Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

PhD on cetacean locomotion, having spent a season as a Whaling
Inspector/Biologist in the Antarctic – as I was to do a few years later. Michael
Swann later FRS, Vice Chancellor of Edinburgh University, and Master of Oriel
College, Oxford) was very helpful with advice on microscopy and
photomicrography in connection with my studies on tooth structure. Hugh
Cott, another vertebrate biologist who had taught me as an undergraduate was
still there and others from my undergraduate days. Janet, now married was
doing a PhD on hydroid nerve nets with Carl Pantin. Geoffrey Matthews, a
contemporary on the Part II Zoology course was in the middle of a PhD on
navigation in birds, conducting experimental work using pigeons. Others
remaining from the Part II Zoology course were *****.
I had followed up my brief encounter with Maureen on the ‘Andes’. She
had digs in Finchley, London, with a Mrs Mather, together with half a dozen
other girls, and was taking her course at the Triangle Secretarial College, in
Bond Street. Increasingly I found myself taking the train down to London for
dinner and theatre, and we were getting to know each other. She came up to
Cambridge too and we often went punting on the river during that warm
summer. I invited her to a couple of May Balls, one in a party with my brother
Mike and his girlfriend Elsie, Derek Thornton and Rhodope, and some others.
Another was with Ray Adie and Kathy (from the Falklands) whom I had
mischievously/unkindly invited. The girls shared a room in my digs in Hills
Road with the consequence that they compared notes!
Maureen had met Bunny Fuchs on the Andes and we spent a number of
Sunday afternoons with him and his charming wife Joyce, helping to keep their
large garden on Barton Road under control, and enjoying the occasional lunch
and many sumptuous teas, with sandwiches and cakes. I learnt to wield a large
scythe, developing a proficiency, which later came in useful when I had a
garden of my own. I knew that I was serious about sharing my life with
Maureen, but she was only 19 and wasn’t in a hurry, so I bided my time,
mostly very happy but occasionally downhearted at the thought that she didn’t
yet share my aspirations. I attended her birthday party in her London lodgings,
which she and the other girls threw. It was ‘black tie’ and as it happened I had
first to give one of a series of talks earlier that evening at the Royal
Geographical Society on my Antarctic work - for which I was of course
overdressed! But I carried it off. Later I gave a number of other talks in
Cambridge and elsewhere. We went to Covent Garden and Sadlers Wells for
Opera and Ballet and to a number of shows preceded by dinner at places we
particularly liked, such as Veraswamy’s curry restaurant in Swallow Street and
Albert’s in Beak Street. I often missed the last train back to Cambridge and took
the ‘milk train’ after spending the night on a station bench.
That summer I contributed an exhibit to the Cambridge Natural History
Society conversazione on my findings of annual layers in seal teeth and at the
same time Colin Bertram, who had earlier been in the Pribilof Islands [check
time of his visit] on a study visit exhibited a bowl of Pribilof fur seal teeth,
showing the external ridges, and a note suggesting they might be used for age
determination. (He knew of my earlier discovery from my l948 annual report
from Signy Island). Victor Scheffer, who had been working on fur seals for
322