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Gormenghast in South Kensington
May 2009
Dry Store Room Number One - Richard Fortey
* * * *
How refreshing to encounter an author who knows his genre fiction. The comparison between the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the setting of Mervin Peake's famous trilogy is Fortey's own and is entirely apt. Beyond the grand public halls of that magnificent Gothic building, through the doors marked "private", lie a warren of store rooms, laboratories and offices inhabited by unusual specimens of humanity engaged in mysterious and arcane practices. But though obscure, the work of these dedicated individuals has helped win wars, avert major epidemics and expand human knowledge, and as a reader I feel privileged to have learned something of their secret world.
My main disappointment was that the promise of the wonderfully evocative title is not fully realised. I was expecting that the stories of its contents would form the bulk of the book, but in fact Fortey uses it as a metaphor for the rag-bag nature of his recollections of the many years he spent in the Natural History museum as its "trilobite man" (see his previous book Trilobite!). While it is true that the book is something of a mixture of opinion, character sketches and science, it is not fair to say that there is no organisation - indeed, as its main theme is the importance of classification, type specimens and systematic study, it would be inconsistent if there were none. The central chapters reflect the five NHM science departments (palaeontology, mineralogy, zoology, botany and entomology) and these are supplemented by reviews of the development of taxonomic science and the organisational history of the museum.
From these branches hang the fruits and tendrils of Fortey's character sketches, stories and scientific explanations. Of these, the people are what will stick in most readers' minds. As Fortey comments, it takes a special kind of personality to make the study of chichlid fish or springtails their lifetime's work, so it is not surprising that a fair few of them were decidedly eccentric. A few examples: Leslie Bairstow, a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, was given tenure and spent his entire career studying the belemnite fossils of Robin Hood's Bay. He filed everything, including the pieces of string used to tie up the fossils he was sent (after his retirement a box was found marked "pieces of string too small to be of use"). But he never published a single paper on his researches. Denys Tucker, an expert on eels, was dismissed in 1960 for his obsessive belief in the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. Peter Whitehead, the herring man, was a notorious lothario who sued his twin brother over the rights to the title of a baronetcy and found a lost Mozart manuscript.
The contribution of other researchers was more significant. In 1989, Martin Hall saved Africa from an invasion by South American screw worms, a nasty cattle parasite that feeds on living flesh and which could have wiped out both domesticated and wild bovine species, by recognising them in imported sheep in Libya. In doing so he probably saved thousands if not millions of lives. During the first world war, John Durrant identified the three species of flour moths that were making hermetically sealed tins of army biscuits go maggoty. Doubtless he was not exactly pleased when the Speaker of the House of Commons (J.W. Lowther, first Viscount Ullswater) spoke disparagingly of the museum's work in "deciphering hieroglyphics and cataloguing microlepidoptera" - the latter, of course, being the suborder to which the flour moths belonged. Ironically, Lowther became a trustee of the British Museum a few years later.
Lowther illustrates the tricky relationship between the scientists and their political paymasters, a subject on which Fortey has some trenchant views. He is particularly keen to emphasise the serendipitous nature of scientific study, a fact that modern politicians and bureaucrats, with their emphasis on justification of funding on the grounds of commercial payback or immediate social utility, cannot get seem to get their heads around. Fortey sees this as a threat to the systematic science that the NHM does and he is right. It is hard to put a monetary value on the benefits of having an expert who can spot invasive animals and plants that might devastate an ecosystem, and easy to dismiss the day-to-day work that leads to such capabilities as "stamp collecting" science that is not worth funding. But as Darwin showed, there is no area of scientific study, however apparently trivial, that does not advance human knowledge (his thinking on evolution was heavily influenced by his study of pigeon breeding, and his last book was a treatise on earth worms). In light of the battle over public spending to come, arms must be taken up against the bean counters who would breach the battlements of Gormenghast and evict its denizens in the name of "efficiency". This book provides powerful ammunition for the good guys - let us hope that it is read.
Dry Store Room Number One - Richard Fortey
* * * *
How refreshing to encounter an author who knows his genre fiction. The comparison between the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the setting of Mervin Peake's famous trilogy is Fortey's own and is entirely apt. Beyond the grand public halls of that magnificent Gothic building, through the doors marked "private", lie a warren of store rooms, laboratories and offices inhabited by unusual specimens of humanity engaged in mysterious and arcane practices. But though obscure, the work of these dedicated individuals has helped win wars, avert major epidemics and expand human knowledge, and as a reader I feel privileged to have learned something of their secret world.
My main disappointment was that the promise of the wonderfully evocative title is not fully realised. I was expecting that the stories of its contents would form the bulk of the book, but in fact Fortey uses it as a metaphor for the rag-bag nature of his recollections of the many years he spent in the Natural History museum as its "trilobite man" (see his previous book Trilobite!). While it is true that the book is something of a mixture of opinion, character sketches and science, it is not fair to say that there is no organisation - indeed, as its main theme is the importance of classification, type specimens and systematic study, it would be inconsistent if there were none. The central chapters reflect the five NHM science departments (palaeontology, mineralogy, zoology, botany and entomology) and these are supplemented by reviews of the development of taxonomic science and the organisational history of the museum.
From these branches hang the fruits and tendrils of Fortey's character sketches, stories and scientific explanations. Of these, the people are what will stick in most readers' minds. As Fortey comments, it takes a special kind of personality to make the study of chichlid fish or springtails their lifetime's work, so it is not surprising that a fair few of them were decidedly eccentric. A few examples: Leslie Bairstow, a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, was given tenure and spent his entire career studying the belemnite fossils of Robin Hood's Bay. He filed everything, including the pieces of string used to tie up the fossils he was sent (after his retirement a box was found marked "pieces of string too small to be of use"). But he never published a single paper on his researches. Denys Tucker, an expert on eels, was dismissed in 1960 for his obsessive belief in the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. Peter Whitehead, the herring man, was a notorious lothario who sued his twin brother over the rights to the title of a baronetcy and found a lost Mozart manuscript.
The contribution of other researchers was more significant. In 1989, Martin Hall saved Africa from an invasion by South American screw worms, a nasty cattle parasite that feeds on living flesh and which could have wiped out both domesticated and wild bovine species, by recognising them in imported sheep in Libya. In doing so he probably saved thousands if not millions of lives. During the first world war, John Durrant identified the three species of flour moths that were making hermetically sealed tins of army biscuits go maggoty. Doubtless he was not exactly pleased when the Speaker of the House of Commons (J.W. Lowther, first Viscount Ullswater) spoke disparagingly of the museum's work in "deciphering hieroglyphics and cataloguing microlepidoptera" - the latter, of course, being the suborder to which the flour moths belonged. Ironically, Lowther became a trustee of the British Museum a few years later.
Lowther illustrates the tricky relationship between the scientists and their political paymasters, a subject on which Fortey has some trenchant views. He is particularly keen to emphasise the serendipitous nature of scientific study, a fact that modern politicians and bureaucrats, with their emphasis on justification of funding on the grounds of commercial payback or immediate social utility, cannot get seem to get their heads around. Fortey sees this as a threat to the systematic science that the NHM does and he is right. It is hard to put a monetary value on the benefits of having an expert who can spot invasive animals and plants that might devastate an ecosystem, and easy to dismiss the day-to-day work that leads to such capabilities as "stamp collecting" science that is not worth funding. But as Darwin showed, there is no area of scientific study, however apparently trivial, that does not advance human knowledge (his thinking on evolution was heavily influenced by his study of pigeon breeding, and his last book was a treatise on earth worms). In light of the battle over public spending to come, arms must be taken up against the bean counters who would breach the battlements of Gormenghast and evict its denizens in the name of "efficiency". This book provides powerful ammunition for the good guys - let us hope that it is read.