..... The family name was originally Beach, but his father changed it to create a fictional connection with the medieval Barons De la Beche of Aldworth.... In 1800 the family travelled to Jamaica, having inherited a slave plantation. However, his father died there in the following year, and De la Beche and his mother (after being shipwrecked to the north of San Domingo) returned to England.
...... Planning to follow a military career, he entered the Royal Military College at Marlow in 1809, but was sent down two years later in disgrace after encouraging a 'dangerous spirit of Jacobinism' .... [After some years he became] interested in meteorology and geology. [He] travelled .... to Scotland and the north of England in 1816, and joined the Geological Society of London a year later. At Lyme, De la Beche also became acquainted with the Annings, an artisan family who were establishing a business selling fossils, and with the daughter Mary he searched the Lias cliffs for remains of extinct reptiles.
......
After coming of age De la Beche began to receive the income from the Jamaican estate. He married Letitia Whyte in the same year, and they set off on a year-long tour of the continent in 1819. .... The tour, and others which followed, laid the foundations for De la Beche's lifelong admiration for French scientific institutions and ideas, and he later published a volume of translations from the Annales des mines (1829). While in Europe and after returning to Lyme in 1820, he published his findings, especially on alpine geology. In the following year a joint paper with William Daniel Conybeare described some fragmentary fossil remains (the most important found by Mary Anning) as a new kind of marine reptile, the pleisiosaurus, or 'near-lizard'. De la Beche was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1823...
De la Beche, concerned by declining revenue from his inheritance and growing instability in Jamaica, spent a year on his estate in 1823-4. He supported paternalistic reforms of slavery, but opposed abolition. His pamphlet, Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes (1825), idealized the situation and stressed his own good practice, attempting to view the issue simply as one of 'facts'. Privately, however, he recognized that he was likely to lose his property. It also became clear that his marriage was a disaster, as he became suspicious of adultery by his wife while he had been abroad. After an acrimonious public controversy, he obtained a legal separation in 1826. Letitia moved in with her lover, Major-General Henry Wyndham, son of the earl of Egremont, and De la Beche obtained custody of their two daughters. .....
...... Already known as an expert on the geology of Jamaica, he consolidated his position as a leading man of science, writing several books, notably a Manual of Geology (1831) which went through two further English editions..... De la Beche believed in the transforming power of science, both for the character of the individual and the nation. He opposed all forms of aristocratic privilege, and was aligned with the philosophic radicals. He read his friend Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) in proof, participated on the royal commission on the health of towns, and issued several books with the 'useful knowledge' publisher Charles Knight. Fiercely anticlerical and denouncing all forms of religious enthusiasm as 'humbug', he placed his faith in common sense, utility, and science.
A skilled draughtsman, De la Beche was noted for his role in pioneering the visual dimensions of geology. His ability is evident throughout his published works, and is displayed to best effect in the forty plates of his innovative Sections and Views Illustrative of Geological Phenomena (1830). He was also a keen caricaturist, throwing off amusing sketches in letters and in privately distributed prints.
A skilled draughtsman, De la Beche was noted for his role in pioneering the visual dimensions of geology. His ability is evident throughout his published works, and is displayed to best effect in the forty plates of his innovative Sections and Views Illustrative of Geological Phenomena (1830). He was also a keen caricaturist, throwing off amusing sketches in letters and in privately distributed prints.
His celebrated lithograph "Duria antiquior" (1830), sold in aid of Mary Anning, was the first time that the extraordinary discoveries of the new science of geology had been recast into an actual scene of the flora and fauna of a 'lost world'.
......
In the early 1830s the income from Jamaica failed entirely...... With support from influential friends in Lord Grey's whig administration, De la Beche was appointed geologist to the ordnance trigonometrical survey of Great Britain under Colonel Thomas Colby. Further funds were granted in 1835 for a survey of Cornwall, and a tiny Museum of Economic Geology was opened in Craig's Court, Charing Cross. From these small beginnings, De la Beche looked to a transformation of British science. Distrusting private initiatives, and following French models, he wanted geology to become part of the state administrative apparatus.
.....
In 1839 he published an official Report on the Geology of Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset, which summed up his findings and included substantial discussions of mining and economic geology.....
De la Beche aimed to create a detailed national geological map, a census of the strata which would accomplish for geology what Chadwick was attempting for sanitary reform. His efforts thus had an important political association with Benthamite reform programmes, as he pressed for recognition of the utility of geological expertise in projects ranging from assessing the quality of coals used in the imperial navy, to searching for an appropriate stone for rebuilding the houses of parliament. The methods and organizational structure De la Beche had established in the survey were copied around the world, not least as men trained under him took up posts in India and elsewhere in the colonies.
....
De la Beche was an exceptional administrator with good contacts in parliament and Whitehall. He fostered camaraderie and 'jollification' among the young bachelors on his staff, but discouraged them from marrying. From the mid-1840s he became dedicated almost entirely to official work. Many of the men complained that he relied too much on bureaucratic regulations, so that the 'red tape worm' infected everything that went on in the survey. In contrast, the diarist Caroline Fox had described De la Beche in 1836 as 'a regular fun-engine' (C. Fox, Memories of Old Friends, ed. H. N. Pym, 2nd edn., 1882,...), full of stories about military school pranks and alligator-hunting. He had 'a handsome but care-worn face, brown eyes and hair, and gold spectacles' (...). She did not suspect him of being happy.
De la Beche was widely honoured, being elected president of the Geological Society in 1847 and awarded its Wollaston medal in 1855. He was knighted in 1842 and made a companion of the Bath six years later.
His greatest triumph came in 1851 when Prince Albert opened the Museum of Practical Geology on Jermyn Street. This became one of the wonders of imperial London, with a vast array of fossils, rocks, and economically useful building stones. It also housed another of De la Beche's great schemes, a government-funded School of Mines and of Science applied to the Arts, modeled on the Ecole des Mines in Paris...... Although other parts of the institutional empire De la Beche created were dismantled in the twentieth century, the British Geological Survey and the earth galleries at the Natural History Museum bear witness to the legacy of his belief in state support for the earth sciences....
......
In the early 1830s the income from Jamaica failed entirely...... With support from influential friends in Lord Grey's whig administration, De la Beche was appointed geologist to the ordnance trigonometrical survey of Great Britain under Colonel Thomas Colby. Further funds were granted in 1835 for a survey of Cornwall, and a tiny Museum of Economic Geology was opened in Craig's Court, Charing Cross. From these small beginnings, De la Beche looked to a transformation of British science. Distrusting private initiatives, and following French models, he wanted geology to become part of the state administrative apparatus.
.....
In 1839 he published an official Report on the Geology of Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset, which summed up his findings and included substantial discussions of mining and economic geology.....
De la Beche aimed to create a detailed national geological map, a census of the strata which would accomplish for geology what Chadwick was attempting for sanitary reform. His efforts thus had an important political association with Benthamite reform programmes, as he pressed for recognition of the utility of geological expertise in projects ranging from assessing the quality of coals used in the imperial navy, to searching for an appropriate stone for rebuilding the houses of parliament. The methods and organizational structure De la Beche had established in the survey were copied around the world, not least as men trained under him took up posts in India and elsewhere in the colonies.
....
De la Beche was an exceptional administrator with good contacts in parliament and Whitehall. He fostered camaraderie and 'jollification' among the young bachelors on his staff, but discouraged them from marrying. From the mid-1840s he became dedicated almost entirely to official work. Many of the men complained that he relied too much on bureaucratic regulations, so that the 'red tape worm' infected everything that went on in the survey. In contrast, the diarist Caroline Fox had described De la Beche in 1836 as 'a regular fun-engine' (C. Fox, Memories of Old Friends, ed. H. N. Pym, 2nd edn., 1882,...), full of stories about military school pranks and alligator-hunting. He had 'a handsome but care-worn face, brown eyes and hair, and gold spectacles' (...). She did not suspect him of being happy.
De la Beche was widely honoured, being elected president of the Geological Society in 1847 and awarded its Wollaston medal in 1855. He was knighted in 1842 and made a companion of the Bath six years later.
His greatest triumph came in 1851 when Prince Albert opened the Museum of Practical Geology on Jermyn Street. This became one of the wonders of imperial London, with a vast array of fossils, rocks, and economically useful building stones. It also housed another of De la Beche's great schemes, a government-funded School of Mines and of Science applied to the Arts, modeled on the Ecole des Mines in Paris...... Although other parts of the institutional empire De la Beche created were dismantled in the twentieth century, the British Geological Survey and the earth galleries at the Natural History Museum bear witness to the legacy of his belief in state support for the earth sciences....
We end our story of one life devoted to science in the Victorian era with some detail about that witness. Another of the books de la Beche wrote was titled:
Catalogue of Specimens in the Museum of Practical Geology: Illustrative of the Composition and Manufacture of British Pottery and Porcelain, from the Occupation of Britain by the Romans to the Present Time, by Sir Henry De La Beche and Trenham Reeks [1st edition 1855].
Here we find information about British industry profiting from the country's geological resources, specifically, Derby Porcelain. We leave out most of the detail on the pottery but here is enough information to illuminate how geology and British business were brought together through the efforts of Henry de la Beche:
Long before the celebrated porcelain factory was established at Derby, there existed at Cockpit Hill an extensive pottery generally known as " The Derby Pot Works".....
When the Chelsea works [nearby I think] were abandoned in 1784, the moulds and models were transferred to Derby, and it is believed that at least a portion of the plant from Bow was also transported thither. Some of the best workmen and artists from both Chelsea and Bow are well known to have settled at Derby....
At one time the Derby works obtained clay from a lead mine at Brassington, but its use was soon given up. The Cornish kaolins and china stones, which became well known to the potters, especially after their introduction into the Staffordshire potteries about 1777, appear to have been employed in the Derby works towards the end of the last or beginning of the present century, and to have continued in use up to the present time.
And one product of this clay, which we might find now, in the Natural History Museum, is a figure referenced on p. 191 --a " figure of female feeding a cat, painted and gilt."
No comments:
Post a Comment