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Father and naturalist

From the Echo, first published Tuesday 29th Oct 2002.

HE was a son of Poole who achieved fame in his own lifetime as a brilliant naturalist but his reputation was tarnished when his son wrote a famous memoir.

The book, Father and Son by Edmund Gosse, became a modern classic but portrayed Philip Henry Gosse (known as Henry) as a stern, fanatical, puritanical monster.

Now Henry's reputation has been rescued in a new biography entitled Glimpses of the Wonderful by biographer Ann Thwaite that has attracted impressive critical reviews.

The writer, who is well known as a children's book author and a biographer of Emily Tennyson and A A Milne, wrote a biography about Edmund Gosse some years ago.

"Father and Son is a brilliant, vivid book but it gives a very dark picture of the highly

religious father," she said on a visit to Poole.

"When I was working on Edmund's biography I discovered that things were very different from the way Edmund had portrayed them."

The son wrote largely from memory and, after his book was published, he himself was concerned at the way his father's character was being received.

"He had distorted his father's character to make a better story," said Ann.

Henry, who, despite differences of opinion, corresponded with Charles Darwin, became a leading zoologist and marine biologist, popularising the aquarium.

He was also a respected author of 40 books and stayed true to his religious convictions, having been christened one of the Plymouth Brethren.

The Gosse family originated in Ringwood and many had settled in Poole. Henry was born in 1810 in Worcester, the home town of his mother, Hannah.

His father Thomas was an itinerant painter and dreamer who decided to move to Poole when Henry was two years old.

They moved to lodgings in Old Orchard and subsequently to a rented house in Skinner Street opposite the Meeting House that, as the United Reformed Church, still stands today.

Poole's population at the time was around 6,000.

Henry's aunts had married well - one to Thomas Bell, a Poole doctor, and another to a Kemp, a leading Poole merchant who lived in a Market Street mansion - and Hannah Gosse and Thomas were the poor relations.

Money was always short.

"Skinner Street," writes Ann Thwaite, "also housed a confirmed and dangerous lunatic and another neighbour, named Cribb, who did many things to earn an honest penny."

He killed pigs and collected bones adding to the terrible smells of the open gutters.

Henry's dad was rarely at home. Although once given a commission to copy a painting in the "Romish Chapel" in Poole for a similar one in Newfoundland, the artist was normally travelling the country in search of painting commissions.

Once, on a rare visit home, Thomas even asked where the family's water butt could be found.

A cane was stretched on two nails above the mantelpiece and it usually fell to Hannah to administer any punishment.

On one occasion, however, Henry deliberately vandalised a miniature on which his father was working for a lady connected with Upton House.

His father lashed out with the cane, calling Henry a "rogue" until Hannah intervened.

As well as painting, Thomas was a keen writer, although Hannah regarded this as a waste of time.

She did, however, value education. At the age of three Henry was sent to attend a "dame's school" in Old Orchard.

Later Henry, and his best pal John Brown, enrolled at a new school in Lagland Street at which he did particularly well.

Sometimes times were so hard Hannah's economies meant Henry was kept from school for a quarter to carry on his studies in a back garret at home.

In time, however, Hannah had her wish and she and Thomas - whose commissions included painting the smuggler Isaac Gulliver - were able to send the 12-year-old Henry to boarding school at Blandford to benefit from the classical teaching of one Henry Lance.

Within two years he had been expelled, accused of being the ringleader in a plot among the boys to run away.

After a spot more schooling in Poole, Henry, at 15, had to start work.

He became a clerk at the Garland family's counting house, dealing in trade with Newfoundland. But in October 1826 he was told he had no job.

Henry set sail from Poole for Newfoundland to embark on a course that would eventually lead him to become one of the most prominent Victorians of his time.

Always a staunch Calvinist, in 1857 he made a brave attempt to reconcile the biblical story of Genesis with the geological findings suggesting fossils were remnants of a non-existent time that pre-dated Creation. He was criticised by all sides.

He died 31 years later, little knowing his reputation would take a hammer blow when his son published his famous memoir.

Ann Thwaite begins her fascinating biography of Henry by quoting Edmund's story of how, as a boy, he had once confessed to his father that he had eaten a slice of plum pudding one Christmas.

His father, responded by flinging the "idolatrous confectionary" into a dustheap.

Whether that story is true or not, there is no doubt that Philip Henry Gosse was a committed Fundamentalist as well as being a ground-breaking scientist.

Indeed, he has been described by one American as the "David Attenborough of his generation".

But he was more than all that. He was, writes Ann Thwaite, "a truly remarkable man".

Glimpses Of The Wonderful by Ann Thwaite, Faber £25.

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