John Battersby Crompton Lamburn

John Battersby Crompton Lamburn (3 April 1893 – 1 November 1972) was a British writer of novels and books about natural history.

During World War I, Lamburn served in Rhodesia in the British South Africa Police. Afterwards, he joined a shipping firm in China, where he travelled widely. Returning to England in the 1930s, he took to writing fiction, mainly under the pseudonym "John Lambourne". He may be best known for his fantasy The Kingdom That Was.

In World War II, he served in the RAF. After the war, as "John Crompton", he wrote books of natural history. Most of Lamburn's notes were destroyed in an act of arson, and little is known about him beyond his published works.

Life and work

John Battersby Crompton Lamburn, born 3 April 1893 in Bury, Lancashire, England, was a British writer, the younger brother of Richmal Crompton, a prolific novelist best known for her hugely popular "William" books for boys.

He wrote fiction mainly under the pseudonym "John Lambourne", or "John B.C. Lambourne", and wrote popular books on natural history under the name "John Crompton". He is perhaps best known for his fantasy The Kingdom That Was (1931).

As Trooper 1757 Lamburn, J.B.C. of the British South Africa Police, he served from 19 September 1913 to 30 November 1919, spanning World War I. In both his fiction and non-fiction he drew on his police experiences. On leaving the Force he moved to the Far East and travelled widely in China. Returning to England in the 1930s, he took to full-time writing, by now drawing on his experience of travel in East Asia as well.

Little is widely known about Lamburn's life and works, but a few details can be gleaned or inferred from various sources.

According partly to Lamburn's own account of himself, on one of his book covers, he was educated at Bury Grammar School and Manchester University. His father was the Rev Edward John Sewell Lamburn, who apparently intended his son to follow in his own footsteps and go into the Anglican Church; but instead, in 1913 at the age of twenty, Lamburn joined the Rhodesian Mounted Police of the British South Africa Police or BSAP, as a trooper. This might have been to the considerable consternation of his parents, and his age at the time suggests that he did not complete a degree course at Manchester.

Consistently with that suspicion, the second of his two elder sisters was Richmal Crompton Lamburn, a novelist and the author of the hugely popular "William" stories, and she was said to have derived part of her inspiration for her leading character, William Brown — a rough diamond — from her young brother. This all suggests that Lamburn might well have been very unpromising ecclesiastical material, and deeply unenthusiastic about his studies. Certainly some of his autobiographical reminiscences on the vigour and variety of his life in Southern Africa and elsewhere make this plausible; see for example some passages in his book The Hunting Wasp, especially chapters 4 ("Locust and Cockroach Hunters") and 6 ("The Fly Hunters").

Crompton made no claim to scientific expertise, and instead described himself as a "layman writing for laymen". Accordingly, the books include occasional slip-ups such as "coastal" (instead of "costal") nervure

In spite of his admiration for the greats, Crompton maintained his own views. For example, he had little patience for Fabre's rejection of some of the assertions of classical Darwinism, which attributed all evolutionary change to gradual increments due entirely to random mutations. Fabre ridiculed the idea that this mechanism could explain the hunting wasp's injection of precise quantities of venom into the hidden nerve centres of her victims, for example. "In daring to question the conclusions of Fabre I am, I know, going out of my class. But Fabre the theorist is not Fabre the naturalist . . . His patience and perseverance . . . have brought a rich harvest of knowledge to the world, but that does not mean that we must agree with him when he branches out in other directions." Similarly in the same book Crompton criticises some of Fabre's cruder experiments on instinctive behaviour, and their naïve interpretation. For his part, Darwin called Fabre "the inimitable observer".

The alert professional also can glean a lot of useful information from Crompton's personal experiences and those of his correspondents, scientific and non-scientific. He was as willing to quote and credit a country gamekeeper as he was the myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler.

A review in Nature of the last of the six books to appear found all six "outstanding for their readability, entertainment and instruction value".

Suggesting that readers who might be acquainted with the "brilliant description" of the nature writers Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and John McPhee should "dust aside any current and tony notions you might have about nature writing when you turn to John Crompton's books The Spider and The Snake", Bonnie Bilyeau Gordon warned them to:

Be prepared for careful viewing, but equally for myth. To read these books is to embark on adventure with Crompton all around the world, or at least the British Empire of the early 20th century.

His books certainly have inspired a fair number of young biologists.

Rediscovery of the books Crompton's six books were rediscovered and reissued in the late 1980s.

The novelist William Humphrey mentioned Crompton's The Spider to the publisher Nick Lyons. Copies of this were elusive, but a little later a colleague of Lyons managed to buy a copy of another Crompton book, The Hunting Wasp. He was spellbound by "Crompton's colorfully laconic, decidedly anthropomorphic style". Lyons resolved to republish all six of Crompton's books. But neither the original publisher nor the British Library could help to identify the author; and The Hunting Wasp assigns copyright not to Crompton but to "J. B. C. Lamburn". However, when Nick Lyons Books found a letter from Crompton to an American fan in 1958 they wrote to the address on the letterhead; Lamburn's daughter responded, and the mystery of Crompton's identity was solved.

The Hive / A Hive of Bees Crompton's own introduction to The Hive (1947; whose later, American edition was titled A Hive of Bees) ends "if you wish to call me anthropomorphic you may do so. A mere word, even one as long as that, never hurt anyone." Much of Verlyn Klinkenborg's introduction to the 1987 edition is devoted to a robust defence of Crompton's version of anthropomorphism, "[whose] results are enchanting", and an extended example of which:

resembles fine nineteenth-century narrative history, say, Prescott on Peru or Parkman on Quebec, for Crompton here depicts the daily life of a great ancient city of some fifty thousand inhabitants, which is exactly what a hive is.

On its first American publication, the book got a favourable review in Time.

The Hunting Wasp A short review of The Hunting Wasp (1948) in The Naturalist praised the author and his book:

His descriptions are both vivid and entertaining, and they cannot fail to enthral anyone unacquainted with the strange habits of these insects; and in spite of his flagrant anthropomorphism the initiated must be very straight-laced not to warm to his graphic writing.

This was tempered by criticism of some slips perhaps resulting from authorial exuberance.

A review in Time praised "this urbane and well-written book"; and another short review described it as "an exciting book which will open up new fields to students of Natural History in all parts of the world".

Writing in Nature, the entomologist Vincent Wigglesworth praised this "popularization anew of the writings of Fabre and the Peckhams . . . written in a vivid and racy style which makes for easy reading".

The review in Scientific American was rather mixed: the reviewer found Crompton "a very good reporter when not romancing": the book "would have been better had he done less sentimental embroidery".

Writing in the New York Times, Edwin Way Teale praised the way Crompton "wanders pleasantly at times" yet returns to his subject. Teale pointed out that Crompton depended heavily for his material on work by Fabre, George and Elizabeth Peckham, and Phil and Nellie Rau, but praised the new book for its freshness.

The reviewer for the Quarterly Review of Biology found the 1955 Houghton Mifflin edition "little improved" from the first edition of 1948: it "remains a dismaying tract of embarrassing absurdity and sciolastic nonsense", by an author seemingly "without a sense of accuracy or logic".

Stephen Bodio's introduction to the 1987 edition is devoted to a robust defence of Crompton's version of anthropomorphism, "[whose] results are enchanting"; he refutes the expectation that the book is an example of "a kind of literate popular science", saying that in this book Crompton is "an eccentric, a storyteller possessed of an unending fascination with the creatures that most people hate", a man tending not to be "analytical, skeptical, and well-versed in the current literature" but instead "a wide-eyed innocent and a man of (a persistent phrase) 'common sense'", whose anthropomorphism is "a way of making the insects' way of life, as weird as that of Sigourney Weaver's Aliens, comprehensible to the receptive human reader". Bodio continues by praising the humour of Compton's observations on wasps – and adds that "His digressions are amazing."

The Spider / The Life of the Spider An unsigned review in Time of The Spider (1950) said that Crompton "writes vividly and with vast enthusiasm".

The review in Nature was mixed, pointing out that the book is "written in a facetious style which some readers will find intolerable; it may, however, persuade some of them to study spiders, not books, more carefully".

The arachnologist B. J. Kaston gave The Life of the Spider a long and detailed review in the Quarterly Review of Biology, concluding that the book, whose author "leans most heavily on Bristowe and on Fabre",

is a curious admixture of good and bad in which the author has assembled much interesting information and has presented it vividly. In this review more emphasis has been placed on the faults, since they are more likely to escape the casual reader than are the creditable features.

In Kaston's view, the faults included anthropomorphism, overgeneralization (despite Crompton's criticism of overgeneralization by others), imprecision, repetition of mere myth, and other inaccuracies.

A review in Annals of the Entomological Society of America says that:

This book leaves the reviewer with somewhat mixed feelings as to its worth. While the author makes a number of excellent observations which he reports in the most objective fashion, on the other hand, he loads the book with biased, unobjective, anthropomorphic, sentimental interpretations. Consequently, any recommendation must be couched in the most careful terms.

Even among Crompton's more interesting treatments, most "contain doubtful facts and useless interpretations which are hopelessly biased by his sentimentality" wrote the reviewer, who concluded that the book was superior to some others, but not Willis J. Gertsch's American Spiders, "that zenith of popular and scientific appraisal".

In Mark Cocker's opinion, this is a "gloriously funny" book.

Ways of the Ant Ways of the Ant (1954) received a short, unfavourable review in The British Journal of Animal Behaviour:

[Crompton's] extreme anthropomorphist way of writing seems to kill the very wonder that he hopes to rouse for he falls into the error of using his false human analogy so much that one almost forgets that the book is about ants.

However, its author conceded that "Perhaps this book will lead some people to keep their eyes wider open than usual and check for themselves the observations described."

Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Edwin Way Teale found it "in the main, up to date", and "a serious work written with a light touch", an excellent introduction to ants for the "general reader".

Reviewing it for the Scientific Monthly, the myrmecologist George C. Wheeler wrote that both he and his 12-year-old son had enjoyed a book that was "absorbing, and even fascinating" and written with a "light touch of humor". He was prepared to overlook miscellaneous minor errors, more worried about the imputation of decision, enjoyment, understanding, and even debauchery and orgy to ants; and hoped that a new edition would correct this. Nevertheless, he recommended the book to all, from laymen at one extreme and myrmecologists at the other.

Writing for the 1987 edition, Paul Schullery labels Crompton's approach "egregious anthropomorphism"; and he concedes that "Most of what's in this book isn't even firsthand observation; it's culled from scientific texts Crompton read." So why not, he asks, skip Crompton and go straight to those texts? Because "the magic's in the telling, not in the tale". Like such Victorian adventurers as Burton and Selous, Crompton was a fine raconteur, and one with a particularly developed skill for digressions.

In a short review of this reissue for Library Journal, Annette Aiello called the book "Fascinating, informative, entertaining, and witty"; but she pointed out that, first published over 30 years previously, it was "sadly out of date and inaccurate in many details", and that Crompton's "highly anthropomorphic and moralistic style . . . often obscures his meaning".

The Living Sea / The Sea

An article in the Sarasota Herald Tribune said of The Living Sea (1957) that:

This is not so scholarly a book as [Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us], and not so literary a work as [Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea]. But it is an extremely valuable and readable book, with well-presented facts, many anecdotes and telling observations."

Another favourable newspaper review said that "From monstrous whale to microscopic diatom his narration is lively and charming."

A review in the New York Times called this "a crotchety and poorly written book", but one whose author "is likely to succeed in injecting the reader with not only a good deal of sea information but feeling for nature."

As for more specialist periodicals, the book got a warm review by William Beebe in Natural History:

Mr. Crompton has produced a book quite free from [the activities and weapons that preoccupy others who write about the sea]. He has marshalled hundreds of facts not one of which is new. But he has clothed them in such excellent prose that even the best-known fact takes on a new impelling interest, arousing a persuasive desire to go on reading. The diction is smooth and effortless; it is punctuated with many similes and "as ifs", parentheses are abundant, and the style is subtle and pleasing.

A review in Nature of five more or less popular books about the sea placed The Living Sea among the slipshod majority, inferior to Ralph Nading Hill's Window in the Sea:

I receive the impression that Mr. Crompton has hurriedly read up marine biology in order to write a book on a subject which will sell. . . . That an author should attempt a book on sea life without knowing or finding out what is meant by "plankton" is truly astounding.

The book received a short and dismissive review in Copeia.

The Snake / Snake Lore Ellen Hazelwood described The Snake (1963; also titled Snake Lore) in The Naturalist as written "in a very conversational way which anyone even remotely interested in natural history must find easy to read".

Comparing The Snake with The Spider (1950), Bonnie Bilyeau Gordon says that Crompton, writing while in Britain and thus with very few snakes to study, presents "mythology and regional lore as a substitute for hands-and-knees observation". Complete with "more of Crompton's rambling speculation", the newer work "is more truly a storybook, and riddled with mildly gruesome stories at that: slow death, odd experiments".

The "sloppily written" Snake Lore received a very unfavourable review in Natural History from the herpetologist Charles M. Bogert, ending:

This anecdotal account can be recommended only for readers who buy books they can ill afford to take time to read. Snake Lore will not add to their frustrations, for they will have no qualms about putting it down. Better still, they might leave it unopened.

The reviewer for Nature found the book as good as its five predecessors; and "erroneous statements are few".