A sketch of John Peake made on a napkin at a conference
The Trustees are not, however, immune from attack. In 1960 the fish man, Denys W. Tucker, was dismissed from his post. In the 1950s Tucker had been noted for his research on eels. He was one of the protagonists in the discovery that these remarkable animals breed in the Sargasso Sea. Their mysterious disappearance from marshes into the sea, and their reappearance as baby eels, or elvers, in the same rivers and creeks, was a biological conundrum that needed solving. However, Tucker also became involved with the infamous Loch Ness monster, which, along with the Abominable Snowman, is the emblematic animal of cryptozoologists.*8 There is little doubt that the Museum establishment of the time looked askance at any endorsement by a member of staff of pseudo-science. Tucker persisted in his belief that in the deep waters of the Scottish loch lurked some kind of large vertebrate, often assumed to be a plesiosaur surviving from the Cretaceous. Warnings from the Keeper to keep away from “Nessie” went unheeded. But Tucker was a member of what his contemporaries would have described as “the awkward squad.” The more he was instructed not to do something, the more he felt he must stick to his guns. The “Nessie” enthusiasts did nothing to help his case, naturally enough citing an authority from the Natural History Museum as a token of their own respectability. Tucker himself had fired off a series of memoranda and complaints about the incompetence of management “upstairs.”
Eventually, disciplinary proceedings against Tucker were started, and, once initiated, the machine ground inexorably on. On 18 May 1960 the Director of the time, Sir Terence Morrison Scott, sent him a blistering memo proposing his dismissal “on the grounds of your long continued vexatious or insubordinate or generally offensive conduct.” Finally, the matter reached the level of the Trustees, and their decision resulted in his removal from the staff. Being the obstinate man he was, Tucker fought back, asserting wrongful dismissal, and questioning whether the Trustees had the right to dismiss him. The matter even went to Parliament. The odd thing was that the official list of charges did not mention “Nessie”—rather, he was accused of the heinous crime of not filling in his diary. Possibly the Loch Ness monster was just too embarrassing and difficult, so his persecutors needed objective technicalities. The case ground on and on. In the end he sued the Chairman of the Trustees, who happened to be the Archibishop of Canterbury, Lord Fisher of Lambeth. We have seen already that Trustees at that time were deemed beyond reproach, and this particular Trustee obviously came with an impossibly high endorsement.
In the end, it required a ruling of the Court of Appeal to terminate Denys Tucker’s campaign. It had taken many years of his life: “Eel expert loses 7 year battle” was the story in the Daily Mail on 8 December 1967. From this distance it does look as if his treatment was harsh, but even his friends recognized that his intransigence did not help his case. The saddest aspect was that Tucker was excluded from all parts of the Museum not accessible to the general public, which included the libraries. His career was castrated. I should finish the account of this affair by noting that modern surveys of underwater Loch Ness using the latest sonar equipment have failed to reveal a pod of “Nessies,” although in the intervening years since the Tucker affair there has been no let-up in reported sightings. The climax of these “observations” came in 1975 when the ornithological artist and conservationist Sir Peter Scott gave “Nessie” a published scientific name (in the journal Nature, no less)—based upon a new photograph only slightly less blurry than its predecessors. That name was Nessiteras rhombopteryx; the species epithet referred to the allegedly rhomb-shaped limb of the Scottish “monster.” It was quite quickly observed that the name was also an anagram of “monster hoax by Sir Peter S.”
A nineteenth-century view of Loch Ness, home of “Nessie”
It is hard to believe that it has anything to do with the fishes they study, but the ichthyologists at the Natural History Museum tended to be a peculiar, if interesting, lot. Peter J. P. Whitehead was an expert on that most economically important group of fishes, the clupeids—herrings, anchovies and their numerous relatives. Many of those fishes with apparently endless, tiny forked bones are clupeids. The bones get stuck in your teeth and snag in your throat, but the fishes feed the millions. They are also full of Omega-3 oils, which make them good for the heart as well as the appetite. Just at the moment, they are considered to be almost the ultimate health food: if we ate nothing but lettuce and herrings we should all last till we are 103 years old. Whitehead’s great work, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1985–88, is Clupeoid Fishes of the World; one part of it alone is 579 pages long, and of course it will be completely unknown to the average reader. Nonetheless, it is an heroic monument to a lifetime of study at the important end of biodiversity, where to name and identify are also to help people survive. Peter Whitehead followed, and possibly exceeded, Tucker’s example of egocentrism. He was extraordinarily arrogant, but also good at what he did. Thin as a lath, with sharply defined bags beneath his eyes, he was perhaps rather an unlikely Lothario, but he was famous for his affairs with younger female members of the Museum staff. Apparently, he was irresistible. He lived somewhere beyond Oxford, and when he commuted into the Museum he travelled in the First Class end of the train, where in those days one could even have breakfast. He always claimed to be able to fix up a date with any attractive waitress by the time he reached Paddington Station. He came from a rather aristocratic background. His twin brother, Rowland, is a baronet: an urbane and cultivated man, with a successful City career and a number of charity commitments. When it came to inheriting the title, Peter evidently believed that he should be the “Sir” rather than his brother. I understand that this rare case might be determined by precedence—the first one out of the birth canal inherits the title. Peter took his brother to court over his right to the title, and eventually lost. Nobody could prove that he was the lead arrival. Not surprisingly, this verdict resulted in estrangement between the twins. Rowland recalls receiving letters of astounding virulence. Herrings evidently do nothing to suppress bile.
Peter Whitehead at home among the fish collections
It is hardly surprising that the reorganization of science within the Museum in 1990 was anathema to Peter Whitehead. He foresaw the destruction of what he considered its traditional values of scholarly research pursued without too much red tape and leading in its own good time to the production of the definitive work. To such an individualist, the whole notion of being “managed” was preposterous, and he was angry about the arrival of what one might term Corporate Man at the Museum. Neanderthal Man was fine in the place, but Corporate Man belonged elsewhere. He was a broadly cultured man, with a passionate interest in classical music. I think now he would be held up as an admirable example of one who ignored the arbitrary division between arts and sciences. He wrote a satirical roman à clef under the title “The Keepers” as a kind of warning, an exaggerated, farcical version of what he saw as happening around him. Sadly, the novel was never completed. The unfinished version has been circulating around the science departments in a kind of samizdat ever since Peter’s death in 1992. The synopsis of the novel has every Keeper in love with some woman or other around the Museum. Wives are not mentioned, which probably reflects Peter’s priorities rather well. The convoluted plot involves Brightlook Investments sponsoring various “improvements” that finish up with the gardens converted into a multi-storey car park and the galleries into an expensive massage parlour. Bluebottle Chemicals pay for what is entirely practical research: farewell trilobites and butterflies, hello germ warfare. After several botched assassination attempts upon him, the Director responsible for the whole débâcle is impaled on a rhinoceros horn. You get the general drift. I wish that the writing had been as good as the outline. I think it would have benefited from more distance; Peter was too involved with the thought that “the majestic grandeur of the Museum, its very dignity, was gradually eaten away, gnawed from the inside until the f
abric was hollow, like a street façade from a film set merely propped up on waste ground…” Well, we were actually approached for a McDonald’s franchise in the eastern basement.
Peter Whitehead became famous briefly in the wider world of non-ichthyologists for discovering a lost Mozart manuscript. It is surprising where the pursuit of herrings can lead. He was searching for a sixteenth-century work that included very early illustrations of Brazilian herring—“the Libri Picturati containing some of the most celebrated natural history drawings,” as he described it himself. The same collection of manuscripts included a good deal of manuscript music by composers both illustrious and obscure. His detective work was persistent—the file of correspondence relating to it runs to two thick folders in the Museum archives. The original collection was removed from Berlin during the war, and he deduced that it “went to Kloster Grüssau, a Benedictine monastery in Silesia, almost certainly survived the war, but now [is] officially lost.” After much dogged research, he eventually traced the collection to the Jagiellon Library in Kraków, Poland, where much of its natural history and music was safely preserved, including a Mozart score. Fortunately for Peter, his discovery was corroborated; had it proved bogus, the newspapers would have had a great time with headlines featuring Red Herrings. The Observer and Sunday Times published the full story on 3 April 1977. When he was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1991, Peter simply disappeared. He went off to Mexico. I am told that his wife visited the Museum shortly afterwards and tried to get into his office, but the Keeper of Zoology had locked it. It was too full of incriminating evidence concerning his exciting love life. The last we heard of him was a postcard sent to the fish section; it showed Peter Whitehead on a small boat somewhere sunny in the company of a topless Mexican beauty. However, he did return home to die. It was a sad end.
Extending beyond the fishes: Peter Whitehead’s musical discovery makes the headlines.
Humphrey Greenwood, who was a near contemporary of Peter Whitehead’s, worked on the cichlid fishes of the African great lakes. I first met him in a part of the basement known as Lavatory Lane. No single locality better encapsulated the class system of the old Museum. There were two different lavatories; one was labelled “Scientific Officers,” the other labelled “Gentlemen,” where the other ranks were allowed to pee. However, in both of these establishments the lavatory paper was a remarkably hard, shiny variety that had the words “Government Property” printed on every sheet. Presumably you were meant to reflect on your Civil Service grade even as you wiped your bottom. Humphrey and I exchanged humorous comments on these curious arrangements. After that, I would see him in the alley or colonnade at the back of the Museum where the smokers congregated by the bike sheds. Humphrey was a furious smoker who often paced up and down as if trying to undo the damage with a brisk walk. I learned about his fish work while puffing in a more leisurely fashion on a Gauloise. The cichlid fishes are a natural evolutionary experiment. They have evolved in isolation in localities such as Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi to produce dozens of endemic species. Humphrey made his reputation from the study of this “species flock,” on which he published the definitive work, showing how behaviour differences and specialized feeding and breeding habits allowed all these closely related fishes to coexist. For example, there are species that feed only on snails and have special mouth parts to help them do this. One species became “mouth brooders”—the female carried the young inside her mouth, thus increasing the chances of the tiddlers growing to adulthood. Even more remarkably, there is evidence that Lake Victoria dried out twelve thousand years ago, so all this evolution must have happened rapidly since that time. This cichlid fish story tells us much about the generation of biodiversity, and how animals exploit their habitat, even though it may not be typical of animals in general. Furthermore, what has happened subsequently in Lake Victoria certainly tells us about what damages ecology when an alien species is introduced. The Nile perch (Lates niloticus) was introduced into the lake as a commercial fish in the late 1950s, because it grows rapidly to a great size. It is a living example of fast food. The effect was to drive some cichlid species to the brink of extinction. Humphrey said wryly that he sometimes did not know whether he was godfather or obituarist to some of the fishes he loved.
Humphrey’s cichlid work is a good example of how research spans generations of Museum employees. The tradition of working on the fishes of the African lakes goes far back in our scientific history. In 1864 Albert Carl Ludwig Gotthilf Günther, who was Keeper of Zoology for twenty years, had described a number of species from dried skins collected from Lake Malawi on the second David Livingstone Zambesi Expedition. The zoologist Georges Albert Boulenger then produced a monumental Catalogue of the Freshwater Fishes of Africa in the British Museum between 1909 and 1916, of which the cichlids formed an important part of the 1915 volume of that work. The small matter of the First World War did not dent his endeavours. I should add that Boulenger’s work in general is still cited regularly in the scientific literature; proof, if you like, that taxonomic contributions can have durability that more flashy publications lack. Charles Tate Regan, who was Director of the Museum between 1927 and 1938, produced a work on Lake Malawi fishes in 1922. He was followed by the redoubtable Ethelwynn Trewavas, the last of Humphrey’s predecessors, and she, too, made her contribution to cichlids from the 1930s onwards, especially those of Lake Malawi—sometimes in combination with Regan. Ethelwynn worked on many other kinds of fishes in addition, including eels and strange, ugly-looking deep-sea species.
The collections of all these workers survive for future generations of scientists to study, so that an interested visitor will feel a kind of tactile link with his intellectual forebears. If he opens one of the appropriate jars where the cichlids are preserved he can touch a specimen that was handled by Trewavas, that had once flipped and jumped in its death throes before being preserved in spirits. A vision of an expedition long ago comes into his mind: Ethelwynn in her sensible khaki clothes deep in Africa, issuing orders to porters, busy with her jars. I had first come across these fishes lurking in the dark in the old Spirit Building when I explored the nooks and crannies of Gormenghast. Now they live in bright new storage in the glass palace of the new Darwin Centre at the west end of the Museum site, rank upon rank in transparent jars. They occupy their appropriate place in the twenty-seven kilometres of shelving where the “wet” collections are stored: lizards on one floor, octopuses on another, snakes elsewhere again. In the basement of the Darwin Centre there is a battery of tanks that house the giants of the fish collection. The artist Damien Hirst leapt to fame with his pickled shark: well, here are a dozen unsung Hirsts wallowing in their formalin archive. It is a development to be welcomed that the public are now allowed to tour through these historical collections. The current fish man, Darrell Siebert, told me that he had found a species in Borneo that was a staple food for a whole village but had never even been named and described—and this at a time when deforestation was changing its habitat for ever. Surely it is not just what E. O. Wilson termed “biophilia” to believe that for a whole species to die out before it has even been named is a tragedy commensurate with any of those that human beings have devised for each other.
Ethelwynn Trewavas was devoted to Denys Tucker; indeed, they may have been lovers at one time. When Ethelwynn made her retirement speech, she let the management have it from both barrels about what she regarded as his shabby treatment. But she continued to work on fishes until she was very old, sprightly to the last. Humphrey Greenwood went on from strength to strength as he documented the cichlid evolutionary radiation in Lake Victoria. His 1974 book The Cichlid Fishes of Lake Victoria: Biology of a Species Flock is a classic of biology. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, which is one of the very few clubs for which membership cannot be bought or traded. For a while he was the only FRS in the Natural History Museum. Nonetheless, he could not be described as a happy man, any more than Peter Whitehead or Denys Tucker.
During his smoky marching up and down the colonnade he grumbled and moaned about the iniquities of management. He frequently had dark rings under his eyes, speaking of disturbed rest and late nights pacing the carpet. Nor did he enjoy easy relationships with his students; he was so hypercritical, they said. He was evidently a difficult and temperamental man. His death, too, had more than a whiff of tragedy. He died of a heart attack while working late in his laboratory. Had a night warder discovered him he might have been saved. So the curation staff in the 1980s who had to work for these awkward scientists often gnashed their teeth in frustration, although frankly they, too, included a number of eccentrics. Jim Chambers was a tall, lugubriously humorous man with wild hair running all down his back. He wore John Lennon glasses, and played in a group vaguely reminiscent of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. His barking laugh could be heard all around the Museum. Jim left voluntarily in the aftermath of the 1990 “night of the long dissecting knives.”
Dry Storeroom No. 1 Page 14
