Dry Storeroom No. 1 (13 page)

Eventually, his room was so crammed with specimens and paraphernalia that it was arranged as a kind of maze, through which the visitor had to pick his way—and his approach could be heard well in advance. At the centre of the maze, like a spider in its web, Bairstow sat wearing green eyeshades, playing with his knitting needles or filing his bits of string. He pretended to be very busy by the time the visitor arrived. His lack of publication was attributed to a paralysing perfectionism. Even collecting the Lias centimetre by centimetre would never suffice; nothing was ever quite in the condition necessary for writing up. In fact, he did once publish something—by accident. One of the replies he had written to an enquiry appeared in print in
Happy Days,
an amateur cycling journal too obscure even to find its way into the library of the Natural History Museum, although I have seen a faded copy of the article, which deals with a fossil that was brought in as an enquiry: I am afraid it is of no consequence. By the time I joined the Museum, Bairstow had retired, but still appeared at the end of the working day like a sad wraith—tall, thin, moustachioed and impeccably polite—just as everyone else was going home. He had taken up deep-sea diving, so that he could gain access to the submerged strata of his beloved Lias on the Yorkshire coast. When he adopted this occupation, diving suits were very heavy, with weighted boots and a bolted-on helmet with a glass visor. He first tried on the suit after hours at the Museum, found himself unable to get out of it again, and was forced to leave the Museum to get help. The stricken scientist was compelled to plod up Knightsbridge, like an extra in a science-fiction film, mouthing through his mask at strangers until he found somebody to release him. The story of Bairstow might seem one of promise unfulfilled, but it has a happy ending of sorts. After his death, his successor at the Natural History Museum, Dr. Michael Howarth, wrote up the Jurassic stratigraphy of Robin Hood’s Bay from Bairstow’s notebooks. Finally, he had broken into print.

Stratigraphy was a popular field of study in the twentieth century; the word means “the drawing of strata”—and many of the scientists working in the department then would have thought of themselves as geologists and stratigraphers first, palaeontologists second; indeed, this part of the BM changed its name from Department of Geology to Department of Palaeontology only in 1956. Bairstow’s unpublished work actually followed a tradition of research that went back to the earliest days. Possibly the most historically important stratigraphical collection of fossils that exists anywhere was purchased between 1816 and 1818. This was the collection of William Smith, who produced the first accurate geological map of the strata of England and Wales—and was among those who laid the foundations of stratigraphy as a science. The splendid map itself is on display on the walls of the Geological Society of London, the oldest society of its kind anywhere, although that organization only belatedly recognized Smith’s great contribution: after all, he was “trade” rather than a gentleman. The tradesman won his proper measure of fame in the end, and Simon Winchester has done his best to add “Strata Smith” to the list of nineteenth-century scientific heroes in his book
The Map That Changed the World.
Smith had used the succession of “organic remains” recovered from the strata he crossed when he was a canal surveyor as a fingerprint for the geological formations. Particularly important were ammonites (see Chapter 3)—they were easy to collect, and their various patterns of whorls and ornament were as recognizable as the faces of old friends. The specific name of
Clydoniceras discus
tells you all you need to know about the appearance of this particular species, and it will be found only in the lower part of the thin limestone formation known as the Cornbrash, which William Smith had been able to map when he traced the Jurassic rocks across country. Follow the stratum and find the fossil. His collection of about two thousand specimens was a conflation of teaching aid and practical guide. It is kept together now in one cabinet, and some of the writing on the labels must be that of Smith himself. Many of the ammonites are fine examples by any reckoning, and they give meaning to that old description of a sample as a “hand specimen”—for they do indeed fit comfortably in the hand, like a medal, or a sports ball. The Jurassic sea urchin
Clypeus ploti
^*5
is more like a well-baked bun. It is an extraordinary thought that William Smith would have shown one particular black
Dactylioceras
ammonite to a convert to his stratigraphic method. See how it has acquired a patina from handling. Teaching by example leaves a subtle shine.

Perhaps Bairstow was inhibited in publishing by the presence in the same department of L. F. Spath, who did little else. He was a kind of ammonite-describing machine. He published on ammonites from around the world: monographs on the ammonites of the Cutch appeared in the
Palaeontographica Indica;
he published on ammonites from Folkestone, from Argentina, from Skye. His output was vast. It must have been intimidating to have such a prodigious character working in the same department. One of my senior colleagues actually knew Spath in his latter years. He reports that Spath had a memory that was so encyclopaedic he could cite the very page on which some particular ammonite had been figured, no matter how obscure the journal. In the end he became quite blind, and he gently stroked the specimens to feel the outlines of their diagnostic ribs and tubercles, and could identify them from touch alone. Oddly enough, he never had a fully “established” job at the Natural History Museum, and continued to be employed on a part-time basis even after he had a worldwide reputation. This may have been because he was an autodidact, having taken his several degrees as an external student. It is unlikely that it had to do with his German origins, because he had served with the Middlesex Regiment in the First World War, but it is said that the Museum was so stingy in its job offer afterwards that he preferred to supplement his livelihood elsewhere. This included teaching at Birkbeck College as a temporary lecturer. Birkbeck is a wonderful institution for devoted students who work for degrees in the evenings, usually after a hard day’s work elsewhere. Spath also did what was effectively “piece work” on ammonites. The journal
Palaeontographica Indica
was established to publish on the fossils of the British Empire in the east and especially India, so he was paid almost by the page, or by the species, to record discoveries from the Himalaya and elsewhere in the subcontinent. There is a view that this encouraged him to recognize rather more species than was strictly necessary.

Ammonites like this Jurassic dactylioceratid from Lincolnshire are not only beautiful but useful in the correlation of sedimentary rocks—the science of stratigraphy, which dominated life in “Palaeo.”

Nonetheless, you cannot argue about Spath’s sheer industry. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1940, and must have been regarded as near the top of his particular tree in this, the heyday of ammonite studies. His only rival was W. J. Arkell of Oxford, author of the monumental
Jurassic System of Great Britain
(1933) and the even more monumental
Jurassic System of the World
(1956). Not surprisingly, the two authorities did not like one another. But, thanks to them, ammonites became the supreme fossil chronometers used to subdivide Mesozoic geological time, the stratigrapher’s ideal material. Almost every few feet of strata could be typified by the appearance of another species of ammonite. Because of their rapid evolution and widespread geographical occurrences, ammonites were a boon to any geologist in the field almost anywhere in the world for determining the age of the strata before him. Even in England, thanks to ammonite precision dating, it was possible to detect earth movements that had hitherto been obscure. It is probably also true that ammonites have been slowly declining as objects of study ever since the time of Spath, as other fossils, particularly microfossils, have taken over their role as chronometers. There are fashions in fossils, as in every other aspect of our culture. In Britain today the only full-time paid professional expert on ammonites is the rubicund Professor W. J. Kennedy of Oxford University Museum, another sterling labourer at the monographic coalface, and one who has the persistence to carry on working even though he may be the last of his kind, like the pearly
Nautilus
—last living genus of the Order Nautiloidea which included the ancestors of the ammonites themselves.

Spath might serve as the model for many of his contemporaries in the Department of Geology. Great cataloguers and stratigraphers, they worked on corals or brachiopods or echinoderms or clams, and became old-fashioned authorities. Several of them laboured over collections studied by still greater forebears. T. H. Withers, for example, prepared a
Catalogue of Fossil Cirripedes,
which included many specimens studied by Charles Darwin himself. Cirripedes are known to most of us as barnacles—anomalous crustaceans that have taken a liking to encrusting rock surfaces, or whales, or one another. They feed by means of modified limbs which protrude from the calcareous valves that enclose the body, like so many feathery nets spread to catch their microscopic food. Barnacles are found from the upper tidal zone to the deepest ocean, so there are plenty of species. There are two main kinds: encrusting sessile ones—acorn barnacles—that are familiar for making some seaside rock surfaces excruciating to walk over, and the goose barnacles with flexible “stalks.” Let us open one of the drawers containing Darwin’s specimens. A series of blocks lie neatly arranged in trays. Most of them are a little disappointing because only the calcareous plates that comprise the casing of the cirripedes survive, and then they fall into individual plates on the death of the animal. A grey piece of chalk has a few of the individual valves scattered over the surface, in shape like miniature kites, but it should be possible to piece together the original barnacle if we know enough about the arrangement of plates on living species. That sloping writing on the label is probably that of the great man himself. Some naturalists will be unaware that Darwin spent eight years during the 1840s devoted to the study of barnacles, both living and fossil. He published a monograph on the fossils in one of Britain’s oldest scientific journals, the
Monographs of the Palaeontographical Society.
He used the time to mull over and develop the thoughts that would make him famous when
The Origin of Species
was published a few years later. Rebecca Stott has shown that the barnacle years were important to establishing Darwin’s respectability as a serious zoological researcher as he made the transition from his earlier phase as a geologist. The scientific basis of the barnacle classification he developed was sound enough to be employed even today in its essentials. Like all taxonomists, he had noticed a mess and set about sorting it out. As the principles of classification clarified as he studied more specimens, so, too, did the arrangement of the ideas that would come to fruition in evolutionary theory. The acorn barnacles helped the growth of the many-branched oak tree of modern biology.

The Museum used to be remarkably hierarchical. The scientists talked to one another and only rarely hobnobbed with their assistants, who were known as Experimental Officers. There are a few survivors from this era. As this is written, Ellis Owen is eighty-three and still working on the shelly fossils of brachiopods, an occupation that seems to have preserved him from the normal processes of decay. He worked for Helen Muir-Wood, doyenne of brachiopods, who was known universally as “Auntie” (though not to her face). A redoubtable maiden lady, she died in 1968, having risen through the hierarchy to become a Deputy Keeper, a trailblazer for her gender. Ellis recalls being treated rather like a slave. He says that the hierarchy was extremely rigid, just like officers and men in the army. The scientists had their own common room, into which the Experimental Officers dared not venture. Meanwhile, the army really did supply the warders on the public galleries until the 1970s. Ex-army personnel were considered just the thing to keep the visitors in order, and stiff, blue, military-looking suits were the right uniform in which to do it. The warders were ruled over by a hard-drinking Scottish Head Warder known as Mitch (“Mister Mitchell to you”), who loudly briefed his subordinates en masse every morning in the Main Hall, shouting at them just like any regimental sergeant major. Most of the warders scowled a lot of the time. Now they are trained in people skills, smile routinely and have nice designer uniforms. It’s hard to feel nostalgia for the old days.

When I joined the Natural History Museum in 1970, the old order still persisted in a somewhat more benign form. I was admitted to the Senior Common Room in the basement corridor even though, as the dinosaur man Alan Charig put it, I was “still wet behind the ears.” An agreeable fug of cigar smoke permeated the room, which boasted a coffee maker and some passably comfortable chairs, occupied by perhaps a dozen scientists. By then, the sports jacket was the uniform, but for a while I attempted to follow the fashion of the day, with a black, wet-look jacket and a red shirt with a big white collar. In the end I, too, adopted the tweedy option; trendiness withers in the vaults. Anecdotes drifted around the Common Room along with the plumes of smoke, but there was not much talking shop, as if it were considered bad form to wax too enthusiastic about the latest discovery. There was still an unspoken sense of hierarchy, and everyone in the room knew exactly which rung of the ladder you were on. There were, of course, no Experimental Officers in sight. The scientific grades went from Assistant Scientific Officer, to Scientific Officer, to Higher Scientific Officer, Senior Scientific Officer, Principal Scientific Officer, Senior Principal Scientific Officer and, somewhere in the stratosphere among the cirrus clouds, Chief Scientific Officer, or the Director. These posts were all known by their acronyms—SSO, PSO and so on—you knew that nobody under SSO would be allowed in the Senior Common Room. Promotion was a long slog upwards through a welter of acronyms. I give you this tedious litany of titles to show how structured the scientific Civil Service used to be. I heard a story from one of the laboratory staff, Johnny Meade, about life under the Keeper of Geology, W. D. Lang, who “reigned” from 1928 to 1938. Meade had joined as a very young assistant, and when I met him was near the end of a long career. Lang would require that an Experimental Officer take out his microscope every morning and place it upon his work desk. On one occasion the usual assistant was ill, and Meade was dispatched belatedly to perform the morning ritual. “You’re late!” sniffed the Keeper. When Meade explained the circumstances and offered to bring out the microscope to its usual place, Lang regarded him loftily. “It is too late. I shall not be requiring my microscope today…” Such was the iron routine in the days of rigid hierarchy.