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

Reading parties and vacation work
In the l940's it was still the thing for students to go on ‘reading parties’ during
the Easter vacation. I went twice with Christopher and half a dozen other students
as his guests to North Devon where we stayed at a farm, ‘Cranscombe’ on the
northern fringe of Exmoor. On one of these trips Fred and Barbara Dainton joined us;
Fred had lost a finger in an explosion in his lab at Cambridge and was recovering.
We ate well, chopped and split wood and did other country tasks, and went for long
walks along the coast to Hunter's Inn and Heddon's Mouth, down to Lynmouth,
across Exmoor, along the Brendon Valley to the Doone Valley. This was Lorna
Doone country and we all re-read R D Blackmore's novel (I had read it earlier at
school as a set book in English literature classes). On the way we would refresh
ourselves with cider, whortleberry pie and cream teas. We usually ended up at the
end of the day in the local pub, the Brendon Arms, for a pint or two of cider, before
running up the hill, passing an imaginary rugger ball - for we kept up our rugby
training - to the farm. Not a lot of reading was done, for the exercise, fresh air, and
draught cider, not to mention the fact that lighting in the farm was by oil lamps,
meant that we tended to ‘nod off’ in the evenings before the log fire. Christopher
bought a small car - a Morris Seven - and gave some of us driving lessons. Once we
drove all the way to Devon but other times we went by train to South Molton and
cycled from there across Exmoor via Simonsbath to Brendon.
Sydney Smith took some of us down to Plymouth at his expense and introduced
us to the marine fauna and to research in the Laboratory. We also went on a twoweek-long
Easter Course at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in one of the vacations
as part of our course. This introduced us to shore collecting and the enormous
variety of colourful and fascinating organisms in rock pools and the intertidal zone.
We also went out on the laboratory launch and dredged in deeper waters, caught
fish and generally messed about in boats. We did experiments in the laboratory and
saw for the first time the dramatic colour changes of live cuttlefish. During another
Easter vacation there was a field course at a sea loch, Lough Ine, near Skibbereen, in
Southern Ireland, but I couldn't afford the travel and missed a valuable experience.
We visited the London Zoo and were taken behind the scenes, where one of my
clearest memories is of several of us handling a twenty foot long python. It was
surprising how warm and smooth it was, and how strong. I spent a lot of time in the
Zoology Museum at Cambridge examining preserved specimens in fluid-filled glass
jars, looking at stuffed animals and birds and at skeletons and fossils – and making
drawings.
In vacations at home in Whitley Bay, I spent much of my time at the Dove
Marine Laboratory at Cullercoats (attached to the Newcastle College of Durham
University). The Secretary of the Laboratory, Mrs Cowan, was a friend of my
mother's who made me very welcome, and I was able to rub shoulders with the few
researchers working there. I spent a lot of time shore collecting - looking for
invertebrate fauna in the rock pools. I became particularly interested in the
nudibranchs, small, often very colourful slug-like creatures, in various shapes and
sizes. They were depicted in one of the classic volumes on the British fauna,
published by the Ray Society, ‘The Nudibranchs’, by Alder and Hancock, with
beautiful coloured plates.
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