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CEREMONY HONOURING DR MOURANT Few living Fellows of the Institute have been honoured by the commissioning of a public portrait sculpture. This honour was recently bestowed by the Société Jersiaise on Professor Arthur Mourant, a Fellow of the Institute since 1957 and for several years a member of Council. The bust was unveiled at a moving ceremony in the grounds of the museum at St. Helier, Jersey, on 27th April, 1990. The introductory address by the past President of the society Mr. Richard Falle, and the oration by Professor Yves Coppens, are set out below. They are reproduced and adapted by permission of the Société Jersiaise from transcripts of recordings made at the unveiling ceremony. The complete text will appear in the Annual Bulletin of the Société Jersiaise. The Institute sent its felicitations to Professor Mourant at the ceremony. Introduction by the Past President, Mr. Richard Falle The art of sculpture, and in particular public sculpture, has not enjoyed a history of support in Jersey. Indeed the strongest emotion it has ever inspired was the iconoclasm of the 16th and 17th centuries, the enthusiastic destruction of images in the name of religion, and since then we have had but four sculptures to grace our public places. The gilded figure of George II, put in place in 1751 in the Royal Square; the elaborate cast-iron memorial to General Don in the Parade; the plump and perambulant Queen Victoria; and the refined bust of Philippe Baudains in the Parade Garden. It was clearly time for a fifth example of the art, particularly when, as we have in Arthur Mourant here, such an intellectual giant to celebrate. The Société Jersiaise awards the title of Membre d’Honneur for distinguished contributions to the field of local studies. This honour has rightly been sparingly bestowed. I know that Dr. Mourant who is a Membre d’Honneur of the Société values it very highly indeed. Many of us however have felt for a long time that his great contribution in many fields of study, which far transcends our local scene, and which has brought such great honour to his native island, deserves greater recognition, and the idea of a bronze, done by the best portrait sculptor of the day, has seemed for some time the means to give some kind of tangible effect to that recognition. The executive committee resolved to commission John Doubleday, the most accomplished sculptor working today in the field of portraiture, to make a portrait bust. His subjects have included royalty, politicians, actors, the wealthy and the famous around the globe. His works grace public places, buildings and private homes. We are delighted to welcome Mr. Doubleday here today. It will be for you to judge whether the portrait bust, shortly to he seen in the full light of day, achieves our object. But we, the members of the small sub-committee which the executive charged with this project, feel it to be a triumph and success which will proudly bear Arthur Mourant’s image, expressing that massive intelligence and the eager alertness in his gaze and demeanur to all who will look upon that bust for many generations to come. When our new Museum buildings take shape, the bust and its pedestal will be removed to a prominent focal point somewhere near the entrance to the new museum. Meanwhile it will sit here in the garden, near the site where the great quern sat for many years, perhaps appropriately, bearing in mind his archaeological interest Having commissioned the sculpture we next thought it best at one and the same time to reveal this work of art and to fete our distinguished and well-beloved subject. It is reasonable to call Arthur Mourant a polymath. His many friends and colleagues in the scientific community cover a very wide range of disciplines. We are delighted to have such distinguished friends of Dr. Mourant with us today. Dr. Mourant was however particularly pleased that we have invited Dr. Yves Coppens to deliver the oration and unveil the bust. We chose a great man to celebrate a great man. Professor Coppens who was born in 1934 has had a most distinguished academic career. He is Professeur de Palaeanthropologie et Préhistoire au College de France, in itself a tremendous honour. He is a former director of the Centre de Recherches Anthropologiques du Musée de l’Homme, and he is a Membre de l’Academie des Sciences. He is a founding member of a new and exciting pan European project – the Academia Europa – which was founded in 1988 where he had the honour to deliver an inaugural address on the origins of man. Professor Coppens is justly celebrated for his studies on the antiquity of man. He is a friend and colleague of Dr. Mourant of many years, and who better to perform this pleasing task? Oration by Professor Yves Coppens I met Professor Arthur Ernest Mourant for the first time 15 years ago in Toulouse. We were both invited by Professor Jaques Ruffle to sit on the examining committee of a student for the defence of his dissertation on the Structure Hémotypologique de Populations Indiennes en Amerique du Sud. I was very impressed by Professor Mourant’s personality, but also a little jealous of his splendid red gown, especially compared with my over-voluminous black one borrowed a few minutes before from a colleague at Jacques Ruffle’s laboratory. The second impression that I had during the examination itself was quite different. It was a sort of admiration and concern at the same time. When the candidate had finished his presentation and Professor Mourant was asked by the president of the committee to give his comments on the work his questions were particularly sharp. After the dissertaion we went with Jacques Ruffle to his home, a beautiful house in the country and spent the evening there. I was again surprised, this time by the knowledge in my own field – geology, geomorphology, palaeontology and prehistory – of someone who was introduced to me as a haematologist, the outstanding specialist in genes, blood, serum and antibodies. It was a good introduction to a personality who can successively and simultaneously impress and entertain. We have met several times since that memorable first occasion. At the Collège de France in 1980 when Professor Mourant was visiting professor there, in Jersey here in 1982 when he so kindly invited me to lecture at the Société Jersiaise and to visit some of the extraordinary sites and scenery of your Island. So who is Arthur Ernest Mourant? Like the red deer of the Belle Hougue cave, Cervus elephas jerseyensis, first of all he is a local species, born near La Hougue Bie. He spent his first 18 years on the Island learning everything learnable, French, English, history, geography, mathematics, physics and chemistry at Five Oaks School, the Jersey Modem School, and Victoria College, but also geology, archaeology, biology, at the library of the Société Jersiaise and at the Pier Road Museum. Having received the King’s Gold Medal for modem languages and the King’s Gold Medal for mathematics in 1921 and 1922, he also gained in 1922 the King Charles I Scholarship, and for the first time left the Island for Oxford. He then spent almost ten years in Oxford, the last three years commuting between the Islands, where he was preparing his dissertation on their geology, and his college, Exeter College. He successively obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925, first class honours in chemistry in 1926, Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy in geology in 1931. Then there started for Professor Mourant a sort of third unexpected period of 7 years. Not able to find a professional position in geology during this difficult time of the 30’s he remembered that he had got first class honours in chemistry and took a short complementary course in medical chemistry. He then came back to Jersey and set up here from 1933 to 1938, a chemical pathology laboratory. A fourth incredible and still continuing period followed, starting in 1939. Professor Mourant became a student again, but this time in medicine. He was 34 years old and went to St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in London and there he gained his degrees of Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1943, Doctor of Medicine in 1948. He was appointed successively house physician at the Chase Farm Hospital Enfield, house surgeon at Friern Hospital London, Medical Officer North London blood depot, Medical Officer Galton Laboratory Serum Unit Cambridge, and in 1946 founder and first director of the blood group reference laboratory, London, a position that he honoured for 20 years. These new diplomas, new positions, new researches made him the pioneer in this new field, the very first haematologist to approach blood group distribution in a world wide manner, and consequently to obtain extraordinary information on human evolution, migration, natural selection, geography of diseases. His first famous book, The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups published in 1954, and its second edition which was actually a new and much larger book, more than one thousand pages, The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups and Other Polymorphisms published in 1976, are not only treatises of what had been published in the world on that subject, but really the synthesis of Professor Mourant’s own enormous work. I went through the titles of his many publications and found that he had made personal observations on the blood of populations from French and Spanish Basque areas, Galicia, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Iceland, Greenland, Norway. Sweden, Finland, Lipari Islands, Greece, Cyprus, Canary Islands, Morocco, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria. Sudan. Egypt, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Rhodesia, South Africa, Middle East, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Socotra, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Siam, Indonesia, New Guinea, America, West Indies, the Pacific Ocean, and not Jersey. About 300 scientific papers and more than half a dozen books and among them The Rhesus blood groups and their clinical effects; The ABO blood groups; Blood groups and disease; The genetics of the Jews; Blood relations; were published on the same subject from 1939 onwards. It is unnecessary to say that this research on blood groups and other polymorphisms founded the new anthropology – Base de l’anthropologie moderne, said Arthur Mourant in a paper in the journal Transfusion in Paris in 1962 – as well as a new medicine. Everybody today knows the importance of the correlation between genetics and some diseases and consequently the problems of transfusion and public health, as well as the use (which has become routine) of blood group polymorphisms together with body measurements in defining a population. During these 20 glorious years, Professor Mourant became honorary member of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, Honorary Adviser for the Nuffield Blood Group centre founded in London, Honorary member of the Sociedade de Patologia, and Membre d’Honneur de la Société Jersiaise. He received the Honorary award for services to blood transfusion, the award of the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Order of Carlos Finlay of Cuba. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society, Director of the Serological Population Genetics Laboratory in London, Honorary Senior Lecturer in haematology at the Medical College of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and member of the governing body of this College, Membre du Comité de Direction du Centre d’Hémotypologie de Toulouse, Citoyen d’Honneur de Toulouse, member of the Home Office panel for the selection of blood testers, Honorary member of the International Society of Blood Transfusion, Honorary member of the British Society for Haematology, Honorary member of the Society for the Study of Human Biology, Honorary member of the Human Biology Council. He received the Landsteiner Memorial award of the American Association of Blood Banks, the Osler Memorial Medal of the University of Oxford, and gave the Marett Memorial Lecture of Exeter College in Oxford. But since his childhood in Jersey and all through his life, even during this period of intensive scientific production on haematology, serology, immunology, Arthur Mourant did not forget his deep interest in geology and prehistory and I am sure palaeoanthropology. As early as 1923 (he was only 19 years old then), he was supporting the Wegener theory of continental drift, which was then abandoned and rediscovered in the name of plate tectonics 45 years later in 1967. His main confidence however was in hard rock geology (he always had a hammer with him), petrology and mineralogy, and many of his papers concern this particular aspect of geology. He wrote about apatite, biotite, andesite, rhyolite, … I had the pleasure to play a modest role myself, not in the research on these minerals nor in their description, but in bringing back from Chantilly to St. Helier the large spherulite from Jersey, probably collected by Jesuits just before Teilhard de Chardin came to the island at the beginning of the century. That specimen remained from the collection in Maison St. Louis in Jersey where the Jesuits were, was sent to Maison de Fontaine at Chantilly when Maison St. Louis was closed in 1954, sold to the fossil and mineral dealer Boubée from Paris, and then sold to private or public collections or destroyed. Fortunately this spherulite that you can see here in the Museum was still in Chantilly, probably because it was too large and too heavy to be moved and consequently not bought by Boubée for sale. But Professor Mourant was also interested in general geology, geomorphology and prehistory. He did some geological mapping. He studied earthquakes and the different terraces and raised beaches of the Channel Islands; the caves and their sediments, fossils and artifacts; the famous Cotte de St. Brelade with its Acheulean and Mousterian; the Pleistocene and Holocene deposits, as well as the megalithic tombs – he excavated some of them – especially the provenance of their materials. He published almost 100 papers on these and received in 1982 the Worth award of the Geological Society of London for this important part of his activities. I feel of course particularly honoured and proud to have been chosen to unveil the bronze bust of Professor Arthur Mourant. Not because we were both born on granite, Professor Mourant only 30 years ahead of me, in these western countries he wrote about in a paper in the journal Hérédité in 1952; not because we share the same passion for stones and bones, the stones for him and the bones for me. But first because of the warm personal contact that we have always maintained since the first thesis in Toulouse; and secondly because we are just scientists interested in experimentation, research. So thank you Professor Mourant for the privilege you have afforded me of participating in this historic occasion. Thank you Advocate Falle for having kindly been the messenger. I also thank the prestigious Société Jersiaise for having taken the superb initiative of commissioning a portrait of Professor Mourant to honour him. And my sincere and personal congratulations to John Doubleday, for his elegant and powerful sculpture. Professor Jacques Ruffle and myself add the official congratulations of our own institutions, the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Medicine and the College de France. | ||||||