Dry Storeroom No. 1 (19 page)

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.
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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 fabric 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.