John Harvard Biles: engineer, professor, egg collector?

I'd like to kick things off with an example of the kind of work I'm doing. I mentioned before that the museum has five egg collections, these are all named after places or people associated with that particular collection. The Minard collection, for example, is associated with the Hamiltons of Minard. The exception to this rule is the collection in cabinet 18, comprising a series of unnervingly open glued-cardboard containers, clearly far younger than their contents, and an interesting selection of eggs and labels. These hadn't been closely examined for some decades, their provenance largely a mystery.



A box from Cabinet 18. Not pictured: my face when the glue started cracking

As part of the background to this project Maggie Reilly, my supervisor in the museum, trawled through various records and uncovered a card revealing that in 1908 the museum had received a collection of bird eggs from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as part of a donation from a Professor Biles. The donation also included animal skulls from Africa and an octopus from Japan. A quick search through the university records revealed only one candidate: Sir John Harvard Biles, John Elder Professor of Naval Engineering from 1891 to 1921.




John Harvard Biles from the National Portrait Gallery

Thankfully a Biles wasn't too difficult to find, we'd have been decidedly less successful I think if his name had been Smith. Sir John was apparently a man much in demand, sitting on various committees and acting as a consultant on ship construction when he wasn't designing them himself. In my brief examination of his writings, he seems to have been a strong critic of those who sought to compromise good engineering practice or safety in the name of convenience or luxury. He was one of the foremost engineering sources consulted by the British enquiry following the sinking of the Titanic and probably had a hand in deciding what recommendations to make (the near-ubiquitous passage in modern texts about how the disaster led to ships carrying more lifeboat space is likely due at least in part to Biles, who called for such less than a week after the sinking). He was aware, and despaired, of the very human behaviour of overlooking risks except in the aftermath of disaster, taking what I would call a very typical engineer's point of view that "acceptable risk" is a contradiction in terms.

But what has this to do with eggs?! Well there's the rub, so far I've found almost nothing to suggest that Biles was a naturalist or egg collector, every source emphasises his engineering credentials and mentions nothing about even being a keen ornithologist. He was fond of sailing though, and is known to have visited Africa, Japan and Sri Lanka (!) as part of his travels. His knighthood in 1922 was formally to invest him as a "Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire" for some form of services rendered to the India Office (I may correct this statement later as more information becomes available). While it's practically certain that the donor J.H. Biles mentioned in the museum records is John Harvard Biles of engineering fame, and he held his position at the university when the donation was made, how he came by the collection and why he donated it remain unknown.



Perhaps the prettiest collection of eggs so far found in the Biles collection

There is one other big question though, which is how do we know that the collection in cabinet 18 and the Biles donation are one and the same? The collection lacks any information besides the labels for the eggs themselves, an example of which is pictured above. The lowest label dates from the 1970's, the middle one is presumed to be contemporaneous with the eggs and the numerical one at the top is the new one I gave them.

There are several specimens in the collection from Sri Lanka (such as the "Ceylonese parakeet"), some of which from species endemic to the island. Additionally, the third language on the original labels, after English and Latin, appears to be Sinhalese. I'm still working on that as the names do not match up well, it's possible that they were poorly recorded at the time, or simply that the language has shifted in the last hundred years or so. Either way, what we now know is that the collection in cabinet 18 contains several species endemic to Sri Lanka and appears at time of writing to be labelled in one of the native languages of that country. The evidence is indirect, but it's enough that we've started referring to the collection in cabinet 18 as "the Biles collection."





I had to clean this one up a bit

There's still more work to be done, we still don't know whether Biles collected the eggs himself or simply bought them, nor do we know what his purpose in doing so was. There's also evidence that some of the eggs, specifically the ones from Europe, may have once belonged to a different collection, as their style of label is markedly different.



The label style suggests a display collection, perhaps?

I haven't yet finished going through this collection. Many of the Eastern species have been renamed several times, often since the last round of identification in the 70's, so ensuring that they are correctly named in the database is a time consuming process. There's also, I'm told, a good twelve metres (!!) of material in the university archives on J.H Biles, and while I'm sure most of that will be relating to his engineering work, I hope to find some material pointing to his hobbies or travels, something to flesh out the scant information on this collection.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll have more on Biles in the coming weeks, but for now I've got to move on.

N.B. Most of the information I obtained on Sir John Biles came from Grace's Guide.