Laurence Fleming - The Entokil Man The Life of Harold Maxwell-Lefroy

Published in 2015 by Dexter Haven Publishing Ltd

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Copyright 2015 Laurence Fleming

The right of Laurence Fleming to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 .

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN (Mobi) 978-1-903660-19-5

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Josh Bryson

Editors Note

The pound in 1900 was worth 104 of todays money, and in 1914 97. If the reader will multiply by a hundred all the sums of money mentioned in the early part of the book he will get some idea of their value at that time. I am most grateful to Mr Robin Baillie for this information.

There were always rupees to the pound, no matter how it fluctuated, and there were annas to the rupee. A lakh of rupees was a hundred thousand, written as Rs . 1,00,000 , and a hundred lakhs made a crore .

Chapter I

At twenty-five past six on the evening of Wednesday the th of October 1925 , Harold Maxwell-Lefroy, Professor of Entomology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and formerly Imperial Entomologist to the Government of India, died in St Georges Hospital at Hyde Park Corner. He was forty-eight and had been unconscious for four days.

Earlier that year, on the st of March, the Morning Post had reported that the Professor had narrowly escaped death a few days ago while experimenting in his laboratory.

It seems that his investigations were concerned with the elimination of the fly danger, and he had reached a point where he had recorded in his notebook that the gases employed seemed too poisonous for use, when he himself was overcome. He was able to return to his private room, where he was found in a state of collapse.

From another source on the same day the Professor is reported as saying: I was so interested in the effect of the poison on the flies that I lost all account of time. Suddenly I felt difficulty in breathing, and it dawned on me my lungs were being filled with the gas.

On that occasion he was able to warn two men working in an adjoining room before he became unconscious. To restore him, oxygen had to be administered for over an hour. The flies, this report concludes, were found to be very much alive after the experiment.

By the nd of April the Morning Post was able to inform its readers that the Professor was once again at work in his laboratory.

I am able to get about again, he said, but it will be some time before I am free of the infection of the lungs which the gas caused. I am surprised and sorry that the matter has received so much publicity, because such accidents are part of the normal daily risk of our work and we do not think very much about them. Professor Maxwell-Lefroy had made a life study of insects, especially from the standpoint of their economic importance, an d as a result of his researches, the death watch beetle, which is threatening the historic buildings of England, can be eliminated at a fraction of the cost previously involved.

But this time the situation was more serious and not only the English papers were concerned. On the th of October the Border Cities Star of Windsor, Ontario, alerted its readers:

Victim of His Own Science Is In Coma

His lungs are filled with an unknown liquid which is slowly strangling him. The doctors say his symptoms indicate a gas containing chlorine. This is the second time that Prof. Lefroy has been a victim of his enthusiasm for science.

On the th, the death was reported in the Border Cities Star , The Standard of Buenos Aires, the Vancouver Sun , the Cape Argus of South Africa, the Toronto Star , the New York Times , the Ceylon Observer of Colombo and all the principal English papers. The Westminster Gazette , in the course of a long article, said:

Professor Maxwell-Lefroy fell a martyr to his own ability. It is difficult to imagine a man more devoted to his work, and more helpful to those whose fortunate lot it had been to attend his lectures, one of his students declared last night, before news of his death was known. If he had a fault it was that of too great reticence concerning his experiments, and many of us have remonstrated with him on the risks he took in the cause of science. He scoffed at the use of a gas mask, but neither of the misfortunes which befell him this year would have happened had he worn one.

From Manchester the Daily Sketch said, among much else:

In his early days Professor Lefroy was a schoolmaster, and later went to the West Indies and India, where he was the first official entomologist ever to be employed. In 1917 he went to Mesopotamia to do furious battle with the sandfly, and was described by the Daily Sketch as The Pied Piper of the War. Temperamentally he was of a retiring disposition, but conspicuously sincere in everything he undertook.