MAKING BRITISH BOTANY
ADA B TEETGEN
Ada Teetgen was born in London to a financially comfortable middle-class family; Teetgen’s grandfather, Augustus, was the founder of the Teetgen’s Tea company. Little is known about her early years and no photograph or portrait of her seems to have survived. Nevertheless, thanks to a ‘word-sketch’ in her sister’s autobiography, we know that Bessie (as she was known to her family) was six feet tall, very upright, and of slender build. ‘By nature she was happy, witty and very talented’. Among Bessie’s hobbies were painting and drawing (a talent she employed admirably in her book about herbs – see below). She was strong-minded, her sister admitting that Bessie’s personality could at times be ‘somewhat overwhelming’.
Bessie employed that drive and determination at critical times in her life. She had a talent for writing. Since many of her books were well-reviewed non-fiction, their subjects ranging from The Life and Times of the Empress Pulcheria 399-452 AD (1907) to The Footsteps of Sir Thomas Moore (1930), she must have been happy to throw herself into detailed and lengthy research.
In 1909 Bessie travelled to the remote township of Islay, Alberta, Canada, to support her sister, Ellen, who was expecting her second child. Sadly the child died. (Ellen was both a nurse and a midwife and is probably the ‘E. Teetgen’ who received a medal for nursing as a member of the Relief Committee during the ‘Maidstone Typhoid Epidemic of 1897-8’.1) Shocked by the medical care facilities in Islay, Bessie wrote an autobiographical novel, A White Passion (1913), which helped raise funds for a local hospital to be built.
At about this time, Teetgen returned to Britain and by one account2 is next found serving as a Matron in the Prison Services. There is a record of a 'Bessie Teetgen' nursing with the 64th Detachment, Westgate, Kent, receiving wounded soldiers in the early years of the war3. What is beyond doubt is that The Chemist and Druggist of 13 May 1916 tells that Ada B Teetgen has passed her ‘certificate of qualification to act as an assistant to an apothecary in compounding and dispensing medicines’. The records of the Society of Apothecaries reveal that while she passed both of the oral parts of the examinations (materia medica and chemistry) in October 1915, she had to resit the practical examination in April 1916 before passing. The final stages of publishing Practical Herb Growing (below) may have demanded her attention for a while but, from 16 February 1917 to 16 March 1918, she worked at the Military Hospital in Scarborough as an assistant in the dispensary4.
Ada Teetgen had a longstanding interest in plants, for in her book, Profitable Herb Growing and Collecting (= PHGC), published by Country Life: London, 1916, she recalls from her travels in Alberta a friendly botanist’s comments on the influence of settlers and their introductions on the local flora. She notes, ‘When the writer was staying on a Canadian prairie farm some years ago, she remembers that the farmer used to receive long lists of wild herbs and weeds from the manufacturing chemists of some of the American and Canadian cities, asking him to note if any were found in sufficient quantity on his land to be worth the prices offered’.
Clearly Ada had a first-hand interest in, and a considerable knowledge of, drugs. She had too an awareness of medicinal plants, but what drove her to write PHGC, a task she must have undertaken while studying for the exams of the Society of Apothecaries?
The obvious imperative was World War I, but a fuller explanation must involve Edward Morrell Holmes (opposite). In the frontispiece of PHGC, Teetgen’s address is given as Orpington, Kent, which is less than 10 miles from Holmes’ home in Sevenoaks, and in PHGC she reveals that she is familiar with the flora around Sevenoaks.
Holmes wrote the Preface to PHGC in which he praises ‘…the literary skill with which the authoress has dealt with the stores of folklore, old herbals, and modern Departmental [government leaflets] publications’. In her turn, Teetgen extensively quotes from his writings and lectures, ending ‘…it is impossible for the writer adequately to acknowledge her obligations to Mr E M Holmes, or to exaggerate the benefit the book has derived from his revision’.
By 1916, Holmes was 73 years old and in retirement. One of Britain’s most distinguished field botanists, he had in his younger days been a practising pharmacist in Plymouth but, since 1872, had been Curator of the Pharmaceutical Society’s museum in London. For periods since 1872 he had lectured on botany at Westminster Hospital School, and on materia medica at the Pharmaceutical Society5. As a Fellow of the Linnean Society, he had shown himself an active supporter of women in science6. His was one of the loudest voices at the outbreak of WWI warning of Britain’s reliance on German drugs and he worked tirelessly to promote the growing and collecting of medicinal plants within Britain (he was an adviser to the National Herb Growing Association). Teetgen was an experienced writer, well able to employ her more youthful energy to promote Holmes’ arguments. Whether she found him, or vice-versa, remains a mystery. It is no mystery that their relationship was mutually beneficial.
PHGC begins by reviewing the history of herb growing and collecting from ancient times to the outbreak of WWI. Thereafter, it is a manual of best practice, with information on drying and marketing. There is praise for Mrs Maud Grieve and her ‘Vegetable and Drug Plant Farm and school of herb culture’ at Chalfont St Peter. Teetgen describes the teaching offered there and notes the farm’s aim of supplying seed and stock to would-be growers She comments, possibly from having visited Chalfont, that more of the six acres could be used if more labour was available. Part II of PHGC is comprised of detailed descriptions of the medicinal herbs, their ecology, and their uses, while Part III moves onto trees and shrubs. There are simple, elegant, line drawings of the most important plants.
In her Acknowledgements, Ada Teetgen thanks ‘J W Knapman Esq., the librarian of the Pharmaceutical Society, for his kindness in allowing her to consult the books at Bloomsbury Square’. Presumably her research for her book was invaluable study for the apothecary’s examinations since candidates were expected to know about the active ingredients of the Monkshoods (Aconitum), Deadly Nightshades (Belladonna) and Foxgloves (Digitalis), etc., about which she wrote in such detail in her book. What is striking is – even allowing for Holmes’ overview - the authority with which she writes. Ada B Teetgen was a confident woman with exceptional talents and an exceptional knowledge of so many subjects.
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My thanks are due to Maggie Hunter, Archives and Special Collections, University of Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1NS, Canada, for providing extracts from the autobiography of Ellen Lively (nee Teetgen). viz.: Autobiography of Ellen Lively, Ellen W. Lively fonds, M-0678, Glenbow Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Calgary.
I thank also Janet Payne archivist of the Society of Apothecaries for investigating Teetgen’s studies and qualifications.
References to published work, and other sources
1. The Maidstone Typhoid Epidemic, 1897-1898. (maidstonetyphoidepidemic.weebly.com)
2. Canada’s Early Women Writers (cwrc.ca)
3. Kent’s Care for the Wounded. A Record of the Work of Voluntary Aid Detachments. Archive.org
4. Wynn, Stephen. 2018. Scarborough in the Great War. Pen & Sword Books: Barnsley.
5. Hudson, Briony, and Boylan, Maureen. 2013. The School of Pharmacy, University of London. Medicines, Science and Society. Academic Press: London.
6. Ayres, P.G. 2020. Women and the Natural Sciences in Edwardian Britain. In Search of Fellowship. Palgrave MacMillan: London.
Now read Edith Gray Wheelwright, or return to Medicinal Plants in Wartime