be studied genetically.’ Ford was therefore obliged to study the subject from books, working his way through all the standard textbooks and published papers in journals – not too demanding a task at this date, for genetics was still a young science. Already Ford’s sharp and lucid mind was hurling the chaff from the wheat:
‘I thought Darbishire’s book the best. It was obvious even then that Punnett writing on mimicry had not properly looked at the butterflies he was writing about…Punnett’s book on poultry was trivial. I thought Morgan’s book, The Physical Basis of Heredity, one of the worst written books I had ever encountered..... How dreadful are the blots on the pages that are called figures. If anything could have stopped me taking an interest in genetics, it would have been that book of monumental dullness and incompetent presentation.’ [And so, gleefully, on.]
E.B. Ford. In: Some recollections pertaining to the evolutionary synthesis (see references)
At this point, another facet of Ford’s many-sided personality comes into play. He had the confidence and ambition to seek out the brightest minds in his chosen field, and those who were likely to be of greatest help to him. They, in turn, found Ford remarkable. In some of his later books, Ford tells stories about his friends, either because of something interesting they had told him, or to illustrate a particular point. There is no doubt that Ford took a great pride in his acquaintances, who included men of letters, politicians, clergymen and dukes, as well as fellow scientists. Among the great friends of his undergraduate days were Leonard Darwin, son of Charles (‘I frequently asked him what Charles Darwin [had] said on various topics’), the aged Edwin Lankester and the great Cambridge geneticist R.A. Fisher. Later friends included A.L. Rowse, M.R. James (with whom he shared a taste for ghost stories), F.A. Lindemann, Churchill’s wartime scientific adviser, the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler and John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls. He knew Thomas Hardy, who told him the Dorset legend that a white moth escapes from a man’s mouth at the moment of death. He was on at least nodding terms with Winston Churchill. And, having once arranged an audience with Pope Pius XI, he even referred to ‘my friend, The Pope’!
After his father, Julian Huxley was the next great influence on Ford’s scientific outlook. It was part of Ford’s usual good luck that his early years at Oxford coincided with the brief period (from 1919 to 1927) when Huxley was lecturing and researching in genetics there. The two first met in 1921. Although Julian Huxley is best remembered as an ornithologist and a student of evolution, he was at this stage in his career concerned more with genetic physiology and the development of body processes in the embryo. Huxley suggested that he and Ford collaborate on a study of the brackish-water amphipod ‘shrimp’ Gammarus chevreuxi, whose eyes are sometimes shades of red and sometimes black. By breeding the shrimp and studying their mysterious eyes, Ford and Huxley (for the generous Huxley insisted that it be that way round) were able to show that the black pigment and its rate of development was controlled by a gene. They called this a ‘rate-gene’, and its existence has a crucial role in evolution for it means that, since rates of development vary genetically, they are therefore open to natural selection; or, to put it another way, genes are able to control the onset of processes in the body. This work shed new light on human evolution. Ford was later to demonstrate that human blood groups were affected by natural selection, and predicted (accurately) that particular blood groups were prone to certain diseases. It may have been at Ford’s suggestion that the Gammarus work was not confined to breeding programmes in the laboratory but was also demonstrated in the field. Several times, Huxley and Ford visited Plymouth to sample the frequency of different genotypes of shrimp in the wild salt-marshland of Plymouth Sound. Much of Ford’s work involved lengthy field observation, and sometimes entailed camping out in remote places and uninhabited islands.
In the 1920s, Ford also worked for some years with John Baker and Charles Elton on a study of the health and parasites of the wood mouse. The work involved dissecting hundreds of corpses, and it was important for the mice to be captured alive and in good condition. This meant inspecting the traps in Bagley Wood in the small hours of the morning. Baker and Elton, fearing that the task might not be congenial to the fastidious Ford, decided one night to hide out in the woods to check on whether he was fulfilling his side of their arrangement. They had, of course, misjudged their man. Ford was on his way. The first they heard of him was a plaintive voice in the darkness, then an elegant figure emerged from the shadows, shouldering a lantern on a pole and exclaiming in his high-pitched voice: ‘I am the way, the truth and the light......’ – probably a show put on for their benefit.
Huxley departed from Oxford in 1927, the year in which Ford gained a Masters degree to add to his B.A. in zoology. Ford began to work with R.A. (later Sir Ronald) Fisher, the most brilliant geneticist of his day, whom Ford had known since his days as an undergraduate. He described in characteristic fashion how they met.
Julian told him about me, and he decided to travel to Oxford to see me. It did not occur to him to let me know he was coming, so when he arrived at Wadham College, I was out. Accordingly he settled down in my rooms to wait for me to return. Fisher often visited me at Oxford, and I was constantly going to see him at Harpenden [the Rothamsted research station], or at Cambridge. He never visited anyone at Oxford but me.’
E.B. Ford. Some recollections, ibid.
Fisher had used mathematics to predict how genes operated in the wild. In 1927-28, he demonstrated how natural selection influenced genes through his famous theory of dominance. It was this work, wrote Ford, fifty years later, that ‘led me to plan my book Ecological Genetics. [Fisher’s] 1927 paper opened up the possibility that I had had in mind for some years of taking genetics into the field.’ It chimed in well with Ford’s observations of the powerful selection forces at work on the marsh fritillary. From 1928 onwards, Ford decided to devote his life to the study of evolution in the wild, seeking conditions in which change could occur rapidly, and analysing the variation of wild populations in conjunction with genetic experiments in the laboratory. He was to call this technique ‘ecological genetics’. In so doing, he founded a new science, based on a new form of natural history.
We have reached the period which Ford describes in great detail in his New Naturalist books. Ford was the first person to notice that butterflies and moths were ideal subjects for the study of evolution in the wild, with their annual generations and variable and easily observed wing patterns. He perfected a technique of estimating the size of a colony of butterflies and moths by marking, releasing and recapturing specimens. Fisher’s statistics did the rest. An early choice of subject was the scarlet tiger-moth Panaxia dominula, which occurs in two or three fairly constant forms, and of which there was a suitably isolated population nearby at Cothill Marsh. It also helpfully appeared on the wing just after the start of the long summer vacation, when Ford was freed from his teaching duties. His work on the scarlet tiger, which was continued by P.M. Sheppard after 1947, was described by Ford, with his habitual modesty, as the most thorough quantitative study ever made of any wild population of animals upon earth. It is best read in Ford’s own words in the important chapter on evolution in Moths, where he describes the work as ‘the first practical test of a problem which has proved a storm-centre in modern biology, the relative importance of natural selection and of random survival in the evolution of small isolated communities’. His other work of this period included the first scientific study of industrial melanism in moths, that is, the production of dark pigment in certain species to match the darkening of tree trunks and other vegetation from soot and other airborne pollutants. Another important study was an analysis of the variable wing patterns of the meadow brown butterfly, based on Fisher’s mathematical principles. In both, cases Ford was assisted by a promising medical student, H.B.D. Kettlewell, who subsequently took over the work.
To find isolated populations of butterflies in which evolution could be studied, Ford made regular camping visits in late summer to the Isles of Scilly, accompanied by his schoolmaster colleague and friend, W.H. Dowdeswell. The two became adepts at camping out on uninhabited islands, so much so that in his book Understanding Genetics Ford suddenly launches into a long digression on camping techniques. For those who have read his accounts of butterflying on Tean in his New Naturalist books, the following extract may be an interesting glimpse of the (I suspect, enjoyable) scene behind the science.
‘We belonged to the Primus-stove age; perhaps this type is still best in remote conditions. There should be a small oven, with a shelf inside, to fit on it. Enjoyable food and good cooking are most important. Conditions nearly intolerable can be gaily supported if one can look forward to one’s meals. A benison goes up to him who returning after a hard day, perhaps on a neighbouring island, prepares with quick efficiency hot scones for tea. The camp must not be polluted by the presence of a drunkard or a total abstainer.
‘Think not to live off the land: occasional augmentation, yes, but nothing more. After breakfast; clearing up the camp; preparing a picnic lunch; scientific work, perhaps in various habitats, for hours; cooking; a quiet drink before dinner; washing up; probably analysis of results in the evening; and planning for the future, there will be no time for food gathering or fishing. As to fresh meat and vegetables, solvitur ambulando. Remember disinfectant tablets for the drinking water; simple remedies; sunglasses; rat traps; and this great rule: semi-permanent camping begins with an unstinting visit to a really good grocer.’
Camp on Tean, 1950. (Photo: E.B. Ford)
E.B. Ford. In: Understanding Genetics (1979)
While he was always dressed punctiliously, in dark suit and tie, in Oxford, Ford dressed appropriately for the field in hard-wearing tweeds or even jeans. He usually wore a trilby hat, having lost most of his hair in his youth. In the well-known painting, reproduced as the frontispiece, Ford appears as one of a quartet of leading ecologists, though all that can be seen of his head is this brown trilby hat. His posture, scrabbling down on all fours to examine some insect, is said to be well observed and absolutely characteristic. It was this that gave the painting its unofficial title of ‘the New Religion’. When it was not obscured by a hat, he had a characteristic way of poking his face forward and tilting it back, as if to express simultaneous interest and scepticism. He had a big, beaky nose, a pointed chin, and permanently surprised eyebrows hovering above round, tortoiseshell spectacles. He was, or could be, an affable man and a cordial host, introducing at least one admiring American scientist to what the latter called ‘the finest traditions of England’. The same visitor remembered some of his expressions: ‘My dear Lincoln, carefully controlled observations are experiments,’ and ‘You do know, Lincoln, that good science is an art; unfortunately the reverse is not true.’ Ford’s rather mannered discourse was not, of course, as unusual then as it would be today. Miriam Rothschild found him exclaiming ‘My dear Mrs Lane, you really must write a book about this,’ as he poured out another glass of white Cinzano. He had a large fund of stories and anecdotes, ‘each with a long-polished patina acquired in the telling’. When Miriam mentioned that her sons and daughters all had carrot-coloured locks, Ford recalled the red-haired daughter of a distinguished entomologist who had been chased across a sand dune by a swarm of sex-starved male burnet moths. When their conversation moved on to the taste of various cryptic and noxious forms of life (Ford made a practice of ‘sampling the body fluids’ of moths to see whether they were noxious or whether they were bluffing), he recollected that ‘When I was in Texas, I used to eat rattlesnakes and I recall they tasted of cold scrambled eggs.’ At the end of their conversation, he repeated, ‘Indeed, my dear Mrs Lane, I think you really should write a book about all this.’
Butterflying near Thorverton, Devon, 1972. E.B. Ford on the left. (Photo: John S. Haywood)
Ford stood on his dignity, and was easily offended, but in certain odd ways he could be more tolerant than most. He seemed not at all surprised to see moths crawling around in Miriam Rothschild’s son’s hair, merely remarking that one of them was a frosted orange, and that it was remarkably well-adapted to its chosen environment. He was not so amused, however, by the duster that had been treated with ammonium nitrate and exploded when he banged the blackboard with it. He refused to deliver his lecture until the culprit had owned up and apologised – the malefactor was, in fact, not a student but a colleague. ‘He liked to be a terror to his students,’ noted one colleague, and exploited his eccentric persona to the full as a means of controlling them. His lectures were always prepared to the last detail and delivered in his most formal voice. Thomas Huxley (Julian Huxley’s nephew) told me that he began his lectures on the hour and stopped just as precisely. ‘The feeling was that he stopped in mid-sentence and then began (several days later) by completing the unfinished sentence of the previous lecture. No introductory pleasantries. And if someone was late…he would stop and “eye” the person until they had found a seat, and the silence while this went on was terrifying.’ John Pusey, another of Ford’s students, recalls his curious way of referring to animals in a genetics context as ‘the snail animal’ or ‘the thrush bird’. Ford seems to have approached his lectures in the same spirit as his father’s sermons.
Off-stage he was usually more approachable. Some of his students used to take him out to dinner, where he could be friendly and entertaining. Ford either liked people or he didn’t, and those in the latter category he simply ignored. As he used to remark when someone for whom he had no regard was mentioned, ‘You can’t like everyone.’ To the student who was on the same wavelength as Ford, clever, dedicated, well-mannered and preferably male, he could be an inspiration and be generous with his time and encouragement. He had the trick of making people feel more intelligent and amusing than they really were. He also had a gift for selecting good research workers and giving them free rein, often in promising areas that he himself had originated. From the 1950s onwards, his genetics laboratory was inhabited by some of the brightest scientific talents in a generation, among them Bernard Kettlewell, Philip Sheppard, Kennedy McWhirter and Robert Creed.
It is easy to accuse Ford of snobbery, but his likes and dislikes were not necessarily based on wealth and position. We could cite, for example, the case of the distinguished geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, whom for some reason Ford could not abide, though the thick-skinned Haldane did not seem to notice. The story has it that Ford heard that Haldane was looking for him while on a visit to Oxford:
‘Very agitated, Ford sought out a colleague, Robert Creed: “Take me home, I do not want to talk to that man.” At that time, Creed had a Brooklands Riley competition car which was a very small open two-seater in which one sat four inches from the ground. When Ford had inserted himself, with hat and briefcase, and Creed was at the front cranking the engine, Haldane turned up, bent down and said, “Ah Henry, I wanted to talk to you.” To this Ford replied from his position near the road, “I am so glad to see you, Jack. I would be delighted to talk to you – but we are very busy. In fact, as you see, we are so busy that we have to use a motor racing car in order to get about.”’
Footnote to Appendix C in Berry, R.J. (1990) Industrial Melanism and the Peppered Moth, Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society 39, p. 320
His misogyny was well known and notorious – he seems to have regarded women as though they were not so much a different gender as a different species. There is a famous Oxford story, probably dating from the early years of the war, when one by one, Ford’s male students were called up for war service. Soon there was only one left, and Ford’s customary preludial ‘Gentlemen!’ was replaced by ‘Sir!’ Eventually, he too was taken away, and Ford turned up to find himself facing a room full of girls. Always master of the occasion, Ford faced the lecture theatre as though it were empty. ‘Since there is no one here,’ he announced, ‘there will be no lecture.’ He was, of course, opposed to mixed colleges, and when in 1978 his own college proposed to allow women guests to lunch, Ford complained bitterly, believing that ‘it would tend to break down the unique style and ethos of All Souls’, and fearing that this would be but the first step towards admitting women students to the college (as, indeed, it proved). On the other hand, there are women who recall Ford with great affection. One student remembers him as ‘an excellent tutor’ and her ‘only good friend at Oxford’, and another recalls him as the kindest and friendliest of men. He was devoted to Evelyn Clark, his partner on archaeological expeditions to Cornwall, and with Miriam Rothschild he had an obvious empathy, a matching of equally brilliant and original personalities.
Perhaps he was not so much prejudiced as old-fashioned. Ford disliked gadgets of any sort, and was ham-fisted when it came to mechanical matters. John Haywood remembers a terrible noise in an adjoining room as Ford attempted to nail something together, later emerging to inform him, with evident pride, that ‘I have been doing some carpentry.’ Ford genuinely admired those skilled in technical matters, especially John Haywood’s and Sam Beaufoy’s mastery of what he called ‘the photographic camera’. He did not learn to drive a car until late in life (though he usually found someone to take him to wherever he wanted to go). His scorn of television and radio extended also to daily newspapers. Neither did he approve of fast food. What he might have thought of pizza shacks and hamburger huts can only be imagined, but he deeply disapproved of fish-and-chips. When the first fish-and-chip van appeared in Oxford, some wag, to tease him, cried out, “Look Henry, fish-and-chips on wheels!” To which Ford remarked that he would never have believed it possible that there could be so much wickedness in this world.
Writing and illustrating Butterflies
E.B. Ford wrote Butterflies at the mid-point of his career, while still plain Dr Ford, Reader in Genetics (and his doctorate was very recent), at a pause in his work imposed by wartime activity. He had written four books already: Mimicry, Mendelism and Evolution (with G.D.H. Carpenter, 1931), Mimicry (1933), The Study of Heredity (1938) and Genetics for Medical Students (1942), all of them weighty and characterised by his crisp, lucid style. Two of them remained in print as standard textbooks for more than thirty years. His published output in the scientific journals had been relatively small, but each paper was, in its way, a landmark. In the whole of his life, Ford published nothing trivial. In 1940 he had written perhaps his most influential paper about the idea of genetic polymorphism, based mainly on field studies of butterflies and moths. Briefly, he had recognised that individuals in a population occur in a number of distinct and recognisable forms in fairly constant proportions, and that these forms must be genetic since they could not be the result of geographical or environmental factors. Through polymorphism, natural selection maintains a delicate balance in the natural world between conformity and diversity. This means that minority forms can redound to the advantage of the insect by allowing it to adapt – for example, when the peppered moth found that its favourite resting places were covered in soot.
All this was fresh in Ford’s mind when he wrote Butterflies. That the book would be something quite outside the ordinary run of natural history books would have been obvious to anyone who knew Ford and his work. What we would like to know is how he managed to write such a big, important book with such evident speed during wartime, when nearly everyone was working harder than they had ever worked in their lives. To broaden the question, we would very much like to know what E.B. Ford got up to during the war years. Ford being Ford, this is a subject of boundless and often fantastic rumour, but, unfortunately, very little fact. In the former category is the story of Ford on a vital intelligence mission to the United States; Ford attending meetings at 10 Downing Street; and Ford in the secret service in Istanbul. These may be examples of what his biographer Bryan Clarke called ‘romantic misinformation of the kind that he did not tend to discourage’. When a colleague asked him why he had discontinued his studies on the meadow brown butterfly after 1939, Ford had replied mysteriously that ‘Some of us were needed at once.’ Rather better documented (because they are told by eye-witnesses) are stories of Ford knitting woollen balaclavas and socks for the Navy during his wartime tutorials! What are the facts? That he continued his pre-war investigations on insect pigments (publishing papers in 1941 and 1942), described as one of the first successful attempts to relate chemistry to classification; that he extended his work on polymorphism from butterflies to human blood groups, and wrote a book about it; that for part of the time at least he was lecturing and tutoring in genetics, much as usual; and that towards the end of the war he wrote Butterflies. On the basis that there can be no smoke without fire, we might suppose that he was engaged in some kind of clandestine war work, perhaps at the behest of his friend Lindemann, now the most influential scientist in the land. Whatever its nature, whether it was too secret or because it was another opportunity to add to the Ford legend, he never spoke about it. But it seems clear that, for some of the time at least, university life went on much as normal. Perhaps Ford took advantage of the absence of male students to write the book.
E.B. Ford (left) and Sir Alister Hardy, posing beneath their joint portrait in the Zoology Department, Oxford. (Photo: John S. Haywood)
As to the genesis of Butterflies, Ford was not an assiduous hoarder and filer of correspondence, and the relevant years are missing both from his private papers in the Bodleian Library and from the contemporary internal minute books and files of Collins. Julian Huxley had sent letters to a number of distinguished scientists in August 1943, asking if they would contribute a book to the series, and Ford’s might well have been among them. The one document still extant is his contract with the publishers to write Butterflies, which is dated 20 January 1944 and calls for the delivery of the manuscript by the end of March. As explained elsewhere, this does not mean that Ford was allowed only two months to write the book. It was normal practice for Collins to issue a formal contract, known as a ‘memorandum of agreement’, only when the book was in an advanced state of preparation; and in any case, the specially-produced New Naturalist contracts were not ready for sending until November 1943. Ford’s contract arrived later than his colleague Alister Hardy’s, suggesting that his book was not the very first to be commissioned. It seems that Butterflies was number one in the series not because Ford was ahead of the game but because he managed to write his book more quickly than anyone else could. By mid-1944, it was clear that Butterflies would be completed first because it was for that title and no other that the Ellises were asked to design their first New Naturalist dust jacket. From what we know or can infer, Butterflies was written after August 1943 and possibly completed by March 1944. It was as if the book was already formed in E.B. Ford’s mind, rolled up and awaiting its time, like one of the Dead Sea scrolls.
Illustrating Butterflies took up much of Ford’s spare time in 1944. The plates of mounted specimens were relatively straightforward to produce. Ford selected and arranged specimens from the large collection that he and his father had built up over the previous thirty years, augmented with others from the collections of the Hope Department of Entomology in the University Museum, including the historic early collection of J.C. and W.C. Dale. He was also lent specimens from the British Museum (Natural History) and from Dr H.B. Williams and W.H. Dowdeswell. The arrangement of the plates was probably facilitated by the nature of the Ford collection, in which the layout was designed to ‘demonstrate geographical variation and a number of other general principles’. He arranged these 31 plates of several hundred specimens with great ingenuity, contriving to include all the British species and their most important variations, but rather than doing this in the traditional taxonomic sequence, he laid them out under thematic headings: Butterflies of Woods and Rough Ground; Seasonal Forms and Geographical Races; The Re-introduction of the Large Copper; Sexual Abnormalities, and so on. Of particular interest is the plate of Historic Butterflies from the Dale collection, illustrating the first-caught specimens of a number of rare butterflies, including a 250-year-old Bath white. Each plate was photographed at approximately life-size by F.C. Pickering, engaged for the purpose by Adprint, using a large-format plate camera. ‘We encountered numerous technical difficulties’, said Ford in his preface, ‘which he satisfactorily overcame.’ What he did not mention was that the high quality of the colour printing was entirely at his own insistence. The proofs were appalling, and there was barely a single plate that had reproduced the colours and tones of butterflies exactly. When he complained, he was told that this was the best the printers could manage. Unimpressed, Ford purchased, at considerable expense, a set of the Royal Horticultural Society colour charts, which he cut up into squares and decorated the margins of the proofs with, indicating the exact colours he wanted. His comment to Adprint was that if the RHS could print the correct colours, so could they, that the technology to do so was obviously available, and that they should feel ashamed of themselves. He got his way. The plates of set specimens are easily the best examples of colour printing in the first half-dozen New Naturalists, and, fifty years on, they remain, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and interesting collection of British butterfly pictures ever made.
But plates of dead museum specimens were nothing unusual. It was part of the ethos of the New Naturalist library to illustrate living animals and insects in colour, and here the difficulties were much greater. The practical problems of obtaining and photographing specimens were onerous enough in the England of 1944, with limited supplies of petrol, even more limited colour film, and many of the best collecting grounds sealed off by the military. To attempt the task, Eric Hosking approached Samuel Beaufoy, then head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Ipswich School of Technology, who had, over a number of years, succeeded in photographing the life-histories of many of the British butterflies. All of his work, however, had been in monochrome. No one had yet succeeded in photographing living butterflies in colour. With the technology available, the difficulties were immense: the emulsion of the only available colour film, Kodachrome, was painfully slow for such lively objects as butterflies and there were additional problems of lighting and colour balance. No wonder Sam Beaufoy expressed due caution, especially since the colour producers, Adprint, were assuming that everything could be done in a single season, regardless of the biological facts of insect life-cycles. A year afterwards, W.A.R. Collins wrote that the work ‘nearly broke Beaufoy’s heart…He started work and test after test was returned to him by Kodak as a complete failure.’ The delay between photographing and processing the film proved yet another difficulty, since by the time the film had been processed and returned, a particular stage in a butterfly’s life might be over for another year.
Sam Beaufoy told me in a letter that:
‘The New Naturalist work “took over” all my leisure time, and involved help from my wife and young daughter in rearing the butterflies. Additionally, the only type of camera then available which fitted my technical requirements was the Kine-Exacta, using 35mm film. Mr Stemmer, of Adprint, was able to obtain the loan, for weekends only, of such a camera. During the week it was in constant use for medical photography at one of the London Teaching Hospitals. It was collected thence on Fridays and put on the train at Liverpool Street for Ipswich station, whence it was collected by me or my wife. Its return rail journey was made on Monday mornings.’
He eventually worked out a method which produced almost complete success by standardising the distance between light and subject, and determining the correct combination of filters and exposures. It had proved impossible to photograph butterflies out of doors to a satisfactory standard. Most of the living insects and their early stages were therefore reared from eggs or caterpillars collected from the field by Sam Beaufoy, or sent to him by Ford from the latter’s own breeding cages. Each adult butterfly was placed carefully on its natural foodplant and photographed within a few hours of its emergence from the chrysalis, after its wings had dried but before it took flight. This is one thing to state, but quite another matter in practice. Some species were more co-operative than others as Beaufoy recalled:
‘I have had a Painted Lady behave so well that the whole operation was over in five minutes. On another occasion, a sweltering summer’s evening, in the closely-shuttered studio, I spent nearly three hours on one of the Blues. The specimen was the only one available; the photograph was urgent. Each time that it flew from its setting, it hid itself effectively in the oddest and most awkward corners, and finding it again meant an exhaustive search of the room each time. In the end, it did consent to pose long enough for me to take the photograph.’
Sam Beaufoy photographing a dragonfly nymph using a plate camera and flash gun in 1947. (Photo: S. Beaufoy)
Sam Beaufoy recalls that the luggage for his summer holiday in Devon that year was encumbered not only by heavy photographic equipment, but also by numerous breeding cages in which the earlier stages of some species of butterfly travelled a return distance of some 550 miles. Fortunately, the house had ample space in which he could set up his ‘studio’. As a result of working together on the illustrations, Beaufoy and Ford became great friends, the former admiring Ford’s unique approach to studying butterflies, the latter in thrall to Beaufoy’s mastery of ‘the photographic camera’. They sometimes met in Cornwall and Devon in the 1950s while Ford was studying clinal variation in the meadow brown, and Beaufoy joined in with enthusiasm in the research, contributing field studies of Lepidoptera and primroses, and reading several of Ford’s books in manuscript for his opinion as an interested ‘layman’.
Probably the last part of Butterflies to be written was the Preface, which, like so much of Ford’s writing, is lofty, lucid and phrased with care. The key to the book lies in the fifth paragraph:
‘I have written this book in the hope that it may be useful to scientific entomologists and biologists in general but, in addition, I have especially kept before my mind the needs of butterfly collectors and of all those who love the country. Perhaps it may increase their pleasure by widening the scope of their interests. Many would, no doubt, wish to go no further than this, for there must be a large number of collectors and naturalists who have no intention of becoming amateur scientists. Indeed I should not wish all of them to do so; but I hope that some of them may, for they would add to their enjoyment. Accordingly, I have pointed out numerous interesting lines of experiment and observation which could be undertaken by anyone using the simplest means.’
Ford was not deliberately writing in a ‘New Naturalist’ style, for no such style yet existed, and he had evidently been given only the broadest and most generalised of instructions. The publishers were, in fact, exceedingly fortunate that his was the first book of the series to be printed. Not only were butterflies next to birds in popularity and appeal, but Ford was, in many ways, the archetype of the New Naturalist. He was an outdoors man and loved the countryside and its wildlife; he had reaped the benefit of the post-Darwin generation’s work in evolution, ecology and behaviour; he was a leading exponent of combining laboratory science and field study; aided by his classical training, he wrote well (you would have to search hard to find an error of grammar in any of Ford’s work); and he had the learning and imagination to see things in the round. In Butterflies, one can find Ford the historian (‘deeply impressed as I am with the importance of the past in interpreting the present’); Ford the collector; Ford the leading geneticist; Ford the anatomist and physiologist; and Ford the scientific thinker: Ford among the grass stalks and bracken, and Ford beneath his study desk thinking about evolution. The book succeeds not only because of its wide learning and originality, but because, like all the best New Naturalist titles, it is a personal book and could not have been written by anyone else. If we treasure Butterflies, we do so not only because of its wisdom and insight, but because when Henry Ford tells us that he once caught one of Britain’s rarest butterflies, he adds that he was ‘tempted to bite into it to determine if it were unpalatable’.
The bestseller
What makes a bestseller? Presentation, promotion, preferably a television series, and serialisation in the popular Sundays, all go into the magic pot; one hopes that the quality of the writing may sometimes play a part, too; but the most important factor of all is good timing. Butterflies was launched at exactly the right moment, as demobbing had begun, and a nation weary of war was dreaming about butterflies. The greatest surprise was not the actual sales but the size of the pre-publication subscription list, which caused Billy Collins to double the intended edition to 20,000 copies. At 16s, the book was quite expensive for those days, yet it sold out within a few months of its appearance. It was to remain in print for 35 years, and in that time sold about 53,000 copies in hardback, sales that would do credit to a successful novelist and far exceed most natural history titles today.
Table 6. The numbers of copies of Butterflies printed for the various editions are as follows:
| First edition 1945 | Fontana paperback 1975 |
| Second edition 1946 | |
| Third edition 1957 | 20,000 |
| reprint 1962 | 20,000 [bound in 1946 and 1947] |
| reprint 1967 | 3,000 |
| reprint 1971 | 2,000 |
| New edition 1977 | 3,500 |
| 2,500 | |
| Readers Union edition, 1977 reprint 1977 | 2,500 [based on the Fontana text and black and white plates] |
The success of Butterflies ‘showed the world that there was a new wind blowing across the pastures of the British naturalists’, as the Editors were to put it in their preface to Moths. Whatever the origin of the wind, it was certainly not evident in the reviews. In later years, the New Naturalist library attracted a number of loyal reviewers, among them Cyril Connolly, Geoffrey Grigson and Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, and the books were reviewed in the quality newspapers and magazines as well as in scientific and naturalist journals. But this following took some time to build up and the few, rather bland, ‘puffs’ quoted on the flyleaf of later editions of Butterflies suggest a scraping of the barrel for this first book of the series.6 I myself have trawled through dozens of microfilm copies of contemporary newspapers without finding more. I was also unable to find the review quoted from Illustrated London News, which in 1945 was little more than a picture gallery of bombed-out towns and war heroes. The Yorkshire Post, one of the best regional papers with a traditional interest in natural history, praised the way in which the book encouraged the naturalist ‘to engage in investigational work’. Cyril Diver’s more critical review in the Journal of Ecology might have disappointed the editors. Though properly appreciative of the ambitious scope of Butterflies and the lucidity of its writing, he rightly drew attention to the problem of writing about general issues in biology and evolution while being cramped for lack of good examples among our small number of native butterflies.
The textbook stuff on genetics and the butterfly natural history do, indeed, sit together rather uneasily: for half of the book butterflies are themselves the subject; for the other half they serve as examples. The key chapter of the book is the one on Evolution, but this can be understood fully only when the previous three on theoretical and practical genetics have been read and absorbed. Surely no more than a minority of readers stayed the course. Most naturalists and collectors would have been far more interested in the chapters on butterfly behaviour, distribution, geographical races and relations with other insects, all of which had something new to say. One skipped the ‘dull bits’, as one did the Agnes Wickfield chapters in David Copperfield. In so suggesting though, I may be doing less than justice to the thousands of people who read Butterflies in 1945. Attention spans seem to have been longer then, and the war had created a cultural revolution among intelligent people of all classes which bore fruit in the immediate postwar years. Perhaps Ford’s was one of those rare books that satisfied nearly everybody. As Miriam Rothschild once exclaimed, ‘E.B. Ford is the author of the best book ever written about butterflies – a redoubtable achievement, for there is general agreement about this – and to weld entomologists into a coherent body must in itself be something of a tour de force.’ Ford himself was astonished at its success. He was proud of the book, though he might not have agreed with his biographer, Bryan Clarke, that it was the best thing he ever wrote.
It might interest readers to learn how much Ford earned from Butterflies; I, for one, had assumed that it was a great deal. His contract, in the standard format specially designed for the New Naturalist series, stipulated £400 for the first 10,000 copies printed, half on acceptance and half on publication. Payment on the second 10,000 copies was at £40 per thousand copies sold, and thereafter at a ten per cent royalty. I estimate that he would have earned about £1,000 in the first year, and thereafter perhaps £75 to £150 per year. The former was quite a respectable sum in 1945, and was considered by the editors to be a generous rate. But it was not exactly a fortune, and the financial inducement to write a New Naturalist title, never very strong, grew weaker as the sales declined. Most of the books were necessarily written in the authors’ spare time, or in retirement. That is the main reason why the series proceeded at the sedate rate of only two new titles per year from 1945 to 1949, and why there was a sudden glut of completed manuscripts in the early 1950s, when everyone finished together.
The second (slightly revised) edition of Butterflies in 1946 was, like the first, of 20,000 copies, and this time Collins did not run out of stock until 1956. Thereafter, with greatly reduced sales affecting every title in the series, the title was reprinted in much smaller numbers, while the price rose from a guinea to 35s in 1962 and to 45s in 1967.
While there were minor revisions made to the second and third editions, Ford was not allowed to revise the text thoroughly until the early 1970s, when the new setting for the Fontana paperback enabled him to do so. Indeed, that may be the reason why he allowed a paperback edition at all, for up until then he had resisted it. The paperback was an ill-starred enterprise. Ford explained that, ‘I have long since ceased to be an entomologist in the ordinary sense, having years ago passed over to invent and develop the science of Ecological Genetics. Thus British butterflies have long passed outside the scope of anything I am concerned with or know about.’ What made the job a peculiarly depressing one was the exclusion of the colour plates, which meant that the whole text had to be gone through to eliminate all references to the original plates and substitute for the monochrome plates new ones taken by Ford’s technical assistant, John S. Haywood. It was a labour of Sisyphus. ‘It is utterly miserable’, wrote Ford, ‘going through this book which has become famous and has been an outstanding success, and cut it about in this wretched way. I hate doing it, and I feel, and know, that all this work I am doing is merely to turn something good into something bad.’
The paperback was eventually published in 1975, after numerous complications and misunderstandings, but it sold poorly. The Fontana paperback series had had a brief period of success in the late 1960s, but the sales had declined, and Butterflies was one of the last titles to be reprinted in that form. The correspondence between publisher and author grew acrimonious after the former had failed to answer two queries about royalties. One can imagine Ford’s eyebrows climbing above his spectacles with astonishment and indignation. He wrote: ‘That I should be so treated by a Publisher has of course given rise to surprise in Oxford.’
The last edition of Butterflies in the traditional New Naturalist format was published in 1977, without any of the colour plates that had once been its crowning glory, and at an inflated price of £8. By then, the blocks from which the plates were made were badly worn – through an oversight, no duplicate plates had ever been made – and the original colour slides were by now dirty and scratched. New colour blocks could not be made without raising the price beyond the pockets of the average book buyer. In retrospect, it would have been better to declare the book out of print. But Collins wanted to keep this book in print, not out of hope of further profit (for there was none in reprinting the older titles) but to keep a famous and still useful text before the public. Unfortunately, they neglected to warn the reader of the change, and kept the original preface which laid such emphasis on the now non-existent colour plates. Ford’s reaction reflected that of many readers: ‘What a poor thing it looks…The statement in the original Editors’ Preface about the use of colour plates has rightly caused amusement and contempt when read in conjunction with the last edition, containing no colour plates at all.’ Numerous purchasers returned their copies to the bookshop with expressions of anger at having been, as they thought, taken in by Collins. It was a sad finale to one of the natural history classics of the twentieth century. Collins’ then natural history editor, Robert MacDonald, admitted that the monochrome edition had been a mistake: ‘I think the lesson is, either to leave the books out of print or to reprint them with the colour at whatever price is necessary.’ Butterflies was declared out of print in 1983, having exceeded the sales of all the case-bound New Naturalist books, with the sole exception of Britain’s Structure and Scenery.
Moths
The second New Naturalist book by E.B. Ford was intended to expand, as he put it, ‘certain of the concepts laid down in Butterflies and applying them, by way of illustration, to moths’. He had hoped to make a start soon after completing Butterflies and his contract for Moths, dated 23 February 1945, was for the delivery of a book by the end of the following year. But the post-war years were a particularly busy time for Ford, and it was not until 1951 that he was able to get on with the sequel. The manuscript (which Ford evidently typed himself) was completed in late 1953, and was read by both Huxley and James Fisher who pronounced it ‘very good, similar in treatment to Butterflies’. Because of printing delays, the book was not in the shops until February 1955. Moths had been eagerly awaited by those who had read and enjoyed the earlier volume, and this time the book was widely and enthusiastically reviewed. It was seen, rightly, as a companion volume that showed, as Miriam Rothschild expressed it in the Sunday Times, ‘how we can graduate from being a mere collector to being a scientist – without losing any of the thrill and the pleasure of collecting in the field5, a view echoed in a detailed review in the Times Literary Supplement and by John Moore in The Observer.
Cothill Fen, near Oxford, where for many years E.B. Ford studied the genetics of the scarlet tiger moth. (Photo: Peter Wakely/English Nature)
The printer’s proof (left), pencil and colour sketches (below) of the Moths jacket. (Private collection)
The illustrations were in similar format, all of them taken, with great skill, by Sam Beaufoy, including the plates of mounted specimens, arranged by Ford from his own collection and from those of his department and of colleagues. They had photographed 48 colour plates, as with Butterflies, but increases in the cost of colour printing had by now reduced the original allocation to 32. Although improvements in film emulsion and close-up equipment had made insect photography accessible to a growing band of naturalists, Beaufoy achieved at least one more break-through in producing the first pictures ever taken of the life-stages of the waved black moth, an aberrant little insect whose caterpillars live on fungi and whose pupae are slung like hammocks. It was unfortunate therefore that the latter, unique, picture was the victim of the only transposed caption in the second edition, which rather took the skin off Ford’s delight in finding a virtually error-free text.
Moths was never the commercial success that Butterflies was, nor was it ever likely to be, given the lesser appeal of its subject. But there were other reasons. After an introductory chapter on the anatomy and physiology of moths, which was already fairly tough going, Ford launched straight into four ‘heavy’ chapters on theoretical and practical genetics which, since he took a knowledge of the material in Butterflies for granted, tended to be more ‘difficult’ than the earlier work. The later chapters reverted to traditional subjects, but overall something of the fresh air and sunlight of Butterflies was missing. One problem Ford could do nothing about was that there were too many moths, with the consequence that their use as examples, rather than subjects, was intensified. So keen was Ford to write about his own genetics research that he even brought in a lengthy section on the meadow brown butterfly. Even so, Moths is, overall, a worthy companion to Butterflies, written in the same lucid, readable style and full of rainbow flashes of insight into the evolution and behaviour of these secret insects of the night. There is a brief account, of which he might have made more, of Ford’s ascents in an RAF barrage balloon with Alister Hardy to determine whether or not moths fly towards the moon. In terms of new information, such as the sections on extinct moths and local races, this book perhaps outweighs its predecessor, and, like it, Moths remains a useful book, both for serious study and for enlightening one’s forays with a lantern and net. The first edition of 8,500 sold rather slowly – Moths was one of the slow-but-steady titles of the series – and by the time it went out of print in 1981, it had been through three editions and sold about 14,000 copies. Whether it might have sold better had more of the book been concerned with the life and habitats of moths is an open question.
E.B. Ford: the later years
Since we have followed Ford’s scientific career in some detail up to the publication of his best-known book, let us now round off the story by detailing, necessarily more briefly, the latter part of his life. Shortly after Butterflies was published, the originality and importance of Ford’s work was recognised by the academic world with a series of honours. He was elected President of the Genetical Society of Great Britain and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946, and in 1954 the latter awarded him its Darwin Medal. In 1958, his name was proposed by Miriam Rothschild for the first scientific fellowship of All Souls College. Ford was duly elected, and thereafter he was jokingly referred to as ‘Mrs Lane’s fellow’. All Souls, with its magnificent library and dining facilities and, at that time, masculine ethos, was at the centre of Ford’s life from then on: he served his college as Dean, where his responsibilities included reading the sermon in the college chapel. In 1977, he received the singular honour of being elected Distinguished Fellow and Senior Dean.
In 1964, his life work Ecological Genetics was published, the magnum opus he had been preparing for more than thirty years. Though the book created a great surge of interest in the subject, many of its themes had already been rehearsed in Butterflies and Moths: the collecting days with his father; the August camps on Tean with ‘Bunny’ Dowdeswell; ‘tiger-hunting’ in Cothill Marsh with Ronald Fisher and Philip Sheppard. By this time, Ford had his own small department of genetics at Oxford, for which a specially designed laboratory had been built in the 1950s – ironically, on a patch of waste ground, known as ‘Henry’s weed garden’, on which he had monitored caterpillars. He was appointed Professor of Ecological Genetics in 1963, not so much an administrative position as a recognition of his achievement in founding a new scientific discipline with a band of gifted disciples, several of whom were to be appointed to university chairs of their own. As a scientist, Ford had risen to the top of the tree, and been honoured in the way he would have wished, by the Royal Society and by Oxford. His ungenerous country failed to follow their example with a knighthood, as it should have done.
During the 1940s and 1950s, E.B. Ford was much involved with the development of nature conservation in Britain. He served on the Wildlife Conservation Special Committee under Julian Huxley and Arthur Tansley, whose famous White Paper ‘Cmd. 7122’ led to the founding by Royal Charter of the Nature Conservancy in 1949. He joined the board of the Conservancy and served there for ten years, longer than any of his scientific peers, with the exception of J.A. Steers and W.H. Pearsall. He was a valued member not only for his contacts and influence but for his unrivalled knowledge of off-shore islands and insect localities. Ford’s interest in nature conservation had grown as he watched so many of the best butterflying and mothing grounds disappear under the plough, both during and after the war. He approved of, and helped to establish, nature reserves, including his scarlet tiger research area at Cothill Marsh. He also took part in the Nature Conservancy’s administrative work, which included interviewing candidates for research Fellowships and scientific posts. Derek Ratcliffe recalls his own ordeal in front of three Fellows of the Royal Society, including Ford, whom he remembers staring at him, beady-eyed, and occasionally firing off staccato questions. When Derek admitted that he had switched from zoology to botany out of boredom, one of the other Fellows turned to Ford and jokingly remarked: ‘Yet another deserter, Henry!’, to which Ford answered with a snort of disgust.
E.B. Ford, Julian Huxley and John Baker in Bernard Kettlewell’s garden, 1971. (Photo: John S. Haywood)
Ford never really retired. Though he ceased his formal duties as professor in 1969, he retained an office in the zoology department which he visited almost daily. His latter days were filled with travel – he was invited to supervise the design of genetics laboratories in many countries, including Finland, Jordan, Canada and France. He continued to study Lepidoptera, and among his last projects was an investigation with Sir Cyril Clarke of the unusual genetics of the gipsy moth. He wrote several more books and pursued his antiquarian hobbies of field archaeology, heraldry and the exploration of medieval churches. The latter formed the subject matter of his last book, Church Treasures in the Oxford District (1984), where each ‘treasure’ is described with the same meticulous attention to detail that he devoted to his scientific observations. Once, while taking notes on the interior of Cumnor Church, he and John Haywood heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path outside which came to a halt by the porch. They assumed that it was the old man who locked up the church each night – ‘We’d better leave, Henry, before we are locked in.’ But on stepping outside, they found no one. Ford’s scientific training rose to the occasion: ‘I think we ought to write this down, right away.’ Evidently they failed to do so, for Ford makes no mention of the episode in Church Treasures. Haywood tells me that instead they headed straight for the nearest public house bar to steady their nerves.
In his last years, Ford returned to butterfly collecting, probably to give him something to do on his walks around Oxford as much as anything else. He was one of those people who never like to waste time: strolling along country lanes just for the pleasure of it was not his style. I have had the privilege of being shown a new collection of butterflies by E.B. Ford, made in the final decade of his long life, each one set with mathematical precision, of a piece with the rest of his work. Sad to say, the earlier collection from which Ford selected specimens to illustrate Butterflies and Moths has been destroyed. John Haywood told me that the cabinets containing the collection were kept in Ford’s attic, and were hardly looked at from one year to the next. When, too late and after Ford’s death, the cabinets were inspected, almost the entire collection had been devoured by mites and beetles. In view of the part they played in Ford’s work, they are a loss to science; Ford, on the other hand, was always willing to sacrifice specimens for scientific purposes, and also, it is said, made a habit of destroying such material after it had served its immediate purpose. He was not, it seems, a sentimentalist.
It was only in the last year or two of his life that Ford was much bothered by serious infirmity, although he suffered from asthma and had recovered from a heart attack in 1971. As late as the mid-1980s, he and John Haywood were planning another Church Treasures book, this time on the Cotswolds where Ford had lived and which had long been his favourite corner of England. He hoped to see the century out and to write a book about evolution and extinction. In about 1985, his housekeeper, to whom he had been devoted, died, and he also lost some treasured possessions in a burglary. He was never quite the same again. E.B. Ford died on 22 January 1988 at the age of 86. As he had requested, his body was cremated, and the ashes scattered on a stretch of downland hillside near Birdlip, where chalkhill blues and brown arguses dance among the summer flowers.
The originality and influence of E.B. Ford as one of the century’s most eminent geneticists are beyond dispute, notwithstanding the fact that not all of his work has withstood the test of time. As a scientist, he must have seemed like someone from an earlier age, perhaps a clergyman-naturalist like Ray or Gilbert White. What is one to make of him? Bryan Clarke, who knew him well, confesses to feeling a mixture of admiration and infuriating annoyance. While his work was always original, brilliant and well-written, it was also often parochial to an extreme degree. Ford was a paid-up member of Oxford’s mutual admiration society; the only Cambridge man he ever paid much attention to was R.A. Fisher, and as for the work of our cousins across the Atlantic, he barely acknowledged its existence in the pages of Ecological Genetics. So far as the New Naturalist books are concerned, that is at once his strength and weakness. They are not so much natural history books in any generalised sense, as a record of the work of E.B. Ford and his closest colleagues. At the same time, it was because they were written from first-hand knowledge, and because that knowledge was so wide, that these books are brimming with fresh insights for anyone prepared to accept the challenge of the new scientific natural history.
Of Ford the man, opinions are almost as many as witnesses. That many of his students and colleagues did not enjoy being ignored by him, or given a hostile glare as they arrived late for a lecture, or enduring his sarcasms, is evident; others remember a kindly man, whose supercilious look and veneer of biting wit could not disguise his fundamental good nature. He was certainly unusual. From several of those who knew him well, I have heard the phrase: ‘You never forgot Henry Ford.’ Nor shall we. I end by quoting part of two tributes, the first by Michael Majerus, a geneticist and the author of the preceding volume in this series, and the second by the scientist who perhaps understood him best, Miriam Rothschild.
‘In 1964, for my tenth birthday, I was given a copy of Ford’s Butterflies. I used my pocket money to buy the companion volume Moths and these two books undoubtedly influenced the rest of my life. From that summer I began to do more than make a child’s haphazard collection of butterflies and moths. I began to run a moth trap, and to record religiously, all species taken, forms, when I could identify them, notes on behaviour, and finally I began trying to rear broods from pairings between different forms, following the advice given in Ford’s books. My own experience is testament to the truth of Ford’s contention that the basic elements of Mendelian genetics can be understood by a child of eleven in an afternoon and thereafter applied (although I was only ten).
‘I think the likely course of my career was laid down with the gift of that book. My interest in polymorphic Lepidoptera was certainly conceived in 1964, and has persisted now for 25 years. I read Ford’s Ecological Genetics in 1972, and the idea of working on green versus brown lepidoptera larvae for a PhD came from that reading and subsequent delvings into the bibliography. Although I never met Ford or Kettlewell (I did hear both of them speak on several occasions, but in those days I was a shy retiring youth), I think it is true to say that Ford influenced my interest very considerably.’
Michael Majerus. In: Berry, R.J. Industrial Melanism and Peppered Moths, (1990) ibid.
‘It is sad that the English language lacks the French adjective genial, for this word could have been coined to describe Henry’s versatile mind and original ideas, coupled with his incisive attention to detail and persistent pursuit of a fruitful line of research. Furthermore he has attracted innumerable students – professionals as well as amateurs – into the butterfly field, recognising how the aesthetic appeal of these matchless insects, which caught our imagination as children, and are associated with the nostalgia of the golden age, can provide us, now we are older and possibly wiser, with one of the best biological tools ever invented. It is not only a rewarding field in itself, but one which carries with it a love of natural history and ageless delight. I will always be grateful to Henry Ford for suddenly endowing my fleas with wings.’
Miriam Rothschild. Dedication: Henry Ford and Butterflies in The Biology of Butterflies (1984)
REFERENCES
Much of this chapter draws on the memories of surviving friends and colleagues of E.B. Ford mentioned in the acknowledgements and from unpublished memorials by Bryan Wilson and Peter Placito. I have also inspected that section of the correspondence of E.B. Ford held in the Bodleian Library which refers to Collins publishers and to Butterflies and Moths. The following are published references mentioned or alluded to in the text.
Berry, R.J. (1990) Industrial melanism and peppered moths (Biston betularia L.. Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 39: 301-322. Contains anecdotes about Ford and Kettlewell, and the appreciation of Butterflies by M. Majerus.
Creed, R. (ed.) (1971) Ecological Genetics and Evolution. Essays in honour of E.B. Ford. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford. Includes a full Ford bibliography compiled by Miriam Rothschild and H.B.D. Kettlewell and a foreword by Professor J.W.S. Pringle.
Diver, Cyril. (1945) ‘A Faunal Monograph’ (review of Butterflies by E.B. Ford). J. Ecol. 33: 204-205.
Ford, E.B. & Huxley, J.S. (1927) Mendelian genes and rates of development in Gammarus chevreuxi. Br. Journal of Experimental Biology, 5: 112-134.
Ford, H.D. & Ford, E.B. (1930) Fluctuation in numbers and its influence on variation in Melitaea aurinia. Trans. Royal Ent. Soc. of London, 78: 345-351.
Ford, E.B. (1940) Polymorphism and taxonomy. In: J. Huxley (ed.) The New Systematics. OUP, 493-513.
Ford, E.B. (1979) Understanding Genetics. Faber and Faber: London.
Ford, E.B. (1980) Some recollections pertaining to the evolutionary synthesis. In: Mayre, E. & Provine, W.B. (eds.) The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology. Harvard University Press. A fascinating account of his life and work by Ford himself, based on a 1974 lecture.
Ford, E.B. (1981) Taking Genetics into the Countryside. Weidenfeld and Nicholson: London.
Ford, E.B. & Haywood, J.S. (1984) Church Treasures in the Oxford District. Alan Sutton: Gloucester.
Ford, E.B. (1989) Scientific Work by Sir Julian Huxley FRS. In: Keynes, M. & Harrison, G.A. (eds.) Evolution Studies. A centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Macmillan: Basingstoke (for the Eugenics Society).
Rothschild, Miriam. 1984. Henry Ford and Butterflies. In: Vane-Wright, R. I. and Ackery, P. R. (eds.) The Biology of Butterflies. Royal Entomological Society symposium No. 11, Academic Press: London, xxii-xxiii.
Obituaries
Clarke, Bryan C. (in prep.) Edmund Brisco Ford. 1901-1988. Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society.
Clarke, Cyril. (1988) In Nature 332: 20.
Jones, D.A. (1988) In Tree 3:115-116.
Oxford Today, Vol. 1:54
The Times, January 23 1988.
Full Bibliography of books by E.B. Ford
Mendelism and Evolution. (1931, 8th ed. 1965) Methuen: London. Available in paperback; translated into Spanish.
Mimicry. (1933) (with G.D.H. Carpenter). Methuen: London. Translated into Spanish 1949.
The Study of Heredity. (1938) Thornton, Butterworth: London. 2nd ed. 1950. Oxford University Press.
Genetics for Medical Students. (1942; 7th ed. 1973). Chapman and Hall: London. Translated into Italian 1948.
Butterflies. (1945; 3rd ed. 1977). Collins New Naturalist: London. Fontana paperback ed. 1975.
British Butterflies. (1951) King Penguin Books: Harmondsworth.
Moths. (1955; 3rd ed. 1972) Collins New Naturalist: London.
Ecological Genetics. (1964; 4th enlarged ed. 1975). Chapman and Hall: London. Translated into Polish, French and Italian.
Genetic Polymorphism. (1965) Faber and Faber: London.
Evolution Studied by Observation and Experiment. (1973; 2nd enlarged ed. 197?). Oxford Biology Readers, Oxford University Press.
Genetics and Adaptation. (1976) Institute of Biology Studies. Edward Arnold: London. Also in paperback.
Understanding Genetics. (1979) Faber and Faber: London.
Taking Genetics into the Countryside. (1981) Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London.
Church Treasures in the Oxford District. (1984) (with J.S. Haywood). Alan Sutton: Gloucester.