The account below is abridged and extended from Biographies for Birdwatchers, The Lives of Those Commemorated in Western Palearctic Bird Names by Barbara and Richard Mearns.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
William Blanford was an energetic multi-talented scientist, having been elected an FRS even before he joined the BOU in 1873, and also served on the councils of the Royal Society, Geological Society, Geographical Society and Zoological Society. He was born near Fleet Street in London on 7 October 1832, next door to his father’s factory. Educated at private schools in Brighton and Paris he spent two years at Civitavecchia in Italy, working in a business run by a friend of his father. He returned home in 1851 to work for the family firm, but decided to follow his younger brother, Henry Francis, to the Royal School of Mines. William had a brief spell in the mining school in Frieberg before both brothers joined the Geological Survey of India, arriving at Calcutta towards the end of 1855. He travelled over much of India and parts of Burma in pursuit of his geological studies, while continually investigating the local mammals, birds and other vertebrates and always maintaining a fondness for terrestrial gastropods.
He took part in one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the British Empire. For the Abyssinian Expedition of 1867–68, Britain mustered overwhelming forces to liberate a small group of European hostages who were being held in the Ethiopian Highlands by the Emperor Tewodros II (Theodore II). Naturalists saw the chance to collect in Ethiopia under the protection of the invading forces as too good an opportunity to miss. Blanford, who was then working on the Geological Survey in India, landed at Zula at the end of December 1867, making a few local forays before heading up to Sanafe (which he referred to as Sanafé). ‘The surrounding country around appeared perfectly safe, and the people thoroughly friendly, so far as I could see.’ and recorded that ‘…. only two larks occurred, both apparently undescribed species, a Calendrella [sic] and an Alauda.’
By the time he left Africa, he had collected 3,500 specimens of invertebrates, notably molluscs, scorpions and centipedes, representing about 500 species. Blanford’s first major book, Observations on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia, made during the progress of the British Expedition to that Country in 1867-68 (1870), was divided into three parts: 139 pages of personal narrative, 60 pages on geology, and 270 pages on zoology. He had amassed about 1,700 vertebrate specimens representing about 350 species and wrote short accounts of 37 mammals, 293 birds, 22 reptiles, and 5 amphibians. Most of his specimens went to the India Museum at Calcutta, but a second set of 476 birds were presented to the BMNH. Although he named five birds and a mammal in a short paper in 1869, only his Ethiopian Swallow Hirundo aethiopica and Yellow-crowned Canary Serinus flavivertex have stood the test of time as full species. However, one of the two ‘apparently undescribed’ larks he had collected was subsequently named Calandrella blanfordi by Shelley in 1902.
In 1870 Blanford went to Sikkim with Captain Henry J. Elwes, on the first scientific foray into that area since Joseph Hooker’s some 22 years previously. Although undertaken during the rainy season, the trip produced an assortment of birds and molluscs for Blanford, and birds, butterflies and ferns for Elwes. After Sikkim, Blanford applied to join the Persian Boundary Commission. He travelled for seven months with a small team, from Gwadar (on the coast of Pakistan) through Jalk, Bampur and Kerman to Shiraz and then to Isfahan and Tehran, where he joined the main survey party. After a brief foray into the Elburz Mountains, Blanford continued alone, returning to London via Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin. Weakened by his exertions, he spent two years in England working on his geological and zoological notes for the second volume of Eastern Persia, an Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870-72 (1876). It was during this time, in 1873, that he joined the British Ornithologist’s Union,
Back in India in 1874, Blanford worked in the desert portions of Sind for three seasons, spending much of 1877 and 1879 completing his geological report. In 1878 and 1879 he also wrote the sections on geology, mammals, reptiles and amphibians in the Scientific Results of the Second Yarkand Mission, based upon the collections and notes of the late F. Stoliczka. He took leave in England for two years, delaying his return so that he could attend the Geological Congress at Bologna in 1881 as a representative of the Indian Government. After more survey work in the Punjab, he retired from the Geological Survey of India after 27 years’ service and lived thereafter in England. In 1883, now over fifty years old, he married Ida Gertrude Bellhouse with whom he had two sons and a daughter (one son joined the Indian Forest Service, the other became a mining engineer).
He attended the founding meeting of the BOC on 5th October 1892, although that was his only Club attendance in its inaugural year. He next attended on 15 Nov 1893 to speak on the proper names of Indian eagles and briefly on Circus spilonotus, and then again on 16 May 1894 to talk about Indian owls. In 1895, he sent a note on the Sarus cranes, to be read at the meeting. These items were subsequently published as abstracts in the Bulletin of the BOC and some in full in Ibis.
Blanford never stopped working, nor did he lose his love of Indian wildlife. He took on the editorship of The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma (1888–1905), a massive undertaking that ran to 17 volumes. He contributed the volume on mammals and the third and fourth volumes on birds. Blanford was working on a volume on land molluscs until a few days before he died, on 23 June 1905, aged 72. It was completed by Lieutenant Colonel H.H. Godwin-Austen. Having long ago made several donations of birds and mammals from Abyssinia, India, Baluchistan and Persia to the BMNH, in 1898 Blandford gifted 1,344 birds from India and Burma – described by Sharpe as ‘an invaluable present, supplementing the great Hume collection.’
Blanford is credited with more than 170 publications, the majority concerning geology, one notable example being his co-authorship of A Manual of the Geology of India (1879).
Sources
Barbara and Richard Mearns. 2022. Biographies for Birdwatchers, The Lives of Those Commemorated in Western Palearctic Bird Names. Privately published. Two softback A4 vols with over 250 portraits (396pp & 266pp). www.mearnsbooks.com.
Anon. 1905. Obituary William Thomas Blanford C.I.E, LL.D FRS., Ibis vol 5 (4). Pp 643-7. Includes a selective list of Blanford’s publications.
Anon. 1905. Obituary: William Thomas Blanford, C. I. E., LL. D., F. R. S. The Geographical Journal. 26 (2): 223–225.
Anon 1907. Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased. William Thomas Blanford. Proc. Roy. Soc. London. Series B. 79 . pp 27–30.
