Richard Meinertzhagen

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Richard Meinertzhagen : biography

3 March 1878 – 17 June 1967

As a child his passion for birdwatching began; he was encouraged by a family friend, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who, like another family friend, Charles Darwin, was an ardent empiricist. Spencer would take young Richard on walks, urging him to study the natural world: "Observe, record, explain!"

Character

Early biographers largely lionized him, until after his fraud was documented, but T. E. Lawrence, a sometime colleague in 1919 and again 1921, described him more ambiguously and with due attention to his violence:

While in India he killed one of his personal assistants in a fit of rage and had the local police officer cover it up as a death due to plague.http://web.archive.org/web/20030301024533/http://www.africa2000.com/IMPACT/drought0611.html Salim Ali notes Meinertzhagen’s special hatred for Mahatma Gandhi and his refusal to believe that Indians could govern themselves.Ali, The Fall of a Sparrow, p. 248-249 Gavin Maxwell wrote about how his parents would scare him and other children to behave themselves when Meinertzhagen visited with "… remember … he has killed people with his bare hands…"Ali, p. 162

Meinertzhagen’s second wife, the ornithologist Anne Constance Jackson, died in 1928 at age 40 in a remote Scottish village in an incident that was ruled a shooting accident. The official finding was that she accidentally shot herself in the head with a revolver during target practice alone with Richard. There is speculation that the shooting was not an accident and that Meinertzhagen shot her out of fear that she would expose him and his fraudulent activities.Garfield, p. 172

After Anne’s death his companion was Theresa "Tess" Clay, thirty-three years his junior.Theresa Clay graduated from St. Paul’s Girls’ School, London, and was awarded a doctorate in 1955 from the University of Edinburgh Meinertzhagen lived at No. 17 and Theresa at No. 18 Kensington Park Gardens, Notting Hill, London. The buildings were originally constructed with an internal passage connecting the foyers of the two houses.Garfield, p. 164; Theresa inherited the property from her parents, Meinertzhagen’s first cousin Rachel Hobhouse Clay and Sir Felix Clay She was his housekeeper, nanny to his children, secretary, "confidante" and later scientific partner who studied and eventually documented the vast collections of bird lice that Meinertzhagen had gathered. He introduced her as his housekeeper or cousin or sometimes, inaccurately, as his niece. When they traveled they took sometimes separate rooms.Garfield, p. 193Salim Ali in his autobiography notes Theresa as Meinertzhagen’s niece

Meinertzhagen himself traced the "evil" side of his personality to a period during his childhood when he was subjected to severe physical abuse at the hands of a sadistic schoolmaster when he was at Fonthill boarding school in Sussex. He was apparently also traumatized by the indifference of his mother to his plight:

Zoology

"From boyhood on [Meinertzhagen] had been in tune with nature; he took photographs, made drawings and provided armchair tourists with keen descriptions of rain forests and snowy mountains … and discovered new (previously unrecorded) species of bats, birds, and mallophaga (bird lice)."Garfield, p. 161 He became a chairman of the British Ornithologists’ Club and a recipient of a Godman-Salvin Medal; the British Museum (Natural History) named a room after him.Garfield, p. 3

Meinertzhagen "first achieved a sliver of international fame when he discovered, killed, stuffed, and shipped back to London the first known to Europeans Giant African Forest Hog, soon dubbed Hylochoerus meinertzhageni, and attributed to Richard Meinertzhagen." At that time, while on active duty in 1903, he was "fearlessly exploring and mapping areas no European had seen before." He later also discovered the Afghan Snowfinch or Montifringilla theresae, and the Moroccan Riparia rupestris theresae and named them, and ten others, after Theresa Clay.Garfield, p. 312