Dry Storeroom No. 1 (45 page)

At 4:30 a.m. on 9 September 1940 two incendiaries and an oil bomb hit the roof of the Botany Department; the damage to the collections took years to repair. Stored seeds germinated.

The Second World War brought much more serious threats to the Museum. If one wanders up Exhibition Road to the entrance to the Earth Galleries, it is easy to see where lumps were gouged out of the limestone blocks in the wall: a bomb fell in the road, and could easily have demolished the adjacent buildings. These holes are the last visible evidence of the bombing of this part of London. The war in the air made things much more dangerous for the type collections, and a decision was made to evacuate most of them, beginning in August 1939. Various stately homes deep in the countryside became temporary quarters to butterflies or molluscs from the national collections, and the aristocratic owners welcomed them enthusiastically, for the most part, as preferable to having a whole lot of troops billeted on them. The public galleries were closed, and then they were open, and then closed again as circumstances changed. The first closure happened on 29 August 1939; by 3 February 1940 the Museum was opening on Saturday and Sunday, and, later that same month, daily; by 29 May—closed again. It must have been confusing for the visitors, in spite of announcements in the newspapers. The archives show that many of the scientists who remained in the Museum did work for the Red Cross or as auxiliary firemen. But the Natural History Museum was a conspicuous target, and life was exciting from time to time. An oil-bomb fire started in the Botany Gallery on 9 September 1940 at 4:30 a.m. and caused much damage. Some seeds of the silk tree,
Albizia julibrissin,
collected from China by Sir George Staunton in 1793, got an unexpected soaking, and proceeded to germinate. This was the first of a number of hits and near misses—there were three more before the year’s end.

At the eastern end of the old building, where the palaeontology wing now stands, a series of concrete bunkers were built. They are still there under the new building—I have always known them as the War Rooms. Now they form a low basement housing some of the anthropology collections, boxes of human skulls and bones, a dark and oppressive place. When they tried to blow the rooms up many years later, the exceptional thickness of the concrete made it an impossible task, so the War Rooms were incorporated into the new building instead. Airborne attacks continued sporadically until 11 July 1944, when a flying bomb in the Cromwell Road did severe damage to the western galleries and the central towers. The Museum had reopened to the public again on 1 August 1942, but closed once more on 6 July 1944, the day after the first flying bombs landed in Queen’s Gate on the western side of the building. At the end of the war one could say that the Natural History Museum had come out of it better than might have been expected. Waterhouse’s extravagant creatures were still on their perches. The longest-paid member of staff on record was remunerated as a result of the damage to the Botany collections: Arthur Hales was brought back to sort out the specimens he knew so well, reconstructing their curation history from surviving scraps of writing. He eventually retired, the job done, at the age of seventy-three.

The Second World War years are recorded in a house magazine called the
Tin Hat.
The first number was produced on 30 September 1939. It is illustrated with charming, if crude, cartoons, often in the deft abbreviated style of Fougasse. The tone is best described by using the wartime word “chipper”—cheery in an eye-rolling way. I particularly like the section on overheard remarks appearing under the heading “The Brighter Side.” They tended to record humour from moments of extreme tension, as when somebody remarked after the bomb damage to the bird room that he had never seen so many birds killed with a single shot. According to the instructions, contributions to “The Brighter Side” “should be sent to Messrs Claxton or Smith. They should be brief.” Another bird-room example will give you the idea. “The shattered Bird Gallery! Broken glass, torn blinds, blasted doors and window frames, dust and grit everywhere. And at the gallery entrance lying conspicuously on the floor, a large printed label ‘BIRD MIGRATION.’” We learn about the Air Raid Protection shelter, and the suggestion that it may have had bugs. In June 1944 the first number of another magazine,
6323,
was issued, which published news of staff fighting in the forces all over the world. There is something rather eloquent about these pages, maybe having something to do with the old-fashioned typewriter on which it appears to have been rapidly knocked out. If it had been done these days on a computer it would be slicker but somehow more impersonal. Peter Purves appeared to me in these pages for the first time, complaining of mud everywhere and fungi rotting everything in the jungles of the Far East. 6323 was the telephone number of the Natural History Museum at the time, as it still was when I joined the staff several decades after the war had finished. Looking at these fading pages, I sense a strong connection with all those curators and collectors, scientists and plant pressers, an unbroken string of scholars united by the collections, enduring through peace and war, small champions of order in a world where chaos is always a possibility.

Cheery under fire: the cover of an edition of the wartime house journal
Tin Hat

At one time it must have seemed possible to grasp the totality of the world’s biodiversity, to discover the entirety of what the Reverend Gilbert White would have called “the system.” In the days of Britain’s imperial greatness such optimism informed the initiation of great expeditions to map the unknown and collect its life. On 7 December 1872 HMS
Challenger
set off around the world under Captain John Nares to find out about the oceans and the life they contained. This was an expedition in the tradition of the famous
Beagle
voyage of Fitzroy and Darwin, but with a particular scientific focus on the least-known two-thirds of the globe. Britain was the leading maritime nation, and a voyage like this was then a top research priority. Richard Corfield has redescribed the journey that founded the science of oceanography in
The Silent Landscape.
The ship returned in 1876, having taken samples of water, sea floor and organisms at 362 different sites. Among the many discoveries was the recognition of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, not to mention the realization that life—in rich variety—could exist deep in the oceans in the realm of eternal darkness.
Challenger
was possibly the first vessel to be kitted out fully with purpose-built laboratories in order to allow conservation of specimens as soon as they were collected. The obligation to publish the results occupied the talents of several employees of the Natural History Museum for years. Under the editorship of John Murray the
Challenger
report, or
The Report of the Scientific Results of the Exploratory Voyage of the HMS Challenger During the Years 1873–1876,
was one of the great achievements of scientific investigation, running to some fifty volumes published in the decade 1885–95, each volume weighing in at about the same size as the family Bible. More than four thousand species new to science were named in one or another of these works, and many of their type specimens still reside on the shelves in the Darwin Centre. I have looked at a series of crabs sadly contemplating me from inside their glass jars,
Challenger
having granted them this strange kind of immortality. If only enough expeditions could be mounted it might be possible to catalogue the whole world, and bring it back to the shelves of a great museum for perpetuity! And indeed there were many more collecting trips, but perhaps nothing on so grand a scale as HMS
Challenger.
Brave individuals voracious for specimens, such as Evelyn Cheesman, or even Colonel Meinertzhagen, added mightily to the collections and the coverage of the remoter corners of the world, but these collecting trips were tasks that knew no end. By a cruel transmogrification of Parkinson’s Law—“work expands to fill the time available for its completion”—biodiversity apparently expanded to match the best endeavours of experts to get to know it. Possibly the last tailor-made expedition run from the Museum was the African entomological shindig in the converted truck during the 1970s with Peter Hammond and Dick Vane-Wright.

HMS
Challenger,
the foundation of scientific oceanography

Meanwhile, the world was changing, and paying little attention to the Natural History Museum. In the early days it would have been assumed that an unthreatened series of global ecologies would be there for sampling in perpetuity. The rapid disappearance of marsupial mammals from Australia following the introduction of cats and foxes showed how vulnerable species could be to mankind’s interference. This lesson was reinforced when knowledge of the riches of island faunas and floras like those found on Hawaii was coupled with an awareness of their fragility and vulnerability to extinction. During the twentieth century, destruction of whole habitats continued to gather pace, particularly in India and the Far East, and the systematic mission was more and more coloured by such phrases as “before it’s too late.” The taxonomist was beginning to be both christener and obituarist. Taxonomic collections and skills were reborn in mitigation of this new and harsher world. If dense concentrations of species could be recognized in particular places and habitats, such diversity “hot spots” could be more readily targeted for protection and conservation. The Worldmap Project was started in 1988 at the Natural History Museum, using computer mapping of species based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. The entomologist Dick Vane-Wright and the botanist and computer virtuoso Chris Humphries began the project and laid down the ground rules for recording species distributions, and Worldmap is now fully operational under the amiable guidance of Paul Williams. Digitization of collections and their occurrences, as well as many other kinds of biological records, allowed any area of the world to be interrogated for its taxonomic richness. To take one example, it is obvious from the biodiversity maps that the Malay Peninsula fully deserves protection efforts to be concentrated upon it. The identification of unknown species from this area should be a priority, but even before that stage is reached conservation of threatened habitats should ensure that such species do not become extinct before they can be identified. That is the theory, at least—but human rapacity often outstrips good intentions, as has happened for many years in Indonesia, where habitat destruction of rainforest is continuing at a dizzying rate. Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity. I believe the organizers of the
Challenger
expedition would have approved. But it is a long road from the quiet vaults of a museum to staying the hand of an illegal logger.

The change in the scientific role of the systematist and taxonomist has been profound over the same period. I have touched upon this several times previously when describing the detailed work of individual scientists, but it bears repeating that the original role of the systematist as cataloguer of life’s diversity has been supplemented and in many cases replaced by a role as investigator of its interrelationships. Many of the younger generation of scientists are interested in methods of working out phylogeny—evolutionary trees—and are not necessarily wedded to “their” group of organisms. We have come across the use of molecular evidence in unscrambling the tree of life, as used in everything from nematodes and winkles to mushrooms. It’s a whole new catalogue of data useful in understanding the multifarious strands that weave together the biological world, and provides a different way of looking at nature from the old “hairs on legs” of insects, or pistils and stamens of flowers. Such is the complexity of DNA that computer methods for handling the evidence it provides are indispensable, so there is a now a career as an analyst for the kind of scientist who is more at home with programming than with looking at weeds or bugs. The green screen figures more prominently than the microscope in their offices, and conversation with their colleagues revolves around the virtues or deficiencies of a new piece of software rather than the discovery of a new species of butterfly. I must admit to being one of the old-fashioned kind for whom the collection remains paramount. Sometimes I think I am already halfway into an historical collection myself. Already I can imagine some future curator peering at an old departmental photograph and wondering out loud: “What an odd-looking fellow…I wonder what he knew about?”