INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF VETERINARY AND ANIMAL MEDICINE (ISSN:2517-7362)

Joshua Timothy Richard Evans was born in South Wales on 3 September 1907. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Royal Veterinary College in London and was elected a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons on 3 September 1928. Following a short period in private veterinary practice in Wales he joined the Sudan Veterinary Service in 1930. As Assistant Veterinary Research Officer and Veterinary Research Officer he worked in the laboratory in Malakal in the south of the country on the production of vaccines against rinderpest. He married in 1938 and had two daughters. Posted to Khartoum in 1942 he continued to work on rinderpest for the next few years before transferring his interest to trypanosomosis. Having produced earlier scientific papers on rinderpest all his subsequent publications were on trypanosomosis mainly related to prophylactic and therapeutic treatment of the disease with new drugs. He was promoted to Senior Research Officer in 1945 and Assistant Director (Research) of Veterinary Services in 1947 and also became Commissioner, Animal Trypanosomiasis Control. Evans was instrumental in the establishment of the Sudan Veterinary Association and of the Livestock and Veterinary Policy Committee of the Board of Economics and Trade. Promoted to Director of Veterinary Services in 1952 he was the twelfth and last expatriate officer to occupy this post. He retired at the end of 1955 as Sudan became an independent country on 1 January 1956. He did not take up any other full time work after his retirement and lived in rural areas in the west of England for the remainder of his life. He died on 20 May 2007 aged 99 years. 

Animal diseases; Livestock exports; Anti-rinderpest vaccine; Animal trypanosomosis; Veterinary policy; Sudan Veterinary Association

After wrenching power from the Egyptian administration in 1885 an Islamic Sudanese nationalist group ruled the country until 1898 [1,2]. A Condominium was established between Great Britain and Egypt following the reconquest of Sudan by their joint armed forces. The initial concern of the newly established veterinary service staffed entirely by British army officers seconded to the Egyptian Army was the health of the thousands of pack and transport animals needed to operate the country [3]. In 1924 the British War Office stopped seconding officers to Egypt. Some in Sudan resigned their commissions to be immediately employed by the Sudan Defence Force such that Directors were still serving military officers. By this time the emphasis of veterinary work had moved from transport to meat and milk and prophylactic and curative treatments for production diseases were sought and applied [4,5].

Joshua Timothy Richard Evans was the twelfth and last of the expatriate directors of the Sudan Veterinary Services of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium between 1899 to the end of 1955. He first served as an Assistant Veterinary Research Officer in the south of the country and then successively as Veterinary Research Officer, Senior Veterinary Research Officer, Assistant Director (Research) and finally Director of Veterinary Services over a period of 25 years from 1930 to the end of 1955.

Joshua Timothy R(ichard) Evans was born in the village of Cilycwm in the Llandovery Civil Registration District in Carmarthenshire, South Wales on 3 September 1907 [6]. Aged 3 in April 1911 he was living with his recently widowed father at Fro Farm Felinfach, Cardiganshire together with four sisters, two brothers and a domestic servant [7].

Evans graduated with a B.Sc. in Veterinary Science from the Royal, Veterinary College of the University of London in1928 [8]. He was admitted as a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (MRCVS) on 3 September 1928 [9]. For a short while after his graduation Evans was in practice at Tynlane, Llangadoc, Carmarthenshire as a Veterinary Surgeon.

Early in 1932 Evans was posted to Malakal in Upper Nile Province in the south of the country (the first Veterinary Inspector had been posted there in 1930). He remained there until the end of 1941 although he was promoted to Veterinary Research Officer early in 1936 (Table 1). This posting was to the Malakal serum station which had been established in 1926 in a series of improvised huts in order to produce anti-rinderpest serum in the country to avoid it having to be imported from Egypt and Kenya. The first attempts at serum production showed that the southern Nilotic cattle were very suitable to virus production and were also much easier to handle than the Arab cattle of the north [12]. These cattle would have been obtained from the as-yet-not-integrated-into-the-modern-world Dinka or Nuer tribal groups (Figure 1) who loved their cattle and sang songs in praise of them (Figure 2) whilst continuously fighting each other and raiding each other’s cattle [13].

Evans was soon into research scientist mode and had already published a paper in 1934 in collaboration with his more senior colleague SCJ Bennett. This described attempts to prepare cattle plague antiserum by intrarumenal hyperimmunisation of cattle. The virus dose was twice that used in parallel hyperimmunisation of other cattle by the intramuscular route and was 50 per cent larger than the dose used in Tanganyika Territory and was repeated at shorter intervals. The resultant serum was grossly inferior to that prepared by the intramuscular process and was incapable at the usual dose rate of protecting cattle against a simultaneous injection of virus. In addition, the serum obtained after four or five hyperimmunisations was of no higher potency than that obtained from the first [14].

In 1907 the veterinary department annual report noted that trypanosomiasis, of all classes of animals, was undoubtedly the most serious veterinary question in the Sudan [15]1 . It is clear that at this stage the main concern of the veterinary services was the health of transport animals and particularly that of camels which were highly susceptible to non-tsetse transmitted trypanosomosis outside the areas infested by Glossina species. Some 40 years later Evans was opposed to this belief and considered that although trypanosomiasis due to Trypanosoma congolense was widespread amongst cattle in Africa it was confined to comparatively small well-defined areas in Sudan and was one of the country’s minor problems. It was important, however, for his own work at Malakal as it had appeared amongst the bulls used for production of cattle plague antiserum. Most of the animals used for this work were from the part of Sudan bordering Abyssinia (Ethiopia) at about the geographical parallel of 9° N where tsetse fly Glossina morsitans were known to occur. Infected animals at the laboratory lost vitality due to the effects of hyperimmunisation and bleeding and, as was to be expected, trypanosomiasis soon manifested itself where previously the infection had been dormant. In order to satisfy the heavy demand for serum all apparently recovered animals, after treatment with Antimosan and Surfen C, were returned to serum production as soon as the improvement in their general condition warranted the change [16]. Much later Evans admitted that much of the research at this stage was ad hoc, undertaken with very limited facilities and financing, that calculated risks had to be taken and accidents would happen but the work was still worthwhile otherwise many people already on the borderline of famine would suffer acute famine [17].

From his early consideration of trypanosomosis being a relatively minor problem Evans later changed his mind about the importance of the diseases as will be seen later in this paper. In addition, the world in general changed its mind about the taxonomic classification of T. congolense, renaming it as Trypanosoma evansi [18]² . 

During the 1930s Evans benefited from the usual perquisites of expatriate civil servants in Sudan, including annual home leave. On his home leave of 1935 he became a member of the British Royal Automobile Club on 2 September (Figure 3). Although this was a club with advantages for motorists, membership was open to any one who could fulfil the arcane requirements for admission to a London West End gentlemen’s club including its luxurious accommodation, fine dining, expensive wine list, gymnasium, massage parlour and heated indoor swimming pool. Evans maintained his RAC membership throughout his life. On 13 July 2005 he had been a Member for almost 70 years and was one of the Senior Hundred Roll (the 100 longest serving members) and was in fact the fifth most senior member of the Club (Figure 4) [19].

On another annual leave Joshua Evans married Mair Gwendolen Evans in the summer of 1938 in North Cardigan (now Ceredigion County Council with Aberystwyth on the southwest coast of Wales as its main centre) [20]. Mair had been born on 4 May 1913 at Llandilofawr in Carmarthenshire. In spite of his marriage Evans was still in experimental mode and published a paper with his senior officer on the effect of the virus load on cattle vaccinated against rinderpest [21]. It is not clear if the new Mrs Evans returned to Sudan with her husband immediately after the marriage but in September 1939 Mair G Evans was living at Cefn Gornoeth, Bryn Road, Aberystwyth described as married and employed on unpaid domestic duties [22].

Following his promotion to Veterinary Research Officer at the beginning of 1936, Evans was posted to Khartoum at the beginning of 1941 (Table 1). Shortly afterwards the Research Section was listed separately as a subordinate entity in government official documents. Early in 1945, on the retirement of SCJ Bennett as Assistant Director and Senior Veterinary Research Officer, Evans was again promoted, this time to Senior Veterinary Research Officer (Table 1) [23].

Sudan’s livestock had done rather well throughout the 1939- 1945 War. Exports of cattle, sheep and camels (many of these last of an “informal” nature) had greatly increased, destined for the Allied Forces in Egypt and the Middle East. The incidence of rinderpest and Contagious Bovine Pleuro-Pneumonia had generally been low. In 1945 and 1946, however, rinderpest again assumed epidemic proportions, especially in Darfur Province which was a major source of slaughter stock for internal consumption and of live animals for export [24,25]. The first really large scale vaccination campaign began in 1947 for which a new laboratory was built in Nyala, Darfur’s capital city. Some 150 000 cattle were vaccinated in the first year and later the scheme was extended to other provinces. The project did not exactly endear itself to the livestock owners and losses were reported in vaccinated herds. In 1949 the more effective attenuated goat virus was used for the first time. A lapinized virus vaccine was later used on calves which were then inoculated with goat virus 12 months later: the number of deaths dropped dramatically [26,27].

It was around the end of the 1939-1945 War that Evans began to accept that trypanosomosis was a serious disease problem in both cattle and camels. Almost 40 years later he wrote [17]:

In addition to converting Evans to the cause of trypanosomosis – all his subsequent scientific publications related to trypanosomosis rather than rinderpest [28-30] -- this problem created awareness in the central Administration of the economic value to the nation as a whole of the Nilotic cattle herds and led to an increase in veterinary service provision in the southern states.

The interest of Evans not only in the development of veterinary services but of the veterinary profession in Sudan as a whole is clear from some of his activities at this time. In 1946, largely due to his low-level politicking, the Sudan Veterinary Association came into being. Evans was a Founder Member and the First President of the Association. A year later, in 1947, he was instrumental in the creation of the Livestock and Veterinary Policy Committee of the Board of Economics and Trade. The Board was composed of the Director of Economics and Trade (as Chairman), the Director of Veterinary Services, the Director of Agriculture and Forests and a Representative of the Civil Secretary. The Terms of Reference were “to study the livestock problems of the country as a whole and to make suggestions [...] for the country’s future livestock and veterinary policy in all its aspects (including animal husbandry and dairying importance) [...]”. The Board’s first recommendation was “that in view of the of animals in the life of the Sudanese, to the fertility of the soil, and, with the limitations of native conservatism, to the economic development of the country, there is urgent need for increasing the staff of the Veterinary Department”. Amongst the other recommendations were development of the veterinary capabilities of the Sudanese people, conservation of pastures and opening up new areas for grazing by the provision of water, either by drilling tube wells or providing surface water by means of ‘hafir’ [25]³ .

Evans was promoted to Senior Research Officer early in 1945 and then to Assistant Director two years later (Table 1). At this second stage, together with a general post-war increase in veterinary personnel, the creation of posts for an Entomologist, for Pasture Research and for Hides and Skins development were indications of the greater value attributed to livestock by the Sudanese government. In addition to general responsibilities as Assistant Director of Veterinary Services, Evans had serving directly under him two Veterinary Research Officers who were both in Khartoum. Early in 1948 he was redesignated as Assistant Director (Research).

Some time later in 1948 Mrs MG Evans left Liverpool bound for Port Sudan on 25 October on board the SS Orbita lodged in HMT (Hired Military Transport) Class on board the SS Orbita, serving as a Troopship. She was described as a Wife (there was no husband present!), aged 35, and was accompanied by Miss SM Evans aged 7. Her last address in the UK had been Gwindy, Goodwick, Pembrokeshire [31]. Mrs MG Evans again left England on 8 December 1950 travelling First Class on the SS Prome of the Henderson Line departing Liverpool for Port Sudan. She was now a Housewife, aged 37 and accompanied by Master SM Evans aged 9 and Miss JA Evans aged 1 plus Miss AD Wilcox a Nurse aged 22. Their address prior to departure had been Gwindy, Goodwick, Pembrokeshire [32]. Early the next year, the SS Matiana of the British India Steam Navigation Company Ltd docked at Plymouth on 12 April 1951. On board, travelling First Class were Miss Sian M Evans, a Student aged 9, Miss Judith A Evans a Child aged 1 and Miss Deirdre Mills, a Child’s Nurse aged 22: all three were going to Gwindy, Goodwick, Pembrokeshire [33]⁴ .

Back at the Office in the late 1940s/early 1950s Assistant Director Evans was fully committed to trypanosomosis. In 1949 he was appointed to the new post of Commissioner, Animal Trypanosomiasis Control. In this capacity he produced two papers for the Interafrican Bureau of Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis Control, the one on the disease situation in Sudan, the other a preliminary note on the effects of a new compound on control of Trypanosoma congolense and T. vivax infections in cattle [34,35]. A more substantive report of the latter based on work in the Khartoum Veterinary Research Laboratory was later produced by a visiting scientist in collaboration with a Sudanese researcher [36].

In the three years 1949 to 1951 the Commissioner, Animal Trypanosomiasis Control produced a substantial report each year to present to the Livestock and Veterinary Policy Standing Committee. These were entitled “Bovine Trypanosomiasis in the Southern Sudan; First Report” and then, of course, Second Report and Third Report. The First Report set the scene. The Second and Third Reports then provided successive updates of progress against the disease in the south of the country. Prophylactic and therapeutic use of Antrycide and Dimidium Bromide were discussed, the numbers of animals treated were provided, the incidence of trypanosomiasis in the southern provinces was detailed as was the progress of a survey of tsetse fly areas. Methods of controlling or eradicating the fly were compared (especially with regard to control of wildlife numbers and distribution). Livestock development as a whole was treated in detail as was the establishment of an Animal Husbandry Advisory Committee. Evans considered that control of trypanosomiasis in the southern areas could increase the risk of East Coast Fever becoming endemic (although the tick vector Rhipicephalus appendiculatus was not known to occur in Sudan) [37-39]. In large part due to these reports a Tsetse Survey and Reclamation Team was established in 1951.

Evans became Director Designate of Sudan Veterinary Services in mid-1952 with the impending retirement of Waldo Hearne Glanville [40]. He assumed full control of the veterinary services towards the end of 1952 whilst his previous position of Deputy Director (Research) remained vacant. New posts of Deputy Director and Assistant Director (Administration) were created at the same time as was one of Chief Veterinary Research Officer but this was also vacant in September 1953. One of Evans’ first outputs as Director was a lengthy internal paper on the state of animal production in the country which included (his) recommendations for the future development of the livestock sector [41].

When Evans became Director in 1952, constitutional changes (with a view to national independence on 1 January 1956) were already imminent, but progress continued to be made. A new Ministry of Livestock Resources was created on 9 January 1954 to which Sayed Bullen Alier de Bir was appointed as Minister. The veterinary services now became a subordinate of this Ministry as the Department of Animal Production in which Evans continued to be Director. A Veterinary Council came into being in 1954 (this was the first Sudanese council created specifically to organize and regulate the practice of a profession). Once again Evans was a prime mover in this development which laid down a new policy for disease control and animal production and underlined Evans’ great abilities and his sound judgement of concepts. When he eventually retired at the end of 1955 he bequeathed a strong and flourishing Department to his Sudanese successor [4].