One hundred years ago this month Europe entered a war that was to kill millions. Men from all walks of life, including birdwatchers and ornithologists, volunteered or were called to fight for their country and many died. Derek Niemann (Birds in a Cage, 2012) has described how John Barrett, John Buxton, Peter Conder and George Waterston made it through the Second World War, but almost nothing is known of other young ornithologists whose lives and careers were brought to a premature end in the two world wars. Here I recall a small group of friends whose studies before the First World War suggest that they might have made a greater contribution to ornithology had they all survived.
A few years before the war began, the first organised bird ringing scheme in Britain got under way at the University of Aberdeen, organised by Arthur Landsborough Thomson, then an undergraduate student (BTO News 122: 8). The first birds to be ringed were six young Northern Lapwings Vanellus vanellus at the Sands of Forvie in Aberdeenshire on 8th May 1909, marked by Lewis Ramsay, Arthur Davidson and Thomson himself, and a Common Starling Sturnus vulgaris at Inverurie on the same day, by Thomas Tait. The first recovery from a ringing scheme in Britain and Ireland (contra Clark & Wernham in Wernham et al. 2002, The Migration Atlas, p. 14) occurred when one of the Lapwings was recaptured nearby on 13th June 1909 (Scottish Naturalist 7: 171).
Tait was 44 years old when the First World War began, but the other three were only 23 (ALT) and 24 (AD, LR). Thomson, Davidson and Ramsay had been friends since they were children. All three lived in Aberdeen. Thomson and Davidson went to the Grammar School during a brief time when natural history flourished there. Ramsay was schooled in Edinburgh, but his father and Thomson’s were Regius professors at the University of Aberdeen and they both lived on the campus in Old Aberdeen. As boys they explored the countryside and shoreline together at every opportunity, cycling up to the Ythan Estuary or along Deeside, often in search of nests, or spending time in the large Natural History Museum in the department run by Thomson’s father. When Thomson started his ringing scheme, it was only natural for Davidson and Ramsay to be in the thick of it with him.
Arthur Gerrard Davidson, the son of a master clothier with a reputable business in town, had fewer academic ambitions than the other two. He worked for several years in his father’s shop and then transferred to a similar establishment in London. Thomson and Ramsay went to the University of Aberdeen, where they studied natural history under J. Arthur Thomson and J. W. H. Trail. Both boys were academically gifted and Thomson was a natural organiser. Both published several papers while they were still students – Thomson’s were mainly on ringing, but Ramsay’s were more varied. One (in the Ibis) was on the avifauna of the Anatolian Plateau following a trip to Turkey when he was 17. Another was on moult in gulls. Eagle Clarke recruited him to help write up the zoological results of William Speirs Bruce’s Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, for which he co-authored the ornithology and prepared an account of the polychaete worms. He went to Cambridge, came back to Aberdeen when J. Arthur Thomson offered him a job, became one of the first Biet Memorial Fellows and was preparing to move to Imperial College as war broke out.
Lewis Neil Griffith Ramsay started as a private in the Gordon Highlanders in August 1914, and was commissioned as a second Lieutenant in November that year. He fought through the 1914/15 winter in France, sur- viving the short battle of Neuve Chapelle on 10th–12th March, the first set-piece offensive from static trenches, and was repairing a trench on ground taken from the Germans when, aged only 25, he fell to a sniper’s bullet on 21st March 1915. Ramsay was buried in the Estaires Communal Cemetery in northern France. His obituary (written by Thomson) appeared in this journal (Brit. Birds 9: 17–18).
Davidson was also sent to France as a private in the Gordon Highlanders and rose to sergeant before gaining a commission. After fresh training he returned to France in April 1917 as a pilot in the Flying Corps, notoriously dangerous with its open-cockpit machines and lack of parachutes. For much of the war the Germans had superiority in the air and only months later 27-year-old Lieutenant Davidson and his observer were shot down and killed in a dogfight with four German planes. His remains were buried in the Zuydcoote Military Cemetery near Dunkirk in France.
Thomson fought in France with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, transferring to staff duties as the war ended, ultimately a lieu- tenant-colonel and assistant quartermaster- general. He was awarded a military OBE in 1919 and submitted his ringing publications for a DSc in 1920. Thomson’s ringing inquiry was never intended to be open-ended but it faltered during his wartime absence and merged with Witherby’s scheme soon there- after. The two men collaborated and Thomson wrote many of the early papers to come out of the work. When Witherby passed the ringing scheme on to the BTO in 1937, he insisted that Thomson should chair the directing com- mittee, which he did until 1965. Thomson’s ornithological output ran to over 70 books and papers, mainly on migration but including the landmark New Dictionary of Birds (1964). He received many awards (including Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1933 and a knight- hood in 1953), was Chairman of the BTO, BOC and the Trustees of the British Museum (Natural History), President of the BOU, the Zoological Society of London and the XI Inter- national Ornithological Congress and served on many other bodies as well – all in addition to his day job. In 1919 he had joined the Medical Research Committee (later Medical Research Council) as assistant secretary and retained that position until he retired in 1957. He died on 9th June 1977 at the age of 86, after a lifetime of influence in ornithological science, conservation and medical research (Brit. Birds 70: 384–387).
Out of nine friends and contemporaries who studied natural history at Aberdeen, only Thomson survived the war, highlighting the cruel tragedy and loss that the conflict brought to so very many people and fields of endeavour.
