In his recent note, Dr Lance Tickell provides a valuable insight into the revitalisation of Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) biology in the early 1960s (Tickell Reference Tickell2012). He credits Sir Raymond Priestley with encouraging an ecological survey by Professor J.B. Cragg of Durham University in the southern summer of 1957–1958 and believes that I was wrong in blaming Priestley for subsequently obstructing Cragg's appointment as supervisor of the survey's biological research programme.
Tickell may well be right about this for (as I indicate in my memoirs) I too remember Priestley as ‘a wise and tolerant man’ whom I knew reasonably well. I make clear (Holdgate Reference Holdgate2003) that I was surprised when the late Bill Sloman told me that Priestley had blocked the appointment because Cragg, in applying for a post at the University of Melbourne, had refused to answer the ‘McCarthy question: “are you, or have you ever been, a member of the communist party?”’ But Sloman was adamant and as he had been involved in the negotiations I accepted his word. I believed (and still believe) that the proposed link with Durham would have been ideal for the survey and that was why I said that if Priestley had indeed done as Sloman stated, he did British Antarctic science ‘a grave disservice’.
Cragg was not in the first flight as a research biologist: he published little and although he became President of the British Ecological Society he was never an FRS. But he was outstandingly good at selecting and training young animal ecologists. Using the Moor House National Nature Reserve as a field station, he assigned a series of research students to in-depth studies of different components of the montane ecosystem. The model was obviously transferable to the maritime regions of the Antarctic, and Cragg's energy and ability to inspire and guide young scientists would have made him an ideal supervisor of the biological research that the survey was seeking to develop.
Sloman met Cragg on the recruiting tour of University departments that Tickell notes as one of Priestley's innovations as acting director of FIDS. The two men became friends. As Tickell records, with the support of both Priestley and Dr F.C. Fraser of the British Museum (Natural History) Cragg was invited to go south to judge the prospects for such research at first hand. South Georgia and Signy Island in the South Orkney Islands were considered prime candidates as biological field stations and Cragg visited both. However his tour was truncated because RRS Shackleton, in which he was travelling, hit ice at speed north of the South Orkney Islands and very nearly sank. None the less, Cragg returned to Durham in no doubt of the potential for ecological research and very keen to establish Durham as the home base of FIDS biology very much as Birmingham had become the base for the survey's geologists. I myself had been recruited to the Durham Zoology Department in October 1957, and although I lacked Antarctic experience, I had recently spent six months on Gough Island in the South Atlantic. I know that Cragg saw me as a major player in his scheme, which he outlined in the paragraph that Tickell quotes.
As Tickell records in his note, it did not happen. The question is why? I think the reason Cragg could not be spared to pay a return visit to the Antarctic in 1958–1959 is that I had been invited to organise and lead the Royal Society Expedition to Southern Chile in that same summer (as part of the society's celebration of the centenary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species), and the small Zoology Department could not spare two of its teaching staff at the same time. But this does not explain why the whole proposition collapsed. By the time I got back from Chile in March 1959 the Durham-FIDS association appeared dead. Sir Vivian Fuchs, returned from the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, asked Professor J.E. Smith FRS, Professor of Zoology at Queen Mary College, London, to become the overseer of FIDS Zoology. Some botanical work meanwhile moved forward under Dr Stanley Greene, an outstanding bryophyte taxonomist from Birmingham University, working under Professor J. Heslop Harrison.
I came back into the picture in September 1961, by which time I had become an Assistant Director of Research at the Scott Polar Research Institute. By then two young biologists, Peter Tilbrook and Barry Heywood, had been recruited to go to Signy Island to study soil microfauna and freshwater ecology respectively. Tilbrook was a Durham graduate and was familiar with the work Cragg had led at Moor House. Fuchs invited me to go south for the summer of 1961–1962 to help Heywood and Tilbrook start their field work and take up where Cragg had left off in preparing plans for the development of Signy as the survey's biological field laboratory. When I got there, I was not only impressed by the ecological diversity of the island but saw the need for information on vegetation and soils. I therefore undertook preliminary surveys of both and collected a series of soil samples that were later analysed at the Nature Conservancy Merlewood Research Station to which Cragg had by then moved as Director (Holdgate Reference Holdgate, Carrick, Holdgate and Prevost1964; Holdgate and others 1967).
During that summer visit I also heard rumours of why Cragg had been passed over as biological mentor for FIDS. These had nothing to do with Priestley. They were to the effect that Cragg had upset the then Governor of the Falkland Islands, Sir Edwin Arrowsmith, by declining an invitation to stay with him during his days in Stanley, instead insisting on doing field science. I am not sure what truth there was in the tales, but Sir Edwin, with whom I did stay, implied that he had found Cragg a bit brusque.
What happened next is well established. Following my summer visit in 1961–1962 Fuchs asked me to transfer from the SPRI to BAS and become the survey's Senior Biologist (not simply Zoologist, as stated in his book Of Ice and Men) (Fuchs Reference Fuchs1982). Smith arranged with Queen Mary College for a vacant house in Bancroft Road, on the edge of the college campus, to be put in order as the base for the BAS Biological Unit. I established a close working arrangement with Dr Stanley Greene in Birmingham, and we developed a research plan together. This followed the approach Cragg had adopted at Moor House, in seeking to examine major components of the terrestrial ecosystem in the maritime Antarctic, and guided recruitment of survey biologists in the years that followed. My initial vegetation survey was followed by further botanical work, initially by Royce Longton, based on Birmingham (Longton Reference Longton1967), and then by Ron Lewis Smith of Aberdeen, guided by Dr Charles Gimingham who went south in 1964–1965 (Gimingham and Smith Reference Gimingham, Smith and Holdgate1970). We also developed marine ecological studies, initially headed by Peter Redfearn who was the first SCUBA diver recruited by BAS. Fuchs, Derek Gipps and I visited Birmingham to view a telephone exchange building erected by Bakelite Ltd which was made of prefabricated resin and fibreglass panels supported on a steel frame, and we commissioned a similar structure containing both living quarters and a biological laboratory. This was erected on Signy in the 1963–1964 summer. By the time I left BAS in January 1966 an integrated programme of biological research was well under way, with Signy at its heart. In parallel valuable work on birds and fur seals was continuing at Bird Island, South Georgia, in which Tickell and Nigel Bonner played leading parts. Smith and Fuchs gave me warm support in developing the programme, and I found myself doing many of the things that I am sure Cragg would have done had he been given the task five years earlier
Forty years later, as Tickell records, I decided to write a memoir (Holdgate Reference Holdgate2003). In it I obviously needed to record these events, and given my debt to Cragg, not least as the creator of the scientific model I transferred to BAS, I wanted to explore why his plan had never been adopted by FIDS. I discussed the subject with Sloman, then living in retirement near Cambridge, repeating the rumour that the then Governor had led the opposition. It was then, to my surprise, that Sloman told me the real reason was that Priestley had remembered his refusal to say whether or not he had been a communist. I agree with Tickell that this just does not fit with the information he has gathered from the FIDS/BAS archives about Priestley's very real contribution to British Antarctic science during his tenure as Acting Director. But I remain of the view that Cragg's appointment as biological mentor would have been an excellent choice for FIDS and BAS and whatever the reason for its rejection, that rejection did a disservice to British Antarctic science.
