Clapham's Wombats

Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a passion for wombats.  The Pre-Raphaelite painter was the proud but rather unsuccessful owner of wombats at his home in Chelsea in 1869.  They have the distinction of a biography by John Simons.

These were not the only wombats in south west London in the 1860s, though they may have been the only pets.  The others, kept in north Clapham by surgeon John Bush, having been stocked for eating purposes.

It is not surprising that these wombats are indirectly associated with two of the most entertaining of 19^th century eccentrics, the Bucklands.  Father, William, was a pioneer of geology and Dean of Westminster Abbey, and his son Frank worked as a naturalist at a time when such an occupation could hardly be said to exist.

John Bush had taken over the Clapham Retreat in Union Road, a private lunatic asylum with extensive grounds, in 1844.  Frank had made his acquaintance under the most unfortunate of circumstances.  William Buckland had been placed in Bush’s care in the 1850s when it was no longer possible for him to live at the Dean’s country living in Islip.  Tuberculosis of the upper spine, which took hold after an injury sustained in a coach accident in Germany, produced years of decline characterised by apathy and melancholia.  William died in 1856.

Perhaps Bush had been recommended to Frank Buckland by the doyen of natural historians Professor Richard Owen with whom Frank enjoyed many an exotic meal.  Both Bucklands were renowned for their efforts to eat their way through the entire animal kingdom.  William was known to serve hedgehog, crocodile and puppy to his guests at the Abbey.  Frank was Honorary Secretary of the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals, an association with the laudable aim of finding cheap and palatable alternatives to beef to feed the growing population.  John Bush became Honorary Treasurer.  (Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the sculptor who created the monsters in Crystal Palace Park eventually succeeded Frank Buckland.)  The Society was backed by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts.  After an energetic start in 1861 the Society petered out around 1867.

Wombats were originally suggested as food but Buckland noted that there might be barriers of prejudice against their consumption.  Three pairs arrived at Clapham around 1863 and became tame, and even gave up burrowing.  Apart from wombats, Bush experimented with keeping Chinese sheep (which were eaten), silk worms (which you can still find today, canned in Chinese grocers), wallabies (kangaroo ham had been eaten at the Society’s banquet in Willis’s Rooms, St James’s in 1862) and numerous species of bird.

There was a report in the Gardener’s Chronicle at the time, though its reporting on such matters was not always entirely serious, that a wombat had been cooked but when it arrived at the table the assembled company “turned pale and rushed out of the room”.

References

Rossetti’s Wombat by John Simons, 2008

They Dined on Eland by Christopher Lever, 1992

The Eccentric Ark, by G. H. O. Burgess, 1967

The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, DD, FRS by Mrs. Gordon, 1894