ARTHUR THOMAS MASTERMAN (1869-1941) AND THE FISH IN THE SEA

Arthur Masterman was another of those remarkable Masterman brothers of whom I have written here, Kent cousins of my grandfather. There were six of them altogether, and one sister, Daisy, who gets badly overshadowed by the achievements of the boys. She isn’t included the only family photo I have, and when in the manner of the times the children were nicknamed with Latin numbers, it’s as if she didn’t count at all – Harry, the sixth child, was called Quintus (meaning “fifth”), and Walter, the seventh and youngest, was known as Sextus, the “sixth”.

The Masterman boys, without their sister: back L-R Harry, Charlie and Walter; front L-R John, Ernest and Arthur

I hope to write more fully about Daisy (real name Margaret) in the future. For now, my subject is Arthur. Arthur was a scientist, a zoologist who immersed himself for almost his entire career in the coastal waters of the British Isles – almost literally, because his greatest enthusiasm was reserved for fish.

After studying zoology at Cambridge he was appointed Assistant Professor of Natural History at St Andrews University in 1893. His researches there were devoted to the life cycles of various North Sea fish, in collaboration with his professor William Carmichael McIntosh. In 1896 McIntosh became director of the new Gatty Marine Laboratory in the town. It is reasonable to assume that both men were involved in setting up the Gatty, which emerged from the government-funded St Andress Fisheries Laboratory. A year later the two men jointly published The Life-Histories of the British Marine Food-Fishes, a pioneering work in its contribution to understanding and managing fish stocks and fishing quotas.

William Carmichael McIntosh (1838-1931)
Professor of Natural History at St Andrews University

In 1900 he moved to Edinburgh to teach biology and zoology. Within a year he had written an Elementary Text-Book of Zoology to accompany his lectures. By coincidence I am writing this on 1^st May 2015, while reading his Zoology preface dated 1^st May 1901. Publishing his own course material no doubt boosted the income of a struggling extra-mural lecturer in the capital city. But in 1903 he moved back to England to take up a post with the newly formed Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries as Superintendent Inspector Director of Fisheries Investigation.

The dead hand of government now overshadowed his working life and he spent much of the rest of it bogged down in administrative duties, with little or no time for the research which had driven him until his ministry appointment. His civil servant superiors there were deeply suspicious of the appliance of science to their millennia-old activities. There was rivalry and jealousy between different local fishery committees around Britain, and between competing scientific bodies, for the limited government funding. Masterman’s job was oversee them all with a critical scientific eye; but his notes and comments carried little weight in the stormy political seas in which he was now launched.

Herbert Asquith (1852-1928) 

Chancellor of the Exchequer 1905-1908, 

before becoming Prime Minister on the death of his predecessor 

Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1908

In 1907 and 1908 Masterman acted as Secretary to a Committee appointed by Herbert Asquith (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) to report on “present scientific activities  in fisheries and to make recommendations as to the future of such work.” It was a sprawling report, by a committee of which (in typical parliamentary fashion) only two out of the committee’s ten members had any knowledge of such matters and of the technical language involved. To Masterman fell the task of making the presented evidence comprehensible to the unscientific members, and his early teaching experience must have proved invaluable. It was all to no avail however: the resulting report (which he edited) was largely futile because of regional bickering about its findings.

Masterman did manage to find some time for research in the midst of all this and published three reports on flat-fish, which had been one of his particular enthusiasms back in St Andrews. He retired in 1920, but retained [says his obituary] his interest in all fishery questions up to his death – but he kept well out of the politics.

His was not a very visible life, unlike his brother Charlie. Charlie was a prominent Liberal politician who served under Lloyd George (Asquith’s successor as both Chancellor and Prime Minister). Perhaps Arthur should have stayed in academia; perhaps he thought a job at the Ministry of Fisheries would take him closer to his passion. But by his research he played his part in increasing the sum of human knowledge. And for that, we must all thank him.

Dissection of a skate, 

from Elementary Text-Book of Zoology (2^nd Edition)

by Arthur Thomas Masterman

CHARLES FREDERICK GURNEY MASTERMAN (1873-1927) AND THE SPECIAL CONSTABLES

Charles Masterman, a cousin of my grandfather, is regarded by many as one of the last great old-school Liberals. But his political potential was frustrated by his inability to find a safe seat. He lost as many parliamentary elections as he won, and his party was eclipsed by the emergence of the new Labour Party before he could shine in office. He died a disappointed man in 1927 at the age of only 56.

From Punch in July 1914, Charles Masterman (right), absent from parliamentary debate, visits in spirit his harshest critic, Conservative MP Lamington Worthington-Evans

He wrote throughout his life. But it was through his friendships with other writers, forged in the years before the First World War, that he had his greatest literary influence. When Britain entered the war in 1914, Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George put Masterman in charge of the newly created War Propaganda Bureau.

Books shape minds. Their very presence by a bedside encourages you to read them. The words within challenge your ideas and form your dreams. If nonconformists like the Gurneys understood this, so too did the propagandists. On 2nd September 1914 Masterman summoned a Who’s Who of British authors to his offices in Wellington House on Buckingham Gate in London. Twenty five literary giants of the day were present at the meeting, among them J.M. Barrie, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, my grandfather’s friend G.K. Chesterton, Cambridge Apostle G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rudyard Kipling sent fulsome apologies and his full support.

What an extraordinary gathering! It took place that September afternoon, and I imagine our authors, all male, arriving one by one as dusk is falling. It’s raining and their capes and overcoats drip as some civil servant removes them from their shoulders before ushering them into a long-tabled meeting room. Full-length portraits of forgotten politicians look down on green leather chairs and the backs of those writerly heads. On the table before them, writerly hands hover over the pens and notebooks of each author’s choice or beside crystal tumblers filled from nearby jugs of water or decanters of brandy and whisky. The heads are wreathed in tobacco smoke as they wrestle with what Conan Doyle might have described as a three-pipe problem: how to counter the newly discovered German propaganda machine.

The approach which they agreed that evening was a subtle one. Rather than pump out propaganda through some patently biased organ of state, Masterman encouraged his authors to write in their own terms about the outbreak of war and about British values. Their output was printed, by secret arrangement, by mainstream publishing houses rather than the government’s own stationery offices. Consequently, none of the output of the War Propaganda Bureau was identified as state propaganda by the British public, but simply as patriotism.

Members of the Junior Debating Club at St Paul’s, London – among them Edward Fordham (tallest, at rear) and G.K. Chesterton (seated, front centre)

Masterman’s authors recruited other authors to the cause. For example, after that first meeting G.K. Chesterton roped in his and my grandfather's old school friend E.W. Fordham. Fordham, like my grandfather, was too old for recruitment into the army, but older men such as he were urged to serve in other capacities, releasing younger men for military service. Fordham (a poet by inclination but, like my grandfather, a lawyer by profession) volunteered to be a Special Constable.

A large force of Specials was recruited during the war years to replace the younger officers who had gone to fight overseas. They were unpaid, and served mainly as a visible reminder of the need for law and order in unstable times. They were also of practical use, chiefly in guarding the nation’s water supply against sabotage by enemy agents. Fordham seems to have been placed on such duty. In 1916 he published Songs of the Specials, describing in his preface the melancholy tedium of “keeping relentless watch on a brick wall.” The first song in the collection, Who?, begins

Who dashes, careless of his skin,

To meet the love-bird of Berlin,

The chuck-and-chance-it Zeppelin?

The Special.

Who watches by the water-works,

Where privily the Teuton lurks,

Besides Bulgarians and Turks?

The Special.

Hugh Riviere’s illustration for E.W. Fordham’s verse Who? In Songs of the Specials

Songs of the Specials was one of millions of books and pamphlets published at arm's length by Masterman's Propaganda Bureau. That first meeting, exactly two hundred years and two months ago tomorrow, launched one of the biggest and most successful propaganda efforts the world has ever seen. Thanks to it, and the Special Constables which it encouraged, the nation's water supply was kept safe from sabotage. Well might Edward Fordham sing!

HARRY MASTERMAN (1875-1900) AND THE SECOND BOER WAR

The family of Kent farmers Willie and Maggie Masterman was a remarkable one. Amongst their offspring, my second cousins, were a medical pioneer, a bishop, a marine zoologist, a member of Lloyd George’s cabinet and a successful pulp fiction author (eventually).

The author was the wonderfully trashy Walter Sydney Masterman, who wrote 27 exuberantly fantastical blends of crime and sci fi between 1925 and his death in 1946. Walter was the youngest of the brood of six boys and one girl (who distinguished herself in academia).  The nearest to him in age, only fifteen months older, was his brother Harry, Henry Wright Masterman, and the two formed a close bond as they grew up.

The Masterman boys in 1899

Back L-R: Harry, Charles, Walter

Front L-R: John Arthur, Ernest

They were day boys together at Tonbridge School and both completed their education at Christ’s College, Cambridge, with sporting disctinction. Walter won the Swimming Points Cup at school in 1893, and a football blue at university; Harry was in both the cricket and the football teams at Weymouth College through which he had passed en route to Cambridge. Both also won a half blue in water polo at Cambridge, where in the 1897-98 season Walter was described as “a good half for defensive work and has played useful games at outside right.” After graduating, both played semi-professional football for their local side Tunbridge Wells FC. Walter played in defence, and Harry was centre half for this game against a London Welsh side on 18^th March 1899.

Tubridge Wells FC vs London Welsh, 18^th March 1899

Harry intended to pursue a career in medicine like his oldest brother Ernest. He had already begun his training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in January 1899, two months before the London Welsh match. But the Second Boer War erupted in October that year and both Harry and Walter signed up for service with the Royal Welsh Regiment. They shipped out to South Africa in December.

Like all wars, the Boer War had at its heart a struggle for control over resources – in this case the gold deposits of the Witwatersrand mines. Britain sought to bring the many states in the region into a federation under British control. But the resident Boer population feared a loss of power if voting rights were granted to the larger population of Britons arriving to exploit the mineral wealth of the land. The war began after the failure of negotiations between Paul Kruger, president of the South African Republic, and British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. 

 Paul Kruger and Joseph Chamberlain

The Boers launched pre-emptive strikes against British garrisons and towns and it wasn’t until the arrival of massive British reinforcements including Walter and Harry that the tide began to turn in Britain’s favour. The relief of the siege of Mafeking in May 1900 was an important boost to national morale.

Both Harry and Walter served as captains, but neither was in the front line. Walter was a railway staff officer at Vryburg, where the British built one of the world’s first concentration camps to house Boer women and children in appalling conditions. Harry was garrison adjutant at Prieska, which had been captured from the Boers in January 1900.

Harry Masterman at Prieska, 1900

Walter was invalided out of the Boer War, I think through illness, returning to London on board the SS Assaye in August 1901. Harry alas remained in southern Africa. In November 1900 he died of malaria and meningitis in Prieska, and is buried there. The death of his nearest and dearest brother must have hit Walter hard, unable as he was to be with Harry in his final illness. More than 8000 miles from Tunbridge Wells, less than 300 miles apart in the theatre of war, but not close enough.

Charles, the third youngest of the Masterman brothers, must also have felt the death of his younger brother keenly; he wrote a short story called With Death as my Friend about it soon afterwards. Charles and Walter took over the running of Horsmonden Boys’ School, a run-down establishment in Kent, for a few years in the first decade of the twentieth century; and Walter continued to play football for Tunbridge Wells until 1906, captaining the side for his last three seasons. But the absence of Harry from the field must have been a constant reminder, and I wonder if Walter’s subsequent career, so extremely chequered, was not in part the result of this early loss.

OLIVE DOREEN LOWRIE (1900-1973) AND THE DEATH OF A SALESMAN

I have written here before about the complex life story of the pulp fiction writer Walter Sydney Masterman (1876-1946, a grandson of my 3x great uncle Thomas Gurney). His path was not straight, and I always had a degree of sympathy with his wife Ollie Lowrie who – I have imagined – must have had to put up with a lot.

I have no real evidence for any long suffering on her part, save the fact that he was more than twice her age when he married her and was serving a three year prison sentence for embezzling the British government at the time of the birth of their only daughter. For the whole of their married life he pursued the precarious existence of an author (tell me about it!), albeit a successful one; and she outlived him by nearly thirty years.

The Flying Beast, 
by Walter Sydney Masterman (1876-1946), not a colonel.

He died in Brighton. She never remarried, remaining on the south coast of England for the rest of her life. Their daughter too remained in the area until her death earlier this century. I spoke to her widower recently, and he always referred to her father as The Colonel. To me that suggests a rather distant relationship with him. I have heard from a nephew of his that he was a difficult man to live with.

But it is entirely possible that Ollie was content. They married in 1920, soon after the Great War whose attrition left eligible men in short supply. He was not a colonel, but he was a captain and from a well-connected family. With a postwar job in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries disposing of the captured German North Sea fishing fleet, he must have seemed quite a catch. Olive’s own family background was far less comfortable and privileged.

Olive Doreen Lowrie was born the eighth of ten children (five girls and five boys) raised by Irish-born Barbara McKenzie. I don’t know what brought Barbara to Northeast England, but a few months after the birth of her first child Barbara married the father, George Arthur Lowrie, in Hartlepool. 

George was a commercial traveller. He’d learned his craft on the road selling hats on behalf of his father, a master hatter in Darlington; and perhaps he’d picked up on other paternal behaviour too – George was himself the second of eight children, and only with George’s birth was his father persuaded to marry his mother.

George went wherever he could sell the most. He was away from home a lot and it seems almost as if every time he did return there was another mouth to feed. From the northeast he moved the family to the more affluent English Midlands and, before the end of the century, to the heavy industry and dense population of South Wales, where he sold brushes and hardware.

Here Olive was born and for a while her mother Barbara was raising not only her own children but the fatherless daughter of George’s unmarried sister Una. George was still travelling, and he was out on the road in 1918 when he died aged only 57, far from home and family, while trying to sell brushes to the good people of West Derby in Liverpool.

I’m not sure exactly what happened next. At least two of Ollie’s older sisters had married and left home by then, and only Barbara’s three youngest children were still under twenty. Without a breadwinner they may have gone to live in Marylebone, London with her eldest son. Certainly it was in Marylebone that Olive and Walter got married on 18^th September 1920. With Ollie still under twenty-one, Barbara had to make a declaration the day before the wedding, confirming that (in the absence of the father) she gave her blessing to this wedding of a minor.

I was told once that Olive sang for the troops, and she was known in the family in later years as Ollie-bird – perhaps that’s how she helped to make ends meet in London after her father’s death, and how she caught the eye of the distinguished older Captain Masterman.