Horizon

Tom Harrisson

Just reading up on some incidental biographical details about Tom Harrisson (1911-1976), as Wikipedia puts it ornithologist, explorer, mass-observer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, film-maker, conservationist, and writer. Here are some bits from his ODNB entry. Crikey: he makes T.E. Lawrence look like a homebody. it's as if Cyril Connolly turned into Colonel Kurtz (then turned back into Cyril Connolly, then turned back into ... etc).

"Harrisson was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 26 September 1911, the elder of the two children of Brigadier-General Geoffry Harnett Harrisson (1881–1939) and his wife, Marie Ellen (Doll; 1886–1961) , daughter of William Eagle Cole, a Norfolk naturalist, and his wife, Rachel, a Liverpool heiress. He spent his early years in Concordia, Entre-Ríos, Argentina, a British railway-building community where his engineer father, who had gone to South America in 1907 to make his fortune, was now the manager. Young Harrisson spoke no Spanish, had no friends, and received virtually no parental attention. His brother, William Damer Harrisson, born in 1913, was his only playmate. In 1914 his father took the family back to England and joined the army; he earned the DSO for building light railways near the front at Gallipoli, and retired in 1918 with the honorary rank of brigadier-general. In the Itchin Valley, Hampshire, the boys' nanny, Kitty Asbury, took them for long walks and their naturalist grandfather sometimes went along; Harrisson became a keen walker and birdwatcher. Their mother, a hypochondriac, gradually degenerated into alcoholism.

In 1919 Harrisson's parents returned to Argentina, leaving both boys at Eastacre junior preparatory school, Winchester, where their ignorance of ‘games’ made them pariahs. While at Eastacre, and later, at Winton House preparatory school, Winchester, they spent their holidays at down-at-heel vicarages with assorted Danes and other ‘foreign’ children. In 1922 the general took them back to Concordia, for the best year of Harrisson's childhood. He made an aviary and kept notes of bird behaviour. His father taught him to hunt with a gun, fly-fish, and climb mountains. This was the high point of his relations with his father. Back at Winton House in 1923, Harrisson felt more a foreigner than ever but later credited his ‘feeling of belonging to England and not belonging to it’ for helping him see his ‘home’ country clearly ...

At Harrow School (1925–30) Harrisson was allowed by an enlightened housemaster to wander for miles (on foot) to gather material for a monograph on birds of the Harrow district. He took part in several bird censuses and in 1930–31, with another public schoolboy, he enlisted 1300 volunteer birdwatchers in a census of the great crested grebe; updating this census afterwards became a fixture of British birdwatching.

Harrisson went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1930, where the pedestrian teaching of the natural sciences bored him. By then he was already recognized by the Oxford naturalists Charles Elton and Max Nicholson as a pioneering ornithologist, having served in that capacity on the Oxford University expedition to St Kilda in summer 1930. Before turning twenty-one he was ornithologist on two more Oxford expeditions: to Norwegian Lapland (1931), and, in 1932, to Sarawak, northern Borneo. He organized the Sarawak expedition and found, for once, that he liked and was liked immediately by a group of people, the longhouse dwellers of north-central Borneo. Ever after, he fitted in better with ‘primitive’ people abroad and with working-class people in England than with members of his own class.

Before leaving for Borneo, Harrisson had a final row with his father (who later disinherited him in favour of his brother). His father could not forgive him for quitting Cambridge (late in 1931), after more than a year of neglecting his studies and engaging in drunken escapades in the company of young literati (including the novelist Malcolm Lowry and the journalist John Davenport) as given to drinking and brawling as he. His failure to take a university degree proved a lifelong obstacle to obtaining the recognition which he craved and may have deserved. For the rest of his life he pioneered in various fields, full of fresh ideas, energy, and not always pent-up rage.

Harrisson's fourth Oxford expedition (1933–5) was to the New Hebrides. When the rest of the Oxford party left Santo Island for home in 1934, Harrisson got to Malekula, where cannibalism was still widespread. Unarmed, barefoot, with no money, he made friends with the cannibals and took censuses that helped to disprove the then popular thesis that the islanders were dying out from a morbid despair caused by culture shock; he found instead that their numbers were increasing. Harrisson's focus had shifted from birds to people. In his best-selling book, Savage Civilisation (1937), he defended the cannibals' way of life and their rights to their own land. He spoke before the Royal Geographical Society and appeared frequently in the press, and on BBC radio and television ...

In 1944 Harrisson was approached by Special Operations Executive, then looking to help its Australian equivalent obtain intelligence on Borneo in advance of an allied invasion. On 25 March 1945 Major Tom Harrisson and his seven seasoned Australian special operatives parachuted onto a hidden plateau in north-central Borneo. Harrisson's unit produced, in terms of damage to the enemy in relation to its own casualties, by far the best results of any Second World War Australian special operations unit. Harrisson provided behind-the-lines intelligence and recruited a thousand blow-piping headhunters who killed or captured 1500 Japanese, losing only a handful of Borneans. Harrisson won the DSO (1946) and dozens of his men received honours.

After the war, lacking credentials for a good job in Britain, Harrisson abandoned his English wife Biddy (Betha Wolferstan Clayton, née Pellatt (1907–1961)) and family, acquired, seriatim, two Kelabit tribeswomen as concubines, and made his home in Sarawak for the next twenty years. Biddy continued a trend towards alcoholism; she divorced Harrisson for desertion in 1954.

As government ethnographer and museum curator of Sarawak (1947–66) Harrisson defended, and recorded the details of, inland Bornean societies before outside influences had transformed them. In 1958 one of his television films about Borneo, Birds' Nest Soup, won the Cannes prize for documentaries. He wrote about Borneo in myriad scholarly journals and in the British press. The best-known of his dozen books, World Within (1959), describes pre-war life among his favourite tribespeople, the Kelabits, and gives an account of his wartime exploits.

Harrisson explored large portions of Borneo, receiving the prestigious founder's medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1962). In Sarawak's Great Cave of Niah, in 1958 his diggers found a skull of Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man), at a level carbon-dated to 40,000 years BP. Lacking stratigraphic methodology, Harrisson faced scepticism from many archaeologists. His reputation as an amateur and limelight seeker, and his violent quarrels with noted anthropologists, helped to keep the Niah skull from receiving the credence it may have deserved.

Harrisson pioneered techniques for saving endangered species, such as the green sea turtle and the Philippine tamaraw, which are still in use. His best collaborator was his next wife, Barbara Brunig, née Guttler (b. 1922), a German who had accompanied her first husband to Sarawak and divorced him to marry Harrisson. Married on 14 March 1956, they gained custody of Harrisson's son in 1957, and tried, unsuccessfully, to make a home for the boy in Kuching. The couple pioneered raising orphan orang-utans and reintroducing them to the wild, via a protected half-way house in the jungle. They continued to organize digs in Sarawak, Brunei, and Sabah, and made the Sarawak Museum in Kuching (founded in the nineteenth century by the second white rajah) a model of its kind.

After Harrisson's retirement from the British colonial service at the mandatory age of fifty-five, the couple went in 1967 to Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, where he was appointed senior research fellow. They were active in the species survival activities of the World Wildlife Fund and made annual trips to Brunei, as guests of the sultan. Tragically, Harrisson was permanently banned from Sarawak in 1967 because of rumours and press stories, never substantiated but spread by his many enemies, that he had misused his position in Sarawak to smuggle out Borneo treasures.

In the late 1960s, as US support for south-east Asian studies diminished, Harrisson sought work in Britain. The historian Asa Briggs, then vice-chancellor of Sussex University, invited him to install the Mass-Observation archive at Sussex, with Harrisson as visiting professor. There would be no salary, but Harrisson resolved his money problem by entering into a passionate affair with Christine Forani, née Madeleine Lucie Antoinette Bonnecompagnie (1916–1976), a Belgian heiress and Second World War heroine parachutist, widow of an Italian baron, who adopted Christine as her nom de guerre. In 1969 he left Barbara for Brussels and his baroness. After his divorce at the end of 1970, they married in London on 9 January 1971. Christine, a sculptor, could be as wild as Harrisson. When the two were not being thrown out of restaurants, or having a riotous good time, or travelling throughout the Far East and north Africa, he worked on the first book to emerge from the revived M-O. The result, Living through the Blitz (1976), was, according to Stephen Spender, ‘not quite the masterpiece by a man of immensely independent mind—Churchillian, Lawrentian—which one hoped it would be’ (The Guardian, 29 July 1976). It was, none the less, wrote C. P. Snow, ‘the best account of the 1940–41 Blitz ever written’ (Financial Times, 5 Aug 1976).

Before the book appeared, its author had been killed. Harrisson and his wife died on 16 January 1976, in a collision of their minibus with a timber lorry on a Thai road north of Bangkok. Cremation later that month at the That Thong wat in Bangkok was followed by interment of his ashes alongside Christine's in the cemetery of Uccle, Brussels, on 2 February, in the tomb of her first husband, Baron Antonio Forani. A memorial meeting for Harrisson at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 17 March 1976 brought together notables from British media, ornithology, and animal conservation, with sprinklings of politicians and literati.

Rarely able to control his temper or his drinking, Tom Harrisson made many enemies but was a sincere, effective advocate for, and protector of, the common people, whether in London's East End, Bolton, or the tropical bush. He bullied his subordinates but gave them interesting work, the training to do it and, behind the scenes, got them recognition and promotion. His museum staff stayed with him for twenty years. A dreadful husband, father, son, and brother, he was often a loyal friend. He brought fresh ideas to many fields: fauna conservation, ornithology, sociology, archaeology, and anthropology, through hundreds of articles, scholarly and popular. Despite careless editing, some of his books remained in print and readable decades after his death. He believed in transmitting knowledge in a form that anybody could use. Two words he hated were ‘obvious’—nothing is—and ‘vulgar’—everything should be.

Judith M. Heimann