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be discussion with the Trustees of a pro-posal for the Meteorological Committee to submit to the Treasury. The Committee sub-sequently wanted to know if an accountant could see the accounts of the Organization to make a report for sending to the Treasury. That report proposed the Met Office taking over the Organization on the basis of paying a capital sum to produce an annual amount of £500, which with surplus income from the Endowment Fund would provide an annual income of around £700 as a pension for Mill. Mill agreed to ask the Trustees to accept the proposal but emphasized the need to decide the fate of the Magazine. Lyons thought that combining with the Organization would strengthen the state service and make for co-operation all round – including the Admiralty and Air Ministry, where there was a strong separatist tendency. Concerning the Magazine, he thought that the Meteorological Committee might take it on, by combining it with the existing Met Circular, but concerning 62 Camden Square the Office could take on no more than a yearly tenancy because there was a suggestion to re-house meteorologi-cal services generally.

The assets of the Organization, according to the agreement to assign them to the

Met Office for £5470 dated 19 July 1919, included copyright of the publications, instruments in the garden of 62 Camden Square, records of monthly totals of rainfall from published sources and originals in about 213 volumes from before 1800 to 1918, as well as original records of rainfall from British Isles observers from 1860. When the agreement took effect, on 14 July 1919, the independent British Rainfall Organization came to an end.

In summary, although Symons and Mill were both overworked and underfunded, resulting in stresses that greatly affected their health, they were able to achieve a great deal. Symons developed a network of gauges with a general uniformity of mea-surement and recording. It depended almost entirely on unpaid volunteers, and it was a model for other countries. But, as Mill said:

Symons never grasped the importance of theoretical reasoning; he was essentially a collector of facts. A shrewd common sense controlled his underlying fire of enthusi-asm, so enabling him to devise rigidly thor-ough models of computation, checking and book-keeping. He was able to keep personal contact with his growing army of

observers and in so doing made friends with all sorts – from the most eminent men of science to the merest dabblers in harm-less hobbies.

Mill was able to transform the essentially gentlemanly pastime of data gathering into an increasingly exact science, largely through the introduction of mapping that enabled much to be learnt about the distri-bution of rain on various time and space scales. Because of the severe stresses, it was wise of him to put the Organization into the hands of Trustees until it was found necessary, in 1919 after 60 years, to merge it with the Met Office.

ReferencePedgley DE. 2002. A short history of the British Rainfall Organization. Occasional Papers on Meteorological History No. 5. Royal Meteorological Society.

Correspondence to: David E. Pedgley,35 Thamesmead, Crowmarsh,Oxon. OX10 8EY, UK.

dbcrow@waitrose.com

© Royal Meteorological Society, 2010

DOI: 10.1002/wea.579

The man behind the British Rainfall Organization

Malcolm WalkerTiverton, Devon

A letter in the archive of the Royal Mete-orological Society begins as follows:

Very thankful to be able to say that I have finished my Address for the Jubilee Meeting – will take 17 or 18 minutes. Hope that it is not too long. It is a little bit pugnacious.

The letter was written on 7 February 1900 by the President of the Society, George Symons (Figure 1). The addressee was the Assistant Secretary of the Society, William Marriott. Symons was going to speak at a meeting on 3 April 1900, the fiftieth birth-day of the Society. Alas, he was struck down by paralysis a week after he wrote the letter and died on 10 March. The President who replaced him, Dr Theodore Williams, read the Address at the Jubilee Meeting, saying in his introduction that

the express wish of Symons, whilst lying ill, had been that another President should be elected in his place.1

The choice of Symons to serve as President for the Jubilee year showed the very high

regard for him in meteorological circles. He had long been a leading member of the Society. He had served on the Council since 1863, become a Vice-President in 1871 and held the office of Secretary continuously from 1873 to 1899, apart from the two years he had been President (1880 and 1881). His contribution to the Society over four decades had been extraordinary.

In paying tribute at the Ordinary Meeting of the Society on 21 March 1900, Dr Williams said that Symons had proved himself one of the most active men of the century.2 It was, he added, testimony to this activity that most of those on the list of new Fellows to be elected that night had been proposed by him. Symons had taken part in every branch of meteorology and his ingenuity Figure 1. George Symons (British Rainfall, 1899).

1Dr Williams had previously served as President for the years 1892 and 1893.2The words of Dr Williams can be found in Volume 26 of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (1900, page 159).

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had been remarkable. He had been able to surmount all difficulties successfully: and if an instrument required for a special purpose was not available, he immediately set to work and invented one. His principal work, though, was his rainfall organization.

Not only did he possess the faculty of work-ing himself, but he raised up around him a great army of co-workers, which at the time of his death numbered over 4000.

Another who spoke at the meeting on 21 March 1900 was Charles Harding, who said when proposing a vote of condolence that his acquaintance with Symons had extended for nearly 40 years. As far back as February 1861, he had worked in the same room with Symons in the Meteorological Office, then the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade. He had at that time learnt to respect Symons thoroughly and had never had occasion to lessen that feeling. Symons had always been ready to assist anyone, especially when making a research, and would always place at their disposal any information and data that he might have received.

In the Meteorological Department, Symons assisted with the telegraphy and worked on the extraction and reduction of observations. By the time he joined the Department, on 12 March 1860, on the invitation of its director, Admiral FitzRoy, he had already established a network of voluntary rainfall observers, which he called his system of collecting rainfall records, with himself as the centre.3 The network contin-ued to grow whilst he was employed in the Meteorological Department, to the extent that FitzRoy became concerned. He recog-nized the importance of the work but felt, nevertheless, that Symons would soon be unable to combine it with his departmental duties. There were exchanges between the two men, the upshot being that Symons resigned in 1863 to work full-time on the collection and collation of rainfall statistics. Despite the resignation, relations between Symons and FitzRoy remained cordial. Indeed, FitzRoy served as a voluntary observer for the network for a short while.

The archive of the Royal Meteorological Society contains a letter dated 10 July 1900 from another who had worked with Symons in the Meteorological Department, Harvey Simmonds. Addressed to William Marriott, this letter says:

Mr Symons’ mother took great interest in her son’s rainfall researches and in the early stages encouraged him to persevere in them.

There is also a note to Marriott from yet another former colleague of Symons, James Staughton Harding (brother of Charles). Dated 19 July 1900, it contains the informa-tion that Symons left the Meteorological Department on 31 December 1863 but received payment after this date for work carried out at home. According to J S Harding, no cause of leaving was assigned, but he had always understood that it was owing to Admiral FitzRoy objecting to his writing to the newspapers with regard to rainfall work.

The data from Symons’s observational network were presented in British Rainfall, and the forerunner of this annual publica-tion, for the year 1860, called English Rainfall, shows there were then 168 stations in the network. He began to publish a monthly rainfall circular in 1863, and this developed into the broader-based Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, first published in February 1866. Another colleague of Symons, Richard Strachan, who joined the Meteorological Department in 1862, founded the Meteorology Magazine in 1864, but it was short-lived. Only four issues were ever published, the first in April 1864, the last in July of the same year. The magazine founded by Symons became the Meteorological Magazine in 1919 and con-tinued to exist until 1993, when publication ceased.

George James Symons was born on 6 August 1838 at 28 Queen’s Row, Pimlico, London, the only child of Joseph Symons and his wife Georgiana (née Moon). He was educated first at St Peter’s Collegiate School, Eaton Square, later under two Irish private tutors at Thornton in Leicestershire and sub-sequently, in the session 1859/1860, at the Metropolitan School of Science applied to Mining and the Arts, Jermyn Street, where he passed with distinction after attending a course of lectures on physics given by Professor John Tyndall. In the early years of his rainfall work, his mother was his chief assistant. His father, a grocer, died in 1857. He married Miss Elizabeth Luke on 16 September 1866 and she too shared his work, helping him greatly in his clerical work and going with him to meetings of the British Association and other bodies. Their only child died in infancy, and Elizabeth her-self died in 1884.

Symons started to make weather observa-tions whilst still a schoolboy and in 1857 became one of the meteorological reporters who sent observations to James Glaisher, Superintendent of the Magnetic and Meteorological Department of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. For some years, Glaisher had been abstracting such obser-vations when preparing the quarterly Remarks on the weather that was published by the Registrar General of Marriages, Births and Deaths. Symons continued to supply

observations until he died, at which time Glaisher, now aged 90, was still carrying out his work for the Registrar-General. Symons offered Glaisher his services as an assistant when he was 16 but Glaisher declined and tried to dissuade him from pursuing scien-tific investigation on the grounds that it did not pay!

Symons was elected a member of the British (later Royal) Meteorological Society on 25 March 1856 and first spoke at a meet-ing of the Society on 24 March 1857. When elected, he appears to have been living in the house where he had been born. His nomination form gives the Pimlico address and also shows that one of those who nomi-nated him was James Glaisher. His first paper, On the thunderstorms of 1857, was read before the Society on 9 June 1858 but not then published. A copy of it was, how-ever, discovered among papers belonging to James Glaisher, after his death in 1903, and was published in 1904 in the Society’s Quarterly Journal (Vol. 30, pp 29–40). Glaisher was the driving force behind the Society for more than two decades and Symons succeeded him as Secretary in 1873.

An autobiographical piece by Symons has been preserved at Cambridge in the archive of the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO 6/5). In it, he wrote thus of his early career.

I commenced observing with standard meteorological instruments in 1856 and have been a regular contributor to Mr Glaisher’s Quarterly tables ever since. In 1856 I was elected a Member of the Brit. Met. Soc. and in 1863 was placed on the Council thereof. I have been a Member of the Scottish Met. Soc. since 1861.

In 1858 I communicated two papers to the British Association, one of which (part of Prof. Baden Powell’s report on Luminous Meteors) was specially commended by the Astronomer-Royal. In 1859 I was placed on the [Association’s] General Committee and in 1862 and subsequent years on the Committee of Section A. It is probably unnecessary to give a list of my contribu-tions to either the British Ass. or other soci-eties, but I may mention that a paper on rainfall read by me at the Cambridge meet-ing [ in 1862] was ordered to be printed in extenso, subsequent reports have been called for, and grants for the issue of gauges voted to myself irrespective of any Committee, i.e. leaving the subject entirely in my hands.

The autobiographical piece formed part of his unsuccessful application in 1865 for the directorship of the meteorological observa-tory at Greenwich.

Symons said in his application that he had attended Tyndall’s lectures on physics

3Only later did he use the term ‘organization’ and he never himself called it the ‘British Rainfall Organization’.

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simply with the intention of profiting by the latest discoveries. He went on to say that on finding an examination was to be held he had decided to sit it and had without preparation passed first of all the competi-tors. He mentioned also in the piece that he had long been a contributor to The Times newspaper and had frequently and for considerable periods had charge of the meteorological instruments belonging to the (late) Board of Health. Of his work in the Meteorological Department, Symons said that his attention was given principally to anemometric investigations, but embrac-ing other subjects occasionally. He had been sent to Orkney in 1862 and erected the self-recording anemometer now at work there.

As well as standard meteorological instruments, Symons also used instruments he had constructed himself, among them a mercurial barometer. Throughout his career, he took a close interest in the design, siting and exposure of meteorologi-cal instruments and equipment, particu-larly rain gauges, evaporimeters and thermometer screens, and he inspected and tested gauges in his network. He also invented instruments, among them storm gauges, the sheathed thermometer and a new kind of thermometer for measuring earth temperature. Perhaps most notable, though, was his brontometer, made to his design by Richard Frères of Paris in 1890 and subsequently used at his climatological station in northwest London as occasion required. This instrument was designed to record the sequences of various phenom-ena during thunderstorms. Barometric pressure, temperature, wind speed and rainfall were recorded on endless paper 12 inches (30 centimetres) wide on a drum which travelled at 1.2 inches (3 centime-tres) per minute. Incidences of lightning flashes, thunder, hail and heavy rain were added by hand.

A factor which encouraged Symons to study rainfall was the rapidly increasing demand on the nation’s water resources in the nineteenth century, brought about by growth of population, ever-greater demands of industry and the need to improve sanita-tion. The outbreaks of cholera which occurred in the British Isles and other parts of Europe in the middle decades of the nine-teenth century particularly concerned him, and he recognized in this connection the need to determine amounts and distribu-tion of water supply.

According to the 1907 edition of British Rainfall (p 9), Symons commenced his sys-tematic observations of rainfall at 9 am on 2 January 1858. In letters published in The Times in 1858, 1859, and early 1860, he gave his address as Queen’s Road, Camden Town. He moved to 129 Camden Road Villas in the spring of 1860 and to 136 Camden Road at

the end of December 1864. Eventually, in June 1868, he moved to 62 Camden Square, his home until his death. These four loca-tions were within a very few hundred metres of each other and so, as noted in the 1907 edition of British Rainfall, their conditions of exposure would not have been greatly dif-ferent. Who looked after his meteorological station whilst he was away is not known. As noted above, he was away in Orkney for some time in 1862, and he said in a letter that was published in The Times on 15 August 1864 that he had been compelled by ill-health to leave for a time both London and his books. The letter was written from Fort Crescent, Margate.

After he left the Meteorological Depart-ment of the Board of Trade, Symons devoted himself wholly to his rainfall work and became well known nationally for this work. He often served as consultant to water engineers and in 1897 received from the Prince of Wales the Albert Gold Medal of the Society of Arts, awarded, to quote the citation:

…for the services he had rendered to the United Kingdom by affording to engineers engaged in the water supply and the sew-age of towns a trustworthy basis for their work, by establishing and carrying on dur-ing nearly forty years systematic observa-tions (now at over 3000 stations) of the rainfall of the British Isles, and by record-ing, tabulating and graphically indicating the results of these observations in the annual volumes published by himself.

It could have been added that he encour-aged rain gauge trials and standardization, even changing the instruments and tech-niques he had used personally for many years to achieve ‘best practice’.

In an obituary notice published in British Rainfall in 1900, Symons’s friend and col-league Sowerby Wallis called him the great-est authority on all branches of British Rainfall and an all-round meteorologist of wide attain-ments. Wallis had worked with Symons since 1872, when he was 15 years of age, first as an unindentured apprentice and since 1890 as joint editor of British Rainfall. After the death of Symons, Wallis assumed full responsibility for this publication and for Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine. He was also, for three years, Director of the network of rainfall observers founded by Symons, known from 1900 as the British Rainfall Organization.

A memorial service for Symons was held on Friday, 16th March 1900, at Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone Road, prior to his inter-ment at Kensal Green Cemetery, beside the remains of his father, mother, wife, and child. The service was attended by the President and Secretary of the Royal Society and by eminent representatives of many other bodies Symons had supported.

He had been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1878 (having first been proposed as a candidate for election in 1872). The 16 Fellows who recommended him included James Glaisher and a number of senior members of the Meteorological (later Royal Meteorological) Society.4 Others included Dr T. R. Robinson, the inventor of the Robinson cup anemometer, and Robert Scott, the Director of the Meteorological Office. His nomination form included as one of his qualifications: author of a series of annual volumes on the rainfall of the British Isles. Also mentioned were the papers on rainfall he had published in British Association reports, the reports on ane-mometry at Bermuda and Halifax he had published in Board of Trade Meteorological Papers in 1861 and 1863, his input on rain-fall to the 1866 edition of Petermann’s Hydrographical Map of the British Isles, sev-eral papers on underground temperature incorporated in reports to the British Association, and his ‘elaborate experiments’ which had led to improvements in rain gauges, solar radiation thermometers, ther-mometer stands, and methods of measur-ing evaporation from water surfaces.

He had been involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science since the late 1850s and served at various times on its Council, General Committee and numerous other committees, including the Climate of Tropical Africa Committee, the Committee on Meteorological Photography, the Rainfall Committee, the Seismological Committee, and the Solar Radiation Committee. He had been a mem-ber of the Société Météorologique de France since 1872 and twice served on its Council. He had also been a Fellow of the Royal Botanic Society since 1869 and served on its Council. However, as Sowerby Wallis mentioned in the obituary notice, Symons resigned his seat on the Council in 1891 when that body resolved to allow smoking in the Society’s gardens. He had always been strongly opposed to this being allowed, even though he was himself a smoker.

Symons had also been a member of the Social Science Association, of which he had become a Council member in 1878, and the Sanitary Institute, of which he had been Registrar from 1880 to 1895. In addition, he had become a Membre correspondent étranger Société Royal de Médicine Publique de Belgique in 1884, a Korrespondierendes Mitglied der Deutschen Meteorologischen Gesellschaft in 1886 and a Socio Corre spondiente Sociedad Cientifica Antonio Alzate (Mexico) in 1892. He was an honorary member of numerous scientific societies, among them the Watford Natural

4Permission to use term ‘Royal’ was granted by Queen Victoria in 1883.

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History Society, the Essex Field Club, the Northamptonshire Natural History Society, the Meteorological Society of Australasia, the Biarritz Association and the Croydon Microscopical Club. His awards and distinc-tions included a Telford Premium of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1876 for his paper Floods and water economy and a cer-tificate of thanks the same year for his assis-tance in connection with the Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus at South Kensington.

The presentation of a Testimonial Album by the Meteorological Society in February 1879 showed that he had long since impressed senior members of the Society. This Album contains nearly 200 photo-graphs of Fellows and an illuminated address that reads as follows:

Presented by a large number of Fellows of the Meteorological Society to George James Symons, Esquire, Fellow of the Royal Society, Member of Council of the Royal Botanic and of the French Meteorological Societies, etc. etc., in friendly recognition of the valuable work done by him for the Society, by inspecting its stations and test-ing the instruments used by the observers, independently of the services rendered by him, for several years, as one of their Secretaries.

Perhaps his greatest honour, though, was his appointment as a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, conferred on him by the President of the French Republic on 29 May 1891 and presented to him by the French Ambassador in London on 18 June. The Album and his insignia of the Legion of Honour are today in the possession of the Royal Meteorological Society, and so, too, is his Gold Medal of the Society of Arts.

As so much of Symons’s time was taken up with committee work, inspecting meteo-rological stations, producing his monthly meteorological magazine, running his rain-fall organization, and editing British Rainfall, one might think that he had no time for anything else, but that was far from the truth. He gave many lectures and wrote dozens, if not hundreds, of articles, reports and pamphlets, not to mention letters to newspapers. We do not know, however, exactly how many pieces he wrote, for he did not sign them all, particularly pieces in British Rainfall and Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine which we can only say were probably by him. He wrote com-paratively few books, notable among them Rain – how, when, where, why it is measured, published in 1867, but he edited, translated,

and published reproductions of a number of works, including, in 1891, a manuscript discovered in the Bodleian Library that year, Consideraciones temperiei pro 7 annis (The earliest known journal of the weather: kept by the Rev. William Merle, Rector of Driby, Lincolnshire. 1337–1344).

Symons had a great interest in collecting books. He was the greatest meteorological historian and bibliographer of his day, whose personal library at the end of his life contained thousands of titles, including about 6500 bound volumes on his shelves, some 7000 or maybe 8000 pamphlets in drawers and cupboards, and a large collec-tion of photographs. He bequeathed to the Royal Meteorological Society any works not already in the Society’s library, as a result of which the library gained 2200 bound vol-umes, about 4000 pamphlets and 900 pho-tographs, all selected by William Marriott in consultation with Theodore Williams. To pro-vide accommodation for such a large amount of material, the Society had to buy bookcases, drawers, cupboards and lockers, something Symons had anticipated, for he left a legacy of £200 specifically to meet this expenditure. That was foresight indeed!

Symons’s library was almost entirely meteorological, but included works on elec-tricity, magnetism, earthquakes, natural phi-losophy, physical geography, balneology, mineral springs, meteoric stones, astronomy and lightning conductors. Nine of the books selected by the Society were published between 1476 and 1499, 128 between 1500 and 1599, 214 between 1600 and 1699 and 403 between 1700 and 1799. Books that were not meteorological were sold by the Society in the 1970s. All other books of the Symons Bequest are today at Exeter, cared for by the staff of the National Meteorological Archive.

Lightning and thunder had long inter-ested Symons. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, the first paper he read before the British Meteorological Society in 1858 had been on thunderstorms. Thus, it was not surprising that he was chosen to become the Secretary of the Lightning Rod Conference which was formed by the Meteorological Society in 1878 (with the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Physical Society, and the Society of Telegraph Engineers and of Electricians) to consider, as it was put in the preface to the committee’s report, the desir-ability or otherwise of issuing a code of rules for the erection of lightning conductors, and to proceed in preparing a code if it is thought desirable. Symons edited the subsequent report, which was published in 1882 and ran to 261 pages.

His interest in seismology may have been aroused by the explanation he was given for a crack in a wall in a house where he lived for a while in Leicestershire when a boy. The cause was said to be an earth-quake. Be this as it may, Symons suggested to the Royal Society after the eruption of Krakatoa in August 1883 that a committee should be appointed to undertake an exhaustive study of this phenomenal occur-rence. The outcome was that he chaired the Society’s Krakatoa Committee and edited the voluminous report on the eruption and subsequent phenomena published by the Royal Society in 1888. And two days after the great earthquake which caused so much damage in Essex on 22 April 1884, he and Sowerby Wallis spent a day in the county making notes of the damage. Characteristically, he also wrote to The Times, asking, in a letter published on 23 April, for information about the time and nature of the shock and for details of dam-age. He prepared an eight-page report for the Mansion House Committee and pub-lished in the May 1884 issue of Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine (pp 49–62) a substantial record of the damage he and Wallis had seen and correspondents had supplied.

But why did Symons use the word ‘pug-nacious’ in that letter he wrote on 7 February 1900? His personality was widely consid-ered amiable. He had a twinkle in his eye. He was, Wallis said in his British Rainfall obituary notice, ever ready to help others to work, supplying freely assistance, counsel, information or funds as seemed most requi-site. He was, Wallis added, a man of singu-larly genial manner, making a friend of almost everyone with whom he came in con-tact, even those with whom he differed. Wallis did not think Symons made a single enemy. And yet, the pages of Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine show that he could indeed be pugnacious and not infre-quently was. Time and time again, he was critical, often scornful, of the men of the Royal Society who ran Kew Observatory and the Meteorological Office. He could indeed be pugnacious but generally was not. Perhaps he did not suffer gladly those he considered fools!

Correspondence to: Malcolm Walker2 Eastwick Barton,Nomansland, Tiverton,Devon, EX16 8PP, UK.

© Royal Meteorological Society, 2010

DOI: 10.1002/wea.595

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