Cedric Dover

Cedric Cyril Dover (11 April 1904 – 1 December 1961) was a British Indian zoologist and later a writer on social and anthropological matters related to race. He preferred to be called a Eurasian rather than as an Anglo-Indian, both terms used for people of mixed ancestry. He wrote several books on race and sought an international unified action by oppressed races against prejudices.

Life and career

Dover was born in Calcutta to Percy and Sophy Dover (a maternal ancestor included James Skinner). At an early age he took an interest in zoology under the influence of Thomas Nelson Annandale. After his education at St. Xaviers, St Joseph's College and the Medical College at Calcutta he worked for a while at the Indian Museum in Calcutta. At the age of 17 he wrote a booklet on "The Common Butterflies of India: An Introduction to the Study of Butterflies, and How to Collect and Preserve Them." With Annandale's encouragement he joined Edinburgh University but returned without completing his studies to Calcutta and joined the Zoological Survey of India as an entomologist. Some his work was on a survey of Chilka Lake,[1] systematics mainly of the Hymenoptera[2][3][4][5][6] (but also dealt in Hemiptera, particularly aquatic ones,[7][8] and mammals) and on applied entomology such as mosquito repellents with one formulation that he developed at the Army School of Hygiene, a mix of citronella oil and vaseline known as "Dover's Cream".[9] He also worked in the oyster experiment station at Kuala Kurau, Perak and briefly served as a lecturer at the Indian Forest College, Dehra Dun. While in Malaya, he explored the Batu Caves from where he collected a bathynellid crustacean which he considered as a "living fossil"[10] and was named as Parabathynella malaya[11] while also examining the fauna living in the fluid[12] of pitcher plants.[13] The alga Micrasterias doveri collected from Malaya was named after him by Kalipada Biswas.[14] The mollusc Opeas doveri Ghosh, and the pseudoscorpion Dhanus doveri Bristowe were also named after him. He married fellow zoologist Mercia Heynes-Wood and they started the periodical The New Outlook in 1925 aimed at the Anglo-Indian reader. Along with Heynes-Wood he published a catalogue of the Cicindelinae of India, including a description of a new tiger beetle species Calomera fowleri. He also published a note on the history of entomology in India in 1922.[15]

The Dovers had three children but he separated from his family and travelled to Egypt and finally settled in London in 1934 and worked with V.K. Krishna Menon's India League. During World War II he served in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and after demobilization, he became a visiting lecturer on anthropology at Fisk University, Tennessee between 1946 and 1949. His affiliation with communism made it difficult for him to find employment in the US but he was briefly a graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research, New York. He moved back to London in 1949 and in this period wrote admiringly of Stalinism, seeing it as a driver for "the movement towards coloured unity" in his book Hell in the Sunshine and this helped earn him a place in George Orwell's list of unsuitable people for writing propaganda against communism. Orwell described Dover as a “very dishonest, venal person” whose “main emphasis” was “anti-white (especially anti-USA)” and "reliably pro-Russian on all major issues."[16] Dover also took a great interest in eugenics[17][18] but gave up his ideas after he read Julian Huxley's We Europeans (1935) which critiqued race science.[19] Dover also became a member of The Men of the Trees, an organization involved in afforestation and founded by Richard St. Barbe Baker in 1924 and edited its journal Trees.[13] In 1954 he was chosen as a delegate to visit China. He married twice again in later life and died from a heart failure in East Surrey Hospital.[20][21][22]

Writings

Dover published extensively on zoological topics until around 1934 when his focus shifted increasingly to matters of race.[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] He also had an interest in writing and poetry.[31] He also wrote several obituaries of friends and influences, including of T.N. Annandale, whom he called the "father of freshwater biology in the east".[32] Dover published as many as 300 publications but only a few books including:

References
  1. Dover, Cedric (1924). "The Insect Fauna of an Indian Island". Nature. 114 (2862): 351–352. doi:10.1038/114351a0. ISSN 0028-0836. S2CID 4040299.
  2. Dover, C. (1929). "Wasps and bees in the Raffles Museum, Singapore" (PDF). Bulletin of the Raffles Museum. 2: 43–73.
  3. Dover, Cedric; Rao, H. Srinivasa (1922). "A note on the diplopterous wasps in the collection of the Indian Museum". Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. New Series. 18: 235–249.
  4. Dover, Cedric (1925). "XXV.— Notes on some Indian bees in the British Museum". Annals and Magazine of Natural History. 15 (86): 219–234. doi:10.1080/00222932508633203. ISSN 0374-5481.
  5. "A note on bees of the genera Xylocopa and Bombus in the Indian Museum". Records of the Indian Museum. 24 (1): 85–89.
  6. Dover, Cedric (1921). "The Occurrence of Bombus in the Indian Plains". Nature. 107 (2690): 362. Bibcode:1921Natur.107..362D. doi:10.1038/107362b0. ISSN 0028-0836. S2CID 4117960.
  7. Dover, Cedric (1929). "Aquaria for Rearing Minute Organisms Requiring Running Water". Nature. 124 (3122): 336. Bibcode:1929Natur.124..336D. doi:10.1038/124336b0. ISSN 0028-0836.
  8. Dover, Cedric. "Notes on a collection of aquatic Rhynchota from the Buitenzorg Museum". Treubia. 10 (1): 65–72.
  9. Dover, Cedric (1930). "An Improved Citronella Mosquito Deterrent". Indian Journal of Medical Research. 17 (3): 961.
  10. Dover, Cedric (1953). "The Story of a Living Fossil: Parabathynella malaya Sars" (PDF). Saertrykk av Nytt Magasin for Zoologi. 1.
  11. Dover, C., ed. (1929). "Fauna of the Batu Caves, Selangor" (PDF). J.Fed. Malay States Mus. 14: 325–87.
  12. Dover, Cedric; Fage, Louis; Hirst, Stanley; Tams, W. H. T.; Ghosh, Ekendanath (1928). "Notes on the Fauna of Pitcher-Plants from Singapore Island". Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. 6 (3 (104)): 1–27. ISSN 2304-7550. JSTOR 41559701.
  13. Wright, Patrick (2010). Passport to Peking. A very British mission to Mao's China. Oxford University Press. pp. 246–252.
  14. Biswas, K. (1929). "Papers on Malayan aquatic biology, Freshwater algae with addendum". Journal of the Federated Malay States Museums. 14 (3–4): 405–435.
  15. Dover, Cedric (1922). "Entomology in India". The Calcutta Review. 3 (2): 336–349.
  16. Slate, Nico (2014). The Prism of Race. W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 24.
  17. Dover, Cedric (1935). "Population control in India". The Eugenics Review. 26 (4): 283–285. PMC 2985394. PMID 21260153.
  18. Dover, Cedric (1935). "Biology and the Nation in Germany". Nature. 135 (3416): 628–629. Bibcode:1935Natur.135..628D. doi:10.1038/135628a0. ISSN 0028-0836.
  19. Dover, Cedric (1935). "We Europeans". Nature. 136 (3445): 736–737. Bibcode:1935Natur.136..736D. doi:10.1038/136736a0. ISSN 0028-0836. S2CID 4140451.
  20. Banton, Michael (30 December 2015). "Dover, Cedric (1904-61)". In Smith, Anthony D; Hou, Xiaoshuo; Stone, John; Dennis, Rutledge (eds.). The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. pp. 1–2. doi:10.1002/9781118663202.wberen325. ISBN 978-1-118-66320-2. Retrieved 11 March 2021.
  21. Christie, Anthony (1962). "Obituary. Cedric Dover: 1904-1962". Man. 62: 55. JSTOR 2796989.
  22. Banton, Michael (2011). "Dover, Cedric Cyril (1904–1961)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/101293. ISBN 9780198614111. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  23. Dover, Cedric (1954). "The Black Knight". Phylon. 15 (1): 41–57. doi:10.2307/271905. ISSN 0885-6818. JSTOR 271905.
  24. Dover, Cedric (1947). "Notes on Coloured Writing". Phylon. 8 (3): 213–224. doi:10.2307/272336. ISSN 0885-6818. JSTOR 272336.
  25. Dover, Cedric (1952). "The Racial Philosophy of Johann Herder". The British Journal of Sociology. 3 (2): 124–133. doi:10.2307/587490. ISSN 0007-1315. JSTOR 587490.
  26. Dover, Cedric (1956). "Culture and creativity". Présence Africaine (8/10): 281–300. doi:10.3917/presa.9564.0281. ISSN 0032-7638. JSTOR 24346906.
  27. Dover, Cedric (1952). "The Racial Philosophy of Jehuda Halevi". Phylon. 13 (4): 312–322. doi:10.2307/272567. ISSN 0885-6818. JSTOR 272567.
  28. Slate, Nico (2014). "Race as freedom: how Cedric Dover and Barack Obama became black". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 37 (2): 222–240. doi:10.1080/01419870.2012.715661. ISSN 0141-9870. S2CID 145355381.
  29. Dover, Cedric (1932). "The Duration of Life of some Indian mammals". Indian Forester. 58.
  30. Dover, Cedric (1952). "The classification of man" (PDF). Current Science. 21 (8): 209–213. ISSN 0011-3891.
  31. Dover, Cedric (1951). "The Snail Regrets". Phylon. 12 (4): 347–356. doi:10.2307/272254. ISSN 0885-6818. JSTOR 272254.
  32. Dover, Cedric (1929). "Fresh water Fauna of the Malay Peninsula". Nature. 124 (3126): 499–500. Bibcode:1929Natur.124..499D. doi:10.1038/124499a0. S2CID 27319781.
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