Lady Smith Woodward's memories: introduction

When Sir Arthur Smith Woodward began to lose his sight around 1940, his wife Maud persuaded him to record his memoirs. When he died in 1944, they were incomplete and Lady Smith Woodward added her own reminiscences to them with a view to having the whole published. It was not, and the manuscript was donated to the Museum by their daughter Margaret in 1966. These ‘Memories’ are now being made available online for the first time. They provide an invaluable insight into the lives of this eminent scientist and his wife, his constant companion through 50 years of marriage. Supplementary material: Lady Smith Woodward’s original typed manuscript has been transcribed, with footnotes and a few illustrations added. It is available at: http:// www.geolsoc.org. uk/SUP18867 In the last years of his life, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward gradually lost his sight. It was devastating not least because it removed from him any hope of continuing his scientific work. His wife Maud recognized the importance of keeping him occupied, and persuaded him to begin his autobiography. To prompt his childhood memories, he had an invaluable resource. He had kept, all those years, some ‘precocious autobiographies’ as Maud called them, the earliest from 1872 when he was 8 years old. These, and some treasures from his boyhood, such as his Trip from Crewe to part of the coast of North Wales, which he printed on a hand press when he was about 12 years old, and tiny books he made for his sister’s doll’s house, were in an old office desk that he had been given as a boy and which he had kept his whole life. His account of his childhood draws a precisely detailed picture of his background and education, with insights into late Victorian life in an industrial town. These early memories are quite revealing of himself, although it is unlikely that was his intention. In his descriptions of himself as a boy, you can clearly see the man who was to emerge. After Smith Woodward’s death in 1944, Maud began her own memoirs. They are in part her childhood reminiscences, but mostly they are a valuable record of the countless countries, museums and palaeontological digs that occupied so much of their married life. She wrote in old exercise books and on loose sheets of paper, now preserved in the Natural History Museum’s Library. In 1950 she sent about 50 pages to the then Keeper of Geology, Wilfred Edwards, who not only read it all, but made constructive and pertinent suggestions as to how she might improve it. ‘I must say’, he wrote to her on 24 March 1950, ‘that I find such records extraordinarily interesting and they appeal to me very much’. He gave her a reading list of ‘some of the best contemporary reminiscence writers’, such as Alison Uttley’s A Country Hoard, Flora Thomson’s ‘masterpiece’ Lark Rise to Candleford and Thomas Burke’s Son of London. He encouraged her to draw her readers in more (today, authors are told to ‘show, don’t tell’), to make them feel they were experiencing what she was recounting. ‘Your crocodile skin’, he told her, ‘when put up on the wall [you say] was “several feet long”. I don’t believe it. It was immensely long. You are betraying your own childhood by telling us that it was merely “several” feet long’. Instead of just describing an old horse bus, he suggested that she write what it was like to travel in one, for example ‘as we shuffled our feet in the straw on the floor of the bus’. What she then wrote was, ‘The straw also scratched and tickled little bare legs’ (Lady Smith Woodward’s Memories, Supplementary material, p. 64, Part II). Edwards then told her, and maybe his enthusiasm was a little overdone, ‘What you have to do is From: Johanson, Z., Barrett, P. M., Richter, M. & Smith, M. (eds) 2016. Arthur Smith Woodward: His Life and Influence on Modern Vertebrate Palaeontology. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 430, 113–114. First published online October 20, 2015, http://doi.org/10.1144/SP430.11 # 2016 The Author(s). Published by The Geological Society of London. All rights reserved. For permissions: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/permissions. Publishing disclaimer: www.geolsoc.org.uk/pub_ethics write out incidents twenty or thirty times in slightly different words and then see how it sounds best’, which might easily have put her off writing anything more at all. Interestingly, he seems to have been more intrigued by Maud’s story than by her husband’s. ‘I am sorry to have to confess that I have not yet finished Sir Arthur’s autobiography’, he told her. He thought it ‘possibly’ a good idea to publish both together, but ‘I would however allow his rather dry straightforward style to stand as he left it in order to make an artistic contrast with the “cheeky” young girl’ (Edwards 1950). The manuscript has been available to those who wish to consult it, but only in the Library of the Natural History Museum. This is the first time that it has been made available to a wider audience, but because of its length, this has to be online. We have not rewritten or edited it, apart from the very occasional spelling error and the use of italics for organism names and for journal and book titles. What we have done is to provide a few annotations and illustrations that, we hope, you will find useful. We should especially like to thank Natalina Risi for her patient work in typing the manuscript. For reviews we thank Aileen Bevan and an anonymous reviewer whose comments and suggestions have been very helpful. We should also like to thank the Trustees of the Natural History Museum for permission to make this manuscript more widely available, Smith Woodward’s granddaughter Ruth Niblett for her permission also, and of course, the Museum’s librarians in whose care the manuscript is. Thanks also to Mike Rumsey of the NHM who provided information on the black diamonds, Ruth Niblett for allowing family heirlooms to be photographed and Teresa Risi for some of these photographs. Early investigations into Smith Woodward’s life in Macclesfield by one of us (M. S.) were greatly helped by Joan Irving of the Cheshire Family History Society, Alan Hayward of the Macclesfield Historical Society and Ron Thorn, Honorary Librarian at Macclesfield Museums.