ANGUS d’A. BELLAIRS
The First Herpetologist I ever met.
Peter C. H Pritchard
I was very happy to read Ian Swingland’s recent letters about the life of Angus Bellairs, and I would like to add a few words of appreciation of my own.
Angus was the first herpetologist I ever met. He was the immediate successor to my father as Reader in Anatomy at St. Mary’s Hospital, my father (Dr. J. J. Pritchard) having been appointed Professor of Anatomy at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland the preceding year, and this connection gave me free access to a man I regarded as an intellectual hero. My (signed) copy of his 1957 book, simply named Reptiles, is dated April 5 1958, when I was just14 years old, and just a few years later I started to write a book of my own, which I ambitiously entitled Living Turtles of the World. Despite the clearly schoolboyish flavor of this early draft, not to mention the lack of personal field experience and shortage of library access, Angus introduced me to the concept of peer review (although we were not exactly peers), and he read the whole thing, making gentle suggestions in pencil wherever he saw fit.
Whenever I was in London, I would find my way to the dusty chambers of St. Mary’s (made famous by Sir Alexander Fleming), and knock on Angus’ door for a conversation on the subject of mutual interest, namely herpetology. At such times, he would always open a bottle of sherry and bring some small-size laboratory beakers from which we would drink it, as he urged me to pursue an experimental approach to herpetology, by means such as studying underwater respiration in softshell turtles, or scute regeneration in chelonians. (Somehow, I never became “experimental”, instead concentrating on natural history, taxonomy, skeletal anatomy, and conservation aspects).
Angus also introduced me to other herpetologists, including Miss Grandison, the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, a lady who had seemed rather remote and doctrinaire when I wrote to her, but was more like a favorite auntie once encountered in person. I was also privileged, through her, to meet J. C. Battersby, on his very last day before retiring in 1961; he had been a “boy attendant” of G. A. Boulenger, no less, appointed in 1916.
Angus introduced me to the bizarre militaristic hierarchies at the London Zoo (Regents’ Park), where the “gentlemen officers” (the Curators etc) lorded it over the non-commissioned ranks (head keepers and below), only the former being admitted to such places as the Fellows’ Restaurant. He himself was, of course, “top of the heap,” a scholar and a gentleman, although unpaid in status as “honorary herpetologist,” and I think his extensive wartime military experience was what prompted him to refer to the Reptile House staff as his “sergeant major,” his “corporal,” etc. It was these same officer/NGO distinctions that had prevented Battersby, who lacked an honors degree, from officially becoming Keeper of Reptiles at the British Museum after many decades of service, de facto head of the department.
Angus also helped me get my first job, when I was about 15. It wasn’t a paid job, but for a couple of months one summer I was a temporary assistant to W. E. Swinton, the distinguished palaeontologist, at the British Museum. I kept expenses down by residing as a house guest in the London townhouse of Angus’s (and my Dad’s) boss, Professor Frank Goldby, commuting to work every day on the “tube.” My work at the museum was chiefly concerned with locating and unpacking subfossil and fossil material (mainly New Zealand moas) that had been packed and distributed to safe remote country locales during the Blitz.
Following my relocation to the USA in 1965, I lost most of my contact with Angus (though was very happy to see him at the Canterbury Symposium), but in the late seventies or so I sent him some preserved severely deformed loggerhead sea turtle embryos collected by Angie McGehee, which he duly sectioned and described in detail in 1983 in the E. E. Williams Festshrift. I, in turn, wrote an account of piscivory in turtles in 1984 for Angus’ own retirement Festshrift.
One was not to know that Angus would die of cancer just one year after the Canterbury symposium. His last publication was a complete surprise to those of us who were only familiar with his herpetological writings. It was a full length, 299 page novel, entitled The Isle of Sea Lizards. Details of exactly how long Angus took to write this work, or when he started, remain obscure, but it was distributed as a freebee to those who attended the Canterbury symposium, and presumably was never distributed by other means. Angus held the copyright, and the book was printed and bound by an entity called Short Run Press Ltd. of Exeter.
The book is an exciting yarn, about the adventures of a middle-aged academic, who happened, like Angus, to have been a Reader in Comparative Anatomy, as well as a museum director, named Adrian Barnard, and his female American friend and colleague Jo Crockett. Adrian’s museum is in danger of being wiped off the map by a visiting American academic consultant, a transcendentally obnoxious man who, with the help of a radical animal rights organization, eventually gets his come-uppance. The story keeps us in suspense as to whether Adrian and Jo will become lovers, or even get married. But they do follow up on a clue and a skeletal specimen to seek out a colony of living mosasaurs somewhere in the eastern Indian Ocean, and, for a while, they become part of the extremely singular culture and politics of the remote island of Wollstonecraft.
The book is a somewhat self-indulgent one (nothing wrong with that!), telling the reader a great deal about the values, preoccupations, and experiences of the author himself. Academic politics, and the progressive exclusion of traditional vertebrate studies in the face of cellular and molecular fashions and enthusiasts, were clearly a major irritant to Angus. Yet in his own career he was versatile enough to get promoted steadily, leaving Cambridge in 1953, and becoming Reader in Anatomy at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, where an enlightened administration not only allowed, but even encouraged his interest in reptiles. Later, in 1970, he was promoted to a Personal Chair in Vertebrate Anatomy at the University of London (a rank also reached by his fictional hero Adrian, who was offered the role of Head of the Department upon his return from Wollstonecraft, but declined it, except on an interim basis, because of the administrative overload that it would entail.
Angus was a “gentleman academic” more than he was a field man, but he did spend time on Isla Santa Cruz in the Galapagos in 1972. I was on the island also at that time, studying sea turtles, but was unaware of his expedition, whose task was a study of the feeding and ranging behavior of giant tortoises by the Cambridge and London University Galapagos Expeditions, 1972 and 1973. Later he told me that he did not really enjoy the trip, which published its findings in J. Zool. in 1975, with Angus’ name squeezed almost to the end of a roster of no fewer than eleven authors, most of whom were presumably undergraduates. But it did give him material for an eye-witness account of Puerto Ayora and the Darwin Research Station, and not to mention the only genuine sea lizards in the world, in The Isle of Sea Lizards.
Reptiles casually encountered in the book are described with a level of anatomical and behavioral detail that only a herpetologist could have mustered. Angus’ World War II engagements also led him to learn a great deal about Nazis, and unlovable German soldiers (and their offspring) of a great range of ranks and circumstances feature extensively in Sea Lizards. WWII experience also perhaps gave Angus the background for the detailed descriptions of extraordinary injuries, fatal attacks, and bloody executions in the book, although his background as an anatomist may also have helped with these sections.
Angus also clearly loved classic English literature and poetry, and references to the Brönte sisters (and brother), not to mention Byron, Keats, and Shelly, permeate the whole story. But the biggest surprise (or perhaps it wasn’t really a surprise) was that this deeply cultured and understated Englishman had a significant taste for the sexy, the mildly erotic, and the topless. These parts of the book, unlike the violent bits, are always understated, never obscene in the slightest, written with elegance (and accuracy) rather than with a lascivious eye, but certainly with the eye of a man who noticed and enjoyed these things.
In this context, perhaps, I remember a midwinter visit to Angus and Ruth as an overnight guest at their home in South London in late 1967. There was snow on the ground and I wore a warm woolen scarf that I had bought in Chichicastenango, Guatemala a few months before. When I came down to breakfast the next morning, Angus had picked up the scarf and was examining it with great delight – its hand-embroidered theme was one of multiple rows of copulating goats. He liked it so much that I almost gave it to him, and in retrospect, that certainly would have been the right thing to do.
