African Naturalist: The Life and Times of Rodney Carrington Wood 1889-1962

African Naturalist: the Life and Times of Rodney Carrington Wood 1889-1962, by David Happold. Brighton: Book Guild Publishing, 2011. xx + 290 pp. ISBN 9781846245558. £17.95. The British Empire offered extraordinary opportunities for individuals to follow an almost nomadic existence. Some, like Rodney Wood, flitted from job to job, never settling anywhere for long, while pursuing a succession of passions - hunting, collecting, recording, studying nature, supplying museums, yet all as an amateur, in the sense of never holding any professional position relating to these activities. Wood's life spanned the high point of the British Empire in Africa and ended just before the wave of decolonisations in the Central and Eastern areas of the continent. It seemed to have a fairly conventional start for a member of the London commercial elite: a prep school in Perthshire, Scotland, education at Harrow, training for entry into his father's business as a vintner. But Wood was one of those who broke loose. None of the rest of his life was in any way conventional. In 1909, barely twenty years old, Wood headed for Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to work on a farm. Soon he was in Nyasaland (Malawi), where he was involved in cotton planting and then tea. He lived in places that were deeply embedded in the history of the country, like Chiromo and Cape Maclear, but his mind was always on other things than the economic necessities of planting. He was a hunter and made collections of trophies, some of which were recorded as of record dimensions, but he soon developed such a respect for nature that he became a reformed hunter and devoted himself to natural history collecting in a variety of different fields. He collected small mammals, bugs and butterflies, and also birds, sending many specimens to the Natural History Museum in London, where he soon had professional contacts. Although he was largely self-trained, he seems to have been meticulous in his taxidermy and in his recording and it is this which gives him such value for subsequent biologists. A number of his specimens were unknown to science and thus became 'types' while several had his name attached to them. But his life became more varied. He spent some time in Canada working as a senior scout in the scouting movement there. He discovered the joys of the Seychelles and bought land there. He became an adviser to other collectors and, in particular, travelled with the retired Admiral Lynes on his natural history collecting expeditions in East and Central Africa in the 1930s. He divided his time between Malawi and the Seychelles and, as the collecting nomad that he was, he moved on to conchology, coElecting certain specialist forms of shells. His collections became so considerable that some were sold and turn up in a number of different museums in the United States. …

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