Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [14]
But in 1909, he lost his free railway pass when a government minister decided that the study and collection of fossils was not a matter of national interest. He also fell foul of the museum authorities. In 1910, he decided to give up his college post and return to medical practice. He supplemented his income as a country doctor by running what amounted to a wholesale business in Karoo fossils, paying collectors to bring him specimens and selling them to clients abroad. His fall into notoriety came in 1913, when he sold a large and rare collection of Karoo fossils said to belong to the South African Museum to the American Museum of Natural History. ‘Here I sit with a pocketful of dollars, and not a friend in the world’, Broom wrote to a fellow collector.
In 1918, Broom settled in Douglas, a small town in the northern Cape on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, taking up an appointment as district surgeon but continuing his trade in fossils. He bought a large family house on Giddy Street, served on the municipal council and was elected mayor for five years.
The house on Giddy Street was soon reputed to be haunted. Broom was an avid collector of skulls and skeletons and used the house as a kind of laboratory. His son, Norman, recalled: ‘It was not uncommon for a human skull or some other horror to be placed on the stove to cook merrily alongside whatever was being prepared for the next meal. Mother never took kindly to this and neither did the servants. Skulls would be left lying around in most of the rooms and it was never necessary to lock up the house for no strange native could be tempted to come near the place’.
Broom raided graves for research purposes and used other unconventional methods of obtaining bodies if he came across interesting specimens.
If a prisoner dies and you want his skeleton [he recalled], probably two or three regulations stood in the way, but the enthusiast does not worry about such regulations. I used to get the body sent up ... then the remains would be buried in my garden, and in a few months the bones would be collected.
He admitted that ‘studying anthropology is not always a pleasant task’.
One day a very interesting native died and I wanted the skeleton very badly so I had the body sent up to my garage for me to do a post mortem. It was in January and the temperature was much above 100 degrees in the shade. I was called out on a long country journey and only got back at 10 o’clock at night ... I fear that the European armchair anthropologists have little ideas of the troubles we workers in the field have.
In his hunt for fossils Broom displayed remarkable stamina. Even under the hottest sun, he would invariably dress in a dark suit and waistcoat, long-sleeved white shirt, stiff butterfly collar and sombre tie, yet never show any signs of fatigue. Throughout his life he appeared to be in a hurry, walking and talking at a brisk pace, turning out scientific papers by the score. By 1925, he had written some 250 papers, named some seventy new genera and almost 200 new species of reptiles.
He also began to acquire an interest in early hominids after learning of the discovery of Boskop Man, the first fossil skull to be unearthed in South Africa. An incomplete fossil skull, it had been found in 1913 by two farmers digging an irrigation ditch at Boskop, near Potchefstroom, in western Transvaal. Broom examined Boskop Man in 1917 and wrote a paper claiming it to be a new species of primitive man that he called Homo capensis. His interest in early hominids deepened when he read reports of the discovery in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1921 of Rhodesian Man (Homo rhodesiensis), a human skull with beetling