Amy Peberdy

Amy Peberdy, who died Sept. 2, 2011, aged 100, played a critical supporting role to her husband, the explorer Philip Storer Peberdy, and spent much of the 1940s travelling with him into the far interior of British Guiana

She was born Amy Annie Barrow on September 29, 1910 in Leicester, and left school at 14. She met her future husband while he was working as an apprentice taxidermist at the Leicester Museum and they married when she was 19.

In 1936 a restlessness and desire for adventure led them to consider a museum post in Malta, only to decide against it because of the risk to their five-year-old son from “Malta fever” (brucellosis).

Yet when Philip Peberdy was offered a six-month contract to reorganise the Carnegie Library and Ethnological Museum in Georgetown, British Guiana, the threat from malaria and yellow fever was somehow overlooked.

Amy Peberdy and the child soon joined her husband, who had been asked to stay and reorganise the Natural History Museum, and entered a colonial life quite alien to her. Although a good bridge player, she forsook clubs and cocktail parties to help him prepare the many habitat displays and papier mâché models which were a feature of his work. More importantly, she also budgeted for, and provisioned, his collecting trips.

In early 1938 she completed most of the pre-departure planning, both financial and practical (preparing boxes and stores to be carried by porters, for example) for the September 1938 to March 1939, so-called Peberdy-Pinkus expedition, which her husband undertook with Albert Pinkus, a collector from New York, to Mount Roraima.

Amy Peberdy did not accompany her husband on this trip, but in 1940, to the astonishment of her friends in Georgetown, she joined him on a two-month-long collecting expedition 90 miles up the Abary, a river in the colony’s north. There she learned bush cooking and to keep her toes away from her hammock’s protective netting in case they were nibbled at by vampire bats.

Meanwhile, the governor, Sir Gordon Lethem, asked Philip Peberdy to take on a five-year investigation into the welfare of Guyana’s native Amerindians – assessing their numbers, as well as health problems (notably with malaria and malnutrition) and lack of education. Lethem also asked him to keep an eye on any military activity along the northern border with Venezuela.

This mission required extensive travel in the interior for four to six months at a time. Most travel was arduous, conducted in dugout canoes along rapids and across falls, and depended entirely on the goodwill of the local people. Amy Peberdy’s role was pivotal, organising supplies for the expeditions before departure and afterwards, when far away from potential medical help, acting as an emergency nurse.

For much of the time between 1943 and 1947 she lived away from Georgetown. The couple’s adventures started with a year’s trek to the Pakaraima Mountains, which began inauspiciously when (for the second time) Amy Peberdy was forced to nurse her husband back from life-threatening malaria.

Snakes, spiders and scorpions posed other dangers. But the creatures did not fluster Amy Peberdy, who encouraged her son to collect insects, and she herself collected mosquitoes on behalf of American medical laboratories.

At Imbaimadai, more than 200 miles inland, they established a government station, built a wattle house and an airstrip (occasionally used in emergencies by American warplanes), and discovered rock paintings in the Ayangana mountains. Their Amerindian neighbours gave Amy Peberdy a pet toucan that came and went freely.

The couple then travelled together to Mount Roraima, which she became only the fourth white woman to climb. Looping back to Georgetown, they dropped in on every Amerindian village they passed.

In Georgetown in 1946 Amy Peberdy had a second child, but this did not reduce her travel – when Philip Peberdy was named District Commissioner in Rupununi late that year, she visited local ranches on horseback and carried her baby daughter in a sling to the top of the highest peak in the Kanuku Mountains, 350 miles south of Georgetown. Her adventurous spirit was not always a boon, however, and she once nearly poisoned herself by trying out local mushrooms.

Amy Peberdy encouraged her husband to write a report on the administration and welfare of the Amerindian people, and Peberdy recommended the creation of several areas for exclusive Amerindian use to safeguard their economic future. Measures were to include Amerindian administration of sawmills already established, as well as the purchase on their behalf of large tracts of land which had been taken over by ranchers. In particular, he was determined to improve their health and education.

This last aspect of the report was influenced by the many visitors the couple attracted in the interior, who included CWW Greenidge, of the Anti-Slavery Society, and George Giglioli, the malaria expert.

The report eventually bore fruit in legislation that was passed in 1951 and reserved some areas of land for Amerindians, as well as establishing basic schools and mobile health clinics for their benefit; Giglioli, meanwhile, had launched a highly successful campaign to control malaria.

In 1948, having built up probably the finest Ethnological and Natural History Museums in South America, the Peberdys returned to England and a totally new life in post-war Cheltenham. After a period of readjustment Philip Peberdy became Curator of Southampton Museum; Amy had two more children.

On his retirement in 1975, the couple returned to Cheltenham, where Amy Peberdy developed a fine garden. After Philip’s death in 1990 she moved to north Wales. She is survived by her son and three daughters. (Excerpted from Amy Peberdy obituary published Oct 14, 2011 in The Telegraph)