by Mike Bruton
The divorce in 1937 was a disgrace on the Pienaar family and devastating for Henriette. For a while after this, Pats and Bob continued to live in Grahamstown with their father and his new wife Margaret, but Shirley stayed with Henriette and only met the family once, many years later, during a reunion in Knysna.
Henriette relocated to Pretoria for a year, where she lived with her sister Helene, and helped raise her children. She then moved to 10 Union Avenue, Pinelands, in Cape Town, where she bought a house with the divorce settlement she had received from JLB Smith. She rented out rooms in this house, and eventually the whole house, in order to generate income, as she received no steady income after the divorce. At one stage she worked temporarily at the Princess Alice Orthopaedic Hospital in Retreat, Cape Town, which she helped to transform into a happy convalescent home for children of all cultures. She eventually moved to Gordon’s Bay where she cared for her ageing parents, who died in the 1950s.
Henriette never remarried, even though she was only 40 at the time of the divorce and lived for another 34 years. The Pienaar family remained bitter towards Smith throughout his life, even after he had achieved world fame, and refused all contact with him. Henriette died at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town on 6th June 1971 at the age of 74 years, 3½ years after JLB Smith had died.
Henriette was JLB Smith’s wife for 14 years, bore him three children, and sustained him during his formative years as an ichthyologist, yet he never mentioned her again in his extensive writings.
CHAPTER 6
Buchu to blacktails
Transition to ichthyology
SMITH HAD spent most of his childhood inland in the dry Karoo and developed his love of angling only after his family had travelled by ox-wagon to Knysna in 1903 and he saw ‘this silvery thing jump out of the water’ (Smith, 1956). Margaret relates, in the 1976 SATV documentary, They called him Doc, that after they returned inland, the young JLB was so frustrated that he couldn’t go fishing that he once ‘fished’ for the neighbour’s fowls with a hook and line, but was caught and punished! Smith later told friends that the first fish he caught as a small boy was a blacktail, Diplodus sargus, in Knysna lagoon; from then on he never lost his passion for angling (W Smith, pers. comm., 2017). In the chapter on ‘Seabreams’ authored by JLB and Margaret Smith in Smiths’ Sea Fishes (Smith & Heemstra, 1986), the blacktail is described as ‘a voracious and cunning fish that will take almost any bait, but is not easily hooked in clear water or with coarse tackle. About the best fighter of our inshore angling fishes’. Later in life, angling became a form of recreation that helped heal his bruised spirit and tired body.
From the mid-1920s onwards, when he was a chemistry lecturer at Rhodes University College (RUC), and known by his colleagues as ‘Len’, JLB organised fishing holidays along the coast near Port Alfred, taking selected students by train and then ox-wagon to remote fishing spots, where they camped out. These fishing camps were disciplined and well organised and it was considered a privilege to be invited on them. JLB had also further developed his interest in bee-keeping and made his own bee hives. He was reputed to spend hours watching the bees fly to and fro and observing the dance that they performed when they returned to the hive and communicated to other bees where they had collected their pollen.
Blacktail, Diplodus sargus.
Smith became informally involved in the Albany Museum’s fish collection from the late 1920s onwards and began methodically to catalogue and classify the collection. By 1937 he had become an authority on Eastern Cape marine and freshwater fishes (Gon, 2002). By 1938, according to Margaret Smith (1969), he had given up all active sports (except walking and angling) and now focused entirely on his research on chemistry and fishes. He was a Trustee of the Albany Museum in Grahamstown from 1930 to 1955, and Chairman from 1946 to 1947, during a very busy time in his life. He also served on the committee of the local government school for boys (now Graeme College) from 1934 to at least 1940.
JLB Smith with his catch near Hamburg, Eastern Cape, in the 1920s.
JLB Smith in the 1920s on the ox-wagon in which he went fishing near Hamburg.
To improve access to his favourite fishing spots, in 1928 JLB Smith acquired his ‘Blue House’ fishing cottage adjacent to Knysna Lagoon, a simple abode made of corrugated iron cladding on a timber frame. As one of his many ‘real life’ chemistry experiments, he painted it with Reckitt’s Blue (a laundry detergent with blue fabric brighteners comprising ultramarine and baking soda) to keep the mosquitoes away as it was surrounded on two sides by the tidal mudflats of the Salt River. He designed a replacement Blue House (which still exists) in 1944 but it was completed only in 1950, at a cost of £1,300 (Rhodes University Archive) and is now a guesthouse. The new house included a small laboratory with shelves piled high with bottled specimens and a simple microscope on the lab bench. There were also ‘tons of books and lots of weather, water temperature, atmospheric pressure, depths, etc of the Lagoon and fishing logs depicted on several types of maps in the main house as well as the “lab”’ (J and W Smith, pers. comm., 2018). JLB spent many happy summer holidays fishing in the Knysna Lagoon and ‘Narrows’, but spent most of his winter holidays on the coast nearer Grahamstown, at Xora Mouth and elsewhere.
Drawing by Liz Tarr of Keppel Barnard.
In the 1976 SATV documentary, Margaret Smith commented that JLB was so passionate about angling that, ‘If he was in his coffin, and he heard a reel scream, he would sit up!’ She also said that angling was one of the few ‘normal’ things that JLB regularly did, and that, when she could sense that he was under excessive strain, they would escape to Knysna so that he could go fishing and relax. She also recalled an event when they were travelling back to Grahamstown by train from Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) after an exhausting expedition during which they had handled over 30,000 fishes, either caught by them and their helpers or bought in fish markets. A weary JLB remarked to Margaret, ‘I would like to go to Knysna and fish’.
While he was still lecturing in chemistry, JLB’s childhood enthusiasm for fishing was growing in intensity, even bordering on obsession. But he soon found that he could not identify many of the marine fishes that he caught, as the available literature was inadequate and he was far removed from any practising ichthyologists. Motivated to improve the situation, Smith began to publish scientific papers that revised the classification of local marine and freshwater fishes and brought new distributional records and new species to the attention of the scientific community.
During the 1930s he maintained a prodigious correspondence with Keppel Barnard (1887–1964), the accomplished taxonomist and later Director of the South African Museum (now the Iziko South African Museum) in Cape Town (Gon, 1994), sometimes writing to him on a daily basis (Gon, 2004), requesting literature, illustrations and advice. Without modern amenities such as copying machines, Barnard would hand-write copies of species descriptions, trace drawings, and send them to Smith (Gon, 2002).
In a letter to Barnard dated 20th April 1934 Smith jokingly wrote, ‘My papers should really all appear as by “Barnard (with Smith)”’, but they never co-authored any publications. In fact, throughout his long ichthyology career, the only person with whom Smith co-authored a scientific paper, book or chapter in a book (or even a popular article) was his second wife, Margaret! This is in contrast to his papers on chemistry, most of which were co-authored with other scientists.
Keppel Barnard published over 200 scientific papers (similar to Smith’s prodigious output), including important monographs on marine fishes (in 1925, 1927, 1948), freshwater fishes (1943), and crustaceans and molluscs. He had a reputation for working very fast: ‘… the man who, it was said, could describe three new species a day and never change a word, the man who drew new types free-hand on scraps of paper and sent them off for publication’ (Brown, 1982).
Smith held Barnard in high esteem and once wrote to him that he had ‘… admiration for your intellect which I rank second to none in your field in the Southern
Hemisphere’ (Gon, 2004), but the sentiment wasn’t always reciprocated, as Mike Brown observes:
‘I never knew him to say an unkind word about anyone. The closest he ever came to it was in an article in which he wrote about the discovery of the first living Coelacanth by Miss Courtenay-Latimer, remarking that it was then “sent to someone in Grahamstown”. He could not stand J.L.B. Smith, but chose to ignore his existence rather than write something disparaging about him. … There was a great deal to be learnt from Keppel Barnard, but I think the most important was scientific humility. Science to him was a constant adventure and he could not understand that there were those to whom research was an ego-boosting experience’ (Brown, 1982).
It seems that Barnard approved of ‘Smith the avid backroom scientist’ in the 1930s but, like many other scientists of the day who preferred to slave away in relative obscurity, he disapproved of the high profile that Smith (with the help of the media) fashioned for himself after the discovery of the first coelacanth.
There is no doubt that Smith did seek publicity for his work, but there was good reason for it – he needed financial and logistical support to achieve his ambitious plans to mount lengthy fish-collecting expeditions up the East African coast and to publish lavishly illustrated books on fishes that would be useful to both scientists and laypeople. Barnard was a prolific writer and highly influential scientist, but he published almost all his work in the Annals of the South African Museum and other scientific journals, and his three ‘popular’ books were all written in technical language and illustrated in black-and-white.
JLB Smith also had a major fall-out with Dr Cecil von Bonde, Director of the Marine Biological Survey (MBS) in Cape Town from 1928, especially over the poor curation of a valuable marine fish collection made for the MBS using the research vessel SS Pickle (Gon, 2002). In a letter dated 1st September 1947, Smith commented, ‘When I think of those thousands of valuable specimens that have been lost I could weep, or alternatively cut a few throats. It is one of the greatest scientific crimes I have ever heard of.’ Von Bonde’s retort was that Smith’s work was ‘… of little value to the Fishing Industry’ (Gon, 2002). Many years later, in a letter dated 18th January 1959, Smith labelled his old nemesis, now Director of the Fisheries Development Corporation, as ‘… an arrogant conservative, a pessimist and a defeatist’ in connection with the latter’s criticism of plans to build a marine research facility in Durban.
The American ichthyologist Carl Hubbs (1968) described Smith’s career at this stage, ‘Since 1931, following an initial career in chemistry, he had been publishing short faunal and revisionary papers on marine fishes of South Africa, thereby establishing for himself a modest reputation as a descriptive ichthyologist’. Of his later career, Hubbs (1968) wrote, he ‘issued a seemingly unending stream of papers, mostly short and succinct, and generally of high quality’.
During the 1930s and until 1941, all the fish specimens that Smith collected were lodged in the Albany Museum and he did his fish research there (or at home) and published under the museum’s name. Then, on the afternoon of Saturday, 6th September 1941, a devastating fire gutted the main building of the Albany Museum and changed the course of ichthyology in Grahamstown. Practically all the exhibited collections, including many fishes and several type specimens (a unique specimen on which the description of a new species of animal – or plant – is based) that had been collected by JLB Smith, were destroyed (Gon, 2002, 2004).
Fortunately, fire fighters isolated the two newer wings of the museum where the wet collections were held and students and town people, supervised by JLB and Margaret Smith, formed a human chain that quickly removed the collections from those buildings that were still threatened by the fire. The fire not only destroyed irreplaceable holdings and displays in the Albany Museum but also caused a major financial crisis during the difficult war years (and the recession that followed) from which the museum took decades to recover (Skelton, pers. comm., 2017).
The fish collections were initially taken from the Albany Museum to RUC for safe-keeping, which immediately raised the issue of the provision of adequate and secure accommodation (and professional curation). The crisis was exacerbated when the Smiths resumed their expeditions after the Second World War and brought considerable amounts of material back to Grahamstown. For instance, their two expeditions in 1946 yielded over 1,000 specimens, including 93 species new to the collection and 17 species new to science (Gon, 2004). Soon they had one of the world’s best collections of East African fishes. The critical situation strengthened Smith’s case for his appointment as Professor of Ichthyology and for the establishment of a Department of Ichthyology at RUC.
Eventually the freshwater fish collection was returned to the Albany Museum when Rex Jubb moved there from the Department of Ichthyology in 1961, but the marine fish collections, which had mainly been made by JLB Smith, were retained by RUC and are now in the holdings of the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB). The freshwater fish collection has since also been moved from the Albany Museum to the SAIAB.
JLB Smith timidly published his first short ichthyological paper, ‘New and little known fishes from the south and east coasts of Africa’, in the Records of the Albany Museum in 1931. At the time South Africa had no scientists studying marine fishes, as Dr Keppel Barnard (1887–1964) had published most of his marine fish papers by 1927 (although his last papers on freshwater and marine fishes appeared as late as 1943 and 1948), and declared that he was ‘sick of fishes’ (MM Smith, 1979). Barnard typified the dying breed of polymath scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries and was quite happy to shift his research focus from fishes to crustaceans and molluscs, which were his real interest. He retired as Director of the South African Museum in March 1956 and died in 1964 (Gon, 2002).
Between 1931 and 1945 Smith published 28 papers on fishes as well as, in 1937, a chapter on fishes in the Guide to the Vertebrate Fauna of the Eastern Cape, published by the Albany Museum. JLB illustrated his first scientific paper himself with what he considered to be reasonable sketches but which are, in hindsight, simplistic and inaccurate. Dr HW Parker, a herpetologist working at the British Museum (Natural History) (now the Natural History Museum) in London, who had been a student with Smith at Cambridge University, wrote to him saying that he was surprised to see a chemist publishing a paper on fishes. He commented that the text was quite good but the illustrations were terrible! For his next fish paper, also published in 1931, Smith spent many hours drawing and redrawing the illustrations, and produced an adequate rendition of a new species of lanternfish, Myctophum (Nasolychnus) florentii.
JLB Smith’s diagrammatic illustration of a fish in his first publication on the topic.
JLB’s publications soon attracted the attention of local and international scientists and he was appointed Honorary Curator of Fishes in the four local Eastern Cape museums in Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, King William’s Town and East London. His parallel lives not only doubled his work load but also led to entanglements with two completely different communities of people: academics and students on the one hand, and laypeople, anglers and commercial fishermen on the other.
Smith continued to illustrate his own papers until 1941 but, from 1943, in a paper entitled, ‘Interesting early juvenile stadia of certain well-known South African fishes’, published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, his young wife, Margaret, took over this important role. Little did she know that this humble beginning would lead to a distinguished career in scientific illustration. Even though Smith pursued his studies on fishes part-time, he did receive official recognition for this work as, from 1933 to 1945, the Research Grants Board in Johannesburg allocated £100 per year towards his ichthyological research (Rhodes University Archive). The functions of this Board were taken over by the CSIR in 1946.
When Smith tried to identify the fishes that he caught in the 1920s and 1930s with the few books available to him he met with little success. ‘The “keys
” were intelligible only to those already so expert as not to need them, so that it was a dreadful job trying to identify unknown fishes’ (Smith, 1956). He set out to solve this problem and, combining his knowledge of mathematics and ichthyology – unusual for a taxonomist – he created a numerical system for identifying fishes based on counts of hard spines and soft rays in their fins, combined with scale counts along the lateral line (or lateral series if there is no lateral line) and around the body or caudal peduncle. As fishes show considerable variability in their meristic (countable) traits, this variation has to be reflected in the fin spine and ray and lateral line scale count formulae. He probably used the meristic data on fishes in Keppel Barnard’s various monographs on fishes, as well as his own data, to compile these identification keys (Day, 1977).
For example, the dorsal and anal fin spine and ray formula for the elf, Pomatomus saltatrix, is D VII–VIII + I, 23–28; A II, 23–27; LL 90–100. This means that it has seven to eight (+ 1) hard spines and 23 to 28 soft rays in the dorsal fin (D), two hard spines and 23 to 27 soft rays in the anal fin (A), and 90 to 100 scales in the lateral line (LL). In case you catch a coelacanth, its formula is: D VIII + 30; A 27–31; LL 76–82 + 15–23. This means that it has eight hard spines and 30 soft rays in the dorsal fin, 27 to 31 soft rays (but no hard spines) in the anal fin, and 76 to 82 scales in the lateral line, with an additional 15 to 23 scales in the lateral line’s extension onto the central lobe of the tail fin. The system took Smith over a year to figure out, entirely in his spare time, and he allegedly wrote out more than a million figures to compile it (Smith, 1956); but, once he had perfected it, it worked well and allowed him to identify most common species quickly and accurately. JLB commented later, ‘This was a tremendous step forward, and gave me power that normally comes from much longer experience’ (Smith, 1995).
