Hugh Torrens

In 1956, aged 15, I found a small half ammonite in a thin rock unit. which had never before yielded a single ammonite. At first W.J. Arkell (1904-1958) said it must only have fallen downhill from a higher, and known, horizon. But I knew different. For a start there was insufficient hill. Driven by schoolboy enthusiasms, I cycled out as often as possible to collect all the rock from that luckily thin bed. lying around its pipe-line outcrop. Months later I recognised, after work with a toothbrush, the fossil's other half in cross-section; embedded in matrix, which proved I was right and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, wrong. His letter of apology for assuming that everything in science was already known made me want to become a geologist. So l joined the Geologists' Association and started donating fossils to public museums. The ammonite (Delecticeras sp.) is: Sedgwick Museum No. J46367.

Only then did start to think about university. My kind friends at the Natural History Museum, London, who were now identifying my better finds for me (in particular LR. Cox and H.D. Thomas) suggested I apply to Oxford and wrote in support. I had to sit the scholarship exam as there were so few places for geology then. This got me in and l spent a very happy three years at Oxford (University College) l959 - 62, but too often getting sidetracked into journalism. old cars, and student drama.

So I went to Leicester University and had the best three/four years of my life there under an inspirational man who discovered what people were capable of and then left them to their own devices, except to give endless encouragement. He thought nothing was impossible and in 1963 supported the crazy idea that l and two non-geologist friends go and explore the Middle Jurassic of the Elburz Mountains in Persia. I ended up at outcrops rich beyond my so far English fantasies - one right beside Marco Polo's Silk Road to China. I also made early contact with three ammonite friends Wolfgang Hahn (Germany), Juli Stephanov (Bulgaria) and Carlo Sturani (Italy). It was a great shock a few years later when I had become the only survivor, all three having been killed (in a car crash. dam disaster. and quarry accident). But Peter and they had inspired me and given me a taste for foreign places and languages and a loathing of insularity.

By 1967 it was somehow inevitable I would stay an academic, and a lecturing job at Leicester was to be mine ˜ on a plate ™ (Peter assured me), until at interview he persuaded (as only he could) the committee they should afford a much more senior position (which rightly went to John Hudson). Peter had meanwhile encouraged me to apply for other jobs and was a fan of the Keele 'vision' (later expensive nightmare) with its Foundation Year and Joint Honours degrees, forcing all students across the Two Cultures. So when offered a lectureship there to replace Tom Burnaby, off I went. Peter thought I would be 'ideal for Keele' (there's a new slogan!) with interests in both stratigraphy and palaeontology and, by then, also in history of science and technology.

At an Oslo lecture a few years ago, I met my old friend David Bruton, who was a PhD student with me. He reminded me that I was then as equally fascinated in the past of the earth as with the people who had studied it. During my PhD. I certainly realised that some of the rocks I worked on, like the Fuller's Earth Rock, had never been studied since the days of William Smith, who would have had much better opportunities than me because there were then so many more exposures available.

As to why I started publishing history from 1974, this had several causes. First, I had got involved trying to improve the often terrible condition of geological collections found in too many of our provincial museums. Brian Page and I started the Geological Curators' Group Newsletter/Journal. This demanded historical investigation of collections and their fates. Second, with the deaths of my three friends (Stephanov 1966, Hahn 1972, Sturani 1975) I felt lonely as an ammonitologist and history may have became a safe refuge. I had started having problems with travel grants, and perhaps. as Derek Ager claimed, When reviewing a volume I had contributed to, in Geological Magazine, 1985, I 22, p, 214. this move over to history was for the same reason why there was more interest in history of geology in former East Europe: 'because there are so many more geologists in the East unable to travel and looking for things to do'? Most important, in 1970 I married Shirley Morgan, a kind, tolerant, and generous person, which perhaps encouraged me to rush around less?

But I'm sure that Sherbone as a place also had a lot to do with it. When researching S.S. [Sydney Savory] Buckman (1860-1929)'s geological career at this school. l discovered that Alfred North Whitehead (18614947), O.M., etc, had been his contemporary - Whitehead published posthumously in 1948 a wonderful essay The Education of an Englishman Essays in Science and Philosophy, London 1948. 26-33. (T he essay first appeared in a periodical back in the twenties.) in which he wrote: 'we had plenty of evidence [at Sherborne] that things had been going on for a long time. It never entered into anybody's mind to regard 6,000 years seriously as the age of mankind - not because we took up with revolutionary ideas [Buckman's Darwinian father did!] but because our continuity with nature was a patent, visible fact, and had been so since the days of Saint Aldhelm [A.D. 640? to 709!]. There were incredible quantifies of fossils about, more fossils than stones - or rather the stones were built out of fossils welded together'. I felt much the same of the historical continuity of these wonderful surroundings.

I was never able to give any formal series of lectures on history at Keele, despite the oft-claimed interdisciplinary focus of my university. It was not until I went to teach in California for a well-remembered semester in the spring of 1996 that I was able to develop a focused set of lectures on both the history of geology and, more especially, the history of technology (which l have always felt was, and is now, even more seriously under-represented in Britain). l have let off some steam on this last topic in a forthcoming piece.'Some Thoughts on the History of Technology and its Current Condition in Britain'. History of Technotogy. 200l, 22.

In 1981 came the first inklings of the impending disaster of 'research assessment'. 1 was 'returned' in the first two of these as a scientist (being expected to have written papers); then in the last one (1996), l was 'returned', without discussion, as a historian. This meant I was given a week's notice that I should have been writing books instead of papers!On the books versus papers crisis, see the critic of sequence stratigraphy. Andrew Miall in: Geoscience Canada, 25. 183-184

Despite such lunacies, or that such assessments can only allow each person to be returned to one 'unit of assessment' (alias subject), l found that the old excitements of finding new faunas in rocks were matched by those of finding new documents in archives. The two skills did not seem all that far apart either and so l well saw how other geologists, like Martin Rudwick, had become such superb historians. I recall three particular historical 'Eureka moments' of excitement.

The first was uncovering Robert Townson (1762-1827)'s illegitimate origins. He was born and baptised four years before his parents married and all the genealogists said this was impossible. But documents in the House of Lords Record Office proved it, and even provided a probable eye-witness account of his conception in support! The second was when I was trying to discover where S.S. Buckman had been a student in Germany. This was wrongly in print as Dresden, but a chance purchase in a Stoke-on-Trent bookshop (a city not renowned for them) in January 1983 (for £0.50) proved it had been Wiesbaden. The third was when I struggled long and hard to uncover the origins of Jeremiah Cruse, William Smith's land-surveying partner. This proved such an extraordinary, and serendipitous, story that I wrote it up.The Cruse family of Bath. Avon and Warminster, Wiltshire: A family's Origin and an Incredible (Co-incidence, Journal of the Bristol and Avon Family History Society. 1984. 34. 14-15

Above all, this excitement of the research chase has never left me, although I do now start to see what a really boring struggle getting some of it into print can be, and has been.

Academic interest in the history of geology is minimal back home in the UK (just as no sane person plays cricket in Reno!). The all-pervading bureaucracy in our universities demands only 'Impact Factors' (to three decimal places!) and 'Research Quality Assessment' of 'Groups'. 'One-Person Groups' are as undesirable as attempts to be both scientist and historian, which supposedly 'diminish' both. Those who try become marginal, moving in more than one world, but not at home in, or of interest to, either. I hoped for better at my former university, set up in 1949 to encourage breadth in education, through its Joint Honours Degree programmes (why aren't its joint honours graduates equally diminished?) and -its now abandoned - Foundation Year. But that university demonstrated its indifference to the history of science by the secret sale of its precious Turner Collection of rare books in 1998.See: Physics Today, April, 1999, 64.

This identifies a first problem, at least in Britain. Good work in science departments there can only be conceived by its many managers if it is done in 'research groups'. No single historian can qualify.For the dangers of individuals not qualifying for Research Group status, see: Antony Wyatt's remarkable recent History of Geology at Aberystwylh University: A Turbid Tale, published in 2000 by himself in California, well away from the Vice-Chancellorial lawyers!

But the American Henry Ford was right to urge the importance of such history, as opposed to the history of religion or diplomacy, etc. Science and technology (whether internet, television, laser, motor car, aeroplane or finding more oil for these last two) have had much the greater influence. But how we urge such history, and its fascinations, whether in the academy or on geologists (who should be the most historical of scientists), remain intractable problems. The Anglo-Lebanese-Brazilian Peter Medawar was equally right to assertPluto's Republic, 1984, 273. that 'the history of science bores most scientists stiff'. There are other geographical paradoxes. I think such history is frowned upon in Britain partly because we are 'an old country'.The title of Patrick Wright's stimulating 1985 book was On Living in an Old Country. We have simply too much history, which can be all too easily sanitised to show how 'happy' the lives of its former coal miners were etc. The 'Public Understanding of Science' pressure group here is both too weak, and history too marginal to it, to help us.

One of the reasons I think this subject is better supported in North America is that these are new countries, more anxious to uncover their ancestries. We are anxious to forget it. In support of this, according to a 1995 Roper poll for the American TV 'History Channel', the item of greatest interest to the public [there] is the History of Science and Technology. This is certainly not the situation here. But we have to keep trying to understand such different perceptions. If we are to improve things here we have first to try and teach some geology through its history and we also have to urge more popular, but still rigorous, history books like Cherry Lewis's on Arthur Holmes.The Dating Game: One Man 's Search for the Age of the Earth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000 (see p. 000).