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

always had Fraser as senior author). He considered that his career would best be
served by publishing the results as sole author. Of course this was monstrous and
completely contrary to our agreement. I took the problem to Mackintosh, who
seemed sympathetic and talked with Fraser, proposing that the original agreement
should be adhered to. However, this was not to be and to add insult to injury the
paper was eventually published, in l9--, in the Bulletin of the Natural History
Museum, as a joint paper with a statistician, Malcolm Mountford. I was furious,
but there was nothing I could do. I discontinued my promising work on the
earplugs and concentrated on completing my major monograph on fin whale
reproduction, growth and age, which contains a short section correlating ear plug
laminae with other methods of age determination; it was published in l962. But I
had wasted a year or two.
Scientific Meetings
So by now I was getting a bit fed up with my professional life at NIO, on
account of the internal political strains and this personal setback. One of the other
contributory reasons was that I had very little support for foreign travel. I guess
funds were rather limited, but I felt that I should have been given more
opportunities.
In fact there were relatively few opportunities during my time at NIO and I
will mention some of the more significant. In l955 I participated for the first time
in International Commission for the Conservation of Whales (IWC), Scientific
Committee, on which I served until I left the NIO in l96l. I write about my IWC
involvement later. In l955 I became involved in the International Biological
Programme as a member of the Committee on Marine Mammals and served on
this committee until l96l.
In l957 I participated in the first course in Fish Population Dynamics
organised by Ray Beverton, later FRS, (a contemporary of mine at Cambridge,
later Deputy Director of the Lowestoft Fisheries Laboratory and Secretary of the
Natural Environment Research Council, NERC) and Sidney Holt - at the
Lowestoft Fisheries Laboratory. We lived in the Victoria Hotel and appreciated the
superb fish menus provided there. John Gulland (later FRS), Basil Parrish (later
Director of the Aberdeen Fisheries Laboratory), and Rodney Jones were our
teachers. The students included Gotthilf Hempel (who became the first Director of
the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research, AWI, with whom I was later
closely involved in the SCAR BIOMASS Programme), Deitrich Sarrhage (later
Professor of Fisheries Laboratory at Hamburg and first Chairman of the CCAMLR
Scientific Committee), Age Jonsgard (an eminent Norwegian whale biologist at
Oslo University who was a colleague on IWC matters and was later elected an
Honorary Member of the Society of Marine Mammalogists), Lars Boerema (FAO),
Robert Clarke (my colleague in the NIO Whale Research Group), ----Ostvedt (who
became a Chairman of the Scientific Committee of CCAMLR and ----- others. Ray
and Sidney had just published their classic book on Fish Population Dynamics and
the other teachers were all leaders in the field. One could not have had a better
course.
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