John Battersby Crompton Lamburn
Encyclopedia
John Battersby Crompton Lamburn (1893 – 1972)
was a British
writer, younger brother of Richmal Crompton
, who was best known for her "William"
books for boys. She was said to have drawn part of her inspiration for the character of William from him.
During World War I
Lamburn served in Rhodesia
in the British South Africa Police
. Afterwards he joined a shipping firm in China, where he travelled widely. Returning to England in the 1930s he took to writing fiction, mainly under the pseudonym "John Lambourne". He probably is best known for his fantasy The Kingdom That Was.
In World War II
he served in the RAF
. Afterwards, under the name "John Crompton", he wrote mainly nonfiction on natural history
themes. Beyond his published works little is known about Lamburn’s life and works, because most of his notes were destroyed in an act of arson.
writer, the younger brother of the more popular author Richmal Crompton
. She was the author of many novels, but best known for her hugely popular "William"
books for boys.
He wrote fiction mainly under the pseudonym "John Lambourne", or "John B. C. Lambourne", and wrote popular books on natural history under the name "John Crompton". He probably is best known for his fantasy The Kingdom That Was (1931).
As Trooper 1757 Lamburn, J. B. C. of the British South Africa Police
, he served from September 19, 1913 to November 30, 1919, which spans WWI. In both his fiction and non-fiction he drew on his police experiences, but according to the official BSAP site nothing is known of his service. (This is no evidence for anything worse than that he never achieved any special prominence in the service, as little is known of the service of most of the troopers of those days.) On leaving the Force he moved to the Far East and travelled widely in China. Returning to England in the 1930s he took to writing, by now drawing on his experience of travel in East Asia as well.
Little is widely known about Lamburn’s life and works, but a few details can be gleaned or inferred from various sources.
According partly to Lamburn’s own account of himself, on one of his book covers, he was educated at Bury Grammar School and Manchester University. His father was the Rev Edward John Sewell Lamburn, and apparently intended his son to follow in his own footsteps and go into the Anglican
Church, but instead, in 1913 at the age of twenty, young Lamburn joined the Rhodesian Mounted Police of the British South Africa Police
or BSAP, as a trooper. Presumably this was to the considerable consternation of his parents, and his age at the time suggests that he did not complete a degree course at Manchester.
On the other hand, the second of his two elder sisters was Richmal Crompton
Lamburn, a novelist and the author of the hugely popular "William" stories, and she was said to have derived part of her inspiration for her leading character, William Brown — a rough diamond — from her young brother. This all suggests that Lamburn might well have been very unpromising ecclesiastical material, and deeply unenthusiastic about his studies. Certainly some of his autobiographical reminiscences on the vigour and variety of his life in Southern Africa and elsewhere, suggest that as a very plausible inference; see for example some passages in his book "The Hunting Wasp", especially chapter 4(III: Locust and Cockroach Hunters) and chapter 6 The Fly Hunters.
He described his fellow-troopers as being about as hard-bitten a crew as it would be possible to find anywhere. He stayed with the BSAP throughout World War I. His duties included patrolling large areas of undeveloped country, and taking charge of isolated up-country out-stations. He found it to be a glorious life in country as unspoilt as any that Selous
hunted. It was full of big game – in his own words: “...country we shall see no more.”
In 1919 he joined a shipping firm and went to China. For 13 years he operated from Harbin at the north of Manchuria down to Hong Kong in the south. His travels took him to the remotest regions of China. It is deeply regrettable that his African and Chinese notes were effectively all destroyed in a deed of arson He generally spent his leave on his own in shooting trips in Portuguese East Africa (present-day Mozambique
). In 1932 he resigned from the firm and “came home” (which among the colonial English of the day, meant “going to Britain” — usually England — whether they had ever seen British shores or not). There he married and settled first in Devon, then in Cornwall. Reading between the lines the rats on the Devon property might well have played a role in persuading him to move to Cornwall.
The study of insects had always been a hobby of his, both in Africa and China. In retirement in England he settled down more earnestly to the pursuit of informal entomology, though, as he observed, with not half so rich a field of subjects as on his travels.
On settling down, he wrote novels, though that was no new departure for him; he had already published “The White Kaffir”, “Trooper Fault”, and his most celebrated novel: “The Kingdom that Was”. Significantly, “Strong Waters” and “The Second Leopard” also appeared in 1932, so obviously his apparently idle time in preceding years actually had been anything but idle. It is worth speculating that his productivity in writing might have encouraged his retirement and “going home”. After settling down he went in for “fairly intensive bee-keeping” as he related in “The Hive”, one World War later.
That his absence from the trenches of WWI was not attributable to lack of patriotic feeling is apparent from the fact that in 1940, at the age of about 47, he joined the Royal Air Force
. One wonders what string-pulling might have been necessary to accomplish that at such an advanced age, but of course at that time Britain was desperate for fighting manpower. In due course he found himself in Iceland as Flight Lieutenant
in Flying Control. In September 1943 he was invalided out with a peptic ulcer
, a condition for which no decisive treatment was to be developed for another forty years or so. As he put it, he was given leave by the Air Force Council
to retain his rank — and unfortunately the ulcer he had contracted as well.
Writing as: LAMBOURNE, John B. C.
Writing as: CROMPTON, John
In his review of ‘Trooper Fault’, Sloman remarks that most of the characters in the book are fictitious, but that they include some real-life names such as Jimmy Blatherwick and Capell, though Sloman states that the latter never started as an ordinary recruit. Trooper Fault himself has the regimental number 1757, which according to the nominal roll was in fact the number of Trooper John Battersby Crompton Lamburn himself. Of Richmal Crompton’s “William” stories, Sloman remarks: “Fortunately for J.B.C.Lamburn these stories were published after his BSAP career had ended, otherwise he could have been ragged rotten!”
Whether Lamburn's vein of invention had dried out, or whether his fiction had failed on the market, or whether he simply had become too engrossed in his natural history studies and writings, we cannot say, but once he began to write on natural history after the war, he apparently published no more fiction.
In writing on scientific matters Lamburn certainly wrote mainly under the name “John Crompton”. As John Crompton he made no claim to scientific expertise, but wrote explicitly as a “layman writing for laymen”. Accordingly the books include occasional slip-ups such as “coastal” (instead of “costal”) venule, though of course some of those might well be attributed to printers’ devils. Also, many of his views on theoretical matters such as evolution and genetics were naïve even for his day. Consider for example in chapter 1 of "The Hunting Wasp"; in response to some of Fabre's less apposite criticisms of Darwinian theory, Lamburn has no better response than: "Fabre, of course, takes the short-sighted view. He has no conception of Time with a capital T..." This was true as far as it went, but it was not adequate in the context of Fabre's misunderstandings. However, it would be inappropriate to criticise those works on such bases. He wrote pleasantly, literately, and intelligently, often quite thoughtfully, on a wide range of biological subjects, and did so at a level accessible to a wider and younger public than most popular scientific writing.
Most of Lamburn's source material was gleaned from popular and semi-popular material, such as the writings of Jean Henri Fabre
, the Peckham
s, O.H. Latter, and the like, and was properly, if informally, credited. He did not stint his expression of his opinions on such sources, though he was neither pretentious nor destructive in his criticism. He was full of praise for Fabre and the Peckhams, whose endless patience and minute gifts of observation have made them outstanding authorities in the field of entomology to this day. Lamburn does not disguise his admiration for these extraordinarily meticulous, seminal entomologists. He notes in 'The Spider': "Fabre ... was disliked by his colleagues. At ease with young people, he was tongue-tied with men, and his timid manners did not endear him to them. But the dislike went further. He wrote about science in a way that ordinary people could understand. This was considered to cheapen the profession. He was a born teacher too, and and pupils almost fought to attend his classes. Naturally the other masters did not like it, and were ready to take action at the first opportunity."
In spite of his admiration for the greats, Lamburn had sufficient strength of character to maintain his own views. For example, he had little patience with Fabre's rejection of some of the assertions of classical Darwinism, which attributed all evolutionary change to gradual increments due entirely to random mutations. Fabre ridiculed the idea that this mechanism could explain, e.g., the unbelievable precision of the hunting wasp's injection of precise quantities of venom into the hidden nerve centres of her victims. "In daring to question the conclusions of Fabre I am, I know, going out of my class. But Fabre the theorist is not Fabre the naturalist ... His patience and perseverance ... have brought a rich harvest of knowledge to the world, but that does not mean that we must agree with him when he branches out in other directions." Similarly in the same book he quite reasonably criticises some of Fabre's cruder experiments on instinctive behaviour, and their naive interpretation. Lamburn outspokenly rejected Fabre's arguments that the behaviour of such creatures as hunting-wasps, that operated by injecting venom precisely into particular nerve-centres, could not have arisen by natural selection. Fabre's views of Darwinism made little impression at the height of his fame. In the twentieth Century, such refinements to Classical Darwinism as the theory of Puntuated Equilibria made a serious effort to address the problem of the mechanism of evolution of complex structures and behaviour patterns, which it seems impossible to have arisen in a half-formed state: until they are perfected, they ought, by the hypothesis itself, to have been eliminated through natural selection. It is important in this connection however, not to read any malice into the relationship between Darwin and Fabre as Lamburn dealt with the subject. Fabre wrote: "...though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news reached me: Darwin was dead..." No one involved in the matter, not Darwin, not Fabre, and certainly not Lamburn in his day, suggested that anything more than a difference of opinion between great spirits was involved.
The alert professional also can glean a lot of useful information from anecdotes derived from Lamburn’s personal experiences and those of his correspondents, scientific and non-scientific. He was as willing to quote and credit a country gamekeeper, as the famous myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler
.
His books certainly have inspired a fair number of young biologists and it is of some interest to note that after many years out of print some are again appearing in Amazon and similar lists. Sloman referred to a (favourable) review of “The Spider” and “The Snake” in the New York Times by Bonnie Bilyeu Gordon In her review, Gordon appositely remarked: "...Crompton blends great enthusiasm with proper fairness. His voice is direct and chatty and sometimes a bit curmudgeonly. He is also often witty. Take this, for example, written on the family of non-web-weaving spiders that includes the tarantula: The web-weaver, having patented a clever device, can now sit back and collect the dividends; the wolf spider, unable to think out anything in the way of a snare, has to pay the penalty by leading a hard, strenuous, and dangerous life..."
, speculated to be the original for “Biggles” of the stories by W. E. Johns
. Apparently Johns had known Wigglesworth in WWI.
Sloman mentioned that David John Crompton Lamburn (presumably a son) attested in the BSAP on 5 May 1952 as Constable 4917 and was discharged on 4 May 1955. He added that members serving in Bulawayo in the 1950s recalled him but, again, all attempts failed to locate him at the time of Sloman’s writing.
In his book "The Hunting Wasp" Lamburn refers to "a child two years old" during the 1930s. This is consistent with a son in the BSAP in the 1950s, but no more information on a son was available at the time of writing this article. However, elsewhere he refers to a daughter of "nearly five" (no date given).
was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
writer, younger brother of Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton Lamburn was a British writer, most famous for her Just William humorous short stories and books.-Life:...
, who was best known for her "William"
Just William
Just William is the first book of children's short stories about the young school boy William Brown, written by Richmal Crompton, and published in 1922. The book was the first in the series of William Brown books which was the basis for numerous television series, films and radio adaptations...
books for boys. She was said to have drawn part of her inspiration for the character of William from him.
During World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
Lamburn served in Rhodesia
Rhodesia
Rhodesia , officially the Republic of Rhodesia from 1970, was an unrecognised state located in southern Africa that existed between 1965 and 1979 following its Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965...
in the British South Africa Police
British South Africa Police
The British South Africa Police was the police force of the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes which became the national police force of Southern Rhodesia and its successor after 1965, Rhodesia...
. Afterwards he joined a shipping firm in China, where he travelled widely. Returning to England in the 1930s he took to writing fiction, mainly under the pseudonym "John Lambourne". He probably is best known for his fantasy The Kingdom That Was.
In World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
he served in the RAF
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
. Afterwards, under the name "John Crompton", he wrote mainly nonfiction on natural history
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
themes. Beyond his published works little is known about Lamburn’s life and works, because most of his notes were destroyed in an act of arson.
Life and Work
John Battersby Crompton Lamburn (June 1893 — April 3, 1972) was a BritishUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
writer, the younger brother of the more popular author Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton Lamburn was a British writer, most famous for her Just William humorous short stories and books.-Life:...
. She was the author of many novels, but best known for her hugely popular "William"
Just William
Just William is the first book of children's short stories about the young school boy William Brown, written by Richmal Crompton, and published in 1922. The book was the first in the series of William Brown books which was the basis for numerous television series, films and radio adaptations...
books for boys.
He wrote fiction mainly under the pseudonym "John Lambourne", or "John B. C. Lambourne", and wrote popular books on natural history under the name "John Crompton". He probably is best known for his fantasy The Kingdom That Was (1931).
As Trooper 1757 Lamburn, J. B. C. of the British South Africa Police
British South Africa Police
The British South Africa Police was the police force of the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes which became the national police force of Southern Rhodesia and its successor after 1965, Rhodesia...
, he served from September 19, 1913 to November 30, 1919, which spans WWI. In both his fiction and non-fiction he drew on his police experiences, but according to the official BSAP site nothing is known of his service. (This is no evidence for anything worse than that he never achieved any special prominence in the service, as little is known of the service of most of the troopers of those days.) On leaving the Force he moved to the Far East and travelled widely in China. Returning to England in the 1930s he took to writing, by now drawing on his experience of travel in East Asia as well.
Little is widely known about Lamburn’s life and works, but a few details can be gleaned or inferred from various sources.
According partly to Lamburn’s own account of himself, on one of his book covers, he was educated at Bury Grammar School and Manchester University. His father was the Rev Edward John Sewell Lamburn, and apparently intended his son to follow in his own footsteps and go into the Anglican
Anglican Communion
The Anglican Communion is an international association of national and regional Anglican churches in full communion with the Church of England and specifically with its principal primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury...
Church, but instead, in 1913 at the age of twenty, young Lamburn joined the Rhodesian Mounted Police of the British South Africa Police
British South Africa Police
The British South Africa Police was the police force of the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes which became the national police force of Southern Rhodesia and its successor after 1965, Rhodesia...
or BSAP, as a trooper. Presumably this was to the considerable consternation of his parents, and his age at the time suggests that he did not complete a degree course at Manchester.
On the other hand, the second of his two elder sisters was Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton Lamburn was a British writer, most famous for her Just William humorous short stories and books.-Life:...
Lamburn, a novelist and the author of the hugely popular "William" stories, and she was said to have derived part of her inspiration for her leading character, William Brown — a rough diamond — from her young brother. This all suggests that Lamburn might well have been very unpromising ecclesiastical material, and deeply unenthusiastic about his studies. Certainly some of his autobiographical reminiscences on the vigour and variety of his life in Southern Africa and elsewhere, suggest that as a very plausible inference; see for example some passages in his book "The Hunting Wasp", especially chapter 4(III: Locust and Cockroach Hunters) and chapter 6 The Fly Hunters.
He described his fellow-troopers as being about as hard-bitten a crew as it would be possible to find anywhere. He stayed with the BSAP throughout World War I. His duties included patrolling large areas of undeveloped country, and taking charge of isolated up-country out-stations. He found it to be a glorious life in country as unspoilt as any that Selous
Frederick Selous
Frederick Courteney Selous DSO was a British explorer, officer, hunter, and conservationist, famous for his exploits in south and east of Africa. His real-life adventures inspired Sir H. Rider Haggard to create the fictional Allan Quatermain character. Selous was also a good friend of Theodore...
hunted. It was full of big game – in his own words: “...country we shall see no more.”
In 1919 he joined a shipping firm and went to China. For 13 years he operated from Harbin at the north of Manchuria down to Hong Kong in the south. His travels took him to the remotest regions of China. It is deeply regrettable that his African and Chinese notes were effectively all destroyed in a deed of arson He generally spent his leave on his own in shooting trips in Portuguese East Africa (present-day Mozambique
Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...
). In 1932 he resigned from the firm and “came home” (which among the colonial English of the day, meant “going to Britain” — usually England — whether they had ever seen British shores or not). There he married and settled first in Devon, then in Cornwall. Reading between the lines the rats on the Devon property might well have played a role in persuading him to move to Cornwall.
The study of insects had always been a hobby of his, both in Africa and China. In retirement in England he settled down more earnestly to the pursuit of informal entomology, though, as he observed, with not half so rich a field of subjects as on his travels.
On settling down, he wrote novels, though that was no new departure for him; he had already published “The White Kaffir”, “Trooper Fault”, and his most celebrated novel: “The Kingdom that Was”. Significantly, “Strong Waters” and “The Second Leopard” also appeared in 1932, so obviously his apparently idle time in preceding years actually had been anything but idle. It is worth speculating that his productivity in writing might have encouraged his retirement and “going home”. After settling down he went in for “fairly intensive bee-keeping” as he related in “The Hive”, one World War later.
That his absence from the trenches of WWI was not attributable to lack of patriotic feeling is apparent from the fact that in 1940, at the age of about 47, he joined the Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
. One wonders what string-pulling might have been necessary to accomplish that at such an advanced age, but of course at that time Britain was desperate for fighting manpower. In due course he found himself in Iceland as Flight Lieutenant
Flight Lieutenant
Flight lieutenant is a junior commissioned rank in the Royal Air Force and the air forces of many Commonwealth countries. It ranks above flying officer and immediately below squadron leader. The name of the rank is the complete phrase; it is never shortened to "lieutenant"...
in Flying Control. In September 1943 he was invalided out with a peptic ulcer
Peptic ulcer
A peptic ulcer, also known as PUD or peptic ulcer disease, is the most common ulcer of an area of the gastrointestinal tract that is usually acidic and thus extremely painful. It is defined as mucosal erosions equal to or greater than 0.5 cm...
, a condition for which no decisive treatment was to be developed for another forty years or so. As he put it, he was given leave by the Air Force Council
Air Force Board
The Air Force Board of the Defence Council is responsible for the management of the Royal Air Force.Prior to the creation of the current UK Ministry of Defence in 1964, the administration of the RAF and its personnel was undertaken by the Air Force Council, part of the Air Ministry...
to retain his rank — and unfortunately the ulcer he had contracted as well.
List of published works
The following titles appear in the British Library Internet catalogue:Writing as: LAMBOURNE, John B. C.
- The White Kaffir 1927
- The Kingdom that Was 1931,1939
- Trooper Fault 1931
- Strong Waters 1932
- The Second Leopard 1932
- The Unmeasured Place 1933
- Inky Wooing 1935
- Squeeze: A tale of China 1935
- Trooper in Charge 1939
Writing as: CROMPTON, John
- The Hive (Illus A E Bestall) 1947
- The Hunting Wasp 1948
- The Spider (Life of the Spider) 1950,1955
- Ways of the Ant (Illus J Yunge-Bateman) 1954
- The Living Sea (Illus Denys Ovenden) 1957
- The Snake 1963
Fictional Writings
Apart from the texts themselves, some idea of the character of his novels, and the way in which he drew on his actual experiences, can be gained from occasional reviews. A particularly interesting example, because it comes from an ex-BSAP officer with personal knowledge of the circumstances and some of the characters drawn from, appears in the magazine “Transvaal Outpost”. At the time of writing this article, the magazine is available in PDF form at the Transvaal branch of the BSAP.In his review of ‘Trooper Fault’, Sloman remarks that most of the characters in the book are fictitious, but that they include some real-life names such as Jimmy Blatherwick and Capell, though Sloman states that the latter never started as an ordinary recruit. Trooper Fault himself has the regimental number 1757, which according to the nominal roll was in fact the number of Trooper John Battersby Crompton Lamburn himself. Of Richmal Crompton’s “William” stories, Sloman remarks: “Fortunately for J.B.C.Lamburn these stories were published after his BSAP career had ended, otherwise he could have been ragged rotten!”
Whether Lamburn's vein of invention had dried out, or whether his fiction had failed on the market, or whether he simply had become too engrossed in his natural history studies and writings, we cannot say, but once he began to write on natural history after the war, he apparently published no more fiction.
Non-fictional Writings
In the “Trooper Fault” review, Sloman said that at that time he had tracked down some 14 titles of Lamburn’s on natural history subjects, under various names: Lamburn, Lambourne, Crompton. Those were more than could be located for this article.In writing on scientific matters Lamburn certainly wrote mainly under the name “John Crompton”. As John Crompton he made no claim to scientific expertise, but wrote explicitly as a “layman writing for laymen”. Accordingly the books include occasional slip-ups such as “coastal” (instead of “costal”) venule, though of course some of those might well be attributed to printers’ devils. Also, many of his views on theoretical matters such as evolution and genetics were naïve even for his day. Consider for example in chapter 1 of "The Hunting Wasp"; in response to some of Fabre's less apposite criticisms of Darwinian theory, Lamburn has no better response than: "Fabre, of course, takes the short-sighted view. He has no conception of Time with a capital T..." This was true as far as it went, but it was not adequate in the context of Fabre's misunderstandings. However, it would be inappropriate to criticise those works on such bases. He wrote pleasantly, literately, and intelligently, often quite thoughtfully, on a wide range of biological subjects, and did so at a level accessible to a wider and younger public than most popular scientific writing.
Most of Lamburn's source material was gleaned from popular and semi-popular material, such as the writings of Jean Henri Fabre
Jean Henri Fabre
Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre was a French entomologist and author.-Life:Fabre was born in Saint-Léons in Aveyron, France....
, the Peckham
Peckham
Peckham is a district in south London, England, located in the London Borough of Southwark. It is situated south-east of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London...
s, O.H. Latter, and the like, and was properly, if informally, credited. He did not stint his expression of his opinions on such sources, though he was neither pretentious nor destructive in his criticism. He was full of praise for Fabre and the Peckhams, whose endless patience and minute gifts of observation have made them outstanding authorities in the field of entomology to this day. Lamburn does not disguise his admiration for these extraordinarily meticulous, seminal entomologists. He notes in 'The Spider': "Fabre ... was disliked by his colleagues. At ease with young people, he was tongue-tied with men, and his timid manners did not endear him to them. But the dislike went further. He wrote about science in a way that ordinary people could understand. This was considered to cheapen the profession. He was a born teacher too, and and pupils almost fought to attend his classes. Naturally the other masters did not like it, and were ready to take action at the first opportunity."
In spite of his admiration for the greats, Lamburn had sufficient strength of character to maintain his own views. For example, he had little patience with Fabre's rejection of some of the assertions of classical Darwinism, which attributed all evolutionary change to gradual increments due entirely to random mutations. Fabre ridiculed the idea that this mechanism could explain, e.g., the unbelievable precision of the hunting wasp's injection of precise quantities of venom into the hidden nerve centres of her victims. "In daring to question the conclusions of Fabre I am, I know, going out of my class. But Fabre the theorist is not Fabre the naturalist ... His patience and perseverance ... have brought a rich harvest of knowledge to the world, but that does not mean that we must agree with him when he branches out in other directions." Similarly in the same book he quite reasonably criticises some of Fabre's cruder experiments on instinctive behaviour, and their naive interpretation. Lamburn outspokenly rejected Fabre's arguments that the behaviour of such creatures as hunting-wasps, that operated by injecting venom precisely into particular nerve-centres, could not have arisen by natural selection. Fabre's views of Darwinism made little impression at the height of his fame. In the twentieth Century, such refinements to Classical Darwinism as the theory of Puntuated Equilibria made a serious effort to address the problem of the mechanism of evolution of complex structures and behaviour patterns, which it seems impossible to have arisen in a half-formed state: until they are perfected, they ought, by the hypothesis itself, to have been eliminated through natural selection. It is important in this connection however, not to read any malice into the relationship between Darwin and Fabre as Lamburn dealt with the subject. Fabre wrote: "...though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news reached me: Darwin was dead..." No one involved in the matter, not Darwin, not Fabre, and certainly not Lamburn in his day, suggested that anything more than a difference of opinion between great spirits was involved.
The alert professional also can glean a lot of useful information from anecdotes derived from Lamburn’s personal experiences and those of his correspondents, scientific and non-scientific. He was as willing to quote and credit a country gamekeeper, as the famous myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler
William Morton Wheeler
William Morton Wheeler, Ph.D. was an American entomologist, myrmecologist and Harvard professor.-Early life:...
.
His books certainly have inspired a fair number of young biologists and it is of some interest to note that after many years out of print some are again appearing in Amazon and similar lists. Sloman referred to a (favourable) review of “The Spider” and “The Snake” in the New York Times by Bonnie Bilyeu Gordon In her review, Gordon appositely remarked: "...Crompton blends great enthusiasm with proper fairness. His voice is direct and chatty and sometimes a bit curmudgeonly. He is also often witty. Take this, for example, written on the family of non-web-weaving spiders that includes the tarantula: The web-weaver, having patented a clever device, can now sit back and collect the dividends; the wolf spider, unable to think out anything in the way of a snare, has to pay the penalty by leading a hard, strenuous, and dangerous life..."
Sundry details
During his time in Iceland Lamburn, the putative original for “William” of the Richmal Crompton books, came into contact with Air Commander Cecil George WigglesworthCecil Wigglesworth
Cecil George Wigglesworth was an English RAF officer and cricketer. A right-handed batsman, he played a first-class match for the Royal Air Force against the Royal Navy in August 1927. In 1930, he played for the Straits Settlements against the Federated Malay States in Kuala Lumpur.In the RAF he...
, speculated to be the original for “Biggles” of the stories by W. E. Johns
W. E. Johns
William Earl Johns was an English pilot and writer of adventure stories, usually written under the name Captain W. E. Johns. He is best remembered as the creator of the ace pilot and adventurer Biggles.-Early life:...
. Apparently Johns had known Wigglesworth in WWI.
Sloman mentioned that David John Crompton Lamburn (presumably a son) attested in the BSAP on 5 May 1952 as Constable 4917 and was discharged on 4 May 1955. He added that members serving in Bulawayo in the 1950s recalled him but, again, all attempts failed to locate him at the time of Sloman’s writing.
In his book "The Hunting Wasp" Lamburn refers to "a child two years old" during the 1930s. This is consistent with a son in the BSAP in the 1950s, but no more information on a son was available at the time of writing this article. However, elsewhere he refers to a daughter of "nearly five" (no date given).