Whilst Wallace lived in Wales
AS Malaysian nature lovers, we are fully aware, or should be, of Arthur Russel Wallace’s exploits and revelations he found during his time in Melaka and in Sarawak.
His historic book, ‘The Malay Archipelago’, and his letters home make excellent reading.
What has always perplexed me is how Wallace acquired his knowledge to write with such authority, having finished his formal schooling at the age of 14. The answer I have recently found is in the motto ‘Pro Doctrina Vitae’, which translated means life-long learning or learning for life.
I believe that all people learn something new every day no matter what their schooling or form of higher education.
It was customary for pupils to leave school at age 14 in 1837, as my father did in 1922.
My father became a blacksmith until he lost all the top digits on both hands in a machine accident five years later, but continued to work in another job until he died.
He was one of the best read men that I have ever known, devouring classic books and 20th century novels at an alarming rate.
Whilst I had the privilege of an Oxford University education, I reckon my Dad could equal the knowledge of the specialists there who lectured on Victorian and early 20th century novelists. Connection with Wales
Wallace was born in 1823 in the village of Llanbadoc near Usk, a small town, in the county of Monmouthshire, which, then, was in England. It took until the Local Government Act 1972, to recognise this county as a Welsh one.
Interestingly, Welsh people still consider him, even today, and despite his English parents, as one of their greatest ever naturalists.
Born into a large Victorian family of nine children, his parents moved back to Hertford in England where he received his formal education from the age of five. Upon leaving school, Wallace was sent to London to join his older brother John, a carpenter by trade, before he moved to Bedford to learn the art of land surveying from his eldest brother William.
This, Wallace did for six and half years working on contracts in Southern England and in South Wales. In 1841, the Wallace brothers settled in the Neath area of South Wales where their first job was to survey the parish of Cadoxton along the River Clydach valley.
As the Welsh language was then the lingua franca of South Wales, apart from Pembrokeshire, Wallace found this tedious to handle let alone to understand. Eye for natural world
As his surveying work necessitated his thousands of footsteps, working so close to nature, he became fascinated with the undulations of the landscape, its geology, plants, animal and insect life. During this time, he surveyed the route of tramlines to take iron foundry products down the valley to the port of Neath.
Then, in mid-Victorian times, the iron and steel industry flourished with all south Wales valleys running towards the coast. Initially, these industries were sited in ‘the valleys’, as there were local deposits of mined iron ore, coal, and carboniferous limestone all needed in the industrial process.
Sadly, today, only two steelworks survive, at Llanwern near Newport and at Port Talbot near Swansea, both owned by the Indian Tata Steel Corporation, and those steelworks, too, face an uncertain future.
With a slump in survey work, Wallace left Neath in 1843 to take up employment in Leicester at a collegiate school to teach draughtsmanship, surveying, English and Maths. Whilst in Leicester, he became acquainted with amateur naturalist Henry Bates, who introduced him to the study and collection of beetles. Wallace found that there were nearly 1,000 different species of these insects within 15km of that town.
Two years later he returned to Neath, upon the death of brother William, and continued the surveying work on the proposed railway to run along the Neath valley to Swansea. This was designated to take coal down ‘the valleys’ to the port of Swansea. The railway was approved in 1847.
Wallace recorded his time there in his autobiography ‘My Life’ as such,
“I enjoyed myself immensely. It took me up the south east side of the valley … along pleasant lanes and paths, through woods and by streams and up one of the widest and most picturesque of little glens I have ever explored.
“Here we had to climb over huge rocks as big as houses, ascend cascades, and take cross levels up steep banks and precipices all densely wooded.”
Whilst living in Neath, on Friday evenings, he was persuaded to lecture in night classes in Neath’s Town Hall and also at the Mechanics Institute to give lectures to working people on geology, astronomy, geography, and science.
He prepared his lectures by avidly reading books from a local wealthy industrialist’s library.
Later in life, this experience caused his socialist conscience to kick in when he became an advocate to offer all working people the chance to attend night classes.
He even designed a new building for the Mechanics Institute to include a library, reading room and classrooms, which still stands and functions today.
And so Wallace’s global wanderings began …
In 1848, he persuaded his erstwhile naturalist friend Bates to accompany him on an expedition to the Amazon Basin in South America in search of flora, fauna and, in particular, insect life. His wanderlust to discover the wonders of our world thus began.
These wonders and wanderings began in South Wales on Dymmau Mountain, where he first stayed with his brother John and bought his first book on the identification of plants and wild flowers, which he sketched from specimens found there.
In his autobiography he has recorded, “What occupied me chiefly (there) and became more and more the solace and delight of my lonely rambles among the moors and mountains, was my first introduction to the variety, the beauty, and the mystery of nature as manifested in the vegetable kingdom.”
As we have a ‘Wallace Trail’ relatively locally in Sarawak, so the South Wales Tourist Board has devised a similar Wallace Trail map for devotees of this great naturalist to follow.
I for one intend to follow the Welsh trail later this year for it is near where my maternal grandparents once lived, if only for a short period of their lives, in the 1920s before my grandfather died and the family moved to Cornwall. Was Wallace a Welshman by birth or an Englishman? There lies a conundrum!