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

The glorious Summer of l947
Meanwhile, at the end of the summer term, after taking our finals, Alan Wallace,
Pete Williams and I went to the Gower Peninsula, via Caerleon, where Pete lived.
While staying with him we visited the Roman amphitheatre, an impressive site. On
the Gower we camped in a field near the Rhossili Post Office, where we received by
telegram our results in the final exams; we had all three got First Class degrees -
which was just as well, as it would have been sad had there been an odd one out! We
were also informed that we had got College Prizes for our performance and later
bought some books with the prize money. While there we had a very relaxed time,
sleeping in a very small tent, swimming and generally enjoying ourselves. We
visited the cave of the Red Lady of Pavilund - a prehistoric site, with some very
vague cave engravings and I think paintings. It stimulated an interest in archaeology
and prehistoric art, which has lasted. I also remember that one afternoon rushing
down one of the very large sand dunes, we surprised two girls who were sunbathing
in the nude and how startled they were by this unexpected invasion of their
privacy.
That summer of l947, following the exceptionally hard winter was idyllic - every
day was soft, warm and sunny, and I don't remember any rain. Later in the summer
I joined a party based at Starcross on the Exe Estuary. The objective was to carry out
a survey of Dawlish Warren, organized by Norman Holme. Another friend, Arthur
Lee, a geographer and fellow rugger player at Cath’s (earlier an MTB Commander in
the Royal Navy during the war), Ursula Grigg, a zoologist in our final year class, and
a girl called Stella who was a botanist, completed the team. We men lived in a
Ministry of Agriculture concrete prefabricated hut. The girls slept in a small tent on
the lawn outside and we often woke them in the morning with spray from a
watering can poked through the tent flaps. We had a small boat, with a ‘Seagull’
outboard engine, which we moored at Starcross overnight. Each day of that
blindingly light and warm summer we puttered down to the mud flats on the north
(inland) side of Dawlish Warren, a sand spit which almost closed off the estuary.
Arthur was engaged in a plane-table survey - and taught me the rudiments (which
might come in useful in the Antarctic). He produced a detailed map of the Warren
and the mudflats.
The rest of us spent the time sampling the fauna on the mudflats. We placed 1metre-square
quadrats randomly, dug out the mud within them to a depth of about a
foot and extracted the fauna. This mainly consisted of a tiny gastropod (snail),
Hydrobia, of which there were tens of thousands. We sieved them, cleaned the
samples and counted them - all in the burning sun. We also looked at other
representatives of the fauna and examined other habitats, such as the sandbanks in
the middle of the estuary. (Norman later published the survey results in the Journal
of the Marine Biological Association). Of course we became very healthy from this
way of life, sunburned to a walnut brown,
Some friends had a chalet among the dunes on the south side of the Warren and
we would go there for a tea break. One of the party was a very pretty girl, with
black hair and blue eyes - and some days we used to break off and go sailing in an
International class sailing dinghy. We entered for races in the Regatta, but didn't do
particularly well. Our team also explored the wider reaches of the estuary. We even
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