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

never saw him because he cut most of the practicals in favour of rugger. (When the
results came out he got a "special" - meaning he had failed, but had permission to sit
the examination again. Apparently his brother got a third - a pass. The story went
that their father sent Mick congratulations and a fiver, but his brother was
admonished and told to pull his socks up). David Attenborough was a near
contemporary, but neither of us now remember meeting at that time.
Among the demonstrators at the practicals was Anna Bidder, later the first
President of Lucy Cavendish College who, when we met again many years later, still
remembered the quality of my drawings in the practicals. John Bradfield, was a few
years ahead of me, and was researching for his PhD on the mechanics of animal
locomotion (toads I think). Later he went on to become a very successful Senior
Bursar of Trinity College, with an annual budget of £20 million or so, and to found
the Cambridge Science Park. George Hughes, a year or two my senior, taught us in
the practicals and went on to the Chair of Zoology at Bristol. Michael Swann, also
demonstrated to us; he was doing research with Lord Rothschild and went on to
become Professor of Zoology and Vice-Chancellor at Edinburgh, Chairman of the
BBC, and as Lord Swann, Master of Oriel College, Oxford, for a short time. There
were many other interesting people.
In Zoology I was taught by Sir James Gray, Carl Pantin, George Salt, Hugh Cott,
Vincent Wigglesworth, Arthur Ramsay, J E Smith, George Carter, Sydney Smith,
Laurence Picken, Hugh Whiting, F R Parrington, Hans Lissman, Margaret Brown,
among others. Another friend was Oliver Barclay, a PhD student who went on to
become a clerk to the House of Commons. Most of the lectures I didn’t find very
stimulating, although many of these people were Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS)
then or later, and very talented. I suppose that my heart was not really in the
invertebrate morphology and experimental biology, which were strengths of the
department at that time. There is no doubt that it was important work, which laid
the foundation for later progress and Carl Pantin was an exceptional invertebrate
physiologist.
But the mechanics of animal locomotion, a strength of the department, left me
cold, nor was I very interested in insect physiology, which was another strength of
the department. My heart was really in vertebrate Zoology and my preference was
for treating animals as a whole – not for the reductionism then fashionable.
Considering that I later became an ecologist I really had very little ecological
training. My main recollection of the weighting of the courses in that direction is of
dry lectures by George Salt, illustrating the principles of ecology using flour beetles,
or borer beatles, wheat sawfly etc., as examples to illustrate density dependence and
other concepts.
Some compensation was that Carl Pantin had a very broad knowledge of natural
history and George Carter (‘Uncle George’ to us) had been on field trips to the
Paraguayan swamps in South America - the Chaco - and had practical knowledge of
field ecology; lung fishes were a specialty of his. Hugh Cott too was an enthusiastic
all round field naturalist who was also a skilled photographer and illustrator in black
and white, as well as a painter. He lectured to us on diverse aspects of vertebrate
biology and brought the subject to life. During the war he had been engaged on
research into camouflage techniques, drawing upon animal camouflage, and
illustrating the principles - counter-shading, disruptive camouflage and so on - with
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