Showing 2 results

SUMMARY:
Press clippings announce that Miss Joan Procter, aged 25, has been appointed Curator of Reptiles at the London Zoo. Articles describe her background, training under Dr. Boulenger, early expertise with reptiles, and recognition by scientific societies.

CONTENT:
THE "DAILY EXPRESS"
LONDON, FRIDAY, JULY 20, 1923.

GIRL SNAKE EXPERT.

APPOINTED TO RULE THE ZOO REPTILES.

25 YEARS OLD.

INHERITED POWER TO CHARM.

MISS JOAN PROCTER, F.Z.S., F.L.S., an Englishwoman of twenty-five, has been appointed curator of reptiles at the Zoo. She will have complete charge of dozens of venomous cobras, deadly pythons, boa constrictors, alligators, and crocodiles.

Miss Procter, unknown to the world at large, is famous among

Mrs. Procter opened a glass cage in her drawing-room, and six beautiful Brazilian snakes, which were sent to her daughter as a gift, were brought out. She allowed them to climb and wriggle and coil round her arm.

"At the age of ten my daughter had her first snake as a pet," Mrs. Procter added. "She also kept many lizards, some of them remarkably tame. One day she received a large and valuable crocodile as a present, and we took it

to Dr. C. A. Boulenger, the famous chief of the department of reptiles at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington.

"He was astonished at my daughter's knowledge of ophiology, and offered to train her in the subject when she left St. Paul's School. She became his assistant when she was eighteen, and when he resigned she was appointed to his post."

Scientists in South Africa and South America have sent Miss Procter rare and deadly reptiles from jungles and swamps. Occasionally a crate of them has been overturned on arrival, and they have been spilled on the floor. Miss Procter, without the slightest fear, has collected the poisonous creatures from their hiding places.

She read her first paper, on the pit snake, before the Zoological Society at the age of nineteen. She was made a Fellow of the society at twenty. She was elected a Fellow of the Linnæan Society, one of the foremost scientific organisations in the world, a fortnight ago. She is also a Fellow of the Zoological Society of Bombay, and last year was offered a remunerative post by the Zoological Society of New York.

MISS JOAN PROCTER.
"Daily Express" photograph.

zoologists as one of the greatest snake experts of the day.

The large, airy room in the basement of the Museum of Natural History, South Kensington, in which she works, is filled with deadly snakes, some bottled and some alive.

"Her interest in the subject is probably hereditary," said her mother to a "Daily Express" representative yesterday. Her grandfather was a famous entomologist."
(AMATEUR GEOLOGIST)

DAILY CHRONICLE.
FRIDAY, JULY 20. 1923.

WOMAN AS CURATOR OF REPTILES.

Miss J. Procter's Appointment at the London Zoo.

Miss Joan Proctor, F.Z.S., F.L.S., will take up in November the position of curator of reptiles at the Zoo, in place of Mr. F. G. Boulenger, who is to become director of the new aquarium.

Miss Proctor, who was educated at St. Paul's School for Girls, worked for some years with Dr. G. A. Boulenger. The newly appointed curator told a "Daily Chronicle" representative last night that she has been interested in reptiles and frogs since her school days, and keeps her own collection now in tanks in her Kensington home.

CURATOR OF REPTILES.
Miss Joan B. Procter, F.Z.S., F.L.S., has been appointed Curator of Reptiles at the Zoo.
-(Daily Sketch.)

SUMMARY:
Newspaper article announcing Miss Joan B. Procter’s appointment as Curator of Reptiles at the London Zoological Gardens, noting her education, museum work, and scientific honors. It highlights other women in similar posts abroad, her research and design of aquarium rockwork, and mentions her reptile pets.

CONTENT:
THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1923.

Women in the News

A CURATOR AT
THE ZOO

(FROM A WOMAN CORRESPONDENT.)

FLEET STREET, FRIDAY.
Manchester readers will be especially in-
terested in the fact that Miss Joan B. Procter,
F.Z.S., F.L.S., has been appointed curator of
reptiles at the Zoological Gardens in London,
for Miss Procter is a granddaughter of Mr.
William Brockbank, of Didsbury, whose
wonderful gardens were famous more than
twenty-five years ago. Mr. Brockbank was a
well-known geologist, and was made a Fellow
of the Linnean Society at the time of the
"Daffodil" Conference. A similar honour
has just been conferred on his granddaughter,
who has inherited his scientific tastes and his
interest in geology. It was because of her
writings and research work in zoology that
the Linnean Society made her a Fellow.

She was educated at St. Paul's School for
Girls at Hammersmith, and it was not long
after she left school that Miss Procter went to
work in the reptile department of the Natural
History Museum at South Kensington, first as a
voluntary assistant to Dr. Boulenger. Since
his retirement she has been in charge of the
department, and she is still carrying on her
work there. A "Manchester Guardian" repre-
sentative who went to see Miss Procter at her
home to-day found her very unwilling to talk
about herself. Ever since she was a child, she
said, she had been interested in reptiles and
batrachia. It is a branch of zoology to which
much less attention has been paid in England
than in America and on the Continent. In
America it is very well worked, and each large
museum has several people devoting themselves
to the study of reptiles and nothing else. The
head of the department at the New York Museum
was a woman, a Miss Dickerson, who has now
retired, and in Leyden another woman, Dr. De
Rooy, holds a similar position. In England
there are only two specialists, Mr. E. G.
Boulenger, who is at present curator of rep-
tiles at the Zoo, and Miss Procter herself.

HER WORK AT THE ZOO.

As a curator at the Zoo Miss Procter will
have charge of the reptile-house and the
tortoises. She will keep on with the research
work she has been doing at the Museum, will
describe new species, and probably work out
their anatomy. "One is always coming across
new species," she said. "With some of these
invertebrate things you get a new species every
day. It is work of absorbing interest, and one
never knows what the anatomical research will
lend to."

Miss Procter endorsed what a speaker at the
Surgeon's Conference said the other day of the
importance to human surgery of research work
in other forms of animal life. At present Miss
Procter is engaged on designing the decorative
rockwork for the new aquarium tanks at the
Zoo. She makes models of the tanks on a
scale of two inches to a foot, and the work-
men carry out her designs. Some of these
tanks will be as big as a room—the biggest
will be 30ft. in length. Instead of making
them all of Portland cement, which would
have a monotonous effect, the idea is to vary

them as much as possible—provide a setting
of natural rock, sometimes of red rock, but
mostly in shades of grey or yellow. The granite
boulders for the turtle tank have been brought
from Cornwall, and the coloured pebbles to
go with the red marble rocks in another tank
come from the Channel Islands.
From his island of Herm Mr. Compton
McKenzie has sent sacks full of the tiny white
and coloured shells that lie to a depth of
three feet on the beaches, and these are to
show off the navy-blue beauty of the lobsters
in their tank. In addition to the rockwork Miss
Procter has to find the appropriate shingles
and water weeds.

Miss Procter has her own reptilian pets, given
to her by collectors from abroad. The boa
constrictor lives at the Zoo, and when she
takes up her new post there Miss Procter will
transfer to the warmer temperature the small
snakes which at present live at her home. She
showed some of these to-day to the interviewer.
The two water snakes from Brazil and the small
snake, also harmless, from Tanganyika, were
in a semi-torpid condition, but they writhed
about in a bunch on her hand, laying their
flat heads along her arm and shooting out
their restless tongues. Realising that they
were harmless, one could understand some-
thing of their fascination.

MISS JOAN B. PROCTER,
F.Z.S., who has been ap-
pointed Curator of Reptiles
to the London Zoological
Gardens.

The Daily Mail

JULY 21, 1923.