According partly to Lamburn's own account of himself, on one of his book covers, he was educated at Bury Grammar School and Manchester University.
His father was the Rev Edward John Sewell Lamburn, and apparently intended his son to follow in his own footsteps and go into the Anglican Church, but instead, in 1913 at the age of twenty, young Lamburn joined the Rhodesian Mounted Police of the British South Africa Police or BSAP, as a trooper.
His duties included patrolling large areas of undeveloped country, and taking charge of isolated up-country out-stations.
It is deeply regrettable that his African and Chinese notes were effectively all destroyed in a deed of arson[1] He generally spent his leave on his own in shooting trips in Portuguese East Africa (present-day Mozambique).
In retirement in England he settled down more earnestly to the pursuit of informal entomology, though, as he observed, with not half so rich a field of subjects as on his travels.
That his absence from the trenches of World War I was not attributable to lack of patriotic feeling is apparent from the fact that in 1940, at the age of about 47, he joined the Royal Air Force.
A particularly interesting example, because it comes from an ex-BSAP officer with personal knowledge of the circumstances and some of the characters drawn from, appears in the magazine “Transvaal Outpost”.
Of Richmal Crompton's “William” stories, Sloman remarks: “Fortunately for J.B.C.Lamburn these stories were published after his BSAP career had ended, otherwise he could have been ragged rotten!” Whether Lamburn's vein of invention had dried out, or whether his fiction had failed on the market, or whether he simply had become too engrossed in his natural history studies and writings, we cannot say, but once he began to write on natural history after the war, he apparently published no more fiction.
As John Crompton he made no claim to scientific expertise, but wrote explicitly as a “layman writing for laymen”.
Within his non-technical ambit, he wrote pleasantly, literately, and intelligently, often quite thoughtfully, on a wide range of biological subjects, and he did so constructively and soundly at a level accessible to a wider and younger public than most popular scientific writing.
He was full of praise for Fabre and the Peckhams, whose endless patience and minute gifts of observation have made them outstanding authorities in the field of entomology to this day.
For example, he had little patience with Fabre's rejection of some of the assertions of classical Darwinism, which attributed all evolutionary change to gradual increments due entirely to random mutations.
Similarly in the same book Crompton quite reasonably criticises some of Fabre's cruder experiments on instinctive behaviour, and their naive interpretation.
[1] Crompton outspokenly rejected Fabre's arguments that the behaviour of such creatures as hunting-wasps, that operated by injecting venom precisely into particular nerve-centres, could not have arisen by natural selection.
In the twentieth Century, various refinements to Classical Darwinism, such as the theory of Punctuated Equilibria, and deeper understanding of the principles and practicalities of molecular biology, made serious progress in addressing problems of the mechanism of evolution of complex structures and behaviour patterns.
Fabre wrote: "...though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty.
The alert professional also can glean a lot of useful information from anecdotes derived from Lamburn's personal experiences and those of his correspondents, scientific and non-scientific.
[7] His books certainly have inspired a fair number of young biologists and it is of some interest to note that after many years out of print some are again appearing in the lists of Amazon.com and similar major vendors.
Take this, for example, written on the family of non-web-weaving spiders that includes the tarantula: The web-weaver, having patented a clever device, can now sit back and collect the dividends; the wolf spider, unable to think out anything in the way of a snare, has to pay the penalty by leading a hard, strenuous, and dangerous life..." The following titles appear in the British Library Internet catalogue: Writing as: LAMBOURNE, John B. C. Writing as: CROMPTON, John During his time in Iceland Lamburn, the putative original for “William” of the Richmal Crompton books, came into contact with Air Commodore Cecil George Wigglesworth, speculated to be the original for “Biggles” of the stories by W. E. Johns.
He added that members serving in Bulawayo in the 1950s recalled him but, again, all attempts failed to locate him at the time of Sloman's writing.