Regarding peacocks and pheasants in the grounds

Zoë Strachan

Between 1932 and 1940, the Physician Superintendent of Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, Angus MacNiven, embarked on a venture to secure ornamental fowl, particularly peacocks and peahens, for the grounds of Gartnavel. He wrote, sometimes several times a day, to various suppliers and breeders. Eggs were duly dispatched, and those birds that he did manage to purchase were confined in wicker baskets and carried by train. The eggs tended not to hatch, and peahens in particular didn’t fare well at Gartnavel, but when birds did roam the grounds they proved as great an attraction as MacNiven had hoped for his patients and their visitors.

15th November 1932

I am anxious to get one or two ornamental birds for the hospital grounds, and it struck me that you might be able to give me some advice as to where to procure them.

Shoes on the table, hats on the bed, throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder, peacock feathers indoors. Perhaps it was because we weren’t a religious family that these superstitions wafted through our lives. In the 1970s, peacock feathers indoors were likely to be in an orange floor-standing vase along with some pampas grass, so it may have been a tenet guided by aesthetics rather than superstition. It always felt counterintuitive: when you see a peacock feather, as a child, you covet it. Your eyes grow wide, like those of my cat when I buy her a single tail feather from the florist. She wants it in her teeth, her claws, and she pounces, raking its barbs with her rough little tongue. They are beautiful, and a little frightening, those big eyes – the cat’s, and the feather ocelli. One a reminder that my furry companion is a natural born killer, the other an uncanny trompe l’oeil.

16th November 1932

They are sometimes apt to wander away a bit, but they never go far away. The one great objection to them to me is their horrible cry, but many people never notice it.

Asylums hold a kind of psychogeographical allure. We know their names, as playground currency, even if the first images we form of them are vague: the men in white coats, the basket weaving, the locked wards. Growing up on the west coast of Scotland, I had a relative who seemed always to be checking in and out of Ailsa, as if it was a rest cure. Perhaps it was. I’d imagined somewhere stocky and grey, on the industrial estate on the way to Troon. (As a very small child my sense of place and time was unformed; I believed Jesus had been crucified on Portland Road, outside the Catholic church. There was a small hill of stones, a wooden cross.) When I passed Ailsa in a car it was more benign and domestic than I had expected. A house, in grounds, with a view of fields.

18th November 1932

I should be very grateful to you if you could spare me a pair of peafowl at the price of £2.10/-, which you quote in your letter. I suppose they would be young birds?

Peacock feathers were treasures long before the 1970s, working their way across the globe from the peacock’s home in India and Sri Lanka well in advance of the birds themselves. In her fascinating study of the peacock for the Reaktion Books’ Animal series, Christine Jackson writes, ‘For anyone seeing a single plume with its brilliant eye-spot and glittering barbules for the first time, a feather was a valuable and desirable object to own. Feathers were bought and placed in cabinets of curios, like rare shells and precious stones.’ Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque tickles herself with peacock plumes in a fan.

19th November 1932

I will tell the men to catch up a pair of peafowl for you, and also a pair of golden and silver pheasants . . . The peafowl I am afraid I cannot guarantee, there are not many young ones reared here, and our stock is mainly reputed recruited from gifts of peafowl that come to us.

When I was sixteen I was taken to Pfaueninsel by a family I was staying with in Berlin. It’s an island on the Havel between Wannsee and the Glienicke Bridge, where Cold War spies were exchanged. I remember sitting on the parched grass looking up at creepy Prussian architecture, the sense of summer holiday day out punctuated by the cries of the peacocks. We picked up feathers from the ground but didn’t take them with us, and I was bought my first (and only) doner kebap on the way home. I couldn’t eat it all so it was wrapped in tinfoil and kept for me. The family rule was sensible: no food was to be wasted. Eventually, the next day, I managed to sneak the soggy kebap remains into the lower depths of the bin. I was homesick; a familiar timbre of loneliness.

23rd November 1932

There is just one point that I should like to know, that is, whether the peafowl require shelter during the winter months?

Peacocks were sacred to Lakshmi and the vahana of several other Hindu gods. They lived happily in Hera’s temple on Samos. For Christians, they were destroyers of serpents, their annual moult a symbol of resurrection. The Romans, on the other hand, ate them by the thousands. In medieval Britain we boiled them or baked them in pies. Henry IV served them in between a first course of cygnets and herons and a third course of aigrettes, curlews and small birds.

24th November 1932

When new ones come here we usually shut them in for a week or two, and then turn them out and don’t trouble any more about them, except when they invade a neighbour’s garden and cause trouble! As a matter of fact, that it what the pair sent to you had been doing, and that is why we happened to be able to send them off so promptly to you!!!

I was assistant manager for a time in a charity shop on Great Western Road. Care in the community was well underway, and the monumental old asylums were being emptied. People were often brought in by support workers, shown how to buy cheap clothing or kitchenalia. Once someone burst through the doors and equally quickly departed, wearing a nightie and non-slip hospital socks. An escapee from Gartnavel, we assumed at the time. A casual kind of cliché and besides, we were used to eccentricity. An individual in crisis, certainly, and soon afterwards a police car swept past, siren discreetly off. It’s easy to forget how the mad used always to be with us. (Recently I had lunch with a doctoral student in a library café. When a man at a neighbouring table tried to engage us in conversation, and then conspiracy, I noticed how both of us clicked into a familiar routine: avoid eye contact, smile vaguely, eschew responsibility, ignore.)

13th March 1933

I note that you are only in a position to give me a young bird, but in spite of this I think I would like to have it, and I shall be grateful to you if you will send it to me.

On first sight, Gartnavel is less benign than Ailsa seemed. I knew where it was, but never had call to go there (although I did imagine a kind of A&E, warmly white and welcoming; a fantasy, as five minutes in any actual A&E shows that those in psychiatric distress sit and wait with everyone else). When I saw it, I was close but not close enough. From a ward window in the general hospital I could see something dark and derelict, too big even at a distance. I thought I could make out turrets, which (disorientated or on morphine), I confused with the toilet in our ward, which was small and had a curved wall. My brother burned to death in there, one of my wardmates said, which didn’t help. He had been locked in somewhere, or had locked himself in, I can’t remember which. There had been a court case, she said, failings.

29th May 1933

These birds have proved a great attraction to the patients and visitors to the hospital, but, unfortunately, this morning I find that the peahen has died from some unknown cause. I found her dead at the foot of the tree where she usually perches.

Once home, I took to the Internet. In 1993, a spokesperson for Greater Glasgow Health Board said: ‘Short of tying people up like in the dark Victorian ages you can’t guarantee they won’t kill themselves. Hospitals are not there to stop people from killing themselves.’ I Googled, morbidly, and then searched the British Newspaper Archive for mention of the fire that killed the woman’s brother. I’m not sure why; something to do with dusk falling on that hulk of a ruined building, viewing from behind thick hospital glass. Nothing came up.

30th May 1933

I am afraid we have no more peahens to spare, in fact we have scarcely any left at all.

For the first nine or ten years of my life, I was taken on holiday to Portpatrick, a seaside village in Galloway with several attractions: pitch and putt, a disused railway track, a lighthouse and lighthouse-keepers’ houses, a rocky island in the bay accessed then by a low tide scramble over rocks, a shop selling gewgaws made from exotic shells. Pheasants flapping across our path on long walks through the Dunskey woods were as much part of the holiday as ice cream on the front or losing the dog in a thicket of gorse. I thought of them as wildlife, like the baby hedgehogs we saw following their mother one day, rather than as game. Sometimes we went to Lendalfoot, where you could find cowrie shells, which we knew were lucky, or picked our way down the sheep track to the sands at Killantringan. I taught my dog Nell to swim in a large rockpool (not entirely successfully) and read an elaborate message written in the sand: Lunatics built castles in the air, psychiatrists collect the rent. I don’t think we knew it was a bastardised version of a quote, or who had said it, but I remembered it was pithy and tried to repeat it later as the opening for one of those agonising talks in secondary school English. I don’t recall what the theme was, only stuttering those words out into the open plan classroom, having to repeat them again. They dropped like stones onto the brown carpet tiles.

1st June 1933

I am not breeding for profit, but merely for the purpose of having a few pheasants around the hospital grounds for the amusements and interest of the patients . . . Some time ago I purchased two peafowl from the Zoological Society in Edinburgh. Unfortunately the peahen died. Do you keep peafowl, and if so, could you supply me with a peahen?

A photograph in the archive of the interior of the concert hall at Gartnavel (‘before murals painted out’) shows rows of stylish chairs arranged with terrifying neatness, the sort of place that the German artist Candida Höfer photographed in saturated colour for her Architecture of Absence. In contrast, the soft edges of trees curve the border of the murals. One shows a gardener at work, neatening something, while a lady stands nearby, holding up one child to see two huge and elegant swans. The other boy has his back turned, as if more interested in the gardener’s broom. It is hard to imagine the hall brimming with the noise and mess of people, an entertainment playing out on stage.

6th June 1933

With regard to the pea-fowl, perhaps I might get in touch with you later regarding the purchase of a young peahen.

I wonder when we stopped expecting the everyday to be beautiful. I don’t mean our homes, over which we sometimes have some control, but municipal spaces. I’m in the modern (1972-80) extension to a Glasgow library now, and even that has wood panelling, windows of appealing shapes and angles, patterned carpets designed and made to last. The Pevsner Guide tells us that early views of Charles Wilson’s City Lunatic Asylum showed, ‘a silhouette like a towered Tudor palace strung out along the ridge, a forbidding effect.’ Of Glasgow’s 19th century civic works, the asylums were conceived on the largest scale. Contemporary attempts to render hospitals cosy or cared for tend not to work; oddly coloured walls or artworks chosen from some central collection if you’re lucky; nothing at all if you aren’t. I am inordinately fond of the ‘anthemion-headed piers and cast-iron railings patterned with anthemia’ (thank you, Pevsner) of what used to be Kilmarnock Infirmary; all that’s left now of its imposing presence atop Mount Pleasant. Teenage urban exploration (not that it was called that then) revealed glimpses: the once-polished wooden banister of a sweeping stairway, tangled amid collapsed stairs that no longer led to the upper storey. Things become frightening when they lose their function, their wholeness.

26th January 1934

Pheasants leaving Waverley one oclock today
Zoological

Pinioning is the disabling of the wing of a bird by the removal of the metacarpal bone and phalanges of one wing. In Scotland, pinioning may be performed on any bird other than poultry for the purpose of ‘general animal management’, according to the Prohibited Procedures on Protected Animals (Exemptions) (Scotland) Regulations 2007. The difference between a protected and unprotected animal becomes unclear.

17th April 1934

With reference to your advertisement in The Field Newspaper of the 14th. April, I should be glad if you would let me know what prices you are charging for your peafowl.

I used to take long walks up Great Western Road into a 1920s housing scheme to facilitate a writing class that I referred to as my ‘mental health group’. My instructions had been loose – dates, times – and I wasn’t ever really aware of how people found or were referred to the group, only that they would have some vague history of mental ill health. We read poems together, I set exercises or suggestions for homework, and the group shared writing which we discussed in a generally encouraging way. Some people wanted to improve their craft, others wanted to be heard (or even to show off), and others just seemed to enjoy the practice and the routine. We were based in a low-ceilinged community centre and had a friendly tea break each week. I grew very fond of most of them (including the person whose favourite writer was . . . himself). We didn’t talk about mental health and nobody was writing about it directly, although occasionally a new person joined for a week or two, bringing it into the room in a more palpable way (the ‘sanny-pad’ incident a case in point). One lady mentioned that she’d stayed with RD Laing at Kingsley Hall (‘a very dirty man’ whose suicide prevention strategy was crudely pragmatic; a mattress dragged to the bottom of the stairs) but most, I assumed, were there because they were retired and lived locally. A few published work, or were placed in competitions, and we enjoyed festive and summer cake potlucks. After one class I overheard one of the men say to a classmate, with urgent empathy: ‘I left the Castle behind me years ago, but you’re still in there.’ The last two words were punctuated by taps to the side of his head.

28th April 1934

I am very anxious to obtain a Peahen. If you have one, or if you know of anyone who has one for sale, I should be grateful if you would let me know

One member of my mental health group wrote to me later on, after I had passed the job on to a fellow writer. The small envelope, wrongly addressed in cramped blue biro, had circled the university’s mailroom for some time before finally landing in my pigeonhole. The augurs it contained were grave, well-meaning, accusatory. Machinations were occurring along University Gardens and beyond. I took note of the warning that my colleagues in the Scottish Literature department might add poison to my tea (milk, no sugar, my correspondent remembered) and did not reply.

30th April 1934

I understand that from time to time you have peafowl for sale. I shall be grateful if you will let me know if you are in a position to let me have a peahen, and if so at which price.

Even as an adult visiting my home town, I love the children’s corner at the Dean Castle Country Park. It’s called an urban farm now. I can’t think of peacocks without thinking of a terrible thing that happened there when I was at school. The boys responsible were caught quickly and ended up supervised in some capacity by another cousin of mine (not the Ailsa one). He was used to working with ‘the very bad boys’, the kind who set their houses on fire with their parents inside, but with these ones, he said he didn’t know what he would do.

7th May 1934

Thank you for your letter, in which you inform me that you are in a position to supply a peahen. I should be glad if you would send me a young peahen at the price of 42/-, which you quote . . . I have already a peacock which seems in good health, but the peahen which I had died for no apparent reason last year, and, from what I have heard, it would seem that the hens are more delicate than the cocks.

I am not very good at parsing my own mental state. It is years since I have calibrated mood on a psychiatrist’s questionnaire or laid it out on worksheets for a psychologist (whose office was perhaps in an old outpost of Gartnavel, now that I think of it; a chunky Victorian villa past Bingham’s Pond on Great Western Road). You were probably depressed when you were younger too, they used to say. Maybe; my many non-specific stomach aches prompted a barium meal at the children’s hospital, the truant officer at the door.

14th May 1934

I am glad to say that the peahen you sent me arrived safely on Friday.

The pavane originated in Spain and became popular across Europe. Christine Jackson describes how in 4/4 time, dancers placed their feet like a peacock strutting (a verb inexorably linked with the bird), then ‘made a wheel before each other, like that of a peacock’s train, also imitating the manner in which two rival peacocks circle one another’.

12th December 1938

Some friends of mine are offering for sale a peacock and two peahens. Could you tell me what would be a reasonable price to offer for these? The peacock and one peahen are at least five years old; the other peahen is a younger bird, and is the offspring of the two older ones.

J.C. Laidlay, supplier of hand-reared waterfowl from Lindores in Fife, supplied MacNiven with a brochure explaining that all stock was kept ‘under as natural conditions as possible’. Alongside his prices, Laidlay noted that, ‘Birds on our List are all hardy, and we keep them here in the North with no protection beyond natural shelter supplied by bushes, banks and reeds.’ All birds were pinioned, including the British geese – White Fronted, Bean, Pink Footed, Barnacle and Brent – which were caught, kept several months and tamed before offering for sale. While pheasants were often available, peafowl eluded him.

14th November 1939

. . . it is quite safe to keep cocks together so long as they have not seen any hens, there fore they won’t desire them. The two I am sending you have always lived together by themselves.

Left to their own devices, peacocks are very good flyers, able to rise quickly and at acute angles and to achieve high speeds, although in general they prefer to run into undergrowth to escape danger. Their sturdy legs make them fast, and their fancy feathers camouflage them surprisingly well. Occasionally escapees form naturalised colonies. In areas of New Zealand, groups of over one hundred descend to munch their way through seeds and shoots. ‘They’re like blimmin’ road runners,’ said a spokesperson for the Wanganui Federated Farmers.

16th February 1940

I should be very grateful if you would send the bird through by passenger train, and I would arrange to meet it here.

Like many people, my formative influences did not give a nuanced view of mental health. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Catch 22 from the library, thrilling (underage) trips to see Betty Blue and In the Realm of the Senses at the Glasgow Film Theatre. After the children’s corner, the train station was my favourite part of Kilmarnock: embarkation point for the foreign film, with its scenes of a sexual nature; escape from the worst of the town. It was a while before I realised that it wasn’t the place that I wanted to escape but its circumstances, the damage that the late twentieth century had wrought on its ‘communal psyche’ (an insight that sticks with me, again from the Pevsner Guide).

29th March 1940

= PEACOCK LEFT 9 OCLOCK TODAY = MAUDE +

Darwin was perturbed by peacocks; the mere sight of a feather, he wrote once, ‘makes me sick!’ The idea that the captivating feathers were not God-given, but an evolutionary tactic to appeal to the aesthetic sense of peahens was already a daring proposition; that females might exert choice in sexual selection even more so. Nevertheless, he came to espouse it, proposing that birds ‘have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.’

5th November 1940

I think it is highly probable that the condition was, as you suggest, some obscure nervous degeneration.

Still dismayed by the death of his peahen, MacNiven took one of his golden pheasants to the veterinary surgery of William L Weipers at 13 Queens Crescent. The same surgery that my big-eyed cat braves today for her annual vaccination. Across the road, a treecreeper does what its name suggests in the central garden. This small bird is elusive when the magpies are about, but a glimpse of it lifts the spirits (or so the man who fitted my kitchen worktop said, scrolling through his phone to show me the photos he’d taken). Laidley of Lindores, the supplier of waterfowl, was getting at something similar when he suggested that, ‘Many lakes and ponds in our parks and gardens could be made more beautiful and attractive by the presence of some ornamental waterfowl. A walk through St James Park clearly demonstrates that fact.’ And so was Angus MacNiven, although he preferred his fowl on Gartnavel’s dry land. I think of him, and his peacocks, when I stroll around Bingham’s Pond, looking at the ducks and swans. None of them are pinioned, all of them are free.

Commentary

The archive material which I was sent, an extract of the ‘Papers regarding pheasants and peacocks in the grounds’, was so tantalising that I downloaded and read the whole correspondence between Dr Angus MacNiven, Physician Superintendent of Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, and the various individuals and businesses that he hoped could supply him with ornamental birds for the amusement of patients and visitors. Much of the correspondence is with T. H. Gillespie, the Director-Secretary of The Zoological Society of Scotland, based in Corstorphine Hill House. Between 1932 and 1940 (the war rather got in the way of the peacock project) letters were flying back and forth – as indeed were telegrams giving the ETA of the baskets containing pheasants and peafowl. It isn’t noted how the birds travelled from railway station to Gartnavel but when they arrived, they ‘did not seem any the worse of the journey.’

My temptation was to write a jolly story about the two men, or maybe something heart-warming about adventures and misadventures with patients and birds. An issue arose though, which I refer to in this piece; I really can’t think of peacocks without thinking of something that at the time, I found very distressing. For itself, of course, but I suppose in terms of something else, some kind of loss of innocence that anchored in my memory back then. I can still see a fuzzy photo on the posters of the front page of the Kilmarnock Standard that used to be fastened on boards outside newsagents, though I can’t remember the one-word headline. ‘Carnage’, perhaps, or ‘Evil’ (I’m unwilling to check the newspaper archive for that one). So, my own memories were stirred, and so was my interest in peacocks.

Christine E Jackson’s book was particularly illuminating and enjoyable as I researched. Peacocks are the most fascinating of birds, and few others can have such rich cultural histories. Like all birds, they are also irresistible sources of metaphor and, in spite and because of appearance, perfectly adapted to survival.

Sources:

Papers regarding peacocks and pheasants in the grounds. 1932-1940. HB13/11/19. Records of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow, Scotland. Wellcome Collection.

Concert hall interior (before murals were painted out). Wellcome Collection.

Jackson, Christine E. Peacock. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

Close, Rob & Riches, Anne. The Buildings of Scotland: Ayrshire and Arran. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012.

Richards, Evelleen. Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Williamson, Riches & Higgs. The Buildings of Scotland: Glasgow. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2005.

The Prohibited Procedures on Protected Animals (Exemptions) (Scotland) Regulations 2007 (legislation.gov.uk) (accessed 20th December 2022).

‘No predators, plenty to eat’: New Zealand struggles with plague of peacocks | New Zealand | The Guardian, 30th October 2020 (accessed 20th December 2022).

[Correspondence on pheasants and peacocks, HB13/11/19]