Dry Storeroom No. 1

by Richard Fortey

  I was involved with the beginnings of all this. The first of the new galleries was the hall of human biology—“making an exhibition of ourselves” as the label eventually read. As a very young scientist, I was in charge of the first steering group for this trail-blazer for the new exhibition schemes, a show all about human biology, perception, the brain, development, genetics and even society. It could not have been more of a departure from the old public galleries. My team made out the first brief for the exhibition, full of bright ideas, not all of them practical. I read everything from Richard Gregory on visual perception and the brain to Jane Jacobs on the growth of cities; it probably did me a lot of good. By the time the exhibition actually opened in 1977, most of the original outline had disappeared. By then, an able ex-palaeontologist, Dr. Roger Miles, had been placed in charge of the modernization of the exhibitions. He was a rather formidable figure: serious-minded and with distinctive convictions about the educational value of the new displays. He approached the exhibitions with the purposefulness he had previously applied to the description of the Devonian fossil fish from Gogo, Australia. Some people did not approve of his high-mindedness, which they associated with a Nonconformist strictness. As one of them remarked to me at the time: “There is Methodism in his madness!” But if Miles had a didactic side, I do not believe it mattered a jot when it came to applying it to the galleries. The Human Biology galleries were a great success. They managed to be both fun and informative, with plenty of knobs to turn and audiovisual displays. It is easy to forget how revolutionary these exhibits were at the time, and even thirty years on they do not seem out of date. I will give one example of their effect. I had noticed that not long after the exhibition opened there seemed to be a large number of young Spanish girls going into the exhibition. This was a time when Spanish au pairs were a common sight in London. I followed them (in the most academic way) and noticed that they beat a path to one particular exhibit, which dealt with the growth of the foetus, inside a womb-like room, illustrated by a riveting film of this vital part of the reproductive cycle. One or two of the girls were making notes. I suddenly realized that this was important to them for one simple reason: this was probably the only sex education they had ever received.

  The status of women within the Natural History Museum itself has changed fundamentally from the early days. From the first there were remarkable female scientists who made important contributions to the collections, as well as those talented botanical artists who contributed artistically to floras. Beatrix Potter was a talented and accurate painter from life, although she did not think much of the employees at the Museum: “a pretty dull lot” as she remarked. Then there were those female adventurers who took off to dangerous parts of the world to secure specimens for the collections. Thanks to a biography by Karolyn Schindler, we can now appreciate the courage of Dorothea Bate, who was a pioneering palaeontologist and collector of mammal fossils from the Mediterranean region. Starting in the early years of the twentieth century, when she was still a young slip of a thing, she explored Cyprus, Crete, Majorca and Menorca in search of new genera and species of fossil animals. What are now popular holiday destinations were then quite wild areas in which brigands could cause trouble, and roads were so poor that access to sites was either by boat or by exhausting treks over dangerous tracks. Nor was there such a thing as sensible field gear for a lady in those early days. Dorothea Bate was undeterred by the obstacles, even when, as she wrote to the Keeper of Geology, Arthur Smith Woodward, finding fossils was “like searching for the proverbial needle in the bundle of hay.”

  In the caves known as Cuevas de los Colombs on Majorca, she was rewarded by finding bones of a very peculiar animal that stood only about forty-five centimetres to the shoulder, which she was later to name Myotragus (Greek: “mouse-goat”). The caves lie on the edge of the sea underneath some formidable cliffs; one can easily imagine what it must have been like to try to gain landfall when the Mediterranean coughed up one of its famous bad storms—and even in calm weather the cave system was several hours by boat from the nearest harbour. Myotragus was remarkable in lacking the usual six lower incisor teeth so typical of ruminants but having instead just two, and these huge and continuously growing, like the gnawing teeth of a rat. It was an impossible animal! News of the discovery excited great curiosity back at the Natural History Museum, for nothing like the beast had been known before. Dorothea was fortunate that she was encouraged by two successive Keepers of Geology, Henry Woodward and Arthur Smith Woodward, who not only valued her work but paid her enough for the specimens she collected to allow further expeditions. The new discoveries were exhibited in the Museum as mounted skeletons and the public flocked to see them. Dorothea also found pygmy elephants in the mountains of Cyprus. She was largely responsible for initiating a story about the Mediterranean islands during the Cenozoic Era that is still having flesh added to its bare bones. The genesis of Myotragus happened when a small species of goat migrated into the Balearic Islands from the Iberian Peninsula at a time of low sea level about six million years ago. At this so-called Messinian time, the Mediterranean Sea was sealed at the Straits of Gibraltar, and nearly dried out. Thick, natural salt deposits were formed in a deep basin where the sea had once been; harsh times, indeed—but for a few animals this crisis was also an opportunity to reach new land. When sea levels rose once again, the “goat” became isolated on its new island home, and over a hundred millennia or so it evolved its extraordinary form while adapting to life on a rocky island: it probably also became a superb climber. Isolation of other islands led to further endemic species—in fact, the phenomenon of “dwarfing” in island species is known elsewhere, so the pygmy elephant is perhaps not so surprising.

  The skull of the curious extinct mammal Myotragus from the Balearic Islands, discovered by the redoubtable Dorothea Bate

  Dorothea’s fearless exploration of the islands was a measure of the new confidence of women as scientists—and probably not just a local phenomenon, when one remembers that Marie Curie won her Nobel Prize in 1903, a symbol that women might win glittering awards as well as the vote. But, as for remuneration from the Museum, Dorothea Bate had to live most of her life on what we would today call “soft money”—hand-outs of one kind or another. At the outset her expeditions were financed, or specimens were purchased, as a result of the excavations. There is no doubt from the correspondence between Dorothea and her male Museum sponsors that she was taken seriously as a scientific worker—the language is collegiate, not patronizing. However, when she finally came to join the Museum staff she was not properly established, but paid on a piecework system by the number of specimens she prepared.

  There were, if it is possible, even more redoubtable and indomitable women collectors. Lucy Evelyn Cheesman was probably the most remarkable. She was born in the Victorian era in 1881, and survived into that of the Beatles, dying in 1969. As a skilled entomologist she travelled through the South Seas, the Galapagos, the Moluccas, collecting indefatigably as she went. In 1924 she left the St. George’s Expedition when it arrived in Tahiti and continued on her own. In the same year she was made the first woman curator of the London Zoo. Between 1929 and 1955 she went on a series of expeditions more or less by herself to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and the South-West Pacific—she was truly intrepid. The thickest jungles did not seem to deter her nor did negotiating with unlettered natives. She published dozens of scientific papers on her discoveries, mostly on insects. But it may be characteristic of the time in which she was working that some scientists seemed to be unaware of her gender. A man named Riley described a species of tomato, based upon specimens Cheesman had collected from the Galapagos Islands. He named it (Solanum) cheesmanii—which is a masculine ending. Presumably he thought that only a man in shorts and pith helmet could have got to such a remote spot. Fortunately, there is justice in nomenclature: the same species name has lately been corrected as Solanum cheesmaniae, a feminine ending acknowledging the gender of the discoverer. There
is a photograph taken in the field of Evelyn Cheesman when she was of a certain age; thin as a lath and with a set jaw, eyes shielded under a hat; one would know at once that this was a woman not to be trifled with. New Guinea tribesmen would fall silent under her imperious stare. But she was no termagant either: she wrote well and humorously about her adventures in Six-Legged Snakes in New Guinea (1949) and Things Worth While (1957). But neither is there any sense of a woman in subjugation to a male hegemony: the males wouldn’t have dared.

  The fearless entomologist Lucy Evelyn Cheesman in the field

  When women were finally admitted on to the scientific staff under the directorship of Charles Tate Regan, they soon became some of the best-known scientists in the Museum. Because no quarter was given to their sex, they might have been described as “blue stockings” by the less enfranchised of their sisters; for the most part I would rather describe them as dedicated. When I came to the Museum to work on fossils, I was introduced to one of the greatest women scientists, Sidnie Manton. She was the high priestess of the arthropods, and over a long research life studied many of them, from sea spiders to lobsters to moths. She had a sister, Irene, who was at least as famous as a botanist, and the Manton sisters remain unique as the only sisters elected to the Royal Society. When I was appointed to my job, Sidnie was married to John Harding, Keeper of Zoology, but she was not formally on the staff—although she spent most of her time working in the Museum. The studies that made her famous included very detailed descriptions of the embryology of crustaceans, and even today workers turn to these meticulous scientific papers. She went on to discover how the arthropods worked, how their muscles lifted and moved their jointed legs from inside, and how different kinds of arthropods—millipedes and spiders, for example—had very different gaits. She treated her subjects like complex pieces of machinery. I often think of Sidnie Manton when I watch Star Wars, in which aliens use gigantic metallic arthropods as steeds, all struts and spindly beams and ball-and-socket joints. Because she found fundamental differences between different groups of arthropods, she came to believe that arthropods had evolved more than once from different ancestors. This idea has fallen into disfavour since molecular evidence has indicated that they did indeed ultimately descend from a single ancestral “proto-arthropod” about a billion years ago. A few scientists have been rather patronizing about Sidnie Manton, as if this one topic was all she had touched, but this is to neglect the enormous factual contribution she made to our knowledge of the most numerous animals on Earth. She had a major stroke in her last decade, one that left her almost completely paralysed. But she went on to write her great summary book about her life’s work, Arthropoda (1978), composing at a typewriter with a finger that still worked. There was something peculiarly tragic about seeing one who had done so much to improve our understanding of scuttling animals ending her days so immobilized, but it was impossible not be inspired by her unquenchable determination in the face of misfortune. Her work on the crustaceans continues unabated with a well-known team of researchers in the Darwin building. With fish stocks now diminishing, the importance of prawns and crabs and their myriad relatives to the feeding of humans is bound to increase—but much needs to be learned about their life histories, parasites and habitats before sustainable systems can be worked out. What goes on in the back rooms of museums has a vital contribution to make to understanding the complexities of marine ecosystems.

  Theya Molleson was a close colleague of Kenneth Oakley, who exposed the Piltdown fraud, and she pioneered the study of diseases as they leave their mark on human bones. She did sterling work in the 1980s on the human remains interred in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields, where there was enough biography associated with the bones to investigate such things as the effects of diet, society and wealth on a section of historical London. The Spitalfields Project was also a good example of collaboration between very disparate bodies: the Greater London Council, the Institute of Archaeology, the BM, the Natural History Museum and so on. Over in the Zoology Department Juliet Clutton-Brock was the authority on the domestication of animals, and wrote an entertaining book about the subject. She left the Natural History Museum as a result of a late imbroglio from the Chalmers “night of the long knives.” When notable scientists retire, they are sometimes given the honour of a Festschrift, a special volume of learned papers on their speciality written by their colleagues. It is a rather touching homage. Nobody except Juliet could have gladly received the volume presented to her in 1993 bearing the title Skeletons in Her Cupboard. Dr. Ailsa M. Clark is a world expert on starfish, and rather formidable; she was also irreplaceable after she retired…And for every woman scientist there were, and are, three or four indispensable female curators labouring away on the collections…and beyond them again there are female volunteers who still give their services for nothing. It is not an exaggeration to say that nowadays science would fall apart without the contribution of women, and it seems extraordinary that the secret world behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum should once have been an almost entirely male preserve.

  The old Museum may have been hidebound by petty rules, but the staff’s security of tenure meant that members of staff were free to be naughty. I am told that just before the war years there was an illicit still inside the model of the blue whale—the same huge replica that survives on exhibition in the public galleries. Indeed, it was given a spring clean in 2007. Inside it is hollow, making it an excellent hiding place—a trapdoor in the stomach allowed access. Stuart Stammwitz, who became head of exhibitions, was allegedly responsible. He was the son of Percy Stammwitz, who for many years was the Museum taxidermist. Together they were one of the few examples of the Museum becoming a family business. I should add that the trapdoor was later sealed over, but a telephone directory and some small change remain hidden inside. For a short while, the workmen who built the whale could have felt what it was like to be Jonah. Then there was the case of the dodo. The bird gallery is the last of the old-style galleries: stuffed with stuffed specimens. Like the minerals gallery, it has been allowed to survive from the old days with which this chapter opened. It is a parade of labelled ornithological examples, family by family—with the added delights of a specially detailed display case on eggs, showing the biggest and the smallest. A somewhat apologetic and in my view unnecessary notice explains that this is a deliberately antique gallery, left behind to show how it used to be done. Halfway along the gallery is a fine dodo, the famous extinct bird, all decked out in whitish feathers. It is, of course, a bogus bird, since no perfect specimens survive in the collections. In fact, it was largely based upon a painting, which may or may not have been painted from life. The feathers are stuck on. The talented model-maker Arthur Hayward was asked to make the life-size replica in the early 1950s—and swan feathers were just what was needed to make the thing convincing. The trouble is that Thames swans belong to the Guild of Lightermen or to the Queen. One is simply not allowed to go and grab a swan. This didn’t deter Barney Newman, another of the Museum’s distinguished topers. He and an accomplice went down to Hammersmith Bridge and grabbed a large cygnet from under the bridge, where nobody could see what they were doing. It was stuffed into a bag and thence into the back of an unmarked van. One version of the story has it that they were stopped by a policeman while speeding back to the Museum, and that Barney had to do creative coughing every time the bagged bird struggled in the back of the van. For all that the Museum was once a stuffy, hierarchical place, decades ago the staff knew how to subvert the rules. If they were “established” civil servants they had to do something very bad indeed to get the sack. Members of staff now may have more freedom, but it comes with less security.

  The dodo (Raphus cucullatus)—a reconstruction using swan feathers

  The real wrongdoers have been persons associated with the Natural History Museum, but not on the staff—conmen who abused a privileged position to dupe the curators and researchers. The worst by far was Colonel Richard Meinertzha
gen, who died at the ripe age of ninety in 1967. Adventurer, soldier, ornithologist, big-game hunter and spy—he had the kind of biography that makes one blink in disbelief.*24 He was as striking in person as his life history would suggest: a natural soldier, erect in posture, chiselled features under a short beard, an imperious and charismatic mien coupled with a penetrating intelligence. He was given to wearing distinctive clothes: one of my elderly colleagues remembers playing table tennis with Meinertzhagen, who was dressed in a black cloak that flew around him “like the very devil.” He was aristocratic and well connected—he even went for childhood walks with Charles Darwin. His passion was birds, and nobody doubts that he was highly skilled as an ornithologist. His postings in Africa and the Middle East allowed him access to rare species, and since he was also an able hunter his collection of skins grew rapidly. In 1954 he presented his collection to the Natural History Museum—an enormous gift of twenty thousand skins. He also had an interest in lice, and presented another collection of about half a million of them mounted on glass slides and in spirit bottles. The Trustees approved Meinertzhagen as an Honorary Associate, a title given to few amateurs, as a measure of their gratitude for the receipt of his collection. No doubt the fact that he was a “toff” did him no harm at all in those snobbish times. Thereafter, he could stride around the Museum as if he owned the place. I regret that I am just too young to have met him, for he was one of those rare people who impress themselves on others within a few seconds. Such people should, perhaps, be fenced off from their fellows from an early age since little good ever comes of such charisma.