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

illustrated with my pen-and-ink drawings. I bound it myself in walnut boards, halfcalf,
with end-papers covered with a repeating pattern of individually drawn roses
in pen and ink - a considerable investment of time – but there was no television in
those days!
Below us at the foot of the hill, where the road to Crook leaves the lake shore
road and curves up to the left, the house in the acute angle between the two roads
was owned by a professional artist, Mr Waddington. He had a studio in his garden,
full of his work (oils and watercolours), which I found impressive, and he also took a
friendly interest in my painting and drawing. His grown-up son was an artist too
and produced among other work some attractive designs for book dust-jackets,
which impressed me by their technical facility and clean-cut professional style.
Biological studies: seminars and visits
From l941 I kept a nature diary illustrated in colour (or in l943, black & white);
each new flower I saw in the spring - the crocus, hazel catkins, aconite for example
and also some birds – were painted. I spent an hour or so most evenings recording
and illustrating natural history events.
I had not been seriously taught Biology up to this time, but in the fifth form the
subject was offered and Mallinson, no biologist, was our teacher. It didn't matter too
much at that level, but when I moved into the sixth form and elected to do Biology
for Higher School Certificate it could have been disastrous. Among my biological
colleagues were George Knox, Thomas ‘Thos’ Walker, Brian Davison, Arthur Bell,
Bernard Clough and others, who all went on to do well academically. The way we
solved our problem was to teach ourselves: we read the recommended textbooks and
other books around the subject, like Wells ‘The Science of Life’, which considerably
influenced us. Also I had begun to collect books on natural history by then and we
benefitted from the new, semi-popular, weekly science journal, ‘Discovery’. We took
it in turns to "mug up" on a subject and then to give a seminar to our colleagues. We
also arranged to visit local biological organisations. I well remember a stimulating
visit two of us paid to the Freshwater Biological Association, which occupied Wray
Castle on the other side of Lake Windermere. We cycled over there (turning up
without any prior contact) and asked to see something of the work of the laboratory.
Two members of staff in particular were most kind and gave us the run of the labs.
Dr Winifred Frost was one; she worked on fish and it was she who first made me
aware of the use of annuli in scales, opercular bones and otoliths for ageing (a field
in which I became professionally involved in my later career). Another research
worker there, Dr David Le Cren (who many years later was to be a fellow Director in
the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)), also took an interest and
showed us round. I remember being told the story of the development of the
wartime perch-fishery of the lake, the concomitant decline of the lake's major
predator population, the pike, and the consequences for the ecosystem. For the first
time I looked down a proper microscope, and was exposed to the wonders and
beauty of phytoplankton architecture and design, learned about the lake’s
sedimentary history, and also saw the experimental studies on fish being conducted
in a flume race in the basement
I remember preparing one seminar for my fellow sixth form biologists
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