CHARLES FRANCIS MASSY SWYNNERTON, C.M.G., F.L.S., F.E.S., C.M.B.O.U.
Massy Swynnerton was born on 3rd December 1877 at Folkestone in Kent,
the only son of the Rev.Charles Swynnerton (1843-1928)
and Maud, daughter of Major Henry William Massy of Grantstown, Tipperary.
Massy was educated at Lancing College, Sussex, and in 1897 went to Southern Rhodesia, via Natal,
where he ran a farm near the Mozambique border at Mount Selinda in the Chipingo district.
There he exhibited two main interests, the introduction and trials with a range of economic crops
and a flair for natural history and ecological studies.
His life was divided into two main phases.
For 22 years he collected and studied intensively the wide range of plants,
insects, butterflies and birds of Gazaland, running from south-eastern Rhodesia
through Mozambique to the East Coast of Africa.
His collections were sent to England and were identified and published in detail
in the Ibis (birds) and in the Journal of the Linnaean Society (plants).
He undertook numerous experiments with birds and insects and a wide range of ecological studies,
the nature of which may be discerned from some of the titles of the papers in which they were published -
- The Flora of Gazaland (1910)
- Birds of Gazaland (1907-08)
- Five Years Special Testing of Mimicry
- Experiments on Some Carnivorous Insects
- Factors in the Replacement of the Ancient East African Forest
- On a Pair of Tame Ground Hornbills
- Colouration of Mouths and Eggs of Birds
and some whose titles seem apposite even today -
- Mixed Bird Parties
- Birds in Relation to their Prey
- Stray Notes on Birds
- written between 1907 and 1918.
From his collections he had a number of birds, plants and a fish named after him.
On 25th August 1908 he married Norah Aimee Geraldine Smyth,
daughter of John Watt Smyth of Larne, Co.Antrim, a Judge of the Chief Court of the Punjab.
They had three sons, Roger John Massy (1911), Gerald Henry (1914)) and Brian Fitzalan (1918).
In his studies and travels in Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique,
Massy Swynnerton had built up a wide-ranging ecological knowledge of the area
and in 1918 he was commissioned to undertake two assignments,
one by the government of Southern Rhodesia to investigate the problem of cattle disease
caused by tsetse fly on farms on the border with Mozambique,
the second by the Mozambique Administration to examine the distribution and habits
of tsetse fly on their side of the border in Mossurize District,
where heavy losses had occurred among cattle from trypanosomiasis or the nagana disease.
At that time tsetse fly occupied about 40% of the countries between the two Tropics,
right across Africa, precluding the keeping of most forms of livestock,
and therefore to a large extent, human habitation.
It occupied two-thirds of Tanganyika Territory.
The second phase of Massy Swynnerton's life in Africa,
for which the first had been gearing him up,
began in 1919 when he was appointed to be the first Chief Game Warden in Tanganyika,
when the British Administration was set up,
with instructions to make a special study of the tsetse fly problem.
In 1928 the Government created the Department of Tsetse Research and Reclamation
to which he was appointed Director.
He established a highly scientific but practical team to study
the natural habits of the fly in relation to its habitat
and to evolve control measures over its several species,
some transmitting human sleeping sickness, others nagana.
The measures applied were largely those formulated by Swynnerton for Mozambique,
based on modifications to the environment to preclude breeding or advance
by the fly and to reclaim occupied land, followed by human settlement.
Large areas of land were reclaimed and re-populated.
Since these were the years of the Great Depression, a battle on a second front
had to be fought to secure necessary funds for the work.
Massy Swynnerton wrote the authoritative work on the tsetse fly,
The Tsetse Flies of East Africa, published in 1936 by the Royal Entomological Society.
In 1937 he was awarded the CMG in the Coronation Honours of King George VI,
but he was killed in an aeroplane crash on 8th June 1938 when flying to Dar-es-Salaam
to receive the award from the Governor.
He had been a pioneer of the use of the aeroplane for low-level ecological reconnaissance of the environment.
During his 19 years in Tanganyika he had advised a number of countries on game preservation
and on tsetse reclamation
and it is generally considered that his methods and his programmes had a wide and lasting impact
on the control of the tsetse fly in Africa.
Massy Swynnerton was buried alongside a large outcrop on Shinyanga Kopie
which overlooks part of the vast area of Tanganyika in which he worked for nearly twenty years.
The grave has a great natural headstone and a bronze plaque bears the words Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice.
In 1940, the Council of the Rhodesia Scientific Association voted the sum of £25
for the erection of a memorial to the late C. F. M. Swynnerton.
Members of the Association were invited to send in sketch designs and suggestions
and the design submitted by R. G. B. Wilson was finally accepted as being the most suitable.
Wilson prepared the working drawings and construction of the sandstone memorial was completed at the end of l94O
by masons from the Mount Selinda Mission.
A suitably inscribed bronze plaque appears in a conspicuous position on the memorial.
The memorial still exists today in the heart of the magnificent forest
where Massy Swynnerton spent so much of his time between 1900 and 1919
and which he loved so devotedly.
(See also Who's Who, Who was Who, Optima Dec.1971, Excelsa No 4 (1974).
