Geologist, botanist and artist - Brian Maye on Sydney Mary Thompson

While the status, position and rights of women improved slowly throughout the 19th century, it was still extremely difficult for a woman to make any sort of impact in so many areas. That makes the achievement of Sydney Mary Thompson, who died 100 years ago on July 16th, all the more remarkable. She was a geologist, botanist and artist and was one of the first women to achieve distinction in the study of geology.

The details we have about her life are scant enough but some influence on her must have come from her uncle, William Thompson (1805-1852). He was “the most important naturalist in mid-19th-century Ireland” and his main work, The Natural History of Ireland, “became the standard text in Irish zoology in the 19th century”, according to Linde Lunney and Andrew O’Brien, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Sydney Mary Thompson was born in 1847 in Whitehouse, near Newtownabbey in Co Antrim, the daughter of James Thompson, who was a Belfast linen merchant. She described her childhood as “amphibious”; the family home was at Macedon Point, a headland in Newtownabbey, just north of Belfast, and she spent a lot of time exploring the coastline in a small boat with her brother. There is little information on her education but we do know that she spent three years in Dresden in Germany, following which she studied art in the Government School of Art, Belfast, beginning in 1870.

She continued her art studies in London but where and for how long are unknown. Her obituary in the Geological Magazine said she possessed “a broad and tolerant outlook upon life” and “cultivated tastes ranging from watercolour painting to the study of both botany and geology in the field”. It was in this latter speciality that she came to excel.

Rock of ages – Ray Burke on Molly Bloom, Gibraltar and Galway

---

Hibernian idyll – Oliver O’Hanlon on Patrick Leigh Fermor in Waterford

---

Cracking over the papers – Frank McNally on uncomfortable parallels between column writing and the Leaving Cert

---

Lagan leviathan – Frank McNally on the centenary of a great Belfast shipbuilder (and Home Ruler), William Pirrie

---

She was an active member of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club, founded in 1863, in which capacity she organised lectures and practical outings, displaying a particular interest in stratigraphy (the study of rock layers and layering) and petrography (a branch of petrology that focuses on detailed descriptions of rocks, especially their fluid inclusions and phases).

According to Patrick Wyse Jackson in Great Irish Geoscientists, a committee was established in the 1870s by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) to report on the distribution of the exotic blocks of stone known as “glacial erratics” (glacially deposited rock that differs from the type of rock native to the area in which it rests). “The work of this committee was championed in the north of Ireland by a number of ladies led by the energetic and able Sydney Mary Thompson, who was assisted by Mary K Andrews (1852-1914), daughter of a professor at Queen’s.” Both were members of the Geological Section of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club.

Thompson and Andrews worked on the glacial erratics, collecting samples, mapping and naming them, trying to work out the direction of ice flow in the north of Ireland. Thompson was secretary of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club and her reports were published in its Proceedings. She was elected to the Glacialists’ Association in 1894.

Her major discovery, which happened sometime between 1907 and 1910 at Moys, near Limavady in Co Derry, was a piece of microgranite from Ailsa Craig (a Scottish island). This enabled the route of the Irish Sea Glacier to be mapped as it had been carried south by the glacier from Scotland and her discovery placed the western limit of the glacier 32km further west than had been previously designated.

She won prizes for her art and belonged to the Belfast Ramblers’ Sketching Club and the Belfast Art Society, becoming its patron in 1921, but, unfortunately, there is little information available on her work. Her fine portrait of Samuel Alexander Stewart (1827-1910), the Irish-American botanist who was a founder member of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club and curator of the Belfast Natural History Museum, is in the Ulster Museum.

In 1900, at the age of 53, she married the Swiss artist, Rodolphe Christen, and was known as Madame Christen for the rest of her life. They travelled throughout Europe for two years after their marriage before settling near Aberdeen. Sadly, their marriage was a short one as he died in September 1906, at only 47. She published a biography of her husband in 1910, entitled Rodolphe Christen: The Story of an Artist’s Life, which her obituary, already referred to above, described as “a finely illustrated work devoted to his memory”.

She never lost her interest in geology and the last of her many continental journeys was to the volcanoes of Auvergne the year before she died. “She died in the fullness of years but the years to come need spirit and inspiration such as hers,” her obituary concluded.