Tag Archives: Southampton

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Southampton @ 15

29 April 1952. A memorable day. Hartley University College, Southampton was granted a royal charter by Her Majesty The Queen (the first of her reign) to award its own degrees, and became the University of Southampton. As Her Majesty celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, so does the university with an interesting of program of events next month, on 14 May.

The University of Southampton is my alma mater. I graduated in July 1970 with a BSc combined honours degree in environmental botany and geography, after three very happy years there.

Studying at Southampton, 1967-1970

Anyway, having written in detail about the academics, I thought I’d put together a few anecdotes and tales of being a student at Southampton in the late 60s.

Mid-afternoon, late September/early October 1967. Almost 55 years ago, and I was searching for a seat on the train chartered by the university’s Student’s Union taking freshers from London’s Waterloo Station to Southampton.

Finding the last empty seat in one compartment, I sat next to Neil, a law student from Hemel Hempstead. Like me, Neil was heading to South Stoneham House, one of the university’s halls of residence on Wessex Lane, about a mile east of the Highfield campus, as were several others in the same railway compartment. Neil and I remained firm friends over the course of our degrees, and are still in touch today.

South Stoneham House – in its heyday.

Swaythling station, on the outskirts of the city, was the first stop where those joining South Stoneham, Connaught, and Montefiore halls were taken by coach the short distance to their destinations.

I had a room on the 6th floor as did Neil. Next door to me was John, also signed up for botany and geography. A couple of days later we discovered there were only five of us on that particular degree course.

Thus was my introduction to hall life, and looking forward to the next three years at the university.

So why had I chosen and ended up at Southampton? The university was not my first choice when I sent in my UCAS application the previous December. That honor went to King’s College, London to study for a degree in geography.

Back in the day, it was normal practice for all applicants to be interviewed. But, in February 1967, when the call came through to attend several interviews, I went down with the flu and had to reschedule all of them. Southampton was extremely accommodating. I contacted the university to say that I’d be in London on a certain day, and could I come on to Southampton the following day.

So, several weeks later, and on a bright, sunny, and quite warm day for the time of year, I was interviewed for about an hour by Dr Joyce Lambert, an ecologist and Reader in the Department of Botany, and Dr Brian Birch, a biogeographer and Lecturer from the Department of Geography.

I met them in the Geography department that, in those days, was based in the Hartley Building on the first floor at the rear, above the university administration offices and behind the university library.

The Hartley Building on University Road, Highfield, now the university library only.

I felt the interview had gone well. It’s hard to explain but I knew the moment that I walked through the doors of the Hartley Building that I could be very happy at Southampton. It just felt right! And a week or so later I received a generous offer of 3 Cs (in biology, geography, and/or English literature/general studies.

The first week at Southampton, Freshers’ Week, passed by in a blur. For many of us, this was our first time away from home. Freedom! Not only did we have to get used to the hall of residence regime, make new friends, there was the whole of the university to explore, very much smaller than it is today.

It was probably by the end of that week that we had our first introduction to the departments and our personal tutees. Joyce Lambert was my tutor in Botany, and Brian Birch in Geography, thus renewing directly my acquaintance from the interview. And also meeting the other members of the botany and geography cohort: Jane, Stuart, and Michael.

(I later learned that one of the combined honours students in the year ahead [1966 intake] reputedly was or became an infamous Mossad agent and assassin. I have had that ‘confirmed’ by someone who knew her).

Our course structure was explained, and in the case of geography we had to sign up immediately for a weekend of field trips around Southampton at the end of the first week of teaching. On one of those days we were taken to the northern outskirts of the city, and then as a group of more than 50 students, walked back into the city with the physical and historical geography features explained along the way. All in the pouring rain! Welcome to geography fieldwork.

Also at the end of Freshers’ Week, the Students’ Union organized the annual ‘Bun Fight’, where all the societies made pitches to recruit and welcome new members.

I signed up to join the English and Scottish Folk Dance Society, although I’d never danced a step before then. And dancing remained an enjoyable pastime during my three years.

Dance as if no one is watching . . .

From that initial folk dancing experience, I helped to found the university morris dance side, the Red Stags, at the beginning of my second year in October 1968.

Sticks and hankies – a tale of Red Stags

The Red Stags are thriving 54 years later, as a mixed male/female Border morris side, but no longer associated with the university.

One other thing I remember about Freshers’ Week were the short trips around the city in the Toastrack, a 1929 vintage Dennis bus, owned and maintained by the Southampton University Engineering Society since 1958.

In the late 60s, Southampton was engineering-heavy, and about one quarter of all undergrads were studying for one engineering degree or another.

In South Stoneham House there were shared rooms in the original Queen Anne mansion but single occupancy ones in the 16 storey tower block erected in 1964. It was all male, fewer than 200 students all told. And woe betide any student with a girl in his room, or attempting to smuggle one out, after the curfew hour of 9 pm. Each room had a wash basin, and there were two baths and toilet/showers on each floor.

The accommodation included breakfast and dinner Monday to Saturday, and breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea on Sundays. Dinner was always formal, and we had to wear a black gown. A bit pretentious, I guess; Southampton trying to emulate an Oxbridge college in some respects.

I enjoyed life in South Stoneham, and when, towards the end of my first year I discovered I’d not secured a place for my second year, I decided to stand for Vice President of the Junior Common Room (JCR, as opposed to the Senior Common Room comprising the Warden and several faculty members who had rooms in hall). Being duly elected, I was automatically allocated a room, moving up to the 13th floor, with a south-facing view over the gardens and the banks of the River Itchen, and all the way down to Southampton docks.

As Vice President I took responsibility for various entertainments, including the Stoneham November dance and fireworks, as well as the May Ball. Neil and I also took on the firework display, and I had a budget of £20 or so (almost £400 today) to source appropriate display fireworks. I was called before the Bursar who gave me a ticking-off for storing the fireworks in my room, and ordering me to put them safely in the basement under lock and key.

For the May Ball, we developed a Parisian theme and review. A great success. I wonder if anyone recognizes a few faces.

In my third year, Neil and I moved into digs at No. 30 University Road, just down from the recently-opened University Administration Building and bookshop (now the Student Services Centre). After I left Southampton in 1970 many of the houses on that side of University Road were taken over by the university as departmental expansion space. No. 30 has now been demolished.

In the late 60s the university was beginning to expand, and new buildings were being put up. Just a year before I arrived there, Botany moved from an old building (now demolished I believe) that stood next to the Hartley Building to Building 44 (now named the Shackleton Building and housing the Geography and Psychology departments) along with geology. Of course Botany no longer exists as a separate department, merging with Zoology (and others?) after I’d left Southampton.

In my second year, Geography moved from the Hartley Building to the new Arts II, which now houses the Southampton Business School and the Music department (formerly located around the Nuffield Theatre).

And talking of the Administration Building. The late 60s were a radical time at Southampton, and rumors abounded that the new building would be occupied within days of its opening. And it came to pass, with the Vice Chancellor (Professor Sir Kenneth Mather FRS) having to remain in his old suite of offices until the students were evicted and the extensive damage repaired. Not the best of times.

Professor Mather came to Southampton from the University of Birmingham where he had been head of the Department of Genetics. He taught a course on population genetics to a class of third year botany and zoology students, and often claimed he was the only teaching Vice Chancellor in the country. After retiring from Southampton, he returned to Birmingham, keeping an office in the School of Biological Sciences. By 1981, I was also a faculty member at Birmingham, and Professor Mather had an office just down the corridor from mine. We often shared Southampton anecdotes.

During my first year I had to attend two field courses. The geography course was held in Swansea in late March 1968 just after the end of the Spring term. We stayed in one of the university halls of residence there, making field trips to see the legacy of the industrial revolution in the Swansea Valley, and the physical geography of the Gower Peninsula. The weather was mixed. It was warm enough on some days for bathing suits on the beach, but on the final morning we woke to almost 12 inches of snow!

I attended two botany field courses. The first, in July 1968, was based near the Burren in County Clare in the west of Ireland. We had a great time.

“There isn’t a tree to hang a man, water to drown a man nor soil to bury a man”.

A year later, we spent two weeks in Norfolk, which coincided with the first Moon landing by Armstrong and Aldrin.

The Man [on] the Moon (updated 20 July 2019)

I guess I was lucky to attend both botany field courses. Until 1970, the university did not allow any students to resit exams they had failed. One strike and you were out, even if the failed course was an ancillary one. And large numbers of students were asked to leave, even at the end of their second year. I scraped my first year ancillary geology course by a whisker.

It all came to a head in 1969 when a very large number (almost 50% if my memory serves me right) of second year chemists failed one or more exams and were expelled. That was a step too far. There was a student uproar. The expelled students were not re-admitted but resit exams were introduced the following year.

Apart from the folk dancing, I guess I spent more than my fair share of time in the pub or the Student Union bar (in the old building), sometimes playing squash in the new Students’ Union building that had been opened in 1967. There were two pubs close to the university on Burgess Road, both now closed perhaps even demolished. I favored the Crown & Sceptre (above) over The Gate, and held my 21st birthday party there in November 1969.

In the summer term, we often had lunch on Saturday at a pub on Woodmill Lane (they did an excellent ploughman’s) on the bank of the River Itchen. It looks as if it’s no longer there. Across the road was a pitch and putt course.

Not having a car, I hardly ever went to the New Forest, but Bursledon on the Hamble River was much more easily accessible by train. My girlfriend Liz and I often missed Friday evening dinner in our respective halls for a pub meal at The Jolly Sailor overlooking the river (where they had an amazing selection of fruit wines). This pub featured several times in the BBC production Howard’s Way over six series from 1985 to 1990.

I joined the Folk Club that was held every Sunday evening in one of the Union bars. Tim Hart and Maddy Prior (later of Steeleye Span fame) were frequent performers at the club.

I even performed once or twice myself. And in February 1969, the Red Stags made their debut at a ceilidh that I organized, attended by several hundred students

I can remember attending only three rock concerts, and all during my first year, held in the Old Refectory.

The first was the Alan Price Set (former keyboard player with The Animals) on 25 November 1967. Then there was Pink Floyd on 26 January 1968 (without Syd Barrett) and supported by T-Rex. I can’t find a gig date for The Crazy World of Arthur Brown; in fact Southampton University is not even listed on several web lists. But he did perform because I remember him launching into his iconic Fire, and setting his hair alight!

Anyway, these are just a few of my Southampton memories. Good times, and an excellent launch pad for a later career in international agricultural research and academia.

On graduation in 1970 I moved to the University of Birmingham to study for an MSc in genetic resources conservation, and then completed a PhD on potatoes from Peru in 1975. I spent more than 8 years with the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru and Costa Rica from January 1973, and another 19 years at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines from 1991. In between, I spent a decade teaching botany at Birmingham.

Returning in 2010, I now just have happy memories of my time at Southampton and the successful career that stemmed from those first years. In 2012 I was awarded an OBE for services to international food science, and I like to think that in many ways it was a culmination of a career in science that began at Southampton in 1967.

 

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Nine towns and cities, four countries, four continents . . .

Do you remember all the places and houses where you have lived? I do. Such varied and (mostly) happy memories.

I left my parents’ home in Leek (a small market town in North Staffordshire) at the beginning of October 1967, almost 19 years of age, to study at university; I only went back for short visits during vacations. Less than six years later I was headed for new adventures overseas living in Peru, Costa Rica, and the Philippines (with a break in between of 10 years back in the UK) over the next 40 years.

Early days in Congleton
I was not born in Leek however, although to all intents and purposes I consider it my home town. We moved to Leek in April 1956 from Congleton in Cheshire. I’d turned seven the previous November.

In Congleton, we lived at 13 Moody Street just a few minutes walk away from the offices and print shop of the Congleton Chronicle newspaper on the High Street where my father worked as staff photographer. No. 13 was owned by the Head family, then proprietors of the Chronicle.

It is a three-storey property. Back in the day, the attic rooms on the top floor weren’t furnished, and we used them as play rooms on wet days. On the ground floor, it seems to me that we hardly ever used the front parlor. A room, the width of the building at the rear of the house, served as dining and living room, with a kitchen and larder off to one side.

Taken in Congleton in about 1952 or so. L to R: Mike, Martin, Margaret and Edgar

My best friend Alan Brennan, a year younger than me, lived just a few doors further up Moody Street. But we didn’t go to the same school. I was enrolled at Mossley C of E village school, a couple of miles south of the town, like my two brothers and sister before me. Each weekday morning, my elder brother Edgar (just over two years older than me) and I took the bus together from the High Street to Mossley. Sometimes, in the summer, I’d walk home on my own (something that parents wouldn’t even contemplate today).

In the early 1950s we made our own entertainment. We didn’t have television. (In fact my parents didn’t own a B&W TV until about 1964). During the summer we’d play outside until dark, even walking the mile south to the Macclesfield Canal where we had fun on the swing bridge (now replaced by a static bridge), or hiding in the old air raid shelter near the cemetery on the way to the canal.

May Day, early 1950s. The kids of Moody Street. That’s me on the extreme left.

In the winter, we tobogganed on Priesty Fields nearby. We also had the Saturday matinee at one of the local cinemas, the Premier on Lawton Street (now demolished and the site of Congleton in Bloom Community Garden) enjoying Laurel and Hardy, or B movie westerns with the Lone Ranger, and Hopalong Cassidy, to name a few of the movie stars we emulated in our games. Happy days!

Thinking of my early years in Congleton makes me realize we did not have the luxury of central heating either in the house or at school. In fact, at home, we must have sat around a small fire in the living room to keep warm.

At school, we actually had a large coal fire in the classroom. Can you imagine? No Health and Safety Executive to put a stop to that. All that separated us from the inferno was a large fire guard. Even when I was in high school in the late 1960s each pupil was entitled to a small bottle (1/3 pint) of milk daily. I doubt that continues today. Anyway, at Mossley during the winter, we would place our frozen bottles of milk in front of the fire to thaw.

65 St Edward St, Leek

Moving to Leek
My parents decided to set up on their own in Leek, and took over an existing photographic business at 65 St Edward St, on the edge of the town center. Not an ideal location, but as an ongoing concern, I guess it was the most appropriate approach to enter the retail trade.

It was by no means a large property, for a family of six. We three brothers shared a bedroom on the front of the property (the top window in the photo on the right). My parents had their bedroom at the rear. That property didn’t have central heating either.

On the first floor was the bathroom/ toilet, and at the front of the house, an L-shaped living room. My sister Margaret (then 15) had her own private space and bed in the ‘L’ of that room. Not an ideal situation, but there was no other alternative. In July 1957 my eldest brother Martin left  to join the Royal Air Force, and thereafter we saw him at home only on leave.

The kitchen was located on the ground floor, behind the shop and we ate most of our meals there, only moving to the first floor room for special family meals like Christmas. My father converted the cellar into his photographic dark room.

A side entrance led to an enclosed yard, Court No. 3, with three or four cottages, none with toilets or bathrooms, but probably just one tap of running water. These were demolished not long after we moved into No. 65, and we then had a large open space to play in.

With my best friend Geoff Sharratt (who lived at The Quiet Woman pub a few doors away) playing with my Hornby clockwork train set.

Winter fun and games with my brother Ed (center), me (crouching), and one of our friends, behind 65 St Edward St, after the cottages had been demolished.

I remember well-attended Christmas parties at No. 65, Christmas lunches around a table in the first floor living room.

Around 1960 or 1961, the lease came due on No. 65 and my parents decided not to renew the tenancy, opting to try and find a better location in the town. That took a couple more years.

In the interim, they moved the shop across St Edward St to No. 56, that was a fine porcelain retailer at the time. When we visited Leek in 2019 it was once again the premises of a photographer, and we discovered other earlier historical links.

My dad took on that fine china business, moving his photographic business there. For about six months we didn’t actually have a house. We had a room behind the shop, and a small kitchen, and a caravan on a farm a few miles north of the town. Somehow we managed, until an apartment became available at the top of the Market Place, at No. 26, above a building society.

No. 26, the red-brick building on the right at the top of the Market Place. We occupied the two upper floors.

We stayed there about two years, even over the coldest (and longest) winter I can remember, 1962/63. Everything froze and we had no running water for almost 10 weeks. Dad’s business was still operating from No. 56 St Edward St.

Then, a semi-derelict property (formerly a watchmaker’s) came on the market at No. 19 Market Place. Despite considerable trepidation on the part of my mother, Dad sold her on the idea of purchasing the property because of its central location in the town, and renovating the two upper floors into a comfortable apartment.

No. 19, with the yellow and black ‘Jackson’ sign, in between Jackson Optician (no relation) and Victoria Wine in the early 1960s. No. 26 is the building on the extreme right at the top of the Market Place.

The renovation was no easy task. There was only one tap in the property, in the cellar. No bathroom or toilet, and no central heating. These all got added and we must have moved in by late 1963, since my sister Margaret had married David by then and they took over the tenancy of No. 26.

The views over the Market Place from both No. 26 and No. 19 were great, being right in the heart of the town. Each Wednesday there was a busy market (you don’t see many of those any more, and I don’t think Leek market runs in the same way any more).

And both were great vantage points to watch the Club Day (or Walking Round Day) procession each July, which I used to take part in when a small boy.

Assembling in the Market Place on Club Day. This was taken around 1960 or so. The awning over the premises of  J Cosgrove (watchmaker) is clearly seen at the top of the image. That is No. 19 Market Place before it became my father’s premises.

University days
Mum and Dad lived at No. 19 until 1976 when they retired. But I had moved out almost a decade earlier, when I headed south to study at the University of Southampton from 1967 to 1970. For the first two years I lived in South Stoneham House, one of the halls of residence just under 1¼ miles from the campus. I lived in the 16 storey tower block, not the original Queen Anne house to which it was attached. I’ve since learned that the grounds were designed by 18th century landscaper, Capability Brown. The tower was condemned for occupation in 2005, partly because of the asbestos in the building. But also the fabric of the tower (built in the 1960s) had deteriorated, and conditions for students were described as ‘squalid’.

South Stoneham House

It was due to be demolished earlier this year. This is how it looked until then, shrouded in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. Very sad. We had happy days there.

In my final year (1969-70), I moved to digs (half-board accommodation) at 30 University Road, just down from the newly-opened university administration building and bookshop on the southeast side of the campus. Within a year or so of leaving Southampton many of the houses along University Road had been bought up by the university and became annexes to university departments. No. 30 was demolished.

This is No. 28. No. 30 to its right has been demolished and stood where the trees now stand.

In September 1970, I moved to Birmingham to begin a 1-year MSc course in genetic conservation. I rented a room in a house on Portland Road in the B16 Edgbaston area of the city, and a 2 mile walk to the campus. I think it was the one on the extreme left. But it was more than 50 years ago, and many properties along Portland Road look different today.

After one year, as I started my PhD research, I joined two engineers in an apartment south of the campus on Abdon Avenue. It was certainly one of the apartments on the left of the entrance, but I don’t remember if it was the first or top floor.

I stayed there until December 1972 when I prepared to leave the UK and head to warmer climes, in Lima, Peru to join the International Potato Center (CIP) as an Associate Taxonomist.

Off to South America
Arriving in Lima at the beginning of January 1973, I lodged for about three weeks in the Pensión Beech (now demolished it seems) on Calle Los Libertadores in the San Isidro district of the city. Then I had to start looking for an apartment to rent.

I found a furnished one-bedroom apartment on the 12th floor of a tower block on Los Pinos in the Miraflores district, close to the Pacific Ocean coast. I don’t have any clear images of the building. I’m not sure it’s even still standing after 50 years. In 1973 it stood apart beside a vacant lot, and next to a Todos supermarket (long since disappeared).

Steph joined me at the beginning of July that year, and very soon we decided that the apartment was too small. We married in Miraflores in October that same year.

At our Los Pinos apartment, just after Steph arrived in Lima in July 1973.

We quickly found a furnished two-bedroom apartment on Avenida Larco just around the corner. Parking was on the first floor, accessed by a lift from the street. At street level, there was an ice cream parlor, Veinte Sabores (20 Flavors), now replaced by a commercial outlet named Mardigras.

The apartment was on the top (12th) floor, on the rear of the building with a view to the coast.

A view to the Pacific Ocean over the Miraflores rooftops.

In October 1974, the coast of Peru was hit by a major earthquake, more than 8 on the Richter Scale. Living on the 12th floor was not so comfortable then, and for many weeks there were countless aftershocks which didn’t do much for our nerves.

So by Christmas that year, we’d moved out to house-sit for several colleagues while they were on home-leave, until the following May when we were returned to the UK for six months. I had to complete the PhD residency requirements at the university and defend my thesis.

We landed in Birmingham at the end of May 1975 having returned to the UK via Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico. We found a one-bedroom apartment in a large house on Farquhar Road close to the campus, which had been converted to about five apartments, with the owner occupying the ground floor.

The ‘bridge’ connecting the house to the garage was our bathroom.

We stayed there until the end of the year before returning to Lima, spending a few months in the CIP Guesthouse. But we didn’t remain in Peru for much longer. CIP asked me to move to Costa Rica in April 1976 to set up a potato breeding program focusing on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Moving to North America (actually Central America)
CIP signed an agreement with CATIE, a regional research and training center in Turrialba, some 70 km east of the capital, San José. It was a campus institute, nestling below the Turrialba Volcano, and was the headquarters of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) from 1942 until 1976 (when it moved to San José).

The Turrialba volcano from the town below.

Initially, we stayed in CATIE’s guesthouse, then moved into a rather run-down house in the #109 sub-division just outside the campus before eventually moving on campus. We rented a two-bedroom detached house with a lovely garden, full of fruit trees, and the most wonderful wildlife: birds, mammals, and reptiles (some very venomous). Our elder daughter Hannah was born there in April 1978, so these were very special years we spent in Turrialba.

In our garden, probably early 1977.
Hannah enjoying a stroll around the garden in 1979.

I don’t have any decent images of the house that we occupied until November 1980 which, after we left, became additional space for the international school nearby.

Hannah visited Costa Rica in 2002, and took these two photos of the house. The upper image shows the car port and rear door to the house (which we used as our main entrance). The lower image shows the front door and living room to the right and Hannah’s bedroom left of the door.

By the end of 1980 I was looking for a new challenge and asked CIP’s director general for a new posting. We returned to Lima and several more months in the guesthouse. In the meantime, however, I had successfully applied for a teaching and research post at the University of Birmingham. I resigned my post at CIP, and we returned to the UK in March 1981 in time for my 1 April start date at Birmingham.

We then set about finding somewhere to live. Within a week of so we had put in an offer on a house in Bromsgrove, a market town in north Worcestershire, about 13 miles south of the campus.

Back in the UK – Bromsgrove
Located just under a mile east of the town center, our three bedroom house was built in 1975. In 1982, just before our second daughter Philippa was born, we extended the kitchen on the front of the house. In 2015 we installed an electric garage door and had the front drive re-paved.

The garden was Steph’s pride and joy, that she carefully nurtured over almost 40 years.

Growing up, Hannah and Phil attended the local schools, and had a wide circle of friends living close by. The house always seemed filled with a small group of girls. And each year there were two birthday parties to organize.

Philippa’s 6th birthday party in May 1988. She is sitting facing the camera on the left, and Hannah is standing.

But that’s not the whole story. Yes, we owned No. 4 for 39 years, but for 19 of those, we lived in the Philippines, only returning to the UK in May 2010. In fact, our stay in the Philippines has been, to date, the longest continual period I have lived anywhere.

In July 1991, I accepted a position at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, some 70 km south of Manila. From the outset we decided to keep No. 4 empty but fully furnished, which we could occupy when we returned to the UK on our annual home-leave. We thought having tenants and the like just wasn’t worth the hassle. In any case, we had a ‘bolt hole’ should our assignment in the Philippines not live up to expectations or the civil/political situation deteriorated to an extent that we might have to leave.

Asia calls
IRRI provided houses for its senior, mainly non-Filipino staff in a gated community about 10 minutes drive from the research center, across the campus of the University of the Philippines – Los Baños (UPLB).  IRRI Staff Housing or ISH as it became known, was developed on the lower slopes of a dormant volcano, Mt Makiling that dominated the skyline over the town.

Mt Makiling from the IRRI Research Center.

Founded in 1959/60, the construction of the IRRI research center and housing began in 1961.

ISH takes shape in July 1961, with Laguna de Bay in the distance.

On the lower slopes of Mt Makiling, ISH takes shape in December 1961, and almost ready for occupation. Our house, No. 15, is the fourth from the bottom, middle column.

Los Baños has grown along the shore of shallow Laguna de Bay (911 km²) that stretches all the way north to Manila, a little over 65 km by road. (Click map to enlarge).

The video below (from my good friend and former IRRI colleague Gene Hettel who has retired in the Philippines near Los Baños) shows the panoramic view over the volcano and lake.

By 1991, ISH was unrecognizable from the site thirty years earlier. Mature trees covered the compound, and everywhere was lush with vegetation. The houses however, were beginning to show their age, and some of the facilities, like the kitchens had never been updated, and that remained the case for House #15 that we occupied until we left the Philippines almost 19 years later.

We had the use of a swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts, and the ISH compound was a safe place for all the children to play, often inventing their own games that were passed down from year to year over the decades. I guess an important downside of living in Los Baños was schooling for the children, most of whom attended the International School in Manila, entailing for many years a two hour journey each way, and an ungodly start time (by the end of the 1990s) of 4:30 am!

While Peru was a country of earthquakes, Costa Rica had its volcanoes, the Philippines had both of these AND typhoons. Several would sweep in from the Pacific Ocean each year and cross the country leaving a trail of destruction in their path. These images show some of the damage around ISH and the UPLB campus in the aftermath of Typhoon Milenyo in September 2006, which passed almost directly overhead, with winds approaching 150 mph.

As often as we could we’d get away to the beach, at Arthur’s Place south of Los Baños where Steph would snorkel and I would scuba dive.

8 Dec 2002: in front of Arthur’s Place

All things come to an end, and by 2009 I’d already decided not to seek another full contract, just extending my current one by a year and then retiring. We returned to the UK and our Bromsgrove home in May 2010.

However, by the end of 2019 we had eventually decided to leave Bromsgrove and move north to Newcastle upon Tyne where our younger daughter Philippa and her family live. (Our elder daughter lives in Minnesota).

So, in January 2020, we put No. 4 on the market, just before the first Covid-19 lockdown. By the beginning of June we’d received an offer that we accepted and began making plans for the move.

We completed the sale on 30 September and moved out that same day.

The removers on their way north!

Goodbye to No. 4.

The following day we moved into a 3-bedroom detached house that we rented for the next six months in the West Allotment area of North Tyneside (east of the city center) while we looked for a new home to buy.

Move-in complete at Cloverfield by 15:55 on 1 October 2020.

We took a week to get ourselves settled and find our local bearings. But then began the search in earnest for a new home. And found just the house almost immediately, viewing it one morning and putting in an offer that same evening. The conveyancing to purchase the property was not as straightforward as we and the vendors expected, but the sale/purchase was finally completed on 15 February last year. We moved in on 6 March.

Finally settled.

Yes, finally settled. A warm, well-appointed home. Only the garden to sort out, and almost from Day 1 Steph has been busy designing, planning, and developing her new garden.

April 2021 and beyond.

And although we enjoyed living in Worcestershire, the prospect of many more treats to come in beautiful Northumberland is something we look forward to.

 

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Morris dancing and genetic resources – an unlikely combination

I was never much good at taking exams. That is, until I studied for my Masters degree in Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources at the University of Birmingham in 1970-1971. So how come I improved?

It was exactly 50 years ago, Tuesday 1 June 1971, when I sat the first of four written exams over consecutive days. It was also the day after the Late Spring Bank Holiday, the 31st and the last Monday of May. I spent that day—all day, in fact—Morris dancing in Lichfield, a town in south Staffordshire famous for its three-spired medieval cathedral, the ‘city of philosophers’ according one of its famous sons, Samuel, Dr Johnson.

Let me backtrack a few years.

Soon after arriving in Southampton in October 1967 to begin my undergraduate studies at the university, I joined the English & Scottish Folk Dance Society in the Students’ Union, although I’d never danced before. Then, a year later, I co-founded (with Dr Joe Smartt, a genetics lecturer in the Department of Botany) the Red Stags Morris that is still dancing today although no longer associated with the university for many years now.

The Red Stags dancing outside the Arts Faculty in March 1970 at a university Open Day. I’m the second dancer from the left, facing Joe Smartt, with Dudley Savage from the Winchester Morris Men playing the fiddle.

As I described in that earlier post about the Red Stags, we were supported from the outset by the Winchester Morris Men, and during the summer term we would join them when they danced out around the villages and pubs of Hampshire. Such a beautiful county.

Each Late Spring Bank Holiday, the Winchester Morris Men would also organize a Day of Dance, beginning in late morning and lasting well into the evening, and probably visiting half a dozen villages in the process (and their hostelries). The Red Stags joined the 1969 Day of Dance around the New Forest and ending up in Winchester by early evening. By then, we’d developed some dancing skills in the Headington and Adderbury traditions and didn’t embarrass ourselves among much more accomplished dancers. Here is a group of photos taken on that particular Day of Dance, 26 May.

Move on a year. In May 1970, the Late Spring Bank Holiday (25 May) fell on the day before my Final exams were due to start. The weather was glorious, just the sort that was never conducive for exam revision. Joe Smartt encouraged me to take that last day off from revision and join the Morris tour. Peer pressure was too great. I declined, and that’s something I have regretted ever since. Those final few hours of revision didn’t help me one iota, and my exam performance over the next week was only satisfactory to say the least, not the glory I hoped for (but didn’t really expect).

Nevertheless, I was accepted on to the MSc course at Birmingham, and moved there in September 1970, full of anticipation for this new field of plant genetic resources, and looking forward to joining a new Morris side.

There were two choices in Birmingham: Jockey Men’s Morris Club or Green Man’s Morris and Sword Club [1]. I chose the latter. One of the people who’d encouraged me to join the folk dance society at Southampton, Dr Edward Johns, had moved to Birmingham and had joined Green Man a couple of years previously.

I danced with Green Man on a weekly basis for the next two years before I moved to Peru in January 1973. When I returned to the UK in 1981, I rejoined Green Man, and became Squire (club chairman) in 1982 for a year. Unfortunately I developed arthritis in my knees and my doctor discouraged me from from dancing. So, by about 1985 or ’86, my dancing days were over.

That’s me, fourth from the right.

One of Green Man’s traditions, something they did for at least 50 years, was leading the Lichfield Bower Procession (a community event dating back to the 12th century) each Late Spring Bank Holiday. This is a procession around the city, of a couple of miles at the very least. And Green Man would dance the Bower Processional, with arms outstretched and carrying leafy boughs (typically elm in the past) the whole way, but with frequent stops to take refreshment on board.


In 1971, I was again faced with the same dilemma: should I spend the last day before exams doing some last minute revision, or head off and forget my exams fears by enjoying a day of Morris dancing, and my first Lichfield Bower?

Actually, I’d more or less made the decision some months previously. Morris dancing it was. During the MSc course I had upped my game and really learnt how to study more effectively and, more importantly, how to organize myself in preparation for the written exams. Everything went to plan, and by the end of May I felt I’d done all that I could to prepare myself for the coming week of exams. I was ready and primed, so to speak.

So, without any last minute feelings of guilt, just after breakfast I joined my fellow club members traveling to Lichfield, and spent the next twelve or thirteen hours dancing, and consuming not an inconsiderable amount of beer in the process, probably at least twelve pints over the course of the day.

I don’t think I got to bed much before midnight, but then had one of the best night’s sleep I’ve ever enjoyed. Not a care in the world, waking up the following morning fully refreshed and relaxed and ready to take on whatever the exam threw at me.

And the outcome? Well it’s plain to see.

During the 1980s, when I was teaching at the University of Birmingham, I gave my own students the same advice: Don’t spend the final day before exams trying to cram last minute information. Take the day off, do something completely different to take your mind of the coming exams. Relax, have a good time, and then have a good night’s sleep.

I know hindsight is a wonderful thing. I just wish I’d taken my own advice back in 1970.

[1] Sadly, in 2017 Green Man’s Morris and Sword Club decided that the side was no longer viable. With ageing members and not recruiting new blood, the club was no longer able to put up a side of six dancers and musician. Thus came to an end 60 or more years of dancers from a club that had provided two Squires of the Morris Ring, John Venables and Ray King. Click here to read a short account of how and why Green Man came to an end.

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Science publications that influenced my choice of career . . .

I’m sure, like me, many scientists have a few publications that they treasure. No, I’m not referring to any which they themselves authored; rather, publications that made them sit up and pay attention, so to speak. And, in doing so, particularly stimulated their interest and perhaps even guided their own scientific careers subsequently.

I’ve now been retired for ten years, but I still look back to how I got started in the world of plant genetic resources fifty years ago, and some of the scientific publications that pointed me in that direction. Let me backup a little and explain how this came about.

In 1967, I was accepted on to a BSc degree course at the University of Southampton (on England’s south coast) to study environmental botany and geography. I’ve written elsewhere about the three very happy years I spent in Southampton until graduation in July 1970.

The core of my degree course, particularly in my third or senior year, was a two semester ecology module taught in the Botany department, and different aspects of physical geography (such as geomorphology, biogeography, and climatology) in the Geography department. But I also took several shorter elective modules in Botany, including plant speciation, plant breeding, and population genetics. This latter course was taught by one of the pioneers in this field, Vice Chancellor Professor Sir Kenneth Mather who came to Southampton from the University of Birmingham (where he had been head of the Department of Genetics). He claimed (probably with some justification) that he was the only teaching Vice Chancellor at that time in the UK.

Joyce Lambert

We were a small group of only six or so ecology students, and this module was taught by quantitative ecologist Dr Joyce Lambert (who was also my personal tutor). All of us were required to submit an extended essay of 4-5000 words on an ‘ecological topic’ of our choice. It goes without saying that Joyce hinted she would prefer essays about her interest, namely the application of numerical methods to study vegetation landscapes.

I did not heed Joyce’s ‘advice’; I guess she was not best pleased. Instead, and with encouragement from genetics lecturer Dr Joe Smartt, I chose to explore the relationship between ecology, genetics, and taxonomy (the related fields of ecological genetics and experimental taxonomy) in an essay about the concept of ‘ecotypes’. Simply put, an ecotype is a distinct form or race of a plant occupying a particular habitat.

So that was my aim. What would be my entry point? And which literature would be most useful for my purpose?

From the 1920s onwards, several botanists (Göte Turesson in Sweden, JW Gregor in Scotland, and three staff at the Carnegie Institute of Washington in Stanford: geneticist Jens Clausen, physiologist William Hiesey, and taxonomist David Keck) had studied the variation of species (genetically, physiologically, and taxonomically) in relation to their environments, and the role of natural selection on plant adaptation. There was a wealth of literature to delve into. But where to begin?

Jack Heslop-Harrison

I was fortunate that, just a few years earlier, Professor Jack Heslop-Harrison (then Mason Professor of Botany at the University of Birmingham) published an important review paper about what became for me a fascinating branch of botanical science, the study of variation within species in relation to environment.

Forty years of genecology, published in Advances in Ecological Research in 1964 (Vol. 2: 159-247) was, for me, one of those formative publications. Not only was the review thoroughly comprehensive in its coverage, but had the added quality of being extremely well written. It has stood the test of time. Yet, it would be interesting to bring it up to date, introducing all the latest evidence based on molecular biology and genomics.

When I contacted Heslop-Harrison’s son ‘Pat’ (who is Professor of Plant Cell Biology and Molecular Cytogenetics at the University of Leicester) to request a copy of his father’s paper (I’d ‘lost’ the copy I once had) he told me that he began writing a review 100 years of genecology, but had never completed it.

He did make this interesting comment: When I started on a ‘100 years’ update, I was taken that some parts [of ‘Forty years of genecology’] sounded remarkably old-fashioned, while other parts could fit unchanged in a strong grant application made today. But how the combination of molecular/marker studies and modelling has really allowed genecology to take its rightful place in biology.

Immersing myself in the various concepts of ‘ecotype’, ‘clines’, and ‘infraspecific variation’ among many others, Heslop-Harrison’s review not only provided me with the impetus to fulfil a pressing course assignment, but subconsciously perhaps helped me make some decisions about a future career. I guess this was the first time I became really enthusiastic about any botanical sub-discipline. Later on, when I began working in the area of conservation and use of plant genetic resources, the study of variation patterns and adaptation in crop species and their wild relatives became an important focus of what I set out to achieve. In fact, understanding the nature of crop plant variation—and how to use it—is one of the fundamental concepts underpinning the value of plant genetic resources.

No study of variation in plant species would be complete, even today I believe, without reference to the pioneering work of Clausen, Keck, and Hiesey in California over several decades from the 1930s. Their work had been highlighted, of course, in Heslop-Harrison’s review. I went back to their original papers*.

L-R: Jens Clausen (cytology and genetics), William Hiesey (physiology), and David Keck (taxonomy/botany)

And what an eye-opener they were: a classic set of papers, published between 1934 and 1958, describing experimental studies on the nature of species that really caught my attention, and to which I still return from time to time.

While others, like Turesson and Gregor, had also studied plant variation experimentally, their work was not on the same scale that Clausen and his colleagues achieved across central California, from the coast to the high Sierra Nevada.

Working with a range of species, they collected samples from different populations of each across this Californian transect and, using a reciprocal transplant approach, grew samples at experimental gardens on the coast at Stanford and at different altitudes in the mountains, at Mather and Timberline. So, for example, samples collected from coastal sites were grown at the high altitude garden, and vice versa and all combinations in between. Even the same species looked different under different environments, in terms of plant stature or days to flowering, for example, being just two of the many traits they studied. They were interested if these traits would persist when grown in another environment. Here is an example from yarrow or Achillea.

Clausen, J, DD Keck and WM Hiesey, 1948. Experimental studies on the nature of species. III: Environmental responses of climatic races of Achillea. Publication 581. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.

They studied how well plants from one environment thrived in another, identifying the adaptations that enabled them to survive, and understanding both the genetic and physiological basis for adaptation, while recognising some of the variants taxonomically, if warranted. Many were simply locally-adapted populations, or ecotypes. Just a beautiful and competent piece of science.

Anyway, come the summer of 1970 and having just graduated, I still wasn’t sure what I’d be doing or where. I’d been accepted on to the MSc course on Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources at the University of Birmingham to begin in September. But while I had a guaranteed place, there was no funding. And without a studentship there was no way I could support myself and pay tuition fees.

That all changed at the beginning of August or thereabouts. I had a phone call from Professor Jack Hawkes, who was Mason Professor of Botany (succeeding Heslop-Harrison) and the MSc course director, letting me know he’d found some funds to support my studies. It was wonderful news, and I immediately began to make plans to move to Birmingham in mid-September.

There was one important thing Jack asked me to do: purchase a copy of a book that had just been published, and try and work my way through it before I landed up in Birmingham.

This book, Genetic Resources in Plants – their Exploration and Conservation, was more than an eye opener as far as I was concerned. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes. What a revelation!

The book was dedicated to Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov. Until then I’d never heard of this eminent Russian geneticist, the ‘Father of Plant Genetic Resources’, who subsequently became something of a scientific hero of mine.

Edited by wheat breeder Sir Otto Frankel and FAO scientist Dr Erna Bennett, both pioneers of the 1960s genetic resources movement, this book was essential reading for anyone entering the new field of conservation and use of plant genetic resources.

Sir Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett

It emerged from a technical conference held at FAO headquarters in Rome on 18-26 September 1967, and comprised 44 chapters penned by many if not most of the leading lights then in genetic conservation and crop and forestry specialists from around the world. As Sir Otto wrote in the preface, the book attempts to define and develop the principles underlying the various stages of exploration, conservation and utilization. Its usefulness will depend on the degree to which it succeeds in illuminating practical problems, rather than offering prescriptions or instructions.

In the course of my own entry into the world of plant genetic resources, I came to meet and become friends with several of the contributors.

The six sections covered topics in: (1) Biological background (the nature of crop diversity, centers of origin, taxonomy); (2) Tactics of exploration and collection; (3) Examples of exploration (crops and forestry); (4) Evaluation and utilization; (5) Documentation, records and retrieval; and (6) Conservation.

It became something of a ‘bible’ for me, and even today, I dip into its many chapters to refresh some of my ideas. Yes, the world of conservation and use of plant genetic resources has moved on significantly since its publication 50 years ago. Just think of the remarkable advances in molecular biology and genomics that nowadays open up a whole new dimension to our understanding of variation among important crop species and their wild relatives. And the impressive progress in computing for both data analysis as well as data management for crop germplasm collections. Fifty years ago, many things that we consider routine today were then but a pipe dream, if they were even on someone’s intellectual horizon.

I really do believe that anyone contemplating a career in plant genetic conservation as I was, 50 years ago, would benefit from delving into Frankel and Bennett, not only to appreciate how the genetic resources movement started in the 1960s, but also just how we have come in the five decades since.

*These are the papers from the California group of Clausen, Keck and Hiesey:

  • Clausen J, DD Keck & WM Hiesey, 1934. Experimental taxonomy. Yearb. Carneg. Inst. 33, 173-177.
  • Clausen J, DD Keck & WM Hiesey, 1939. The concept of species based on experiment. Amer. J. Bot. 26, 103-106.
  • Clausen J, DD Keck & WM Hiesey, 1940. Experimental studies on the nature of species. I. Effect of varied environments on western North American plants. Publ. Carneg. Instn. No. 520.
  • Clausen J, DD Keck & WM Hiesey, 1945. Experimental studies on the nature of species. II. Plant evolution through amphiploidy and autoploidy, with examples from the Madiinae. Publ. Carneg. Instn. No. 564.
  • Clausen J, DD Keck, & WM Hiesey, 1948. Experimental studies on the nature of species. III. Environmental responses of climatic races of Achillea. Publ. Carneg. Instn. No. 581.
  • Clausen J & WM Hiesey, 1958. Experimental studies on the nature of species. IV. Genetic structure of ecological races. Publ. Carneg. Instn. No. 615.

 

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Three score and ten . . .

18 November 1948. Today is my 70th birthday. Septuagenarian. The Biblical three score and ten (Psalm 90:10)!

Steph and I have come away for the weekend to celebrate my birthday with The Beatles in Liverpool.

We are staying for a couple of nights at Jurys Inn close to the Albert Dock. Later this morning we’ve booked to visit the National Trust-owned Beatles’ Childhood Homes (of John Lennon and Paul McCartney). And after lunch, we will tour The Beatles Story where I’m hoping to see, displayed there, something special from my childhood.

How the years have flown by. Just a month ago, Steph and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary. And I find it hard to believe that I started university over 50 years ago.

That got me thinking. I’ve written quite a lot in this blog about the years after I graduated, my time working overseas, about travel, and what Steph and I have been up to since retiring in 2010.

However, I written much less about my early years growing up in Cheshire and Staffordshire. This is then an appropriate moment to fill some gaps.

A son of Cheshire
I was born in Knowlton House nursing home in Congleton, Cheshire (map), third son and fourth and youngest child of Frederick Harry Jackson (aged 40), a photo process engraver, and Lilian May Jackson, also aged 40, housewife.

Mum and Dad, around 1959/60 after we had moved to Leek

My eldest brother Martin has been able to trace our family’s ancestry (mainly on my father’s side) back to someone named Bull, who was my 13th great-grandfather, born around 1480 on the Staffordshire/ Derbyshire border, just one of my 32,000 plus direct ancestors then. I must be related to royalty in one way or another (as are most of us), although looking at the occupations noted for many of them in various official documents (birth and marriage certificates, census data), we came a long way down the pecking order. Definitely below the salt! We’re Irish on my mother’s side of the family.

A punk before it was fashionable!

I am also a child of the National Health Service (NHS) that was founded in July 1948. In fact, I’m (approximately) the 190,063rd baby born under the NHS!

Knowlton House on Parson Street in Congleton – it’s no longer a nursing home.

I wonder who assisted at my birth? It could well have been our family Dr Galbraith, or Nurses Frost and Botting.

Dr Galbraith (R) was our family doctor, who (with his partner Dr Ritchie) often attended births at Knowlton House, and is seen here with resident midwife Nurse Rose Hannah Frost, who assisted at more than 3000 births. There is a very good chance either Nurse Frost or Nurse May Botting (who ran the nursing home) assisted at my birth. In this photo from 1936, Dr Galbraith and Nurse Frost are holding the Nixon triplets. Photo courtesy of Alan Nixon, who was apparently named after Dr Galbraith.

My dad registered my birth¹ on 22 November (Entry No. 442). There are few ‘Michaels’ in the family; Thomas is my paternal grandfather’s name.

My eldest brother Martin was born in September 1939, just a couple of days before war was declared on Germany. My sister Margaret was born in January 1941. Martin and Margaret spent much of WWII with my paternal grandparents in rural Derbyshire. My elder brother Edgar (‘Ed’) is, like me, one of the baby boomer generation, born in July 1946.

The difference of around 55 years – 1951/52 and 2006

I’ve often wondered what sacrifices Mum and Dad had to make to give us all such a good start in life.

Growing up in Congleton, we lived at 13 Moody Street, close to the town center’s High Street.

There’s not much to tell about my first couple of years, other than what I can surmise from a few photographs taken around that time when I was still in my pram or just beginning to walk. Two things I do remember clearly, though. The hens my father used to keep, and even the large henhouse he constructed at the bottom of the garden. And our female cat, Mitten, and all her kittens. That must have been the start of becoming an ailurophile (cat lover).

My best friend was Alan Brennan, a year younger, who lived a little further up Moody Street at No. 23 (and with whom I reconnected through this blog, after a gap of around 60 years!).

With Alan and his parents (and friends) at Timbersbrook, in 1955. I clearly remember Mr Brennan’s Vauxhall car – a Wyvern I believe.

We didn’t go to the same primary school. Like my brothers and sister before me, I was enrolled (in September 1952 or April 1953, maybe as late as September 1953) at the small Church of England school on Leek Road in Mossley, south of the town. By then, Martin had moved on to grammar school in Macclesfield; Margaret had also transferred to secondary school in Congleton.

Each morning, Ed and I would catch the bus in the High Street together for the short, 1½ mile ride to Mossley. And even as young as five, I would sometimes walk home alone from school during the summer months, along Leek Road and Canal Road/Street. How times change!

I remember the headteacher, Mr Morris, as a kind person. My class teachers were Mrs Bickerton (on the left) and Mrs Johnson (on the right). Courtesy of Liz Campion.

There was a real community of children around Moody Street, Howie Lane/Hill, and Priesty Fields. In summer, we’d all wander up to play on the swing bridge over the Macclesfield Canal (beyond the cemetery – where we would also play in a WWII air raid shelter). The bridge has long been replaced, but from comments on a Congleton Facebook group I belong to, it seems that over the generations, many children enjoyed the swing bridge as much as we did.

In winter, we had fun in the snow at Priesty Fields just round the corner from Moody St. And, as you can see below, we enjoyed dressing up. Happy days!

In the upper image, taken on Coronation Day in 1953, I’m fifth from the right (carrying the stick). Alan Brennan is the little by to the left of the ‘clown’, and in front of the ‘pirate’, my elder brother Ed. The lower image was taken on May Day, probably 1953 or 54. I’m on the left, carrying the sword, uncertain whether to be a knight or a cowboy.

c. 1955. L-R: Veronica George, Carol Brennan, Jessica George, my elder brother Ed, me, Margaret Moulton, and Alan Brennan. Taken in the garden of No 13 Moody St. The George sisters lived at No. 21 Moody St.

I often joined my father when he went out on photographic assignments for the Congleton Chronicle (where he was Chief Photographer), often to Biddulph Grange when it was an orthopedic hospital, also to Astbury, and out into the beautiful Cheshire countryside.

I remember one outing in particular, to Little Moreton Hall in May 1954. This is my father’s photo of Manley Morris Men dancing there, an image that stuck in my mind for many years. So much so that when I went to university in the later 1960s, I helped form a morris dancing side, the Red Stags, that’s still going strong (albeit in a slightly different form) 50 years later.

The Manley Morris Men at Little Moreton Hall on 8 May 1954.

For family holidays I remember those in North Wales, at a caravan park or, on one occasion, a camping coach, a converted railway carriage alongside the mainline to Holyhead next to the beach at Abergele.

During these early years, until July 1954, rationing was still in place that had come into effect at the start of the Second World War. I often wonder how my parents managed to raise four children during these difficult years. One thing I do recall, however, is how we shared things, particularly confectionery. No individual treats. My father would buy a Mars bar (I’m sure they were bigger then) and cut it into six pieces. Funny how these things stick in one’s memory.

The move to Leek
April 1956. A big change in my life. My family upped sticks and moved 12 miles southeast to the market town of Leek in north Staffordshire, where my father took over a retail photography business. As I was only 7½ when we moved, I’ve come to regard Leek as my home town. My parents lived there for the rest of their lives. My father passed away in 1980, and after my mother had a stroke in 1990, only then did she move away from Leek to spend her last couple of years in a care home near my sister in South Wales.

We lived at No. 65, St Edward Street, and within a couple of days of arriving there, I’d made friends with three boys who lived close by: Philip Porter (next door), Geoff Sharratt – whose father was publican at The Quiet Woman pub a few doors away, and David Phillips who lived over the road. Geoff’s younger sister Susan sometimes joined in our games, as did Philip’s sister Jill. We were the ‘St Edward Street Gang’.

Here we are in the late 1950s (probably 1958), in the yard of The Quiet Woman pub. L-R: Sue, Geoff, me, Philip, and Dave. And again in 2018.

Geoff was my best friend, and we spent a lot of time playing together. There were several upstairs rooms at The Quiet Woman, one of which was the Lodge of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes (RAOB, the Buffs, a fraternal organization somewhat similar to the Freemasons). During inclement weather, we often took refuge in the Lodge, playing among the benches and high chairs.

Playing with my Hornby ‘O’ gauge clockwork train at ‘Congleton’ station – it would be a collectors’ item today. Taken around 1958.

I was also a cub scout, as was Ed.

Around 1960, the lease on No. 65 came due, so my father decided to to find a better location for his business. First, he moved across St Edward’s St to No. 56 (while we lived in a flat at the top of the Market Place). In 1962/63 my father acquired No. 19 Market Place as premises for his photographic business, with living accommodation above. This was just what he had been looking for, centrally located in the town, lots of footfall. But the whole property had to be refurbished; there was only one water tap – in the cellar. He did much of the refurbishment himself. I’ve never ceased to be amazed at his DIY talents, something I sadly have not inherited to the same degree. My parents remained at No. 19 until they retired in 1976.

Sandwiched between Jackson the Optician (no relation) on the left, and Victoria Wine on the right, No 19 Market Place was my parents home for 14 years.

Around the same time, Geoff’s parents left The Quiet Woman and moved elsewhere in the town. I was also traveling every day to school to Trent Vale on the south side of Stoke-on-Trent (a round trip of about 28 miles), while Geoff continued his education in Leek. As a consequence, we drifted apart, but through my blog we reconnected in 2012.

Mr Smith

My mother’s family were Irish Catholics, and although we had not been brought up in the faith while in Congleton, both Ed and myself were enrolled in St. Mary’s RC primary school on Cruso Street, a short walk away from home. We were taught by Sisters of Loreto nuns. Headmistress Mother Elizabeth or my class teacher, Mother Bernadine, were never averse to wrapping us across the knuckles with the sharp edge of a ruler. In my final year at St Mary’s (1959-60), we were taught by Mr Smith. But my recollections don’t tally so much with many others who also attended St Mary’s. And I have been horrified at some accounts of how unhappy they were at the school in the 1950s and 60s.

In the late 50s and early 60s, just Ed and I would join our parents for holidays in Wales, most often camping or in our own caravan.

Some of my happiest memories though come from our visits to my grandparents² (my father’s parents) in Hollington, a small Derbyshire village between Ashbourne and Derby. My grandfather was almost 76 when I was born; Grandma was 68.

Family picnic at Hollington, c. 1952, with cousins. Grandma in the center, my mum is on the left. I’m center front ‘guarding’ the bottle.

With Grandad and Grandma Jackson, and our cousin Diana, c. 1959 at Ebenezer Cottage.

Grandma and Grandad celebrated their Golden Wedding in 1954, the occasion of a large gathering of family and friends in Hollington.

Enduring high school
I passed my 11 Plus exam to attend a Roman Catholic grammar school, St Joseph’s College, at Trent Vale on the south side of Stoke-on-Trent. Founded by Irish Christian Brothers in 1932, the school took boys only (but is now co-educational). I had to be on the bus by 07:50 each morning if I was to get to school by 09:00. This was my daily routine for the next seven years.

On reflection, I can’t say that I found the school experience satisfying or that the quality of the education I received was worth writing home about. Yes, there were some good teachers who I looked up to, but much of the teaching was pretty mediocre. I’ve written elsewhere about the gratuitous use of corporal punishment at the school.

Perhaps one of the school’s claims to fame was the priest who attended to our ‘spiritual needs’. He was Father John Tolkien, son JRR Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. My first impressions of Fr Tolkien were not favorable. He came across as cold and authoritarian. When I got to know him later on, however, I found he was a warm person with a good sense of humor. I was saddened to learn that his last years were blighted by accusations of abuse, later dropped.

On to university . . . and faraway places
I was lucky to secure a place in October 1967 at the University of Southampton to study botany and geography, beginning three of the happiest years of my life. I’ve already blogged about various aspects of my time at Southampton, and you can read them here. Little did I think that I would have a career in botany, and that would lead me to fulfill one of my ambitions: to visit Peru.

Even though I graduated in 1970 with only an average BSc degree, that didn’t hold me back. I had ambitions.

I was fortunate to be accepted into graduate school at the University of Birmingham, where I completed MSc and PhD degrees in plant genetic resources, and returned there in 1981 for a decade as Lecturer in Plant Biology.

After my PhD graduation at The University of Birmingham on 12 December 1975 with my PhD supervisor, Prof. Jack Hawkes (L) and Prof. Trevor Williams (R) who supervised my MSc dissertation.

My international career in plant genetic resources conservation and agriculture took me to Peru and Costa Rica from 1973-1981, to work on potatoes for the International Potato Center (CIP). And then in July 1991, I moved to the Philippines to join the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) for the next 19 years as head of the genebank then as Director for Program Planning and Communications.

I had good opportunities to publish my research over the years, in terms of journal articles, books and book chapters, and presentations at scientific conferences.

I retired in April 2010, at the age of 61. But I haven’t rested on my laurels. Scientifically I have:

In the 2012 I was honored to be made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, or OBE, for services to international food science (in the New Year’s Honours).

I set up this blog in February 2012, and have written more than 460 stories for a total of around 470,000 words since then, and posted thousands of images, most of which I have taken myself.

Family
Steph and I were married on 13 October 1973 in Lima, Peru. We’d met at Birmingham during 1971-72, and after I’d moved to Lima in January 1973, she joined me there in July and also worked at CIP.

At La Granja Azul restaurant near Lima (on the left) after our wedding in 1973. And on the right, exactly 45 years later during one of our walks at Croome Court in Worcestershire.

Hannah, our elder daughter was born in Costa Rica in April 1978. Philippa was born in Bromsgrove in May 1982, a year after we had moved back to the UK (in March 1981). When we moved to the Philippines in 1991, they both attended the International School Manila, and then went on to university in the USA (Macalester College in Minnesota) and Durham in the UK, respectively. In 2006 and 2010, they completed their PhD degrees in psychology, respectively at the University of Minnesota and Northumbria University.

PhD graduands! On the left, Hannah is with her classmates in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Emily and Mike, on 12 May 2006. Philippa (on the right) is with one of her PhD supervisors, Prof. David Kennedy of the Brain, Performance and Nutrition Research Centre in the Dept. of Psychology at Northumbria University on 7 December 2010.

In those same years Hannah married Michael, and Phil married Andi. We now have four wonderful grandchildren: Callum (8), Elvis (7), Zoë (6), and Felix (5). The family came together for the first time in a New Forest holiday in July 2016.

On holiday in the New Forest in July 2016. L-R (sitting): Callum, Hannah, Zoë, me, Steph, Elvis, Felix, and Philippa. Standing: Michael and Andi

The 2018-19 school year started for Callum and Zoë in August, and for Elvis and Felix in September. It was also Felix’s first day at school.

In September, Steph and I spent a week in Cornwall exploring many National Trust and English Heritage properties around the county.

Foldes and Fenner family photos in July and September

So, as I look back on the past 70 years, I can’t say I have much to complain about. Steph and I have a beautiful family. An interesting career took me to more than 65 countries (and Steph to some of those). We’ve lived and worked in three countries and made some wonderful friends.

Je ne regrette rien

At 70, though, what does life have in store?

I think Fleetwood Mac (one of my favorite bands) sum it up quite nicely. If it was fine for Bill Clinton, it’s good enough for me.

Retirement is sweet. Who could ask for more?

¹ I no longer have my original birth certificate. That now sits in an archive somewhere in the Miraflores Municipality building in Lima, Peru. When Steph and I married there in October 1973 we had to present our original birth certificates, not realizing these would be filed away in perpetuity and never returned to us.

² I did not really know my mother’s parents, who died before my sixth birthday. They lived in Epsom, Surrey.

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Studying at Southampton, 1967-1970

In October 1967 (when I started my undergraduate studies in [Environmental] Botany and Geography¹), The University of Southampton was a very different institution from what it is today. So many changes over the past 50 years! One of the biggest changes is its size. In 1967 there were around 4500-5000 undergraduates (maybe 5000 undergraduates and postgraduates combined) if my memory serves me well, just on a single campus at Highfield.

Today, Southampton is a thriving university with a total enrollment (in 2015/16) of almost 25,000 (70% undergraduates) spread over seven campuses. Southampton has a healthy research profile, a respectable international standing, and is a founding member of the Russell Group of leading universities in the UK.

In 1967, the university was led by Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Kenneth Mather² FRS (1965-1971), an eminent biometrical geneticist, who came to Southampton from the Department of Genetics at The University of Birmingham, where he had been head of department. Since Mather’s tenure, there have been seven, and the current Vice-Chancellor is Sir Christopher Snowden FRS, an engineer, who took up the reins in 2015.

The Chancellor (1964-1974) was Baron Murray of Newhaven. Five Chancellors have served since he retired from the position in 1974. Businesswoman Dame Helen Alexander, who became Chancellor in 2011, passed away in August this year.

(L) Professor Sir Kenneth Mather and (R) Lord Keith Murray (from Wikipedia)

The campus
Looking at a map of the Highfield campus today, many new buildings have risen since 1967, departments have moved between buildings, and some have relocated to new campuses.

In the 1960s, Southampton had benefited from a period of university expansion and new infrastructure under the then Conservative Government (how times have changed), with Sir Edward Boyle at the helm in the Department for Education or whatever it was named in those days.

Until about 1966 or early 1967, Botany had been housed in a small building immediately north of the Library, which has since disappeared. It was one of the early beneficiaries of the ‘Boyle building expansion’ at Southampton, moving to Building #44, shared with Geology.

After I left Southampton in the summer of 1970, Botany and Zoology merged (maybe also with physiology and biochemistry) to form a new department of Biological Sciences at the Boldrewood Campus along Burgess Road, a short distance west of the Highfield Campus. Biological Sciences relocated to a new Institute for Life Sciences (#85) on the main campus at Highfield a few years back.

Geology now resides within Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton located at the Waterfront campus on Southampton Docks.

The Geography department had been located on the first floor of the Hartley Building (#36, now entirely devoted to the university library). By autumn 1968, Geography moved to a new home in the Arts II Building (#2). For some years now it has occupied the Shackleton Building (#44), the former Botany and Geology home.

Spending more time in Botany
As Combined Honours students, the four of us had feet in two departments, and tutors in each. We took the full Single Honours botany course for the first two years, but in the final year, specialised in plant ecology, with a few optional courses (such as plant speciation, plant breeding, and population genetics in my case) taken from the botany common course that all Single Honours students took. I also sat in our the plant taxonomy lectures given by Reading professor and head of the department of botany there, Vernon Heywood (90 next Christmas Eve), who traveled to Southampton twice a week for five or six weeks. In the early 1990s I crossed paths with him in Rome where we were attending a conference at FAO, and enjoyed an excellent meal together and an evening of reminiscing.

Students complain today that they have few formal contact hours during their degree courses. Not so at Southampton in the late 1960s. But that was also a consequence of taking two subjects with a heavy practical class load, and an ancillary, Geology, for one year, also with a practical class component.

During the first term, Fridays were devoted to practical classes from 9-5 with a break for lunch. In the mornings we spent 10 weeks learning about (or honing existing knowledge) plant anatomy, taught by cytologist Senior Lecturer Dr Roy Lane. Afternoons were devoted to plant morphology, taught by Reader and plant ecologist Dr Joyce Lambert. In the Spring Term in 1968, we started a series of practical classes looking at the flowering plants. Ferns and mosses were studied in the second year.

In the second year, we focused on genetics, plant biochemistry, plant physiology, and mycology, taught by Drs. Joe Smartt, Alan Myers, David Morris, and John Manners. On reflection, the genetics course was pretty basic; most of us had not studied any genetics at school. So practical classes focused on Drosophila fruit fly crossing experiments, and analysing the progeny. Today, students are deeply involved with molecular biology and genomics; they probably learn all about Mendelian genetics at school. During the second year, plant taxonomist Leslie Watson departed for Australia, and this was the reason why Vernon Heywood was asked to cover this discipline later on.

The structure of the Single Honours Botany course changed by my final year. There was a common course covering a wide range of topics, with specialisms taken around the various topics. For us Combined Honours students, we took the plant ecology specialism, and three components from the common course. We also had to complete a dissertation, the work for which was undertaken during the long vacation between the second and third years, and submitted, without fail, on the first day of the Spring Term in January. We could choose a topic in either Botany or Geography. I made a study of moorland vegetation near my home in North Staffordshire, using different sampling methods depending on the height of vegetation.

We made two field courses. The first, in July 1968, focusing on an appreciation of the plant kingdom, took us to the Burren on the west coast of Ireland in Co. Clare. We had a great time.

The last morning, Saturday 27 July 1968, outside the Savoy Hotel in Lisdoonvarna. In the right photo, L-R, back row: Alan Myers, Leslie Watson (staff), Jenny?, Chris ? (on shoulders), Paul Freestone, Gloria Davies, John Grainger, Peter Winfield. Middle row: Janet Beazley and Nick Lawrence (crouching) Alan Mackie, Margaret Barran, Diana Caryl, John Jackson, Stuart Christophers. Sitting: Jill Andison, Patricia Banner, Mary Goddard, Jane Elliman, Chris Kirby (crouching)

Checking out the Cliffs of Moher, and working on individual projects (Paul Freestone, John Grainger, Jane Elliman)

We all had to carry out a short project, in pairs, and I worked with Chris Kirby on the brown algae abundant on the coast near Lisdoonvarna which was our base. At the end of the second year, we spent two weeks in Norfolk, when the Americans first landed on the Moon. Led by Joyce Lambert and John Manners, the course had a strong ecology focus, taking us around the Norfolk Broads, the salt marshes, the Breckland, and fens. We also had small individual projects to carry out. I think mine looked at the distribution of a particular grass species across Wheatfen, home of Norfolk naturalist (and good friend of Joyce Lambert), Ted Ellis.

Professor Stephen H Crowdy was the head of department. He had come to Southampton around 1966 from the ICI Laboratores at Jealott’s Hill. He was an expert on the uptake and translocation of various pesticides and antibiotics in plants. I never heard him lecture, and hardly ever came into contact with him. He was somewhat of a non-entity as far as us students were concerned.

Joyce Lambert in 1964

Joyce Lambert was my tutor in botany, a short and somewhat rotund person, a chain-smoker, known affectionately by everyone as ‘Bloss’ (short for Blossom). Her reputation as a plant ecologist was founded on pioneer research, a stratigraphical analysis of the Norfolk Broads confirming their man-made origin, the result of medieval peat diggings. Later on, with her colleague and head of department until 1965, Professor Bill Williams, Joyce developed multivariate methods to study plant communities. This latter research area was the focus of much of her final year teaching in plant ecology. Joyce passed away in 2005.

Joe Smartt

I became a close friend of Joe Smartt, who retired in 1996 as Reader in Biology, and a highly respected expert on grain legumes. It was Joe who encouraged my interest in the nexus between genetics and ecology, which eventually led to me applying to Birmingham in February 1970 to join the MSc course on Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources – in September that year, the beginnings of my career in genetic resources conservation. Outside academics, Joe and I founded a Morris dancing team at Southampton, The Red Stags, in October 1968, and its ‘descendant’ is still thriving today. Joe passed away in June 2013.

A young Alan Myers in 1964

I also had little contact outside lectures and practical classes with the other staff, such as physiologists Alan Myers and David Morris, or cytologist Roy Lane. In the late 1980s, when I was a lecturer in plant biology at The University of Birmingham, as internal examiner I joined plant pathologist John Manners (the external examiner) to examine a plant pathology PhD dissertation at Birmingham. I hadn’t seen him since I left Southampton in 1970.

Every October he used to organize a fungus foray into the New Forest for a day. I’ve read a couple of accounts from former botany students, before my time, and how enjoyable these outings were. John was elected President of the British Mycological Society in 1968, and was a recipient of the very special President’s Medal of the Society.

October 1969 – John Manners leading a fungus foray, near Denny Wood in the New Forest

Les Watson in 1964

Leslie Watson (who came from my home town of Leek in Staffordshire) taught flowering plant taxonomy, and had an interest in the application of numerical techniques to classify plants. At some point in my second year, he joined the Australian National University in Canberra, completing several important studies on the grass genera of the world. After I had posted something a few years back on my blog, Leslie left a comment. I’ve subsequently found that he retired to Western Australia. I’ve recently been in touch with him again, and he gave me some interesting insights regarding the setting up of the combined degree course in botany and geography.

In October 1968 (the beginning of my second year), John Rodwell joined Joyce Lambert’s research group to start a PhD study of limestone vegetation. He had graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Leeds that summer. In the summer of 1969, John stayed with me in Leek for a few days while making some preliminary forays (with me acting as chauffeur) to the Derbyshire Dales. After completing his PhD, John was ordained an Anglican priest, and was based at the University of Lancaster and becoming the co-ordinator of research leading to the development of the British National Vegetation Classification. He joined the faculty at Lancaster in 1991, and became Professor of Ecology in 1997, retiring in 2004.

Until 1970 there were no re-sit exams at Southampton – unlike the general situation today nationwide in our universities. You either passed your exams first time or were required to withdraw. We lost about half the botany class in 1968, including one of the five Combined Botany and Geography students. Students could even be asked to withdraw at the end of their second year. However, after much uproar among the student body in 1969, the university did eventually permit re-sit exams.

James H Bird, Professor of Geography and head of department, 1967-1989

Geography in the late sixties
The Head of Geography was Professor James Bird, an expert on transport geography (focusing on ports) who joined the department in 1967, replacing renowned physical geographer, FJ Monkhouse. I can’t recall having seen, let alone met him more than a handful of occasions during my three years at Southampton. But from his obituary that I came across recently, he was remembered with affection apparently. He passed away in 1997.

In the Geography department I had contact with just a few staff who taught aspects of physical geography. Dr R John Small lectured on the geomorphology of the Wessex region, and various tropical erosion processes. He was an excellent lecturer. After I left Southampton he authored a student text on geomorphology, published in 1970, with a second edition in 1978. He became first Reader in Geography, then Professor, and head of department (1983-1989). He retired in 1989. I heard from Professor Jane Hart, who was appointed after his retirement, that he still lives in the Southampton area. He must be in his late 80s.

His younger colleague, Michael Clark (later Professor of Geography) also taught several courses in physical geography, focusing on river erosion and weathering processes. He was only 27 in 1967, and had completed his PhD in the department just a couple of years earlier. His work evolved to focus on environmental management, water resources, coastal zone management and cold regions research and on the interactions between society and risk. His involvement in multi-disciplinary applied research and the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to decision-making led to the co-founding of the GeoData Institute in 1984, where he served as Director for 18 years (1988-2010). A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he received the Gill Memorial Award in 1983. He passed away in 2014.

The third geomorphology class had eight students: four from Combined honours, and four single Geography honours. Among those was Geoff Hewlett/Hewitt (?), a rather intense, mature student, who was awarded one of just two Firsts in Geography. Just a week before Finals in May/June 1970, John Small took our group of eight students for a short field trip (maybe four days) to Dartmoor in Devon, to look at tropical weathered granite landscapes (the tors) there. It was also an opportunity, they divulged, to get us all away from intense revision, and to relax while learning something at the same time.

John Small and Geoff (R)

My Geography tutor during my first year was Dr Roger Barry, a climatologist who left Southampton in 1968 for a new position at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is still active at the National Snow and Ice Data Center on the Boulder campus, as CIRES Fellow Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Geography, Emeritus.

Dr Brian P Birch became my tutor in my second and third years (he had interviewed me for a place at Southampton in early 1967 with Joyce Lambert from Botany). Brian taught a course on soils and their classification. But I have subsequently discovered that his interest was in settlement patterns (particularly in the US Midwest, where he had completed his Master’s degree in Indiana; he has undergraduate and PhD degrees from Durham University) and their impact on the environment. I never attended any lectures in this field from him. After contacting Prof Jane Hart at Southampton earlier in the year, she gave me Brian’s address so I wrote to him. In a lengthy reply, he told me about the evolution of the Combined Honours degree course into a fully-fledged Environmental Sciences degree, for which he was the Geography lead person. The course grew to include Geology, Oceanography, and even Chemistry. Brian took early retirement in 1990. It was lovely hearing from him after so many decades; he is now in his 80s. He recalled that on one occasion, I had turned up in the Geography department coffee room, and met with staff. He still knew all about my connections with Peru and potatoes. I wonder if that was in 1975 while I was back in the UK to complete my PhD, or later on in the 80s when I did attend a meeting in Botany/ Biological Sciences on a plant genus, Lathyrus, I was working on.

In my final year, there was a new member of staff, Keith Barber who taught Quaternary studies, and who was still completing his PhD at Lancaster University. Keith later became Professor of Environmental Change, and retired in 2009; he passed away in February this year.

At the end of the first week of classes in October 1967, all geography students had a Saturday excursion to the northwest outskirts of Southampton (I don’t remember the exact route we took), and having been dropped off, we all walked back into the city, with various stops for the likes of Small and Clark, and another lecturer named Robinson, to wax lyrical about the landscape and its evolution and history. This was an introduction to a term long common course about the geography of the Southampton region, examined just before Christmas.

There was only one field course in Geography that I attended, just before Easter in March 1968, to Swansea (where we stayed at the university), and traveled around the region. It was fascinating seeing the effects of industrialization and mining, and pollution over centuries, in the Swansea Valley, and attempts at vegetation regeneration, as well as the physical geography of the Gower Peninsula. The weather was, like the curate’s egg, good in parts. On some days it was hot enough to wear swimsuits on the beach; other days it rained. On the morning of our departure home, there were several inches of snow!

Student life
I had a place in South Stoneham House, an all male hall of residence about 25 minutes walk southeast from the Highfield campus. In the sixties, most of the halls of residence were single sex (some of the time – remember these were the ‘Swinging Sixties’). Across the road from Stoneham was Montefiore House, a self-catering hall mainly for mature students, and just down Wessex Lane was Connaught, another all male hall. Highfield (to the west of the campus) and Chamberlain (to the north) were all female halls; Glen Eyre (close to Chamberlain) was, if I remember, both male and female, and self catering.

Rules about occupancy were supposedly strictly enforced. Being caught was cause for expulsion from hall. However, the number of males in female halls and vice versa overnight on Fridays and Saturdays was probably quite significant.

I enjoyed my two years in Stoneham, being elected Vice-President of the Junior Common Room (JRC) in my second year. Law student Geoff Pickerill was the President of the JCR. One of my roles was to organize the annual social events: a fireworks party and dance in November, and the May Ball.

Several of my closest friends came from my Stoneham days, and Neil Freeman (Law) and I have remained in touch all these years. Neil and I moved into ‘digs’ together (with an English and History student, Trevor Boag, from York) in a house at 30 University Road, less than 100 m south of the university administration building that opened in 1969. Our landlord and landlady were Mr and Mrs Drissell who looked after the three of us as though we were family.

Neil had an old Ford Popular

The university had a very active Students’ Union in the late sixties. A new complex of cafeterias, ballrooms, meeting rooms, and sports facilities had just been completed in 1967. My main interest was folk music and dancing. I joined the Folk Club that met every Sunday evening, and even got up to sing on several occasions. I joined the English and Scottish Folk Dance Society, and as I mentioned earlier, co-founded The Red Stags Morris in Autumn 1968. Through these dancing activities, I attended three Inter-Varsity Folk Dance Festivals in Hull (1968), Strathclyde (1969), and Reading (1970), performing a demonstration dance at each: Scottish at Hull and Strathclyde, and Morris (Beaux of London City) at Reading.

I also was involved in the University Rag Week as part of the Stoneham contributions, although we didn’t take part in this actual 1967 stunt. In my second year, students broke into maximum security prison, Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight, and daubed some Soton Rag propaganda on the perimeter wall. The authorities were not amused.

In my final year, I bumped into a couple of young women in the foyer of the university library. They were from a local teaching college, and were taking part in the city-wide Rag activities. They asked me to buy a raffle ticket – which I did. Then, I suddenly asked one of the girls, who had very long hair, if her name was Jackson. You can imagine her surprise when she confirmed it was. ‘Then’, I said, ‘you are my cousin Caroline’ (the daughter of my father’s younger brother Edgar). I hadn’t seen Caroline for more than a decade, but when I was speaking with her I just knew we were related!

Three years passed so quickly. I graduated on 10 July 1970.

Later in September began graduate studies at The University of Birmingham, and a career in international agricultural research for development. But that’s another story.

I spent some of my happiest years at Southampton, enjoyed the academics and the social life. I grew up, and was able to face the world with confidence. Southampton: an excellent choice.

These are some of my memories. Thinking back over 50 years I may have got some details wrong, but I think the narrative is mostly correct. If anyone reading this would like to update any details, or add information, please do get in touch. Just leave a comment.

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¹ In 1967 I applied to study Botany and Geography. During the Autumn Term of my final year, in 1969, the university changed the degree title to ‘Environmental Botany and Geography’ that perhaps better reflected the course structure of (mainly) ecology on the one hand and physical geography (geomorphology, climatology, biogeography) on the other. This was probably one of the first environmental degrees.

² After he retired, Mather returned to his home in Birmingham, and became an Honorary Professor in the Department of Genetics in the School of Biological Sciences. In 1981 I joined the staff of the Department of Plant Biology (where I’d taken my PhD) in the same School. By about 1988, the four departments of the School (Plant Biology, Zoology & Comparative Physiology, Microbiology, and Genetics) had merged to form a unitary School of Biological Sciences, and I became a member of the Plant Genetics Research Group. I also moved my office and laboratory to the south ground floor of the School building, that was previously the home of Genetics. Prof. Mather had an office just down the corridor from mine, and we would meet for afternoon tea, and often chat about Southampton days. At Southampton he taught a population genetics course to a combined group of Botany and Zoology students. It was an optional course for me that I enjoyed. One day, he was lecturing about the Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium, or some such, and filling the blackboard with algebra. Turning around to emphasise one point, he saw a young woman (from Zoology) seated immediately in front of me. She was about to light a cigarette! Without batting an eyelid, and not missing an algebraic beat, all he said was ‘We don’t smoke in lectures’, and turned back to complete the formula he was deriving. Needless to say the red-faced young lady put her cigarette away.

The late 60s were a period of student turmoil, and Southampton was not immune. Along University Road (which bisects the Highfield Campus), close to the Library, a new Administration building, with the Vice-Chancellor’s office (#37) was completed in late 1969 or early 1970 and, as rumored ahead of the event, was immediately the focus of a student sit-in, and regrettably some significant damage. However, one of Mather’s enduring legacies, however, was the establishment of a Medical School at Southampton.

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In the blink of an eye, it seems, 50 years have passed

The first week of October 1967. 50 years ago, to the day and date. Monday 2 October.

I was setting off from my home in north Staffordshire to the port city of Southampton on the the UK’s south coast (via London for a couple of nights), to begin a three year BSc Combined Honours degree course in [Environmental] Botany and Geography at the university. I was about to become a Freshman or ‘Fresher’. Not only anticipating being away from home for the first time (although I’d always been sort of independent), I was looking forward to the excitement of ‘Freshers’ Week’ to make new friends, discovering new activities to take up.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 4 October, I joined the ‘Freshers’ Special’ from Waterloo Station in London, a train chartered by the Students’ Union, and met several fellow students in the same compartment who remained close friends throughout my time at Southampton. Unlike mainline rail services, our train stopped at the small suburban station at Swaythling, and hordes of Freshers were disgorged on to the platform and into buses to take them to their respective Hall of Residence, several of which were close-by.

I’d accepted a place in South Stoneham House (becoming Vice President of the Junior Common Room in my second year in autumn 1968), comprising a sixteen floor tower (now condemned for habitation as there’s a lot of asbestos) alongside a rather elegant Queen Anne mansion built in 1708.

I later discovered that the grounds had been landscaped by Capability Brown. Quite a revelation considering my interest in these things nowadays associated with my membership of the National Trust. It’s sad to know what has happened to South Stoneham in the last decade or so.

I had a room on the sixth floor, with a view overlooking Woodmill Lane to the west, towards the university, approximately 1.2 miles and 25 minutes away on foot. In the next room to mine, or perhaps two doors away, I met John Grainger who was also signed up for the same course as me. John had grown up in Kenya where his father worked as an entomologist. Now that sounded quite exotic to me.

Over the course of the next couple of days, I met the other students who had enrolled for Combined Honours as well as single honours courses in botany or geography, and others who were taking one of these as a two-year subsidiary or one-year ancillary subject.

We were five Combined Honours students: Stuart Christophers from Devon, Jane Elliman from Stroud in Gloucestershire, another whose name was Michael (I forget his surname; he came from Birmingham), John and me. Failing his exams at the end of the first year in early summer 1968, Michael was asked to withdraw, as were about one third of the botany class, leaving fewer than twenty students to head off to an end-of-year field course in Co. Clare, Ireland.

End of first year field course in Co. Clare, 27 July 1968. Dept of Botany lecturers Alan Myers and Leslie Watson are on the left. Beside them is Jenny ? Back row, L-R: Chris ? (on shoulders), Paul Freestone, Gloria Davies, John Grainger, Peter Winfield. Middle row: Nick Lawrence (crouching), Alan Mackie, Margaret Barran, Diana Caryl, John Jackson (Zoology with Botany subsidiary), Stuart Christophers. Front row: Jill Andison, Janet Beasley, Patricia Banner, Mary Goddard, Jane Elliman, Chris Kirby.

As ‘Combined’ students we had, of course, roots in both departments, and tutors in both as well: Dr Joyce ‘Blossom’ Lambert (an eminent quantitative ecologist) in Botany, and Dr Brian Birch, among others, in Geography. However, because of the course structure, we actually had many more contact hours in botany, and for my part, I felt that this was my ‘home department’.

Three years passed quickly and (mainly) happily. The odd pull at the old heart strings, falling in and out of love. I took up folk dancing, and started a Morris dancing team, The Red Stags, that continues today but outside the university as a mixed male-female side dancing Border Morris.

And so, in late May 1970 (the day after the Late Spring Bank Holiday), we sat (and passed) our final exams (Finals), left Southampton, and basically lost contact with each other.

In developing this blog, I decided to try and track down my ‘Combined’ colleagues John, Stuart, and Jane. Quite quickly I found an email address for Stuart and sent a message, introducing myself. We exchanged several emails, and he told me a little of what he had been up to during the intervening years.

Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find any contact information for John, although I did come across references to a ‘John Grainger’ who had been involved in wildlife conservation in the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The profile seemed right. I knew that John had stayed on at Southampton to complete a PhD in ecology. Beyond that – nothing! Then, out of the blue in late 2015, John contacted me after he’d come across my blog and posts that I had written about Southampton. We’ve been in touch ever since.

To date, I’ve had no luck tracking down Jane.

Why choose Southampton?
Southampton was a small university in the late 1960s, maybe fewer than 5000 undergraduates. There was no medical faculty, and everything was centred on the Highfield campus. I recently asked John why he decided to study at Southampton. Like me, it seems it was almost by chance. We both sat the same A level exams: biology, geography, and English literature, and we both applied for quite a wide range of university courses. He got a place at Southampton through clearing; I had been offered a provisional place (Southampton had been my third or fourth choice), and my exam results were sufficiently good for the university to confirm that offer. I’d been very impressed with the university when I went for an interview in February. Instinctively, I knew that I could settle and be happy at Southampton, and early on had decided I would take up the offer if I met the grade.

John and I are very much in agreement: Southampton was the making of us. We enjoyed three years academics and social life. It gave us space to grow up, develop friendships, and relationships. As John so nicely put it: . . . thank you Southampton University – you launched me.

My story after 1970
After Southampton, I moved to the University of Birmingham in September 1970, completing a MSc in conservation and use of plant genetic resources in 1971, then a PhD under potato expert Professor Jack Hawkes in 1975. Thus began a career lasting more than 40 years, working primarily on potatoes and rice.

By January 1973 I’d moved to Peru to work in international agricultural research for development at the International Potato Center (CIP), remaining in Peru until 1975, and moving to Costa Rica between 1976 and 1981. Although it was not my training, I did some significant work on a bacterial pathogen of potatoes in Costa Rica.

I moved back to the UK in March 1981, and from April I taught at the University of Birmingham in the Dept. of Plant Biology (formerly botany) for ten years.

By 1991, I was becoming restless, and looking for new opportunities. So I upped sticks and moved with my family to the Philippines in July 1991 to join the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), firstly as Head of the Genetic Resources Center until 2001, and thereafter until my retirement in April 2010 as Director for Program Planning and Communications.

In the Philippines, I learned to scuba dive, and made over 360 dives off the south coast of Luzon, one of the most biodiverse marine environments in the country, in Asia even.

Retirement is sweet! Back in the UK since 2010, my wife Steph and I have become avid National Trusters (and seeing much more of the UK than we had for many years); and my blog absorbs probably more time than it should. I’ve organized two major international rice congresses in Vietnam in 2010 and Thailand in 2014 and just completed a one year review of the international genebanks of eleven CGIAR centers.

Steph and me at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland in mid-September 2017

I was made an OBE in the 2012 New Year’s Honours for services to international food science, and attended an investiture at Buckingham Palace in February 2012.

Receiving my gong from HRH The Prince of Wales (L); with Philippa and Steph after the ceremony in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace (R)

Steph and I met at Birmingham when she joined the genetic resources MSc course in 1971. We married in Lima in October 1973 and are the proud parents of two daughters. Hannah (b. 1978 in Costa Rica) is married to Michael, lives in St Paul, Minnesota, and works as a group director for a company designing human capital and training solutions. Philippa (b. 1982), married to Andi, lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and is Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University. Both are PhD psychologists! We are now grandparents to four wonderful children: Callum (7) and Zoë (5) in Minnesota; and Elvis (6) and Felix (4) in Newcastle.

Our first full family get-together in the New Forest in July 2016. Standing: Michael and Andi. Sitting, L-R: Callum, Hannah, Zoë, Mike, Steph, Elvis, Felix, and Philippa

Stuart’s story (in his own words, 2013)
I spent my first year after Southampton teaching English in Sweden and the following year doing a Masters at Liverpool University. From there I joined Nickersons, a Lincolnshire-based plant breeding/seeds business, acquired by Shell and now part of the French Group Limagrain. 

In 1984 I returned to my native Devon to run a wholesale seeds company that fortunately, as the industry rationalised, had an interest in seed-based pet and animal feeds. Just prior to coming home to Devon I was based near York working with a micronutrient specialist. A colleague of mine there was Robin Eastwood¹ who certainly knew of you. Robin tragically was killed in a road accident while doing consultancy work in Nigeria.

This is my third year of retirement. We sold on our business which had become centred around wild bird care seven years ago now and I stayed on with the new owners for four years until it was time to go !

Stuart has a son and daughter (probably about the same as my two daughters) and three grandchildren.

John’s story
John stayed on at Southampton and in 1977 was awarded his PhD for a study that used clustering techniques to structure and analyse grey scale data from scanned aerial photographs to assess their use in large-scale vegetation survey. In 1975 he married his girlfriend from undergraduate days, Teresa. After completing his PhD, John and Teresa moved to Iran, where he took up a British Council funded lecturing post at the University of Tehran’s Higher School of Forestry and Range Management in Gorgan, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea.

Alice, Teresa, and John at the Hejaz railway in Saudi Arabia, c. 1981/82.

By early 1979 they were caught up in the Iranian Revolution, and had to make a hurried escape from the country, landing up eventually in Saudi Arabia in February 1980, where John joined the Institute of Meteorology and Arid Land Studies at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. Between Iran and Saudi Arabia there was an ‘enforced’ period of leisure in the UK, where their daughter Alice was born in December 1979.

John’s work in Jeddah included establishing an herbarium, researching traditional range conservation practices (hima system), and exploring places with intact habitats and interesting biodiversity. This is when his career-long interest in and contributions to wildlife management took hold, and in 1987 he joined a Saudi Commission for wildlife conservation. The work included an ambitious programme of establishing protected areas and breeding endangered native wildlife species for re-introduction – particularly Arabian oryx, gazelles and houbara bustards. The photos below show some of the areas John visited in Saudi Arabia, often with air logistical support from the Saudi military. 

In 1992, he was recruited by IUCN to lead a protected area development project in Ghana where he spent an exhausting but exhilarating 28 months doing management planning surveys of eight protected areas including Mole National Park. Then in 1996, the Zoological Society of London appointed him as  the project manager for a five year, €6 million EU-funded project in South Sinai to establish and develop the Saint Katherine Protectorate. John stayed until 2003, but by then, Teresa and he had separated; Alice had gained a good degree from St Andrew’s University in Scotland.

With a range of other assignments, and taking some time out between in Croatia, South Africa and other places, he was back in Egypt by 2005 to head up a project aimed at enhancing the institutional capacity of the Nature Conservation Sector for planning and implementing nature conservation activities. By 2010, and happily settled with a new partner, Suzanne, John moved to South Africa for several years, returning to Somerset in the past year. Suzanne and John were married in 2014. Retirement brings extra time for pastimes such as sculpting (many stunning pieces can be seen on his website), and some continuing consultancies in the wildlife management sector.

But I can’t conclude this brief account of John’s career without mentioning his thoughts on what being at Southampton meant to him: I have many reasons to be grateful to Southampton University – the degree involved me in the nascent environmental movement and provided me with the general tools and qualifications to participate professionally in the field. It was I think in the years that I was a postgraduate that I learned the true value of being at university and to become intellectually curious.

John sent me a more detailed account of his post-Southampton career that you can read here.

What next?
Fifty fruitful years. Time has flown by. I wonder what others from our cohort got up to? I have some limited information:

  • Allan Mackie went into brewing, and he and I used to meet up regularly in Birmingham when I was a graduate student there.
  • Peter Winfield joined what is now the Department for Agriculture & Fisheries for Scotland at East Craigs in Edinburgh.
  • Diana Caryl married barrister Geoffrey Rowland (now Sir Geoffrey) who she met at Southampton, and moved to Guernsey, where Geoff served as the Bailiff between 2005 and 2012. She has been active with the plant heritage of that island.
  • Mary Goddard completed a PhD at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge (awarded by the University of Cambridge), and married Dr Don MacDonald from the university’s Dept. of Genetics.
  • Zoologist John Jackson (who took the subsidiary botany course for two years) completed a Southampton PhD on deer ecology in the New Forest, and spent many years in Argentina working as a wildlife coordinator for INTA, the national agricultural research institute.

The others? Perhaps someone will read this blog and fill in some details. As to geography, I have no contacts whatsoever.

However, through one of the earliest posts on this blog, Proud to be a botanist, which I wrote in April 2012, I was contacted by taxonomist Les Watson, who was one of the staff who took us on the first year field course to Co. Clare, and by graduate student Bob Mepham, who had taught a catch-up chemistry course to students like John Grainger and me, as we hadn’t studied that at A Level, and which was a requirement to enter the Single Honours course in botany. Another botany graduate, Brian Johnson, two years ahead of me and who sold me some books he no longer needed, also commented on one post about a field course in Norfolk.

I’m ever hopeful that others will make contact.

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¹Robin Eastwood had completed the Birmingham MSc course in the early 1970s when I had already left for Peru. If memory serves me right, Robin did start a PhD, and was around the department when I returned from Lima in Spring 1975 to submit my PhD dissertation.

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I wrote this story, looking back on my degree course, in October 1967. I added this link today, 10 July 2020, exactly 50 years since I graduated from Southampton with my BSc in Environmental Botany and Geography.

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Farewell to a Queen . . .

Halloween. 31 October 1967. Tuesday.

I’d been an undergraduate at the University of Southampton for less than a month, and here I was already skipping classes. But, in my defence, it was for a once-in-a-lifetime event. For that was the day that the iconic ocean liner, RMS Queen Mary, owned and operated by the Cunard Line, made her last voyage from her home port of Southampton, bound (via Cape Horn) to Long Beach, California where she was destined to become a luxury hotel and major tourist attraction. Almost 50 years on, she is still a fixture on the Long Beach skyline.

QueenMary31-10-67

What started as just a whim among a group of friends quickly gained traction. And once we’d persuaded one of our colleagues, Tom Power (a mature student who was studying geology and, more importantly, had his own set of wheels) we had to decide on the best vantage point from which to observe the Queen Mary glide down Southampton Water towards the Isle of Wight and the English Channel. My father’s cousin, Chris Jewett and her husband Norman (and daughters of roughly my age, Anne and Pat) lived in Weston, on the east shore of Southampton Water, and just south of what was then Cunard’s Ocean Terminal in the port. I checked with her and was told that they would have an excellent view from the terrace of their house overlooking Southampton Water. And so, quite early in the morning that’s where about five of us headed, piled into Tom’s Hillman Imp.

And what a magnificent sight the Queen Mary was, surrounded by a flotilla of sailing vessels of all sizes. She was escorted on her way by tug boats, and overhead flew a squadron of helicopters.

PACIFIC_Royal.inddSo what has brought all these memories to the surface. Well, I’m about halfway through a book I was given last Christmas called Pacific: The Ocean of the Future by Simon Winchester. It’s an interesting series of essays about events and people that have shaped the history and influence of this region of the world. The first chapters were concerned with the atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the rise of surfing as a Pacific Ocean phenomenon, the ‘nuisance’ (his words) that is North Korea and, in the chapter that I have just begun, Winchester describes the demise of the Queen Mary’s younger sister ship, the RMS Queen Elizabeth. After the Queen Elizabeth had been decommissioned, it was sold as a possible tourist rival to the Queen Mary (but on the US east coast), but eventually made its final voyage to Hong Kong destined to become the floating  Seawise University. Instead it ended up lying on its starboard side, settling into the mud of Hong Kong harbour in January 1972. In what was clearly a well-planned arson attack, the beautiful Queen Elizabeth was destroyed in a wanton act of violence. It was scrapped two years later but its steel lives on in the many skyscrapers that make up the Hong Kong skyline. The Parker Pen Company made a limited edition pen from the salvaged brass fittings on board. What could not be salvaged, mainly the keel, now lies buried beneath one of Hong Kong’s container ports on land reclaimed from the sea.

queenelizabeth07

RMS Queen Elizabeth on fire in Hong Kong Harbour in January 1972

Seawise_University_wreck

The once magnificent RMS Queen Elizabeth lying on her starboard side and settling into the mud of Hong Kong Harbour

My father, Fred Jackson, was born in 1908 in the Staffordshire brewing town of Burton upon Trent in the English Midlands. It hard to think of anywhere in the country that’s further from the coast than Burton. Yet, he and his younger brother Edgar both had naval careers, and when war broke out in 1939 and they were finally conscripted into the armed forces, they joined the Royal Navy. But in the previous decade my father had sailed the Atlantic almost 100 times as ship’s photographer on ships operated by the Cunard White Star Line. His favourite ship was the RMS Aquitania.

He met my mother on one of these Atlantic crossings, and before they married in 1936 they returned to the UK on board the Aquitania. He did not serve on either the Queen Mary (launched 1934) or the Queen Elizabeth (launched 1938). However, I recall my mother mentioning that she had sailed just the once on the Queen Mary, but I may be mistaken.

Apart from my university days in Southampton, our family has a long ‘Southampton connection’. Dad’s aunt and uncle, Albert and Rebecca Osman (my grandmother’s sister) settled in Southampton, with their son Jim Osman and daughter Chris who I mentioned earlier. Dad’s brother Edgar moved to Lyndhurst in the New Forest, and their elder son Roger joined the merchant marine spending some years as an engineer on the SS Canberra.

Mum, Uncle Albert, Auntie Becky, Ed, and me.
Mum, Albert, Becky, and Dad.

My cousin Roger Jackson and his bride Anne. That’s my bridesmaid cousin Caroline on the left, Roger’s younger sister.

On holidays in the New Forest around 1960, we paid a couple of visits to Southampton Docks, nostalgic visits for my Mum and Dad. In those days you could just wander around on the quayside, enter the Ocean Terminal and get up really close to the ships. Here are a few images of both the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth and other ships in port. The girl with my brother Ed and me is our older second cousin Anne Jewett.

RMS Mauretania.
The RMS Queen Elizabeth heading south down Southampton Water.
That’s the RMS Queen Mary in the distance, and green-hulled RMS Caronia close-by.
The RMS Queen Elizabeth getting ready to sail.
The RMS Queen Elizabeth.
RMS Queen Elizabeth – two funnels.
The distinctive three funnels of RMS Queen Mary.
RMS Queen Elizabeth readying for departure.
RMS Queen Elizabeth at the Ocean Terminal; not sure what the other Curnarder is.
Alongside RMS Queen Mary.
Me, Ed, Anne and my Mum.
RMS Queen Elizabeth just before sailing.

There really was a majesty about these great ocean liners. The RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 (launched 1967, but now enjoying retirement in Dubai) and the RMS Queen Mary 2 (launched 2003) carried on the graceful tradition and lines of their predecessors, and are worthy successors to their 1930s namesakes.

The cruise behemoths that now carry 4-5000 passengers at a time have, in my eyes, a fraction of the grace and glamour of the Queens, notwithstanding that they are wonders of modern maritime engineering and technology.

 

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The Man [on] the Moon (updated 20 July 2019)

FullMoon2010 copyDo you remember where you were on Sunday 20 July 1969? I do.

I was attending an ecology field course in Norfolk having just completed my second year at the University of Southampton (studying botany and geography). I was one of a group of 20 or so botany and combined honours students spending two weeks studying plant ecology under course tutors Drs Joyce Lambert and John Manners.

Joyce Lambert (ecologist) and John Manners (mycologist)

Looking back, I think we had a good time, visiting the Norfolk Broads (the origin of which Joyce Lambert had determined many years earlier), and the Breckland, among other places. The first week was spent on site visits, and during the second, we split into pairs to carry out a series of mini-projects at Wheatfen Broad, home to celebrated Norfolk naturalist and broadcaster, EA ‘Ted’ Ellis.

We stayed at Wymondham College, a boarding school in the village of Wymondham about 15 miles southwest of Norwich. Now a state day and boarding school for pupils (including international students), in the late 1960s it catered more to families from rural Norfolk, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, there we were ensconced in Wymondham College, almost the only occupants as the school was closed for the summer holiday. It was also more than a mile walk to the nearest pub, which we undertook almost every evening once any after dinner studies had been completed.

During the first week, however, Apollo 11 had blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral) in Florida on 16 July on its way to the Moon, for the first landing mission. A momentous occasion, and one we did not want to miss. The problem was that there was no television to watch.

But four days later, very late on the evening of 20 July and in the early hours of 21 July¹, we were all huddled around a TV in the common room, watching rather grainy live pictures from the Moon as Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing module and uttered those forever famous words: That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

We had clubbed together and rented a TV—much to the disapproval of Joyce Lambert and John Manners—from a local company so that we could participate in one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. I don’t think botanical productivity was particularly high at Wheatfen Broad the next morning. We were a group of very sleepy botanists staggering around up to our knees in Norfolk mud as we tried to work out plant succession in the various communities we were tasked to study.

And of course, just a few days ago it was the 46th anniversary of the first Moon landing, bringing back so many other memories as well.

It’s also interesting to see that this important anniversary has brought all the Moon landing deniers out of the woodwork. First Moon landing astronaut Buzz Aldrin and broadcaster Professor Brian Cox (from the University of Manchester) were soon on social media refuting these denials.

Whatever next will the deniers get their teeth into?

¹ And, on the 50th anniversary of the Lunar landing, I realised that one detail at least in the account above was wrong, and which I have now corrected. Originally I had written that we watched Armstrong step on the Moon on 20 July.

Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon at 20:17 UTC on 20 July 1969, a Sunday. In the UK, with British Standard Time in place (UTC +1), that would have then been 21:17. The moonwalk didn’t begin until 02:56:15 UTC (Monday 21 July), when Armstrong uttered those memorable words: That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.

We were sat in front of the TV watching the landing and moonwalk until at least 4 am. No wonder we didn’t approach fieldwork after breakfast with any degree of enthusiasm.

Incidentally, on 16 July past, at about 22:30 (21:30 UTC) there was a partial eclipse of the Moon, that we easily observed in the southeast sky from our bedroom window.

 

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First impressions: two weeks in 1967

It was the first week of October, or thereabouts. 1967. I was headed to Southampton to begin a three-year undergraduate course in botany and geography at the city’s university.

Like all students in the UK, I’d applied for admission to six courses at different universities: King’s College, London (geography); Aberystwyth (zoology and geography); Southampton (botany and geography); York (biology); Queen Mary College (combined sciences); and Newcastle (botany and geography). I don’t really remember my priority list, but I do know that King’s was my first choice and Southampton was my third. I had interviews at King’s, Southampton, Queen Mary, and York; I never heard from the other two before I made my choice. The interview at York was a disaster. I was asked to describe Krebs Cycle, not something with which I was at all au fait. In fact, at a later date – at Birmingham – I came across something that an obviously bored student had written on a bench in one of the lecture rooms in the School of Biological Sciences: ‘I wouldn’t know Krebs Cycle if it ran me over‘. I couldn’t have agreed more!

Because I’d been off school with flu, I wasn’t able to make interviews at several universities on the dates requested around February or so in 1967, so had to try and reschedule these. My dad and I drove to the various campuses, and in fact ended up visiting York, King’s, and Southampton in the same week! The King’s interview went quite well, and I was offered a place. I can’t remember now who interviewed me, only that he was a Professor of Geography and had taught my elder brother Ed (1964-1967, in the Joint School of Geography between the London School of Economics and King’s).

Joyce Lambert in 1964

The day I visited Southampton was a bright sunny day, and even warm for that time of the year. In those days, the Department of Geography was housed in the Hartley Building (which also housed the library and various administrative departments), and I had a 1 hour interview with Dr Joyce Lambert* from the Department of Botany and Dr Brian Birch from Geography. The interview must have gone well because a few weeks later I received a conditional offer in the post. My place at Southampton was guaranteed if I received the necessary exam grades.

I accepted that offer. In fact, almost as soon as I walked through the front door of the Hartley Building I knew I would accept an offer from Southampton. I just had this immediate feeling of well-being. And my instinct didn’t let me down. I had three wonderful undergraduate years there.

In the late 60s, Southampton was still quite a small university, with only about 4500 undergraduates. After all it had received its own charter only in 1952; prior to that its degrees had been awarded by the University of London. Today there are more than 16,000, and the expansion has been phenomenal over the past 45 years since I graduated. A medical school opened not long after I graduated, and the botany department merged with other life sciences and moved to another campus location about a mile away. The Centre for Biological Sciences is now back on the main campus.At the end of my first year, in 1968 or early 1969, the geography department (now geography and environment) moved to a new building (part of that late 60s expansion that benefitted Southampton), but is now housed in the Shackleton Building, actually the old botany building 44 where I studied for three years.

However, to return to that first week in 1967. I may have difficulties these days remembering what I did last week, but my early memories of Southampton are crystal clear.

The tower block of South Stoneham House. I had a room on the west-facing sixth floor (shown here from Woodmill Lane) in my first year, and a south-facing room on the 13th floor in my second year. This block, constructed in the 60s, has been decommissioned because of an asbestos problem.

I was lucky to secure a place in one of the halls of residence, South Stoneham House, and had sent a trunk with clothes and other belongings on ahead of my arrival. The Students Union had organised a special train from London Waterloo to carry new undergraduates – or Freshers – to Southampton, and arrange transport at the other end to everyone’s accommodation. I stopped with my brother Ed for a couple of nights in London. He had just started his first job after graduating from LSE that summer. I bought his bicycle and on the day of my train to Southampton, I hopped on that bike and rode it through the rush hour traffic from his flat in Kilburn across the Thames to Waterloo. I left it at the station and returned to the flat to collect my suitcase. At Waterloo I retrieved my bike from the Left Luggage office, deposited it on the train and then searched for a seat. In those days, railway carriages were generally not open plan as they are today, but had a corridor down one side and compartments with seat for eight passengers. I remained close friends with three of the other seven in that compartment for the rest of my time at Southampton, and have kept in touch with one, Neil Freeman, ever since. We were even assigned rooms on the same floor at South Stoneham House.

Neil studied law, and in fact my close circle of friends was generally outside either botany or geography. Another law student who became a good friend was Malcolm Forster. I did lose contact with him but did come across his name a couple of years ago and briefly made contact then. Recently, however, he came across one of my blog posts and left a comment.

They often say that first impressions last longest. Well, these two in February and October 1967 certainly remained with me. Choosing Southampton over other universities was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Three great years, and good friendships. What more can you ask for?

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* Who received the nickname ‘Blossom’ from several generations of botany students.

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“There isn’t a tree to hang a man, water to drown a man nor soil to bury a man”.

So said – or words to that effect – an army officer named Ludlow during Oliver Cromwell’s campaign of persecution throughout Ireland between 1649 and 1653.

And what was he referring to? The Burren – located in the west of Ireland, in County Clare, and one of the most impressive – and ostensibly bleak – landscapes anywhere. I have visited Ireland three times, and each time I made a beeline for the Burren.¹

The Burren is a landscape of limestone pavement, or karst, one of the largest expanses of such in Europe, covering an area of more than 200 km². The Burren National Park – the smallest in Ireland – covers an area of only 1500 ha. Although ‘devoid of trees, water and soil’, it is nevertheless an incredibly biodiverse environment, with an impressive array of wildlife.

Luxuriant plantlife among the grikes and clints.
Limestone pavement or karst.
Right beside the ocean.
Limestone pavement ‘meadow’.

Dryas octopetala

Botanically, the Burren is fascinating, with Arctic-alpine plants growing alongside those more typical of the Mediterranean, as well as both lime-loving (calcicole) and acid-loving (calcifuge) species. One of the signature species of the Burren is the mountain avens (Dryas octopetala) which is found throughout the Alps and far into the north of Europe. But here on the Burren it grows almost at sea level. There is also an impressive list of orchids that have been recorded here.

The Burren attracts many tourists wishing to have a special ‘botanical experience’ to discover all manner of plants among the grikes and clints of the limestone pavement. And it was in July 1968 that I first visited the Burren, participating in an end of first year undergraduate field course from the University of Southampton. Based in the small town of Lisdoonvarna (famous for its annual matchmaking festival), the course was led by tutors Mr Leslie Watson (a plant taxonomist) and Dr Alan Myers (a plant physiologist/ biochemist). We were a small group of only about 19 students who had survived the end of year exams when several of our colleagues who had failed were required to withdraw from the university. There were no re-sits in those days! The group included four students (including me) studying for a combined degree in botany and geography, and one zoology student who would continue with botany as a subsidiary subject into his second year. The others were all ‘single honours’ students in botany.

Back row (standing), L to R: Chris ? (on shoulders), Paul Freestone, Gloria Davies; John Grainger; Peter Winfield. Middle row, L to R: Alan Mayers, Leslie Watson, Jenny ?, Nick Lawrence (crouching), Alan Mackie, Margaret Barron, Diana Caryl, John Jackson, Stuart Christophers. Front row (sitting): Jill Andison, Janet Beasley, Patricia Banner, Mary Goddard, Jane Elliman, Chris Kirby.

Spending two weeks on the west coast of Ireland could have been a disaster, weather-wise. But how fortunate we were. Almost two weeks of perfect sunny and warm days. Apart from several days exploring the Burren – in clear weather and in fog! – we had day trips to the mountains of Connemara, along the beaches close to Lisdoonvarna (where I did a short project on brown algae), and a ‘free day’ to search for ‘Kerry diamonds‘ – actually quartz crystals – on the Dingle Peninsula, about 100 miles south of Lisdoonvarna.

Close to Lisdoonvarna are the spectacular Cliffs of Moher², rising over more than 120 m from the Atlantic Ocean – next stop North America! Part of our interest was to look for fossils in the shale layers that make up the cliffs.

But all work and no play makes Jack(son) a dull boy. We had plenty of opportunity of letting our hair down. Every day when we returned from the field we were pleased to see a line of pints of Guinness that had already been poured in readiness for our arrival, around 5 pm. In the evening – besides enjoying a few more glasses of Guinness – we enjoyed dancing to a resident fiddler, Joseph Glynn, and a young barmaid who played the tin whistle. Since I had spent the previous year learning folk dancing, I organized several impromptu ceilidhs.

Joseph Glynn of Limerick, July 1968

Joseph Glynn of Limerick, July 1968

All too soon, our two weeks were over, and we headed back to Dublin via Limerick to catch the boat train from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead and on to our homes from there. We arrived in Holyhead in the early morning, and I had to travel to Stoke-on-Trent where my parents would pick me up. Leslie Watson also came from Leek, and we were headed in the same direction together as he was taking the opportunity of visiting his parents there. I remember that we cheered ourselves up around 6 am or so on Crewe station, taking a wee dram from a ‘smuggled’ bottle of raw poteen, a traditional spirit distilled from potatoes or grain, whose production was outlawed and remained illegal until the 1990s.

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¹ Landscapes photos of the Burren used from Wikipedia under its Creative Commons licences – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burren, where all attributions are filed.
² Photos of the Cliffs of Moher used from Wikipedia under the respective Creative Commons licences – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffs_of_Moher, where all attributions are filed.

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Dr Joe Smartt

Dr Joe SmarttJoe Smartt, an old and dear friend, passed away peacefully in his sleep on Friday 7 June, in Southampton, UK, just three months shy of his 82nd birthday. He had been in poor health for several years, and towards the end of 2012 he’d moved into a care home. I last visited Joe in July 2012, and although he was essentially bed-ridden by then, we sat and reminisced over old times while drinking many mugs of tea (a ‘Joe favorite’!).

Groundnuts and beans
A geneticist by training, Joe obtained his BSc from Durham University, took a diploma in tropical agriculture from Cambridge University, and spent time in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) working on groundnuts. He completed his PhD in the Department of Genetics at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 1965, submitting a thesis Cross-compatibility relationships between the cultivated peanut Arachis hypogaea L. and other species of the genus Arachis.

In 1967 he was appointed to a Lectureship in the Department of Botany at the University of Southampton, and remained there until his retirement in 1996, having been appointed Reader in Biology in 1990, and awarded the DSc degree by the university in 1989 for his significant work on grain legumes – the area of scientific endeavour for which he will perhaps be best remembered. He authored two books on grain legumes, edited a major volume on groundnuts, and was invited to co-edit a second edition of the important Evolution of Crop Plants with the late Professor Norman Simmonds. In the late 60s he worked on cross compatibility relationships of Phaseolus beans, and also published a series of strategically important synthesis articles on grain legumes, which did much to re-energize interest in their development and improvement.

In the latter part of his career Joe turned his attention to the genetics and breeding of goldfish, co-editing one book and authoring another two which became essential texts for goldfish enthusiasts.

L to r: Russell Meredith, Mike Jackson, Steve Jordan, and Joe

Sticks, bells and hankies
I first met Joe in 1968, which might seem strange as I began my undergraduate studies at Southampton in 1967 in the Departments of Botany and Geography. Joe taught a second year class on genetics, so it wasn’t until the autumn term in October 1968 that I was faced with ‘Smartt genetics’. But by then I had made myself known to him, as I have described in another post on this blog. Joe and I were the co-founders of the first Morris side at the university in autumn 1968 – the Red Stags, and our common interest in traditional music (particularly bagpipe music – see this post) was the basis of a friendship that lasted more than 45 years. Many’s the time Joe and I sat down with a beer or a wee dram to enjoy many of the LPs from his extensive music library.

A friend indeed
But Joe was more than a friend – he was a mentor whose opinions and advice I sought on several occasions. In fact, it was a suggestion from him in February 1970 that I apply to the University of Birmingham for a new MSc course under the direction of Professor Jack Hawkes that got me into genetic resources conservation and use in the first place, and the start of a successful career in international agricultural research lasting more than 40 years.

Physically, Joe was a big man – but a gentle person and personality. I’ve seen him slightly cross, but I never saw him angry. It seemed to me that he had the most equitable of temperaments. He married Pam in 1970, and they had two daughters, Helena and Fran (about the same ages as my two daughters), and both have been very successful academically. Joe often told me of his pride in what they had achieved. I know that was a source of great comfort to him in his latter years as his health declined.

While I feel sadness at his passing, I can also celebrate the many scientific contributions he made, and his true friendship over so many decades. He will be missed by many colleagues in legume and goldfish circles, but particularly by his family and friends. Friends like Joe come along very few times in one’s lifetime. It’s been my luck – and privilege – to be among his.

I wrote this obituary in 2013:

Jackson, MT (2013). Dr. Joseph Smartt (1931–2013). Genet Resour Crop Evol 60, 1921–1922 (doi:10.1007/s10722-013-0044-7

Click here to read the Order of Service for Joe’s funeral on 21 June 2013 in Southampton. Several homilies were delivered during the service by Joe’s brother and his daughters Helen and Fran. You can read them here.

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Proud to be a botanist

Botanist. That’s right. Not plant scientist or plant biologist. Botanist!

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the term ‘botany’ to ‘plant sciences’ or ‘plant biology’ that are now preferentially used to give the study of plants a more ‘modern’ image.

And I’m proud that I received my university education in botany: BSc at Southampton (combined with geography, 1970), and MSc (in genetic resources, 1971) and PhD (botany – biosystematics of potatoes, 1975) at Birmingham. By the time I returned to teach at the University of Birmingham in 1981, the Department of Botany had already become the Department of Plant Biology, a decision made in the late 1970s in the hope of attracting more undergraduates to study plant courses offered as part of the biological sciences degree.

Botany has had a bit of a bad press, I guess. And there has been a significant decline in teaching plant sciences at university level in the UK.

For one thing there’s an image issue. It’s often seen as old-fashioned, the purview of enthusiastic Victorian amateurs like country parsons collecting and studying wild flowers, and perhaps not relevant for today’s society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Given that food security is dependent upon the productivity of agricultural systems – all life depends on plants in one way or another – the study of plants is essential for humanity’s survival.

In an interesting article [1], Grierson et al. (2011) ask what are the 100 most important questions for plant science research. They also propose that “We need to radically change our culture so that ‘plant scientist’ (or, if we can rehabilitate the term, ‘botanist’) can join ‘doctor’, ‘vet’ and ‘lawyer’ in the list of top professions to which our most capable young people aspire.”

I’ve had a successful career over 40 years based on botany, one way or the other. So why did I become a botanist in the first place? In high school, I didn’t study biology until I began my GCE Advanced Level courses in 1965. Biology was not taught at my school in earlier years, and only accepted a handful of students for the advanced course. I’d always had an interest in natural history, particularly bird watching, and had harbored ideas at one time of becoming a professional ornithologist. But over the two years of the biology ‘A level’, I came to realize there was likely to be a more secure future in plants, and even the possibility of getting into agriculture in some way, better still if that would take me overseas.

Southampton University was not my first choice, but once I’d attended an interview there, I knew that was where I wanted to study. As a botany-geography undergraduate, I knew that there would be a focus on plant ecology, even though we took the full honours course for two years, and selected modules in the final year. My tutor was Dr Joyce Lambert, Reader in Ecology, who had studied the origin of the Norfolk Broads in the east of England, and shown that they were actually man-made, the result of medieval peat diggings that became flooded. Just before I went to Southampton (and for the rest of her career at Southampton – she retired in 1979) she began working on multivariate methods to study plant communities (with former head of department Bill Williams, who had left Southampton in 1966 to join CSIRO in Australia). I even completed my dissertation on an assessment of vegetation sampling techniques based on quadrat size related to the height of the vegetation (not really a success). I made this study in the Back Forest area of the Roaches in the Staffordshire Moorlands. I measured quadrats along a 200 m transect from open heath to larch-oak woodland dropping steeply to the Black Brook and River Dane. I used a tape recorder with a thumb switch microphone to record the presence and absence of species in each quadrat, using a checklist of species.

As a final year student, however, my interests had already begun to turn from ecology. I took courses on plant speciation and plant breeding with geneticist Dr Joe Smartt, and a special course in flowering plant taxonomy offered by Professor Vernon Heywood of Reading University. Southampton’s own taxonomist, Leslie Watson had emigrated to Australia in 1969, and it was felt that a botany degree without any taxonomy component was not complete. Heywood travelled down from Reading once a week for 10 weeks, giving two lectures each time. This was not one of my specific elective courses for examination, but I decided to sit in and listen – and I was hooked. Linking what I heard in Heywood’s lectures with the plant speciation and plant breeding courses, and ecology was the foundation for my career-long study of plant variation, and entry into the world of plant genetic resources.

But there was one research endeavor that really fired my imagine (and others) – and it’s as good today as when it was originally published in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. In a ground-breaking series of experiments, geneticist/ecologist Jens Clausen, taxonomist David Keck, and plant physiologist William Hiesey, from the Carnegie Institute of Washington located on the campus of Stanford University, studied the adaptation of plants to their environments, the variation in plant populations, and the genetical and physiological basis of the variation they observed.

Establishing a series of experimental stations across California, they undertook transplant experiments in a range of species such as Achillea and Potentilla, to understand the nature of variation and species, and published in a series of monographs Experimental Studies on the Nature of Species.

Similar work had been carried out in Scandinavia by Turesson and in Scotland by Gregor, but the Californian group was, in my estimation, pre-eminent. Thus was the concept of the ecotype established. And the methods of experimental taxonomy and genecology which they developed are used to study the nature of variation in the genetic resources of crop plants conserved in genebanks around the world – and certainly the approach I took with my own work on lentils and grasspea (Lathryus sativus), potatoes, and rice.

Another influence was Missouri Botanical Garden geneticist Edgar Anderson. If you’ve not read his highly entertaining and readable Plants, Man & Life, then grab yourself a copy.

But the most influential concept he developed was introgressive hybridization, the merging of plant species populations through crossing and backcrossing – a phenomenon we believe to have played a major role in the evolution of many crop plants.

Joe Smartt encouraged me to follow a career in plant genetic resources. In fact he was the one who suggested I should apply for a place on the Birmingham MSc course on Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources, founded by Jack Hawkes in 1969. Joe had studied the cytogenetics of groundnut (= peanut, Arachis spp.) under Walter C Gregory at North Carolina State University, and joined the Department of Botany at Southampton in 1967. He had also spent time in Northern Rhodesia (= Zambia) working on groundnuts in the 1950s.

And the rest is history, as they say, and I spent the rest of my career studying genetic resources and agriculture in many different countries (Peru, Costa Rica, Canary Islands, Philippines and other countries in Asia).

Some of my own interests have included the species relationships of triploid potatoes, and we have looked at the compatibility relationships between wild and cultivated forms.

These photos show the growth of pollen tubes in compatible (left) and incompatible (right) crosses between wild potato species.

In potatoes and rice we made tens of thousands of crosses to understand the biological relationships between different species.

It’s important to make many crosses when the chances of success are quite low. And we have looked at the morphological and biochemical variation in different plant populations – the ability to study species relationships at the molecular level is throwing a whole new perspective on plant speciation; applications of GIS permit easier mapping of diversity.

One of the concepts that has guided much of my work with genetic resources is the genepool concept developed by Illinois geneticists Harlan and de Wet in 1971 [2]. This allows one to assess the relationship between crops and their wild relatives based on crossability, and the accessibility of different genetic resources that can be used in crop improvement.

I’ve been very fortunate in my career choices – all because of my decision to become a botanist. Who says that botany is an old-fashioned science? Just look through the 100 science challenges I referred to earlier on and you will see just how and why it’s ever more important that we invest in the study of plants.

[1] C. S. Grierson, S. R. Barnes, M. W. Chase, M. Clarke, D. Grierson, K. J. Edwards, G. J. Jellis, J. D. Jones, S. Knapp, G. Oldroyd, G. Poppy, P. Temple, R. Williams, and R. Bastow, 2011. One hundred important questions facing plant science research. New Phytologist 192 (1): 6-12.

[2] J.R. Harlan and J.M.J. de Wet, 1971. Toward a rational classification of cultivated plants. Taxon 20: 509-517.

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Standing on Vavilov’s shoulders . . .

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943). Not a name familiar to many people. Vavilov is, however, one of my scientific heroes.

Until I began graduate school in September 1970, when I joined the MSc course at the University of Birmingham on Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources, I’d never even heard of him. In fact, looking back, I’m rather surprised that his name didn’t crop up once during my undergraduate years. I’d been encouraged to apply for a place on the Birmingham course by a lecturer in genetics at Southampton University, Dr Joe Smartt. But Vavilov and his work was not on the curriculum of botany courses that I took.

In preparation for Birmingham, I’d been advised to purchase and absorb a book that was published earlier that year, edited by Sir Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett [1] on genetic resources, and dedicated to NI Vavilov. And I came across Vavilov’s name for the first time in the first line of the Preface written by Frankel, and in the first chapter on Genetic resources by Frankel and Bennett. I should state that this was at the beginning of the genetic resources movement, a term coined by Frankel and Bennett at the end of the 60s when they had mobilized efforts to collect and conserve the wealth of diversity of crop varieties (and their wild relatives) – often referred to as landraces – grown all around the world, but were in danger of being lost as newly-bred varieties were adopted by farmers. The so-called Green Revolution had begun to accelerate the replacement of the landrace varieties, particularly among cereals like wheat and rice.

Thus began my fascination with Vavilov’s work, and a career in genetic resources in a broad sense that was to last 40 years until my retirement in 2010.

Vavilov was a botanist, geneticist and plant breeder who rose to the top of agricultural research in the Soviet Union who, through his many expeditions around the world (described in the book Five Continents [2], published posthumously in English in 1997) assembled a vast array of diversity in many crop species. Vavilov developed two seminal theories of crop evolution, which have influenced the science of genetic resources ever since.

The first was his Centers of Diversity and Origin, in which he stated that “the place of origin of a species of a cultivated plant is to be found in the area which contains the largest number of genetic varieties of this plant.” While we now appreciate that this was an oversimplification, his ideas about the origin of crop diversity have been the foundation for much of the genetic resources exploration carried out in subsequent decades.

The second was his Law of Homologous Series in the Case of Variation, published in Russian in 1920 and in English in 1922. I applied this concept in my search for pest resistance in wild potatoes, which I presented at a Symposium organized by the Linnean Society of London and the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London in 1987 to celebrate the centenary of Vavilov’s birth [3].

Vavilov died of starvation in prison at the relatively young age of 55, following persecution under Stalin through the shenanigans of the charlatan Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko’s legacy also included the rejection of Mendelian genetics in the Soviet Union for many years. Eventually Vavilov was rehabilitated, long after his death, and he was commemorated on postage stamps at the time of his centennial.

Although never having the privilege of knowing Vavilov, I do feel that I met him vicariously through three people I have known, who did meet him, and I worked with two of these for many years.

First, Sir Otto Frankel FRS, who I first met at a genetic resources meeting in Jakarta in the mid-80s, was an eminent wheat breeder and geneticist, and one of the founders of the genetic resources movement. Originally from Austria, he had escaped before the Nazis came to power, and moved to New Zealand and Australia afterwards. Frankel visited Vavilov in Leningrad (now St Petersburg again) in 1935.

Jack Hawkes, Mason Professor of Botany at the University of Birmingham and my PhD supervisor, travelled to Leningrad in 1938 to consult with Vavilov’s colleague, SM Bukasov, about the potatoes he had collected in South America. He wrote about his meeting with Vavilov, which he presented at the Vavilov Symposium referred to above [4].

John S Niederhauser was an eminent plant pathologist who spent many years researching the potato late blight fungus in Mexico. He was awarded the World Food Prize in 1990. I worked for several years with John in the 1970s when I was regional leader for the International Potato Center in Costa Rica, and we were developing and implementing what turned out to be the first consortium, PRECODEPA (Cooperative Regional Potato Program – in four Central American countries, Mexico and the Dominican Republic), of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). As a young man of about 17, so John told me, he’d asked a travel agent how far he would be able to travel (return) from San Francisco with the money he had available: Leningrad was the destination. Walking around a research garden there one day, he was approached by a kindly gentleman – Vavilov as it turned out – who offered him the chance to work for a few weeks harvesting germplasm evaluation trials on one of his institute’s research stations in the Soviet southeast.

What all three emphasised – in their writings or related to me personally – was Vavilov’s friendliness, generosity of spirit, his boundless energy, and above all, his humanity, and that he treated everyone as an equal, even young persons as Hawkes and Niederhauser were when they met him.

Vavilov’s legacy endures. He is recognized as one of the giants of 20th century biology. And he has been an inspiration for countless students of genetic resources conservation and use.

[1] Frankel, OH & E Bennett (eds), 1970. Genetic Resources in Plants – their Exploration and Conservation. IBP Handbook No 11. International Biological Programme, London and Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford and Edinburgh. pp. 554. SBN 632 05730 0.

[2] Vavilov, NI, 1997. Five Continents. International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Rome, Italy. pp. 198. ISBN 92-9043-302-7.

[3] Jackson, MT, 1990. Vavilov’s Law of Homologous Series – is it relevant to potatoes? Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 39, 17-25.

[4] Hawkes, JG, 1990. NI Vavilov – the man and his work. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 39, 3-6.

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Sticks and hankies – a tale of Red Stags

I took up Morris dancing while a student at the University of Southampton. This is how it all started and how the Red Stags came into existence.

I came up to Southampton in October 1967 to read environmental botany and geography. I had a place in South Stoneham House (SSH) hall of residence in Wessex Lane (now closed down – riddled with asbestos and no longer safe for human habitation) for my first two years at Southampton. Botany and SSH have a lot to do with the founding of the Red Stags.

I’d always had an interest in folk music (especially Irish music) but had never taken part in any folk dancing whatsoever before arriving in Southampton. Well, during Freshers’ Week (the introductory week for freshman) in 1967, I attended an event known as the Bun Fight where all the Student Union societies tried to sign up as many new members as possible. Well, I happened to sort of dawdle in front of the stall of the English and Scottish Folk Dance Society (ESFDS), and before I knew it, I’d been signed up to join. And so the following Monday I went along to the Union and started to learn to dance English and Scottish dances – nothing about Morris at this time.

At the end of the first year, all botany students had to attend a field course in the summer vacation, held at Lisdoonvarna on the west coast of Ireland in County Clare – lots of Guinness and good music and dancing. I guess we must have done some work as well since the area of the Burren close to Lisdoonvarna is a limestone of outstanding natural beauty and botanical interest. While on that course, one of my fellow students, Gloria Davies mentioned that Dr. Joe Smartt, a geneticist, was involved in folk music, and apparently had danced with the Winchester Morris Men (WMM). Joe didn’t teach first year students, so I had not met him – in fact, I didn’t really know who he was.

At the beginning of the second year, in October 1968, the Botany Dept. held a welcome party for incoming freshman. After a few glasses of beer, maybe wine, I decided to introduce myself to Joe. I told him that I’d heard he was a Morris dancer. He told me about the WMM, and that he’d also danced with the Westminster Morris Men. On the basis of what he told me, I asked him that if I could find five others who were interested, would he teach the Morris to us. And, lo and behold, within two weeks, the Red Stags Morris Men was founded, and registered as a society in the Students’ Union.

In October 1968 I was Vice President of the SSH Junior Common Room, and managed to persuade a number of friends there to join the Red Stags – Neil Freeman (Law), Simon Newman (Maths), Chris Lovegrove (Music), Derek Gorham (English freshman), and Clive James (Accountancy). Joe had a collection of 78 rpm recording of William Kimber (Headington) playing Morris tunes, and we used to meet once a week in the seminar room on the first floor of the Botany Dept. (now the Shackleton Building where Geography is housed). Joe would bring a portable record player and the records; we cut short and long sticks for the stick dances, and settled on learning the Cotswold Morris traditions from the villages of Headington, Adderbury, and Bampton.

We were also joined by some friends not in SSH – Colin Anderson (Accountancy), Rob Williams (Electronic Engineering), and Steve Jordan (Maths). We were also joined from time-to-time by Russell Meredith (Maths), a year ahead of us in SSH, who was primarily with the WMM. Colin was a member of the ESFDS, and that’s where I had met him – I think he also danced with the WMM. Others joined the Red Stags after its foundation, but sadly, I can’t remember all the names.

It took a little time to decide on a name for the side, finally settling for Red Stags, as that was the university’s crest in those days. Colin’s girlfriend Veronica worked somewhere in the university’s admin, and she kindly knocked up the tabards we designed, in the university colors of gold on the front and black on the back, with the silhouette of a red stag’s head on both sides. Our choice of tabards and black hats was made to set us apart, to some extent, from the WMM. The Westminster Morris Men also wear black hats, and I guess it was Joe Smartt’s association with them that set us on that course. We had to search out a supply of straw hats in Southampton – not the easiest thing to do in mid-winter. We finally found a supply in Dunn & Co in the High Street – we caused some amusement asking for about 10 hats, different sizes. Then we had to spray them black.

Our practices continued through the autumn term of 1968, and we made our first public performance in February 1969. I was also a regular member of the folk club that met in the Students’ Union on Sunday evenings. I persuaded the club to let me organize a ceilidh at which the Red Stags would make their first performance. But we needed a musician! Joe did take up the pipe and tabor later on, but in early 1969 (and on many other occasions) we were supported by Dudley Savage, a fiddle player of considerable skill whose playing could really lift the dancers. He played also for the WMM and as lead in a local folk band. The star turn were the Red Stags – making their debut, processing on, and dancing maybe four or five Headington and Adderbury dances. Needless to say, we were very nervous, but the reception was great. And I think we went from strength to strength.

We joined up with the WMM during the summer term on their tours throughout Hampshire and especially in the New Forest. We also joined with them in West Sussex to meet up with the Martlet Sword and Morris Men from Chichester. I certainly had some great times out with the Red Stags and the WMM.

From the outset, the Red Stags were supported by the Winchester Morris Men, particularly Dr Lionel Bacon who had founded the side in 1953, had been Squire of the Morris Ring 1962-64. Here are a few photos of Lionel playing his fiddle and dancing.

Click here for a more detailed account of how the Red Stags were founded, that I wrote in 2005.

L to r: Russell Meredith, me, Steve Jordan, Joe Smartt

I think the Red Stags were in demand, and we did quite a few shows, at University Open Days, in the city and around. The local TV used a film of us dancing Above Bar street in Southampton for the closing credits of a weekly news program, and this was shown for well over a year.

Today the Red Stags is a border Morris side, with both men and women dancing together, and is a member of the Morris Federation. The Red Stags will celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2018.

In September 1969, Joe Smartt, Russell Meredith and myself (as Red Stags) joined a group of dancers and pipers from Newcastle, including Colin Ross – of The High Level Ranters fame – and his wife Ray Fisher (a well-known Scottish folk singer, who sadly died last year), to participate in a bagpipe festival in Strakonice, Czechoslovakia.

We danced our way across Holland, Germany and into Czechoslovakia. Our stay in Strakonice was sponsored by the local brewery! Highlights included a fabulous Breton pipe band from Brest and a dance group from Concarneau. We danced Morris and Rapper that the group had taught me very quickly in Newcastle before leaving*. A baptism of fire. Although I didn’t get the stepping entirely correct, it was more important to get the movements, patterns right. We went round workingmen’s clubs in the Newcastle area on the Saturday night – and those men know their rapper! Our stay in Strakonice was sponsored by the local brewery!

The Red Stags were represented at only one meeting of the Morris Ring, in Bristol 1970. We were unable to field a full side unfortunately, but had a good time nevertheless. Joe was not with us – being otherwise engaged, getting married in Southampton!

Well, 42 years later, what are we all up to? Joe Smartt retired from the University a few years ago, and living still in Southampton, although not in good health. Neil Freeman is semi-retired, a solicitor and senior partner in a practice in Aylesbury. He still dances with Albury Morris Men in Hertfordshire. Chris Lovegrove is a music teacher as far as I know in Bristol. Si Newman is still around in the Southampton area. I believe that Steve Jordan dances sometimes with the WMM, as does Derek Gorham occasionally. I just heard from Derek who found this post! I don’t know about the others. As for me, my Morris days are long past. I danced in Birmingham with the Green Man’s Morris & Sword Club in Birmingham from 1970 until I headed off to Peru in January 1973, and for a while in 1975 when I was back writing my PhD thesis.

GMM&SC logo
Dancing ‘Sheriff’s Ride’ from the Lichfield tradition
Dancing ‘Vandals of Hammerwich’ from the Lichfield tradition

I danced with them in the 1980s and became Squire 1982-1983. I gave up from the mid-1980s because I developed arthritis in my hips, and was advised that such energetic exercise was not good. Two members of Green Man I danced alongside became Squire of the Morris Ring (John Venables and Ray King), as did Geoff Jerram of the Winchester Morris Men.

This photo was taken at the annual feast where I ‘danced in’ as Squire. The group photo was taken in Lichfield in about 1982, when the side was presented with a recognition of the many years that it had led the Lichfield Bower Procession.

* Just last night (3 May 2012) I was looking for some information about Strakonice and came across a link about a rapper team that had been formed in 1969 to attend a bagpipe festival in Czechoslovakia. It seems that the Sallyport Sword Dancers continued from a nucleus of the group that went to Strakonice – and they are still active and successful!

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‘Thank you, Margaret Thatcher’ – my Pioneer Interview with Gene Hettel

The head of IRRI’s Communication and Publications Services (CPS), Gene Hettel, is compiling a set of Pioneer Interviews with IRRI staff, past and present. These have been published in IRRI’s in house magazine for the past decade, Rice Today. In addition he usually also makes a video.

In mid-February 2010, just over two months before I retired from the institute, Gene and I found a time for my Pioneer Interview. If you want to know about many of the things I did at IRRI, and elsewhere – and some of my opinions about international agricultural research and how it’s organized, just watch the videos.