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

Introduction
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘Memoir’ as an “essay on learned subject
specially studied by the writer”; ‘biography’ as the “written life of a person”; and
‘Autobiography’ as the “written story of one’s own life”. This book describes the first
phase of my life as a combination of autobiography and memoir. Two later books, in
preparation cover another two phases of my life and work. I am inclined to think of
the three as a trilogy of memoirs, because overall it is more slanted towards the
explorations and findings in research on which my professional life has been
focussed than on my life as a whole. I will try here to relate the first phase of my life
and career – described in this book - to the whole, briefly anticipating what followed.
The first three chapters take us through the early years up to my first job and are
plainly in autobiographical, rather than memoir form. They are more expansive
perhaps than is usual in an autobiography because I have attempted to trace the
development of interests and qualities that came to influence and shape my later life.
This should become apparent when the whole is completed. I studied Biology at
school from an interest in natural history, but not until the fifth form. Our biology
master was a mathematician and knew no biology – so in the sixth form we young
biologists taught ourselves by reading up on subjects and conducting seminars for
our fellows. It was a successful expedient as demonstrated by results – for most of us
did well in exams and followed biological professions to a senior level.
The choice of title for a trilogy of memoirs needs some introduction. The large
animals – the very large mammals – involved are the largest of their kind – the
elephant seal, the largest whales, the largest ‘pig’ the hippopotamus - and the largest
land animal the elephant. I was led to study these fascinating beasts, not as part of a
pre-conceived plan, but almost by accident, each element of my career leading on to
the others.
Effectively you might say I had no research training. I took a first class degree at
Cambridge in which the relatively new subject of ecology played a very small part –
the term Ecology was coined by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and Charles Elton framed
the basic principles of modern animal ecology. Elton’s Animal Ecology (1937) an
influential book moved the emphasis from animals as individuals to study of their
populations.
Ten years after its publication my research career began when I was thrown in ‘at
the deep end’, studying the biology and ecology of the huge elephant seals with a
‘nominal’ supervisor. He was a zoologist, Sydney Smith, but not versed in my chosen
field (his was experimental embryology). He was nine or ten thousand miles away
during my field research and long range communications were very primitive at that
time compared with today. Although he was a very important mentor in other ways
– he was a polymath par excellence – I was never really trained in research, but was
self-taught. In fact I wrote the whole of my PhD thesis and was about to submit
before he actually had an opportunity to read it! This was ‘cutting–edge’ research as
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