A Visit to Malvern: for Darwin Day, 12th February 2024

St Anne's Well, Great Malvern

Taking up the Blog again after absence (for good musical reasons, see below) of a few months. The Malvern Hills featured in this blog last year with a visit to the grave of Edward Elgar, whose great ‘coded’ work inspires the name of this blog and of my Darwinian string quartet ‘Eyenigma Variations’. Great Malvern itself has strong and poignant Darwin connections, rather beautifully described in this Zoonomian blog by excellent science communicator Tim Jones. On a visit this weekend to the beautiful Malvern Priory in the centre of town – the stained glass is the most magnificent exposition of the Bible in the country after York Minster – we paused for a sad moment at the grave of Charles and Emma’s daughter Annie (see Tim’s blog for a picture and description). Charles took Annie there in a desperate attempt to cure her ill-health, as many have over centuries to ‘places of healing’. His scientist’s willingness (or faith?) to at least try new methods and critically evaluate them didn’t play out; fashionable water-cures and hydrotherapy were no match for the tuberculosis bacillus, scourge of the Victorians and only isolated in 1882. He had to leave his daughter in the churchyard,  170 miles from home.

At least Malvern did have good claims to be a healthy, life-affirming environment. I don’t buy the theories that Darwin had a ‘mysterious stomach illness’. Sheer terror at upsetting the conventional world-view with his comprehensive treatise on Evolution (and our modern knowledge about stress-related conditions) is quite enough to explain his symptoms. But the mere sight of real mountains -and they are real mountains! – must have lifted his spirits and tired his legs for the first time since his Andean climbs and briefly, later, UK geological tour. And the water is very good. Hundreds of springs gush from fissures in the impermeable pre-Cambrian rock all along the ten-mile ridge. The picture above is Katherine at the probably the most celebrated ‘pilgrimage’ well: St Anne’s Well.  It’s at the top of the ‘Ninety-nine Steps’ – plus a stiff climb – from the town (C.S. Lewis’s ‘Narnia Lantern’ is at the bottom, when one is returning to civilisation and the pubs). We filled up three litres from HaySlad well and it’s jolly good.

So, Malvern was the best he could do for himself and poor Annie. It must have been a time of mental turmoil for him, only to get worse up to the publication of ‘Origin of Species’ eight years later. But he won through the turmoil to a contentment and peace: “As for myself, I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following, and devoting my life to Science”. And, “If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives… the highest pleasure on this earth.”

You’ll hear ‘Darwin singing’ this extract in my next blog post. And Happy Darwin Day!