Cataloguing the correspondence of zoologist/animal breeder James Cossar Ewart (1851-1933), I have been intrigued by the various ‘life stories’ which emerge from the letters. Periodically I will be including some highlights in a series of posts entitled ‘letters in the limelight’ .

Sometimes even the smallest mention of a name in a letter contains the kernel of a fascinating story. On 13 June 1915, Mr Bailey writes to Ewart that he is currently staying with a ‘Miss Christie’ at Cowden Castle, Dollar, Perthshire, where a ‘Tahitian boy’ is lodging and receiving a military education. Bailey also provides some details about the sheep he has seen in Tahiti, which would have been of relevance to Ewart’s researches into different sheep breeds at this time. But who was this ‘Miss Christie’, Mr Bailey’s host at Cowden Castle?

Isabella (Ella) Robertson Christie (1861-1949) was an independent woman who travelled the world, photographed and wrote about her experiences and was made a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society as well as the Royal Geographical Society. However, she is now best remembered for the Japanese garden she commissioned in the grounds of her home at Cowden Castle. When visiting Japan in 1907, Christie was especially struck by the gardens, which she wrote ‘were first copied from the Chinese, and then improved upon the lines of nature till one can scarcely see where the artificial and natural join.’ Once back at Cowden, Christie created a lake out of some marshy ground and employed Japanese designer Taki Hionda, from Nagoya’s Royal School of Garden Design, to help create a garden filled with symbolic stones that traced a route around the lake. The garden, named Shah-rak-uenor (Place of Pleasure and Delight) was frequently used for entertaining the friends and visitors who came to Cowden from all over the world. A favourite activity of visitors would be to take a fishing trip on the lake before tea, served in the tea house on an island in the middle of the lake.

Christie later called upon the advice of Professor Jiju Soya Susuki of the Soami School of Imperial Design, who deemed the gardens ‘the best in the western world’, except for the bridge, which he called ‘a flaw in a precious gem.’ Suzuki insisted on redesigning the bridge. In 1925, Christie used her contact with Susuki to employ a gardener called Matsuo, who had lost his entire family in an earthquake in Japan. Matsuo was able to provide specialist care for the plants and although he had little English and Ella Christie had no Japanese, they were clearly able to find a way to communicate. Christie granted Matsuo an estate cottage, and when he died in 1937 he was buried next to the Christie family plot in the cemetery of Muckhart Church.

After Ella Christie’s death in 1947, the Japanese gardens were maintained and kept open to the public, even after Cowden Castle was demolished in 1952. However, things quickly deteriorated. Several acts of vandalism in the 1960s, including the burning of the teahouse, the destruction of the bridges, shrine and lanterns, left Ella Christie’s beloved garden in ruins. Now, despite efforts to raise money to restore the gardens, not to mention the enthusiasm of Christie’s great-nephew and the current owner of the estate, Sir Robert Stewart of Arndean, little remains of Sharakuen except the lake, some stonework and a few tantalising fragments of the shrine, although the rhododendrons that Christie imported from the Himalayas can still be seen.

Although it would be nice to know more about the ‘Tahitian boy’ undergoing military training that F. Bailey mentions, his letter’s brief hint does at least point the way towards the fascinating life of Ella Christie and the garden she created.

You can read more information about the Ella Christie’s Japanese garden, and also see some pictures, here: http://www.geocities.jp/kita36362000/perthshire_english.htm

Photographs from Ella Christie’s travels can be seen on the Royal Geographical Society’s website: http://www.rsgs.org/ifa/gemellachristie.html

I am also indebted to Catherine Horwood’s book, Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present (Virago, 2010).

Cataloguing the correspondence of zoologist/animal breeder James Cossar Ewart (1851-1933), I have been intrigued by the various ‘life stories’ which emerge from the letters. Periodically I will be including some highlights in a series of posts entitled ‘letters in the limelight’ .

As a prominent figure in the field of zoology, Ewart’s professional connections frequently interlinked with those involved with disciplines such as archaeology and palaeontology. Ewart was often able to use these connections to benefit his own research into the prehistoric origins of domestic animals. For example, one of his most well-known pieces of research was ‘On the Skulls of Horses from the Roman Fort at Newstead, near Melrose, with Observations on the Origin of Domestic Horses’ (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 45: 555-587, 1907). But one of his Ewart’s correspondents from the archaeological world proved to be more notorious than the rest…

In September 1915, Ewart received a letter (ref: GB 237 Coll-14/9/21/16) from amateur palaeontologist and antiquarian Charles Dawson (1864-1916) concerning the case of a horse with some unusual horn-like protuberances on its skull. Dawson goes on to say that he will shortly be visiting Ewart in Edinburgh and will bring with him ‘some new pieces of Eoanthropus skull from near Piltdown, in which you might be interested.’ Just how interested Ewart was in these skull fragments we will never know, but Charles Dawson was certain to hold the interest of the scientific world in a firm grasp for some time to come.

Unlike his brothers, Dawson did not attend university but followed his father into the legal profession and became a solicitor. However, he held a lifelong passion for fossil-hunting and archaeology, making some uncannily fortunate finds (a Roman statuette made uniquely of cast iron, the teeth of a previously unknown species of mammal, a unique form of an ancient timber boat). At the age of only 21 he was made a Fellow of the Geological Society. However despite these successes, he complained that he was always ‘waiting for the big ‘find’ which never seems to come along’.

Ever since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, there had been an intense rush to find any ancient remains which would form ‘the missing link’ between apes and humans. Early human remains had been found elsewhere in Europe (including Cro-Magnon man in France), but the British Isles apparently  lacked any evidence. However, this changed when in December 1912 it was announced at a meeting of the Geological Society that skull and jawbone fragments had been discovered by Charles Dawson (later accompanied by palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward), in Pleistocene gravel beds in Piltdown, Sussex, which seemed to suggest an early human with a large brain, ape-like jaw but human teeth. The fragments Dawson refers to in his letter to Ewart were those of a molar tooth and skull pieces which seemed to match those of the Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni or ‘Dawson’s Dawn Man’) which were unearthed at a nearby site in 1915. Dubbed ‘the Wizard of Sussex’, Dawson finally found the public acclaim he craved, although he did not live to gain a knighthood or a prestigious Royal Society Fellowship. However, he also died without seeing his Piltdown discovery exposed as a fraud: this did not happen until 1953.

Improved technology for dating fossils from the 1940s meant that scientists in the Natural History Museum began to examine the Piltdown remains in detail. It was then they made various alarming discoveries: the skull and jaw fragments actually came from two different species, a human and an ape (probably an orang-utan); the teeth had been deliberately filed down to make them look human; and the remains had been artificially stained to match the local gravels.

Several theories have emerged which either inculcate Dawson as the sole perpetrator of the fraud or name various other individuals who could have been involved (including Arthur Conan Doyle). However, the general consensus casts Dawson as the prime or only suspect. But all of this was still to come when Dawson wrote to Ewart back in September 1915 – yet another example of how James Cossar Ewart’s correspondence collection charts its way through an eventful and occasionally turbulent period in scientific discovery.

You can read more about the Piltdown hoax on the Natural History Museum’s site here:

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/the-scientific-process/piltdown-man-hoax/