A puzzling unrecorded herbarium and some related mysteries
previously unknown locations for British plant species – an ideal project for a volunteer. What follows is some of the information that I have assembled that relates to this collection and to Thomas Stephenson, but I have not been able to resolve the uncertainty of whether part of the collection was made by William Edgar Gough or the greater mystery of how plants collected by Stephenson found their way to the school. While I was living in Shropshire from 1965 to 1976 I collaborated in many projects with the late Charles Sinker of the Field Studies Council, who was very well known in Shropshire, so that he was an obvious person for Mrs Susan Cecchet, then Headmistress of Adcote School, to ask for advice in 1985 about an old collection of pressed plants in a cupboard there which the School Governors thought would be more appropriately housed in a professionally managed herbarium. Charles knew that, having moved to Cambridge, I was in close touch with the late Peter Sell, who was in charge of Cambridge University Herbarium, so he asked me whether I could visit Adcote to assess the collection and, if this was acceptable to the School Governors, transport it to Cambridge. I discussed this with Peter, who agreed to incorporate the collection into Cambridge University Herbarium. I was finally able to transport the specimens to Cambridge in November 1988. It was believed at the school that the plants had been collected by William Edgar Gough (1864– 1930), the husband of the first Headmistress, Amy Gough (née Halliday, 1865–1947). He is described by Lowe (1987: 6) as ‘a keen student of local and natural history, filling notebooks with observations for talks and articles and making a valuable collection of herbs, recently rediscovered at Adcote!’. The final phrase clearly relates to the pressed plants found in the cupboard, the origin of which was doubtless being discussed at the time Lowe’s book was being written, so the suggestion that the plants were Gough’s is certainly questionable. Amy Halliday married Edgar Gough on 18 January 1894 (Lowe, 1987: 10) and 13 years later she opened her own school in Glenmore House, 32
BSBI NEWS 148 | September 2021
Doseley, near Dawley, moving it to Innage House, Shifnal, in 1915 and then to Haughton Hall on the outskirts of Shifnal in 1919, before the final transfer to Adcote in September 1927 (Lowe, 1987: 18, 38, 47, 92). One of the arguments against any of the herbarium specimens being Gough’s is the improbability of his having moved the collection from house to house; it seems more believable that it was already in the butler’s pantry at Adcote when the school moved there, even though the reason for this is obscure. Having read about the transfer of the collection to Cambridge, the late Rachel, Lady Labouchere wrote to Mrs Cecchet suggesting that part of the collection could have been made by one of the Darby family. Adcote, a splendid Tudor-style house (now Grade 1 listed) designed by Richard Norman Shaw, was built to the specification of Rebecca Darby, née Christy (1821–1909), in 1881 (Lowe, 1987: 76–77) and inherited from her by her son, Alfred Darby the second, in 1909 (Lowe, 1987: 79). His father, Alfred Darby the first, cannot have been the collector because he died in 1852 (Lowe, 1987: 77), but perhaps his son was, though there is no record of his being a botanist; or possibly a relative was. It might be possible to match the handwriting on the labels with an example in the Darby papers in the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Library and Archives. There was in fact a collecting tradition in the Christy family, Rebecca’s brother William being a well-known botanist, but, since he died in 1867 (Lowe, 1987: 76), the specimens cannot be his. Alfred Darby the second died unexpectedly on 3 July 1925 (Lowe, 1987: 90), leaving Adcote unoccupied and making it possible for Amy Gough to move her school there two years later. Even a rapid inspection of the herbarium indicates that it contains specimens collected by more than one botanist which have been brought together into a single systematic order. For example, some of the sheets suggest a beginner’s collection of common species, and others, while having no collector’s name on them, carry a distinctive label with crosses in its four corners. Examples include plants collected in Spalding (1884), Blandford (1889),
