AdminHistory | Major Stanley Smyth Flower (1871 – 1946) was an English army officer, science advisor, administrator, zoologist and conservationist.
Flower was born on 1 August 1871 in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of which his father, Sir William Henry Flower, was then Curator. His mother was Georgiana Rosetta, daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth. From the age of 11 he regularly attended meetings of the Zoological Society of London with his father. After attending Wellington College, Berkshire, he studied at King's College London and joined the Artists' Rifles. After obtaining a regular commission in the Northumberland Fusiliers in 1890, he went with his regiment to India and the Straits Settlements, where he began to take an interest in the local fauna. In 1896 he was awarded the post of scientific advisor to manage the collections in the Royal Museum of Siam. In 1898 the government of Egypt under Lord Cromer wanted to appoint a Director of the Zoological Gardens at Giza and the post was awarded to Flower, which he held until his retirement. In 1913 Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener sent him to India to report on the collections of wild animals held in captivity there. While in Egypt, he organized the Zoological Museum in a building in Giza Zoo, started the Fish Garden with aquarium on Gezira Island, and was appointed Ranger of Central Africa. During World War I, he was recalled to the army and set up and ran the Egyptian Camel Transport Corps, a logistical unit which carried much of the supplies needed by the British Empire forces fighting the Ottoman Empire in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign. He was awarded an OBE for his role in maintaining order in Giza during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919.
He was vice-president of the Zoological Society of London from 1927 to 1929 and chair of the British Ornithologists' Club from 1930 to 1933, a Fellow of the Linnean Society, and Honorary Foreign Member of the American Institute of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. In 1896 he married Sibylla Maria Peckham Wallace, known as Sybil (1876 – 1938), the elder daughter of Charles William Napier Wallace (1849 – 1910) and they had four children together. Following her death, he married Charlotte Dorothea Rose Stewart (1889 - 1981) in 1839. He died on 3 February 1946. |
Description | Author's annotated and interleaved copy of 'On the Memmalia of Siam and the Malay Peninsula' by Stanley Smyth Flower, from the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, April 3, 1900, pp. 306-379.
Includes 2 drawings of a bat's head; notes and anecdotes relating to his work; 5 leaves of MS notes at the end; and a letter of transmittal, dated 2 December 1935 from Flower to S.Savage.
Binding title is 'Siamese and Malay Mammals'. Inscribed on inside cover: 'S.S.Flower 26 Stanhope Gds, London SW and Kedah Hosue, Ghizeh, Egypt, 13 Sept. 1900' |