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").
He described his fellow-troopers as being about as hard-bitten a crew as it would be possible to find anywhere. He stayed with the BSAP throughout World War I. His duties included patrolling large areas of undeveloped country, and taking charge of isolated up-country out-stations. He found this a glorious life in country as unspoilt as any that Selous hunted. It was full of big game – in his own words: "country we shall see no more".
In 1919 he joined a shipping firm and went to China. For 13 years he operated from Harbin at the north of Manchuria down to Hong Kong in the south. His travels took him to the remotest regions of China. His African and Chinese notes were effectively all destroyed by arson. He generally spent his leave on his own in shooting trips in Portuguese East Africa (present-day Mozambique). In 1932 he resigned from the firm and moved to England. There he married and settled first in Devon, then in Cornwall. Reading between the lines, the rats on the Devon property might well have played a role in persuading him to move to Cornwall.
The study of insects had always been a hobby of his, both in Africa and China. In retirement in England he settled down more earnestly to the pursuit of informal entomology, though, as he observed, with not half so rich a field of subjects as on his travels.
On settling down, he wrote novels (no new departure, as he had already published The White Kaffir, Trooper Fault, and his most celebrated novel, The Kingdom that Was). Strong Waters and The Second Leopard also appeared in 1932, so his apparently idle time in preceding years actually had been anything but idle. Possibly his productivity in writing might have encouraged his retirement and return to England. After settling down he went in for "fairly intensive bee-keeping" as he related in The Hive, one World War later.
That his absence from the trenches of World War I was not attributable to lack of patriotic feeling is apparent from the fact that in 1940 he joined the Royal Air Force. He was then about 47, but Britain was desperate for fighting manpower. In due course he found himself in Iceland as Flight Lieutenant in Flying Control. In September 1943 he was invalided out with a peptic ulcer, a condition for which no decisive treatment was then available. As he put it, he was given leave by the Air Force Council to retain his rank — and unfortunately the ulcer he had contracted as well.
Lamburn died on 1 November 1972 in East Grinstead, West Sussex in England.
Fiction
Apart from the texts themselves, some idea of the character of his novels, and the way in which he drew on his actual experiences, can be gained from occasional reviews. A particularly interesting example, because it comes from an ex-BSAP officer with personal knowledge of the circumstances and some of the characters drawn from, appears in the magazine Transvaal Outpost.
In his review of Trooper Fault, Sloman remarks that most of the characters in the book are fictitious, but that they include some real-life names such as Jimmy Blatherwick and Capell, though he states that the latter never started as an ordinary recruit. Trooper Fault himself has the regimental number 1757, which according to the nominal roll was the number of Trooper John Battersby Crompton Lamburn himself. Of Richmal Crompton's "William" stories, Sloman remarks: "Fortunately for J.B.C. Lamburn these stories were published after his BSAP career had ended, otherwise he could have been ragged rotten!"
Lamburn seems not to have published more fiction after the war.
Natural history
As "John Crompton", Lamburn wrote on natural history from at least as early as 1938.
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 (though some of these might be printers' errors). Also, many of his views on theoretical matters such as evolution and genetics were naïve even for his day. However, Crompton wrote pleasantly, literately, and intelligently, often quite thoughtfully, on a wide range of biological subjects, and he did so constructively and soundly at a level accessible to a wider and younger public than most popular scientific writing.
Most of Crompton's source material was gleaned from popular and semi-popular material, such as the writings of Jean-Henri Fabre, the Peckhams, Oswald H. Latter, and the like, and he credited such material properly, if informally. Crompton did not stint in expressing his opinions on such sources, though he was neither pretentious nor destructive in his criticism. He was full of praise for Fabre and the Peckhams. He notes in The Spider:
Fabre . . . was disliked by his colleagues. At ease with young people he was tongue-tied with men, and his timid manners did not endear him to them. But the dislike went further. He wrote about science in a way that ordinary people could understand. This was considered to cheapen the profession. He was a born teacher too, and pupils almost fought to attend his classes. Naturally the other masters did not like it, and were ready to take action at the first opportunity.
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.
It is important not to infer any malice in the relationship between Darwin and Fabre from Crompton's writing. No one involved – not Darwin, not Fabre, and certainly not Crompton – suggested that anything more was concerned than a difference of opinion.
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 have certainly inspired 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.
A review in The Conservationist of the new edition of The Spider credited Nick Lyons Books with the discovery of "a gem of an author".
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: