Dorothy Chapman's (note)books

While researching items to feature in the current Naturalists’ Notebooks exhibition, I looked for notebooks that were not only visually attractive, but ones that could also tell a story, and illustrate the various ways in which notebooks were used by naturalists between the 18^th century and today.

What immediately attracted me to this Treasure of the Month was its outward appearance: a colourful cloth is carefully stitched as a cover. It signalled that the book was precious to its owner, who intended to use it and take good care of it. Opening its pages, I was initially disappointed to find that it was a published book, rather than a notebook: the 1924 edition of W. H. Fitch’s Illustrations of the British Flora (MS/6). Yet it was housed amongst our manuscripts, because the owner had used it as such, carefully colouring its black and white illustrations every time she came across the plant in the wild or in gardens, and annotating each image with the date and location of when and where she observed said plant. Remarkably, only eight plants in the book were not given this treatment, a testament to its owner’s diligence as an amateur botanist.

This is one of several such books in our collections, kept within the manuscripts collection, rather than in the library; they are half printed books, half notebooks, and raise interesting questions about the relations between print and manuscript, what exactly is a notebook, and how a printed book can become a repository for notes and thoughts, and can thereby morph into a notebook. As such, it deserved to feature in the exhibition, amongst others of its kind.

Further digging into our collections revealed a second ‘notebook’ by the same amateur botanist, this time a printed fifth edition of the Wild Flower Society Field Botanist's Diary, which was meticulously filled out between the years 1927 and 1939 (MS/576).

The owner cleverly colour coded her entries, using one pen colour for every year of entry. The Wild Flower Society published a Field Botanist’s Diary on a regular basis (and still does to this day, albeit in a less attractive format, as an Excel spreadsheet), to be filled in with the date, location and habitat as and when they found each species in the British Isles. The diary was then submitted to the Wild Flower Society, who used a team of experienced botanists to check it for likely mistakes and mark the number of species added each year. It was a competitive process and after a certain number of species had been recorded, the member entered the branch of the Society called Valhalla, and after that the top level of Mount Parnassus!

In one case at least, it seems, she cheated, having collected abroad a flower extinct in Britain for at least 150 years: dried between two pages is a single culm of Eriophorum alpinum (now Trichophorum alpinum), the cotton deergrass, a flowering plant in the sedge family, which was only ever found in a single locality in Angus, Scotland, between the years 1791 and 1804. The third entry in the corresponding diary page is indeed Eriophorum alpinum, with an indication that it was collected in Bavaria on 12 June 1956, much later than any of the other plants.

The book and notebook were clearly used in tandem: the dates and locations between them match. Hence, Eriophorum alpinum, which also features in Fitch’s book (on pp. 276-277), was annotated in both the book and the Field Diary: ‘w. Immenstadt, Bavaria, 12 June 1956’, and both printed book and diary contain dried specimens of the plants. In the book, these have been bunched together in two little bouquets, held together by paper tape, one of which also holds a handwritten note with location and date. Clearly, the discovery and collection of such a plant, some 17 years after the Field Diary had been completed, was treated like finding the missing piece of a puzzle – with special care and excitement.

Both these books/notebooks attest to the popularity of botany amongst women of the upper classes in the first half of the 20^th century. Such ladies took pleasure in participating in amateur botanical activities, in collecting flowers or colouring botanical works. They would have been enthusiastic members of the Wild Flower Society.

Who, then, was this meticulous recorder and colourist, keeping track of wild flowers and plants of the British Isles? Her name was Dorothy Beatrix Chapman, born on 18 July 1877, daughter of the Hon Thomas John Wynn, and brought up in the family home, Glynllivon Park, Caernarvonshire, before attending school in Strasbourg. In 1889, she was awarded the courtesy title of 'Hon.' as if the daughter of a baron; two of her brothers became the fourth and fifth Barons Newborough. In 1905 she married Rear Admiral G. Chapman (d. 1931) and they had two daughters and a son. She lived in Kent, Norfolk, Shropshire, and Berkshire, had a keen interest in wild flowers, and she travelled widely in search of them – through the British Isles, the Channel Isles, and Europe. As a member of the Wild Flower Society from 1924-1966, she may well have attained Valhalla status. She died on 5 March 1974, aged 96. Both her coloured copy of Fitch’s work and her Wild Flower Diary came to the Linnean Society through her son, Colonel P.G. Chapman, in 1977, while her lovely black and white photographic portrait was donated by her granddaughter Judith Anne Chapman in 2011.

Isabelle Charmantier, Head of Collections