AFTERWORD

If I felt any regret during the writing of The Man Who Ate the Zoo, it was that I was unable to flesh out the character of Hannah Buckland. She emerges from her husband’s story as a supportive, perhaps even long-suffering wife who, by the standards of the time, was well treated by the father of her illegitimate son. Frank’s marriage to her after the premature death of ‘poor little Physie’ is a testament at least to Frank’s sense of responsibility – by no means the norm among Victorian men who impregnated socially inferior girls – though there is little suggestion of romantic love. ‘My Dear Wife’ and ‘Your affectionate husband’ are fairly low down on the spectrum of passion. In return for his affection, Hannah seems to have been a more than usually supportive wife unfazed by Frank’s erosion of the boundary between ‘home’ and ‘menagerie’, or ‘order’ and ‘chaos’.

I had not known when I wrote the book that Hannah had a sister, Emma, whose life ran on a similar track to Hannah’s own. According to her great-granddaughter Mary Pritchard, who has kindly written to me about her, she too “married well”. Given the family connections, it was perhaps no great surprise that she should marry another contributor to Land & Water, Charles Bayly, and that she should live near her sister in Albany Street. It is to Emma that we owe the survival of what, to modern eyes, is an extraordinary letter from Frank to his wife, written on the headed notepaper of the Salmon Fisheries Office, 4 Old Palace Yard, Westminster, SW. It is addressed to Mrs F Buckland, 37 Albany St, Regent’s Park, dated 2 March 1872, and marked ‘Private’.

It is impossible to know what was the likelihood of Hannah feeling any ‘wish to leave’ her husband, but it is hard to believe that this was the kind of dispensation commonly extended to Victorian wives. Questions abound. Frank did nothing without a reason. Perhaps he did not want her to feel, and did not want to feel himself, that she was bound to him by money alone – a somewhat backhanded declaration of love. Perhaps he wanted her to leave. One might wonder why no more children were born after the loss of Physie. Or perhaps there was something else on his mind altogether. Whatever it was, there is no evidence that Hannah ever took advantage of the offer. Neither is it clear why Frank feared the will might be challenged. By whom? There were no dependent relatives, and no evidence of creditors. Perhaps the subsequent embezzlement of part of the sum he had left in trust to the Director and Assistant Director of the South Kensington Museum indicates a possible target for his suspicions. We will never know.

I thank Mary Pritchard also for her revelation that the family’s ‘animal eccentricity’ did not die with Frank in Albany Street. In a distinct echo of Christ Church pond, Mary’s own father and his twin sister kept the tradition going with pet alligators. I am grateful also to Frank’s great-nephew, the children’s author Roderick Gordon (great-grandson of William Buckland’s daughter/biographer Elizabeth Oke Gordon and, as it turns out, a near neighbour of mine in Norfolk) for revealing the existence of his own collection of papers and memorabilia from his great-great-grandfather William Buckland, Frank’s father. Here again, family traditions clung on. From a very early age, Roderick was taken by his father on Buckland-style fossil forages along the south coast, and regaled with stories of Frank’s singular tastes in meat and fish. Influences from William and Frank’s lives duly found their way into the Tunnel series of books for young adults which Roderick co-wrote with Brian Williams. What better name could there have been for a subterranean slave-race than William Buckland’s gift to the scientific lexicon, ‘Coprolites’?

Acknowledgements

THERE IS NO better way to reassure yourself of the innate generosity of your fellow humans than to embark on a book and ask for advice. Even after long and grateful experience I continue to be amazed by the lengths to which people will go to help a complete stranger find a reference, confirm a fact or locate a picture. Some of those who gave their time were lifelong Buckland enthusiasts; others had never heard of him. It made no difference to their willingness to help, and this book would have been a lot more difficult to write, and a lot worse in its execution, without them. I would like to thank in particular:

Michael Hellyer, Archivist, St Martin-in-the-Fields; Suzanne Foster, Archivist, Winchester College; Emma Anthony, Project Archivist, and Fahema Begum, Assistant Archivist, Royal College of Surgeons; Linda Fitzpatrick, Curator, Scottish Fisheries Museum; John Firn, Clerk, and Richard Shelton, former Chairman of Trustees, the Buckland Foundation; Sarah Pearson, Carina Phillips and Bruce Simpson, Curators, Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons; The Very Revd Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster; and Oliver Riviere, without whose expertise I would have been unable to reproduce many of the pictures.

My thanks go to my agent, Jonathan Pegg, for a magnificent lunch, limitless enthusiasm and bold encouragements; to Poppy Hampson at Chatto for commissioning and editing the book with all her customary skill and sensitivity; and to my copy-editor, Katherine Fry, for her work with dustpan and brush, whisking away repetitions, obfuscations and howlers.

Of my wife, Caroline, I can say only that she is a gift far beyond the scope of thanks.

ALSO BY RICHARD GIRLING

Fiction

Ielfstan’s Place

Sprigg’s War

Non-fiction

The View from the Top: A Panoramic Guide to Reading
Britain’s Most Beautiful Vistas

Rubbish!: Dirt on our Hands and Crisis Ahead

Sea Change: Britain’s Coastal Catastrophe

Greed: Why We Can’t Help Ourselves

The Hunt for the Golden Mole: All Creatures Great and Small, and Why They Matter

About the Author

Richard Girling is an award-winning environmental journalist. For his work in the Sunday Times he has been named Specialist Writer of the Year in the UK Press Awards. He was Journalist of the Year at the Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards in 2008 and 2009. His most recent book, The Hunt for the Golden Mole, was highly praised: ‘This is a book that bursts into life from the first page… Rousing, fascinating… Utterly engaging.’ Sunday Times

About the Book

Frank Buckland was an extraordinary man – surgeon, naturalist, veterinarian, popular lecturer, bestselling writer, museum curator, and a conservationist before the concept even existed.

Eccentric, revolutionary, prolific, he was one of the nineteenth century’s most improbable geniuses. His life-long passion was to discover new ways to feed the hungry. Rhinoceros, crocodile, puppy-dog, giraffe, kangaroo, bear and panther all had their chance to impress, but what finally – and, eventually, fatally – obsessed him was fish. He can be justly regarded as the godfather of fish-farming and the progenitor of marine research and fishery protection. Forgotten now, he was one of the most original, far-sighted and influential natural scientists of his time, held as high in public esteem as his great philosophical enemy, Charles Darwin.

The Man Who Ate the Zoo is both a rollicking yarn – engaging, funny and provocative – and a celebration of the great age of natural science, one man’s genius and what, even now, can be learned from him.

CHAPTER ONE

The Kit of Parts

THE BEGINNING COULD hardly have been more propitious. ‘I am told,’ Frank wrote, ‘that soon after I was hatched out my father and godfather, the late Sir Francis Chantrey, weighed me in the kitchen against a leg of mutton, and that I was heavier than the joint provided for the family dinner.’ A family-sized leg of mutton weighs eight pounds or more – a good size for a newborn. The adult Frank, too, though of modest height, was a giant, vast in girth, immense in his achievements, a huge personality that would fill whatever space it was unleashed upon.

Frank idolised two men in his life, both of whom left indelible marks. The first was his father; the other we will come to later. Father, like son, was a man committed to an ideal. Like his son, he kept company with famous men and original thinkers. But he differed from him in one important way. Unlike the forgotten Frank, Dr William Buckland enjoyed a reputation that would stretch across the next two centuries. He deservedly has a biography of his own – The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S., by his daughter, Frank’s sister Elizabeth Oke Gordon – and he is well represented in scientific libraries. Mrs Gordon’s tribute to her father, published in 1894, is well worth seeking out. To know Frank, one first has to know William.

He was a clever boy from a conventional West Country background. His father Charles was rector of parishes in Devon and Dorset, who could pull enough strings to swing his elder son a place at Winchester College and thence, in 1801, to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. A fellowship and holy orders followed in 1809. William’s trajectory thereafter was steep. Like many churchmen of the nineteenth century he was as passionate about nature as he was about its Creator, and there was an apostolic zeal in the way he threw himself into the new science of geology, as if, through unpicking His works, he would know the mind of God. His studies took him so far and wide and deep, burrowing beneath the skin of so many counties, that he must have spent more time on horseback than he did in bed. Few men can have acquired a more intimate knowledge of England’s hidden anatomy. In a story told by Mrs Gordon, he was heading for London with a friend one night when they lost their way. Dr Buckland dismounted, sniffed a handful of earth and pronounced with the authority of an olfactory satnav: ‘Uxbridge!’

His talents did not go unnoticed. By 1818 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a year later Oxford University’s first Professor of Geology. His inaugural address, Vindiciae Geologicae; or the Connexion of Geology with Religion explained, was published afterwards as a pamphlet. In it he sought to prove, as Mrs Gordon put it, that ‘there could be no opposition between the works and the word of God; and that the facts developed by it were consistent with the accounts of the Creation and the Deluge as recorded in the Book of Genesis’. Well, heigh-ho! Science was inviting Genesis to dance, and it wanted to call the tune. William argued that ‘the beginning’ was not a six-day event but a strung-out process in deep time, spanning the millennia between the origin of Planet Earth and the emergence, through a catalogue of extinctions and mini-creations, of life as we know it. All part of God’s grand design. As William explained it in Vindiciae Geologicae:

It was a slick and sophisticated argument, supported by evidence that accounted for the earth’s extreme old age and its layered history. But slick and sophisticated are the lodestones of heresy. Oxford in 1820 was still forty years away from the scandalising sensation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It was stuffed to the pinnacles with reverend gentlemen who cherished their ancient certainties, and for whom ‘theory’ and ‘blasphemy’ were cause and effect. Membership of the Church of England at that time was a prerequisite for an Oxford degree – no God, no BA – and academicians had to be ordained. For all William’s justifications, the elders did not like the look of geology: it carried a reek of sulphur, a diabolical trimming of eternal truths. According to Mrs Gordon, these were men ‘who feared that the study of God’s earth would shake the foundations of Christianity’. As late as 1852, when William ventured abroad, the pious Thomas Gaisford, Dean of Christ Church, thought fit to declare: ‘Buckland has gone to Italy, and we shall hear no more, thank God, of geology!’

Even so, in a sense, William Buckland had it easy. His important book, Reliquiae Diluvianae, published in 1823, sealed his reputation as a visionary. A year earlier he had received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for his work at Kirkdale cave in the Vale of Pickering, twenty-five miles from York, which he had identified as a pre-diluvian hyena’s den. Here he had found the remains of twenty-three other species including tiger, bear, wolf, elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus, a vivid snapshot of life before the Flood. The evidence for a traumatic deluge, he believed, was there for all to see – in the jumble of soils and rocks overlaying the bedrock, and in the carving of valleys by apocalyptic surges of water. Science, however, expects its proponents to keep up with new evidence. They must be willing to change their minds, and William duly did so. In his best-known work, the Bridgewater Treatise of 1836, he accepted that there was no convincing evidence for a universal flood, and became instead a powerful advocate of glaciation – the more plausible idea that the true architect of topography was not water but ice. He burnished his reputation in other ways: by providing the first written description of a fossil dinosaur (Megalosaurus, ‘the great lizard’ discovered in 1824 at Stonesfield, Oxfordshire); by identifying the stones found inside animal skeletons as fossilised faeces, and by giving them the name they still bear – ‘coprolites’. To him, a liassic animal turd was a testament in stone, revealing not just a few ancient, undigested fishbones but an entire philosophy of life. For him it proved the ‘general law of Nature, which bids all to eat and be eaten in their turn’; carnivora throughout the epochs ‘fulfilling their destined office – to check excess in the progress of life, and maintain the balance of creation’.

I said that William had it easy, and compared to Frank he did. Before Darwin stirred up the hornets, William plausibly could assert that Creation was the hand in science’s glove. For him there was no conflict. But history would not be so kind to his God-fearing son. Post-Darwin, Frank would be as horrified by all the monkey talk as was his friend ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, the reactionary Bishop of Oxford who opposed ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley, in the famous debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 1860. Darwinism was a hurricane that would leave Frank profoundly disturbed, clinging to the pillars of the established Church, torn but obstinate in his faith, the rational scientist casting his lot with Genesis. William died, out of his mind, in 1856, so we cannot know how the author of Vindiciae Geologicae might have responded to Darwin’s theory of evolution, or how Frank might have squared his position with his father’s. The greatest irony is that William Buckland’s interpretation of fossils would contribute significantly to the Darwinian eruption. Geology, wrote the geologist and archaeologist Sir William Boyd Dawkins in his preface to Mrs Gordon’s book, ‘enabled Darwin to grasp the principle of evolution that now [1894, only fourteen years after Frank’s death] influences our view of life as a whole in the same way as the law of gravitation has affected our view of matter, not only in the earth, but also in the universe’. Thus were father and son, however unknowingly, divided by their common interest.

In most other ways Dr Buckland was a yardstick for Frank to measure himself against. William was a charismatic lecturer who liked to entertain his audiences with jokes, funny walks and peculiar exhibits, and who never felt confident until he had raised a laugh. This encouraged some people – sadly including Darwin himself – to underestimate him. In his autobiography Darwin mentioned him only once, and not until page 102.

Mary Buckland and William Buckland

Frank, too, liked to spike his lectures with strange and occasionally shocking displays, and he thrived on laughter. He, too, would be accused of trivialisation, and would be celebrated as much for the peculiarities of his household as for the importance of his achievements. Otherwise their paths were markedly different. In 1825, the year before Frank was born, William’s rise through the scientific firmament was matched by his rise through the Church. He was made a canon of Christ Church Cathedral. On the last day of the same year he made a fortuitous marriage to Mary Morland – a highly intelligent woman who was an accomplished fossil geologist and marine biologist in her own right, and who would illustrate many of her husband’s books. In his autobiography Praeterita, the critic John Ruskin, a ‘gentleman commoner’ at Christ Church from 1837 to 1842, remembers the Buckland family as ‘all sensible and good-natured, with originality enough in the sense of them to give sap and savour to the whole college’. Sensible and good-natured they may have been, and sap and savour they had in abundance, but nobody could have mistaken the Buckland ménage for a textbook illustration of Victorian family life.

Frank Buckland was born on 17 December 1826, and raised in his parents’ house in Tom Quad, Christ Church. Altogether the Bucklands had nine children, of whom Frank was the eldest. Only five of these, three girls and two boys, survived infancy – a heavy loss even for Victorian England (infant mortality in the upper and educated classes then averaged one in five). Frank in his writing gave much space to his childhood. Some of his memories have a ring of family legend: mythical hand-me-downs. I find it hard to believe, for example, that the adult Frank could have had a clear recollection of an event which happened before his third birthday, though he recounts the story in fine detail. In November 1829, when he was aged two years and eleven months, his father bumped into a coachman, ‘Black Will’, who was ‘tugging along in each hand a crocodile about four feet in length’, which he had brought from London to Oxford in the hope of turning a profit – a matter in which Dr Buckland was only too happy to oblige. ‘Both the crocodiles were put into hot water,’ wrote Frank. ‘One died in the water, and the other lived but a few hours. They were taken over to the anatomy school at Christ Church, and dissected by the late Dr. Kidd and my father, thinking they would never have such a good chance again, agreed that they would taste a little bit of the crocodile, and see whether its flesh was good or not.’ A feast ensued, at which the meat was said to bear comparison with sturgeon or tuna. In another version of what seems to be the same story (though in this case it involved only a single crocodile brought from Southampton), the animal was tipped into Christ Church pond, where young Frank splashed about on its body.

But that was not the end of the affair. In the anatomy school lived an old man called William, whom Frank described as ‘the most curious weazen old fellow ever beheld. He wore the old-fashioned knee-breeches, gaiters, and broad-tailed black coat. His face looked like a preparation [by ‘preparation’ he meant a specimen preserved in spirits], and on his little round head (more like a skull than a head) he wore a very old wig. Altogether he looked much like an injected skeleton with clothes on.’ For this apparition the young Frank bore ‘the greatest awe and respect’. One can see why. William liked to entertain the little boy with the skeleton of a murderer, which he would let down on a rope just far enough for the toes to rattle on the floor. The ‘slightest touch’ then ‘would make it reel and roll about, swinging its gaunt arms in all directions’. Few boys can ever have had a more powerful inoculation against squeamishness. On the night of the crocodile feast, the old man himself became embroiled in drama. ‘In the middle of the night,’ wrote Frank, ‘there came a furious ringing of the bell, and a messenger from the anatomy school to say that William was dying.’ The old man was found sitting up in bed with his wig off, clutching his stomach and ‘looking the picture of misery and ugliness’. It turned out that he had taken a large helping of crocodile for his own supper and, in his enthusiasm for free meat, had polished off ‘enough for five people’. The consequences were unpleasant but easily cured by what Frank, with untypical coyness, described as ‘proper remedies’.

This was not the only story from Frank’s formative years that involved the pond. Frank by now was seven. The year was 1834; the occasion, a visit to Christ Church by the Duke of Wellington. The description is from Frank’s diary:

Viewed from the twenty-first century, this reads like something from a different world. Turtles are now protected by law, and the green turtle, the kind most often used for soup, is an endangered species. Any parent giving a child a ride on any food animal before participating in its slaughter would attract the attention of social services and the RSPCA, if not the police. Yet William Buckland was a deeply caring father who wanted his son to turn out well, not a man who took pleasure in cruelty. As so often in our journey through Frank’s life, we must keep a sense of perspective. The nineteenth century cannot be judged by the mores of the twenty-first. Trite but true: we all live in the world we’re given and are children of our time. It is not improbable that two centuries hence we, too, will be unkindly judged for our attitudes to children and animals. Frank kept the severed turtle’s head, which decades later would become an exhibit in his Museum of Economic Fish Culture at Kensington – a physical manifestation of a state of mind. In effect Frank would parcel up his childhood and carry it around with him until he died, like an internalised how-to-do-it manual. Look! Touch! Take apart! Eat! He had scant regard for books, though he wrote plenty of them himself. From boyhood he was an autodidact who learned through experience, often with little thought for his own safety or for the sensibilities of others. Even in an age which confronted death as often and as intimately as Victorian England did, his approach to mortal remains, whether of man or of beast, was heroically devoid of sentiment. William was the same. Their stomachs could not be turned, nor their resolve deflected. That was William’s gift. The lesson he dinned into Frank was that good work required application. ‘Never spare yourself,’ he said, and it was a lesson that Frank would absorb only too well. Hard work was the drug that would first intoxicate, and then kill him.

The crocodile feast was no rare moment of whimsy. William and Mary’s table was famously a post-mortem menagerie of roasted exotics, vermin and superannuated pets. John Upton in Three Great Naturalists described a lunch party at which William dished up the pickled tongue of his brother-in-law’s horse. The guests ‘enjoyed it much, until told what they had eaten’. Ruskin wrote appreciatively of breakfasting at Tom Quad in company with ‘all the leading scientific men of the day, from Herschel^fn1 downwards’, but regretted having missed ‘a delicate toast of mice’. The Liberal politician Lord Playfair described an agreeable dinner of hedgehog (‘good and tender’) but demurred over the crocodile (‘an utter failure’). Frank’s first biographer, his brother-in-law George Bompas, blandly reported the consumption of puppies. And then there was the bear. William’s daughter described the occasion brilliantly:

You might suppose it impossible to cap such a story, but that would be to underestimate William’s refusal to let anything pass untasted. The English travel writer Augustus Hare (1834–1903) in The Story of My Life gives this account of an evening at Scotney Castle, when ‘the conversation turned on witchcraft’:

According to Frank’s later biographer G. H. O. Burgess, William changed his mind about the mole. It was only the second-worst thing he had eaten. The worst was a bluebottle. As to the heart, it can’t be imagined that William ate the whole organ. A more plausible account is given by the chroniclers of Westminster Abbey, who suggest that the incident occurred in 1848 when Dr Buckland ‘was shown a silver locket containing an object resembling pumice stone. He popped the object in his mouth, perhaps to try and find out what mineral it was, and swallowed it. It was in fact part of the mummified heart of Louis XIV of France which had been taken from the royal tomb by a member of the Harcourt family.’

As parents, William and Mary were kind but particular. The children were expected to join in adult conversations at dinner, and to have something interesting to tell their father. Gossip and ‘evil-speaking’ were not allowed. ‘Educated people,’ their mother told them, ‘always talk of things; it is only in the servants’ hall that people talk gossip.’ It is a stricture from which the adult Frank seems seldom to have strayed. In his writing, with rare exceptions, a gentle joke at the expense of his detractors was as acerbic as he ever got. Family walks were no mere rambles or ‘constitutionals’. The children always had to have an ‘errand’ – taking cough medicine to a sick bargeman, for example. Sundays were for church and for the weekly treat of a walk in Christ Church meadows or up Headington Hill, led by William for the express purpose of observing trees, plants and stones, and noting the dates when flowers bloomed. It was an idyll of sorts, but a rigorous one.

The house in Tom Quad was a riot of disciplined chaos. The mining engineer Thomas Sopwith noted a staircase made hazardous by a scree of ammonites, fossil trees and bones, and piles of books and papers stacked on tables, chairs, sofas, bookstands ‘and no small portion of the floor itself’. Frank’s friend William Tuckwell,^fn3 in his Reminiscences of Oxford, remembered visiting the house to play with Frank and his brother. A side table in the dining room was covered with fossils and with a card bearing the stern admonition ‘Paws Off’. Then there was William’s menagerie, a seethe of exotic wildlife that used the house as a private jungle and human visitors as fellow denizens – another of William’s eccentricities that his son would enthusiastically perpetuate. Tuckwell remembered being served a dinner of mice baked in batter, while ‘the guinea-pig under the table inquiringly nibbled at your infantine toes, the bear walked round your chair and rasped your hand with file-like tongue, the jackal’s fiendish yell close by came through the open window, the monkey’s hairy arm extended itself suddenly over your shoulder to annex your fruit and walnuts’.

Yet none of this was without purpose. Even the mad menus were philanthropically inspired. The ordinary men and women of England were ill-fed and poorly supplied with meat. William’s mission was to find new things for them to eat. Mice and puppies were plentiful, so why not? W. C. Williamson, Professor of Botany at the University of Manchester, quoted by Mrs Gordon, applauded William for his dedication to others: ‘This craving to be useful in promoting the welfare of the world around him characterised his entire life.’ This was no exaggeration. William would not have understood ‘blue-sky thinking’. There had to be an end in view, something more than just scratching the itch of curiosity. He saw a connection between geology – understanding the soil – and efficiency in agriculture, putting the soil to work. He liked to say ‘there is no waste in nature’. Everything had its uses, even coprolites. This fossilised excrement, phosphates from the bowels of ancient beasts, made excellent fertiliser – a kind of transmillennial recycling scheme. Wilderness offended him. Wild places in the nineteenth century were not cherished as they are now. William’s enthusiasm for cultivating morasses, fens and marshes would appal a twenty-first-century conservationist, but the nineteenth century had no idea of the destructive power of its own genius, and nobody would have balanced the needs of birds against the wants of men. You’d have to be soft in the head. The farmlands of England were in depression. Poverty bred discontent which frequently expressed itself in riots. Ricks were burned, machinery broken, butchers and bakers ransacked.

In the field, as in the university, William’s progressive thinking was about as welcome as an alligator at high table. Half a century on, Mrs Gordon was still indignant on her father’s behalf: ‘Agricultural prospects were at a very low ebb, and every sort of advice was looked upon with the utmost contempt and scorn by the John-Trot [i.e. boorish, bumpkin] geniuses of farming. The more ignorant a man is, the more conceited he is; and, in order to convince both farmer and labourer that science was any good, it was very important to be able to point to practical proofs of its benefits.’ Then as now (pace the controversies over genetically modified crops) it was no easy matter to prove the benefits of techniques which people were afraid to try.

But young Frank listened and learned. He listened when William took an interest in artificially hatching trout, and listened when he began to think about the migratory habits of salmon and how fish moved through water. The Reverend Gilbert Heathcote, sub-warden of Winchester College, told a story about William that could have been a model for Frank himself. It was William’s scientific instincts, not his salivary glands, that were stimulated when a magnificent turbot was served at a New College dinner. His mind was on dissection, not carving. Before the meal could be dished up, he raced ahead of the waiters and surgically removed the turbot’s head and shoulders. ‘Just what I wanted,’ he said.

William also bequeathed a sharp-eyed scepticism and a loathing of what the modern world would call bullshit. This could be frightening. Young William Tuckwell confessed that he ‘did not understand his sharp, quick voice and peremptory manner, and preferred the company of his kind, charming, highly cultured wife. Others found him alarming; dishonesty and quackery of all kinds fled from that keen, all-knowing vision.’

Saints in particular had a hard time of it. During the year-long geological tour of Europe that served as his honeymoon, William caused outrage in Palermo by denouncing the holy relic of its patron saint, Rosalia, as the bones of a goat. From Frank himself, Tuckwell learned the story of the Bucklands’ visit to ‘a foreign cathedral, where was exhibited a martyr’s blood, dark spots on the pavement ever fresh and ineradicable. Dr Buckland dropped on the pavement and touched the stain with his tongue. “I can tell you what it is; it is bat’s urine!”’ Everyone should have such a father.

In other ways, William’s intolerance now looks on the bigoted side of quaint. Despite his clever wife, he could not accept that women had any useful contribution to make to intellectual life. In 1832 he agonised in a letter to his fellow geologist Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, setting out his (successful) objection to female representation at a meeting of the British Association. Women, he said, would ‘turn the thing into a sort of Albemarle-dilettanti meeting^fn4 instead of a serious philosophical union of working men’. Even the leading female scientist of the age, Mary Somerville, was browbeaten into staying away – ‘for fear’, as Mrs Gordon put it, ‘that her presence should encourage less capable representatives of her sex to be present’. Hardly the message a feminist would print on her T-shirt. But we need to remember that this was 1832. Women in Britain would have to wait until 1870 before the law gave them the right to own property, and even longer before they had Oxbridge colleges to call their own (Girton at Cambridge, 1873, and Somerville, named for the same polymathic Mary, at Oxford, 1879). It was not until after the First World War that most women in the developed world would get their first, often incomplete smidgeon of enfranchisement, and not until 1928, after a long and bitter struggle, that British women would achieve the same voting rights as men. Viewed from that perspective, William was not quite the harrumphing dinosaur he now seems. His egalitarian instincts may not have evolved any faster than those of his fellow clerics, but neither did he lag behind them: he was a man of his time.

How all this worked on Frank is difficult to know. There is little evidence of misogyny in his writing, but neither is there much acknowledgement of the part played by his wife Hannah, who seemed an obscure figure even to his brother-in-law biographer George Bompas, who managed both to misspell her name and to omit the embarrassing truth of their early years together. As we shall see, Hannah had a lot to put up with. The unimaginable reality of life with Francis Trevelyan Buckland was not likely to have been covered by any prenuptial advice from her mother or sisters, if she had any.

Frank’s own mother was as powerful an influence as his father. ‘Most men of mark’, observed George Bompas, ‘have had . . . remarkable mothers.’ Mary shared her husband’s love of geology and was a more than capable assistant to him. Had she been born into a different generation, she might have had an outstanding career of her own. She was also a gifted illustrator, a generous hostess, a wise parent whose firmness left Frank in no doubt of her love, and a woman untouched by prejudice. Mrs Gordon described how Mary ‘took great interest in the spiritual and bodily welfare of a settlement of Jews living in . . . a very poor part of Oxford’. She did much to help families who lost their homes in a fire there, and at every Feast of the Passover would accept a gift of ‘half a dozen of the large thin wafer-biscuits – the “Passover Bread” – in token of respect and gratitude’. Again it is not possible to know what Frank took from this, but he would go on to develop a deep and lasting fascination with other cultures.

We are beginning to see what Frank Buckland was made of. His father was the kit of parts from which he would assemble himself, if not quite in the same order or in the same proportion. Buckland Mark II would be no mere copy of Mark I, but he could not have existed without his blueprint. Frank’s mother, too, played her part. She was a guiding light and a necessary moral stabiliser, but no inhibitor of her wilful son’s precocious individuality. As she recorded in her diary:

Frank at this age was recognisably the same person he would be at fifty: impelled by the evidence of his own experience, sceptical of received wisdom:

He was still only three when Mary wrote:

And not yet four when he reached the point at which this book began. This account of it comes from Bompas:

The die had been cast. At the age of eight, the prodigy would be sent away to commence one of the most bizarre school careers ever recorded in English history.

CHAPTER TWO

Matron’s Cat

FRANK WAS PREPARED for school by his mother. It might better be said that she prepared him for life. Her thoughts, her language, her piety, were a character-building syrup spooned into him daily. The source of Frank’s ironclad Christian faith is no mystery when you read the words of Mary Buckland. Here is the letter she wrote to him on his fifth birthday. The handwriting is almost childishly meticulous – a lesson in clarity – though it becomes cramped as she approaches the bottom of the page: an uncharacteristic miscalculation in a woman who took pride in perfection. It is dated 17 December 1831.

A call to obedience: Mary Buckland’s letter, written to Frank at school on his fifth birthday

Some part of this may have been insurance, to keep Frank in good spiritual order in case of premature death. At five, he was not yet beyond the reach of childhood disease. Notes in the family Bible recorded that Frank was ‘vaccinated effectually at 2 months old by Mr Bull. Had the measles 1834. Had hooping cough 1835.’ Either of these might have carried him off. But this was surely not the limit of Mary’s intentions. Perhaps she hoped he would follow his great-grandfather, grandfather and father into the Church. Or perhaps she just wanted him to share her faith, to bind them together in this world and the next. On the same day she wrote somewhat less apocalyptically in her diary: ‘He reads a great deal to himself such easy books as he can perfectly understand, and he has a happy knack of making himself acquainted with the contents of a book by merely turning over the pages; it seems as if he never forgot anything.’

Frank kept the letter all his life. In fact he seems to have kept almost every shred of paper that was ever addressed to him, or that contained any mention of his name. Many of these are preserved in the grand, classically porticoed building designed by Sir Charles Barry, architect of the House of Commons, for the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, central London. The college library is on the first floor next to the Hunterian Museum, at the head of a ballustraded staircase hung with portraits of past presidents. Here on an enormous desk beneath pillared galleries and shelves stacked with one of the world’s finest collections of surgical literature (some of it reaching back to the fifteenth century), an archivist opens a box and sets down a leather-bound volume the size of a parish Bible. I wait for a while before I open it: set up my laptop, spread out my notebook and pencils (no ink allowed in here), compose myself against the possibility of disappointment. When I fold back the cover it is like a doorway to another world: a treasury of frozen moments. A few of the 259 thick brown pages are empty – their contents perhaps lost or removed before they came into the college’s possession – but most are aflutter with stuck-on paper and card, crammed so tight that they overlap. There are letters, posters, William and Mary’s marriage certificate, newspaper cuttings, book reviews, school timetables, club membership lists, invitations, menus, cartoons, engravings, photographs, anything and everything, the magpie collection of a man who threw nothing away. A second volume, 308 pages long, is even thicker than the first. At the front of Volume One is Frank’s handwritten introduction:

He was forty-eight when he did this, and probably already had some sense of his own mortality: he had only five years left to live. To see and touch these things is oddly affecting, not at all like viewing some dry thing in a museum or even reading Frank’s books. These scraps of paper, stained and desiccated though they may be, are more than just witnesses to Frank’s life: they are tangible parts of it. To touch them is to touch him, and to touch those who mattered to him, most importantly his mother and his father. On his eighth birthday Mary wrote to him again. This time the neat, sloping handwriting looks practised: it is on notepaper so thin that each page bears the mirror image of what is written on the reverse, each word like the ghost of its writer.

She concluded by describing the volumes of Thomas Smith’s The Naturalist’s Cabinet, which ‘Grandmama’ and ‘Papa’ were sending to him, ‘so you will have quite a library of pretty books’, and signed herself as before, ‘Your affectionate mother, Mary Buckland’ – an odd contrast to the informal ‘Papa’ and ‘Grandmama’. This clearly was not a relationship to be taken lightly. Six months later, aged eight and a half, Frank was packed off to his first boarding school, at Cotterstock near Oundle in Northamptonshire, where the headmaster was the vicar, Alexander MacDonald. Not much is known of this period in Frank’s life, save that he was acutely homesick. As a sample of his oeuvre, his first letter home was uncharacteristically brief but characteristically misspelled:

After two years at Cotterstock, Frank moved to a school at Laleham, by the Thames near Staines, run by his uncle, the Reverend John Buckland. For whatever reason – family loyalty, or perhaps just lack of knowledge – George Bompas in his biography of Frank had nothing to say about what went on here. John Buckland does not seem to have been made of the same stuff as his brother. A paper about William written in 1978 by J. M. Edmonds^fn2 presents clear evidence of John’s early shortcomings. Confusingly, William and John’s uncle – their father’s brother – was also John. He too was a minister of the Church (vicar of Warborough, Oxfordshire) and did much to smooth William’s path into Winchester College. In March 1801 he checked a Latin exercise written by his younger nephew, John, at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, which he quickly saw had been ‘patched up’ from sentences lifted from Cicero and Charles Este’s Carmina quadragesimalia. Then, as now, there was nothing unusual about schoolboy plagiarism. ‘Boys at school are very apt to practise such impositions in this matter,’ wrote Uncle John to his brother Charles. What made him angry was his nephew’s reaction to being found out.