Dry Storeroom No. 1 (20 page)

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.”

I hesitate to add yet one more fishy figure, but the story would not be complete without introducing Alwyne Wheeler into the plot. His finest memorial is probably his contribution to cleaning up the River Thames. London’s river was a disgrace after the Second World War—increasing and unbridled pollution and waste had removed oxygen from its lower stretches, until it had a distinct pong in summer, which I can remember sniffing queasily as a child on visits to the Embankment. About the only creature to thrive in the fetid mud was the little red
Tubifex
worm, which is almost impossible to kill. My father used to dig clumps of it up to use as fish food. Other aquatic life, and especially piscatorial life, was severely on the wane. “Wyn” Wheeler was much more the populist than either Whitehead or Greenwood. He helped set up networks such as the Thames Estuary Partnership, bringing the interests of anglers and industry and government agencies together. Nowadays there is a host of such organizations ranging from the London Biodiversity Partnership to the Thames Salmon Trust, most of them seeking co-operation between partners with an interest in a clean river. Wheeler worked tirelessly identifying fishes brought in by members of the public. Sometimes there were surprises, as when “tropical” fish were found living near the warm-water outlets of power stations. He wrote popular guidebooks. He enjoyed friendly relations with watermen up and down the river.

The last naturally spawned salmon was caught in the River Thames in 1833. One hundred and forty-six years later the Thames Salmon Rehabilitation scheme attempted to reverse history: fish were introduced artificially. Such was the progress in cleaning up the former “open sewer” that by 1982 a spawning salmon run up the Thames happened once again. There was a tremendous sense of triumph when this was announced, for salmon are choosy fish—they will not tolerate pollution. Now more than twenty species of fish can be found in the Thames. And with the fish comes all the associated bird life: richness has been restored. “Wyn” Wheeler was one of the heroes of this triumph of conservation and habitat restoration, which remains a model for many others around the world. It is not a battle that has been won, however. Exceptional rains in 2005 strained the antiquated sewerage system of London beyond breaking point and raw waste ran into the river once again, which shortly yielded up a slurry of scaly corpses. The price of freedom from pollution is eternal vigilance.

Wheeler could not bear Peter Whitehead. He hated his aristocratic mien, and regarded his ostentatious cultural breadth as not a little precious and pretentious. Whitehead fully reciprocated the loathing. Fortunately for him, he was the senior employee at a time when seniority counted. The two fish men never talked to one another, if they could possibly avoid it. The upper echelons of the Museum regarded the
whole
of the fish section as almost unmanageable. In Wheeler’s Annual Confidential Report in 1979, the Keeper described the “problems…inherent in the fish section manned by a number of ‘prima donnas.’” It may have been a response to this perceived management impossibility, but by a dramatic coup de théâtre that could have happened only in the fish group, John Peake decided to reverse the hierarchical structure: he put Alwyne Wheeler in charge of Peter Whitehead. This was a ludicrous thing to do, because even “Wyn” Wheeler’s supporters would have said that he had little talent for managing anything, even his temper. He soon obtained satisfaction for years of slights by vetoing Peter Whitehead’s publications on musical or cultural matters—after all, he would argue, the job has to do with fish, not all this other stuff. It was either hilarious or tragic depending on where you stood: through it all the curators struggled on with their duties. When I talk about those times to the surviving curators, such as Ollie Crimmen, they are recalled with a mixture of affection and exasperation. About “Wyn” Wheeler Ollie said: “He taught me everything I know; he drove me mad.”

I have dwelt on the drama within this group of fish zoologists not only because it makes entertaining gossip, but because it illuminates what Museum science is probably all about. I hazard a guess that if any quality assessment of fish research had been made during the period 1970–90 the Natural History Museum would have come out as one of the world leaders, possibly
the
world leader. This was while feuding, “primadonnaing,”
affaires de coeur,
litigation and heaven knows what else were happening in all directions. Management was concerned, as it always is, with what Sir Walter Bodmer called the “right to manage.” This does not have any necessary connection with what actually happens in the scientific arena. It might actually be the case that having an obstructive, disagreeable, temperamental, competitive or even downright anarchic group of people all scrapping and competing is the best way to push knowledge forwards. Should Peter Whitehead have turned his back on important musical discoveries just because it said “fish man” on his label? I usually avoid such rhetorical questions, because they permit of only one answer, but in this case I’ll go ahead: “Of course not!” Research is sometimes a matter of sheer serendipity, but if anything it is more a matter of persistence, of sheer bloodymindedness. The kinds of people who are able to work alone for long periods, often without much encouragement, with modest financial reward, and by remote African lakes with no creature comforts, are actually rather rare. These are ideal employees of a great museum.

Sometimes individualism merges into lunacy. One of the most striking examples in the zoology part of the Natural History Museum was the case of the sponge and protozoan worker Randolph Kirkpatrick. In William T. Stearn’s official history of the Museum he merits a peripheral mention as an author of
The History of the Collections
(1906). He actually did some quite respectable work on sponges. But he is known today for one of the more extraordinary intellectual excursions in the history of palaeontology. In the early Tertiary rocks a rather common kind of fossil is the nummulite (see colour plate 8). It is about the size and shape of a coin, and is made, as are so many fossils, of calcium carbonate. It is a fossil of a gigantic single-celled organism, a behemoth of the group known as Foraminifera—which are usually not much larger than a pin head—and for which Kirkpatrick had responsibility in the Museum. Inside the “coins” are a beautiful spiral series of tiny chambers that were secreted by the protoplasm of the simple organism. Limestone rocks containing nummulites polished by the action of the sea can look like nebular maps of some remote corner of the universe. Nummulites are sometimes so abundant as to make cliffs and whole rock formations; they are most celebrated as supplying the nummulitic building stone for the pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt—hence
Nummulites gizehensis.
I have seen them peeping out of pebbles on beaches in Greece. They are certainly not rare.