IDENTITY STATEMENT
Reference code(s): GB 0068 AUH
Held at: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Title: Henry, Augustine (1857-1930)
Date(s): 1873-1943
Level of description: Collection (fonds)
Extent: 4 Series, 3 volumes, 1 item
Name of creator(s): Henry | Augustine | 1857-1930 | Professor of Forestry, University College Dublin
CONTEXT
Administrative/Biographical history:
Augustine Henry was born in Dundee on 2nd July 1857 to Bernard Henry and Mary MacNamee. His father was originally from Tyanee in county Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and had worked as a gold prospector in both California and Australia. The family moved to Cookstown, co Tyrone shortly after Augustine’s birth where his father owned a grocery shop and worked flax dealer. Henry spent some of his childhood with his grandparents in Tyanee.
Henry was educated at the Cookstown academy and in Queen’s college, Galway. He studied natural sciences and philosophy, graduating with a first-class degree and gold medal in 1877. While at Queen’s college, Galway, he met Evelyn Gleeson who became a lifelong friend and correspondent. He then moved to Queen’s College, Belfast to take a MA the following year. After this he worked for a year in a London hospital and in 1879 passed the Queen’s University examination in medicine. During this time, one of his professors suggested the possibility of a position with the Chinese Customs service. For this Henry needed a medical qualification and he gained this possible at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, taking special examinations to speed up the process. By 1881, he had his medical qualification and accepted a post as a medical officer, setting out for China in the summer of that year.
Henry arrived in China at Hong Kong and then was ordered to his first posting at Shanghai. He spent the winter at Shanghai learning about the ways of the customs services and in the spring of 1882 he was assigned to the port of Ichang in the Hubei province on the Yangtze river, more than 900 miles inland as assistant medical officer. It was at Ichang that Henry started collecting plants. The area immediately surrounding the town is plains while only a few miles were the San Xia, a hundred miles of gorges filled with vegetation. Henry began to collect at the weekends as a hobby and then more as part of his duties as customs officer. After four months of collecting and struggling to name the plants, he wrote to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew seeking their advice. After the initial letter brought instructions on plant collecting, he wrote again offering to send them his specimens if they would identify them for him. The offer was accepted and he sent his first collection of around 1000 specimens to Kew in November that year. Henry continued to send specimens to Kew throughout his time in China and corresponded regularly with the director of the time, Mr Thiselton-Dyer. In 1888, he arranged special leave from his post to go plant collecting on behalf of Kew.
During this leave, Henry made two long journeys, one to the mountains southwest of the Yangtze and the other to the mountains in the north in the Hubei district. The main objective of these expeditions was to study the vegetables used in Chinese medicine. In addition to this, Henry also found many plants that were not known to grow in China. The areas he travelled were largely unknown to botanists and in some areas he was the western man to travel there. Although these trips were on behalf of Kew, it is unlikely that Henry was paid for his specimens. In order to recoup some of the money spent on the trips, Henry prepared several other sets of specimens which he then sold to other herbaria. In addition to these trips, Henry also was the first to employ native people as collectors on his behalf when he was not able to leave Ichang. They collected the some of the specimens that Henry sent to Kew.
In 1889, after a failed bid by Thiselton-Dyer for Henry to go collecting again, Henry was transferred to the island of Huinan. During the four months that he spent in Huinan, Henry collected 750 specimens. Henry then contracted malaria, endemic to Huinan. He was removed Hong Kong and then, after eight years in China, he returned home.
The year he spent at home was divided between Ireland and London. In London, he spent a great deal of time at Kew, staying with the Thiselton-Dyers. He also attended meetings of the Linnean Society, having become a fellow in 1888. During this year he met and married Caroline Orridge, a friend of Evelyn Gleeson and an artist. In 1891, he returned to China with Caroline. It was a difficult journey as Caroline was suffering from tuberculosis and she was taken seriously ill on the journey. Henry was based at Shanghai and was not able to go plant collecting due to his work and Caroline’s health. The Henry’s then moved to Taiwan in hopes that it would better suit Caroline. Henry took up collecting again although he was disappointed with the results. He became very interested in the native people and their use of plants. His wife health continued to suffer and in 1894, she and Henry’s sister Mary set out for Denver, Colorado to improve her health. Henry was about to leave China to join them, having arranged to sell his herbarium to Harvard, when Caroline died in September 1894.
After her death, Henry returned to Europe for a year, becoming a member of the Middle Temple. In 1895 he returned to China and was once again based at Shanghai. In May 1896 he was posted to Mengzi in South Yunnan, once of the most remote posts in China. During his time at Mengzi, he studies the local people and he began plant collecting again. His first trip into the surrounding countryside was spoilt by the weather but there were many others. Here he found lilies, magnolias and many others. When he left Mengzi, he sent off 32 cases of botanical specimens. In 1898, Henry was transferred again, this time to Simao. He was now Acting Chief Commissioner of Customs. This meant that Henry had less time to go collecting and he relied more on one of his native collectors who had been with him for many years to do the actual collecting. Henry started to learn the language of the local people, the Lolos. In 1899, he became alarmed at the rate of deforestation in the province and wrote to Mr Thiselton-Dyer and Mr Sargent at Harvard about sending out a professional collector. In the end, neither sent a collector but one was sent by James Veitch and Sons, nursery owners. This collector was E. H. Wilson, better known as Chinese Wilson. Wilson went to see Henry when he arrived in China to learn about plant collecting in China. About the time he arrived, Henry was moved back to Mengzi again and they went their separate ways, Wilson taking Henry’s plant specimens to send back to Europe when he reached the coast.
The political situation in China, which had been unsettled for many years, now became increasing dangerous. Henry became worried by this and almost resigned in 1900. This was now the time of the Boxer rebellion and later that year he had to abandon his post at Mengzi and go to Hekou. There he remained for several months. At the end of December 1900, he left China, officially on leave but in reality having resigned. He returned to London via Sri Lanka where his sister Mary was then living. Much of the next year was spent at Kew working on the collections he had sent back from China. He was now a well known plant collector and it seems that it was at this time that he became particularly interested in forestry.
In 1902, when there was no longer any question of him returning to China, Henry began to study forestry at the premier forestry school in Europe, at Nancy in France. He struggled during his time at Nancy, disliking the teaching methods and finding the French language hard to master. He was also much older than his fellow pupils which may have caused him disquiet. After a time, Henry began to wish for a job back in Ireland but none was forthcoming. He left Nancy before the end of the course and he then co-authored The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland with H. J. Elwes. This huge work, eventually published in seven volumes, took several years to complete and Henry travelled all over the country to collect information. Once it was completed, he was without a set purpose and entered into the social whirl of London in the early twentieth century. In 1907 he became engaged to Alice Brunton who became his second wife on St Patrick’s day, 1908. Henry also became professor of forestry at the new Forestry school at Cambridge University. In 1913, Henry got the position that he had always wanted when he was appointed to the newly created chair of forestry at the College of Science in Dublin. He continued at the college until his death in 1930 after a short illness.
CONTENT
Scope and content/abstract:
Papers of Augustine Henry, 1873-1943, comprising four series. The first contains two manuscript Chinese-English dictionaries written by Augustine Henry. The second is a volume of correspondence from Augustine Henry to H. B. Morse, beginning in 1893 and ending in 1909. The third series is three volumes of plant lists, detailing specimens that Henry collected in China and those which he sent to Kew for identification. The fourth series consists of a letter written by Mrs Henry to Mr Cotton and also 6 black and white photographs and a postcard inserted into a printed pamphlet.
ACCESS AND USE
Language/scripts of material: English, Chinese, French
System of arrangement:
Arranged in four series as follows: AUH/1: Dictionaries (c. late nineteenth century); AUH/2: Correspondence (1893-1943); AUH/3: Plant lists and notes (c. 1880-1900); AUH/4: Photographs.
Conditions governing access:
Unrestricted - surrogates to be used where available.
Conditions governing reproduction:
Please contact the Archive for further information.
Finding aids:
Detailed catalogue available, contact the archives for more details.
ARCHIVAL INFORMATION
Archival history:
Immediate source of acquisition:
The dictionaries were presented to Kew by Sir Peter Kerley in 1956 (see June/56.1/Herb/8/5). The volume of correspondence from Augustine Henry to H. B. Morse has an unknown provenance. The letter to Mrs Alice Henry and the photographs have an unknown provenance however they probably were given by Mr Arthur Cotton to whom the letter is addressed (see AUH/2/2: Letter from Mrs Alice Henry (1943)). The three volumes of plant lists were deposited by Augustine Henry in 1907.
ALLIED MATERIALS
Related material:
Related material At Kew:
In the Archives:
- Letters to W B Turrill - Flora of the Near East 1918-1929 Vol 1 (f 200)
- Letters to William Thiselton-Dyer concerning projected biography 1890s-1930 - 1 vol (ff 114-115)
- Letters to William Thiselton-Dyer 1870s-1920s Vol 2 (ff 94-114)
- Director’s Correspondence (DC) vol 88 English Letters HAN-HIL 1866-1900 (ff 162-165)
- DC vol 109 English Letters G-J 1901-1905 (ff 779-780)
- DC vol 115 English Letters FLA-KNO 1906-1910 (ff 863, 877-890)
- DC vol 121 English Letters FL-HE 19111-1920 (ff 1761-1800)
- DC vol 126 English Letters D-K 1921-1928 (ff 716-724)
- DC vol 144 French Letters 19101-1914 (ff 229-231)
- DC vol 151 Chinese and Japanese Letters HANCOCK-Y 1865-1900 (ff 578-584, 587-767, 815) contains letters re E H Wilson
- DC vol 152 Japanese, Chinese and Siberian Letters 1901-1914 (ff 300-307)
- DC vol 158 Indian Letters- Calcutta Botanic Garden 1901-1914 (ff 187, 189)
- DC vol 180 North African and Atlantic Island Letters 1901-1914 (f 308)
- JDH/4/16 J D Hooker Notes on Impatiens c.1900-1910 (f 1)
- Miscellaneous Report (MR) China. Plant collections, cultural products etc. 1853 - 1914 1 vol. (ff 302, 322)
- MR China. Economic Products 1880-1893 vol II (ff 280-282, 341)
- MR New Zealand Flax 1907 -1921 1 vol. – Microfilmed (f 13)
- MR Venezuela and Colombia. Miscellaneous 1864 - 1921 1 vol (f 144)
- MR Great Britain. Forestry Education and Misc. 1873 – 1926 1 vol. (f 24)
- MR British Forestry 1868 – 1909 1 vol.
In the Main Library:- Henry’s published works, various biographical pamphlets and a biography. See Catalogue for further details
Henry’s diaries and papers are deposited at Archbishop Marsh’s Library. His correspondence with Evelyn Gleeson is deposited in the National library of Ireland and his correspondence with E. L. Hillier is deposited at the Hampshire Record Office.
DESCRIPTION NOTES
Archivist's note: Entry transcribed by Sarah Drewery, March 2011.
Date(s) of descriptions: March 2011