In the 1830s his prospects at Oxford seemed to glow. Fluent, rapid, engaging, he would stalk up and down amid his audience brandishing a cave-bear jaw or a hyena thigh-bone. He held field days on which he demonstrated the different deposits in the countryside. His ebullience, his sharp voice, his hatred of the dishonest and the bogus, and his own learning established him as an authority. He was a popular diner-out; he would appear at a dinner party carrying his blue bag, from which he would draw fossils and bones and intrigue the company. Another don wrote him the following friendly letter:
On our return last night I found as I thought that a spider had crawled out of the inkstand over a piece of paper; but it turns out to be a hieroglyphic from you which I so far interpreted as to perceive it was an invitation to meet some professor whose name as you wrote it looked somewhat indecent. I shall be happy to wait on you and take the opportunity of learning the Egyptian mode of writing.
He had no rival in his field and might have been expected to have established a school of natural science at Oxford. Yet when he left Oxford in 1845 it was as if he had never existed.
One cause for Buckland’s failure to make any impression on the Oxford curriculum was the strength of the spirit which was embodied in the Dean of Christ Church himself. Dean Gaisford did not take kindly to the peregrinations through the college of the pets that lived in the Buckland household. He thanked God when the family departed for a holiday in Italy and prophesised, ‘We shall hear no more of this geology.’ Yet this was the same Gaisford who had compelled Christ Church undergraduates to study physics. He was a surly, grim, meticulous classical scholar born of an obscure family but who had married the daughter of the Bishop of Durham. Everyone quotes today a sentence which he dropped in one of his sermons to his undergraduates: ‘Nor can I do better,’ he concluded, ‘than impress upon you the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument.’ He spoke from his own experience. When he was an undergraduate the then Dean of Christ Church detected his ability and told him: ‘You will never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with certainty as a scholar. Take some little known Greek author and throw your knowledge into editing it: that will found your reputation.’ Gaisford chose a work on Greek metres by the Alexandrian grammarian Hephaestion, and produced an edition of monumental erudition. That was the spirit which defeated Buckland.
In the 1830s Oxford and Cambridge were in much the same situation. Both had their naturalists and neither acknowledged the existence of science in their curricula. But whereas a century later Cambridge was famous in almost every field of science, and scientists governed its affairs as much as arts men, at Oxford science was fenced in by a shortage of college fellowships. Scientists – and especially technologists – were relegated to the backwaters of the university. However powerful the impression that Buckland made, he scarcely made a dent upon the serried ranks of classicists; and when in fact years later the curriculum broadened it was in the direction of language, law and history: few undergraduates took the science option. The studies at Oxford fit for a gentleman, fit for the ruling class, leading to ‘positions of considerable emolument’ were, if no longer confined to Greek literature, certainly not those that Buckland attempted to popularise. On his death his collection of rocks and fossils was swept away into an inadequate building.
In the short run, however, Gaisford was to be discomfited. For though Buckland left Oxford in due course his eldest son, Frank, came up to Christ Church as an undergraduate and for three years plagued the Dean. The principles of scientific experiment were embodied even more deeply in the son, and his father had trained him to be a keen observer. When he was eight years old a turtle had been sent to the college for the banquet which was to follow the Duke of Wellington’s installation as Chancellor. His father gave it a swim in the fountain in Tom Quad, with Frank riding on its back; and the boy then watched it being decapitated in the college kitchen and noticed how the severed head bit the kitchen boy’s finger. Frank was sent to school at Winchester, and there he followed his father’s principles. He collected the heads of cats and rats as other boys collected birds’ eggs. He taught himself to eat hedgehogs, fry mice in batter, dissect the eye of the Warden’s mastiff and snare and skin the headmaster’s exquisite cat. He dissected the cat’s body night after night until the stench became overpowering … for the other boys. Dissection was his principal pastime and he was heard to remark meditatively, ‘What wouldn’t I give for that fellow’s skull,’ when a particularly dolichocephalic youth happened to saunter by.
At Oxford Frank Buckland was at last able fully to develop his hobbies. He was a large, genial, bohemian figure, often dressed in a German student’s cap and a blue pea-jacket, and would make the quad resound to the notes of a gigantic Swiss wooden horn. True to family custom he lived surrounded by livestock. There were marmots, guinea pigs, snakes and a chameleon which perched on a wine glass, swallowing flies, until, to the delight of the spectators, it tumbled headlong into the preserved ginger. There was an eagle which walked into cathedral during the eight o’clock service: Dean Gaisford ‘looked unspeakable things’. There was a jackal whose yells curdled the blood of nervous freshmen. Most notable of all was his young bear, named after a ferocious Old Testament king Tiglath-Pileser. Tig went to wine parties in cap and gown, watched the boats and lived a full social existence. At one party he met Monckton Milnes. Milnes was at that time known as a fashionable young versifier and man-about-town and happened to have been learning the elements of mesmerism from the well-known bluestocking Harriet Martineau. He decided to mesmerise Tig, who growled ferociously but fell in a stupor to the ground. Dean Gaisford, however, had the last word. He had already rusticated the eagle for its sacrilegious behaviour, and the jackal had also been sent down. ‘Mr Buckland,’ he said, ‘I hear you keep a bear in college; well, either you or the bear must go.’
‘My object in life, to be a high priest of nature, and a great benefactor of mankind,’ Frank wrote in his diary at the age of twenty. He therefore became a doctor. But instead of turning to research after becoming qualified, as his contemporary, Darwin’s great supporter T. H. Huxley did, he accepted a commission in the Life Guards as an assistant surgeon so as to be able to pursue his collection of freaks and animals. He was popular in the mess; though on one occasion he upset the solemnity of church parade when first the men and then the officers were overcome by gales of laughter on seeing Buckland, who was off-duty, stroll by on the far side of the parade ground deep in conversation with a dwarf and a seven-foot-five French giant whom he had been entertaining to breakfast. He later married and set up house near Regent’s Park. Nothing could have been more cordial than the welcome the Bucklands gave to their guests, but they had to be people of strong nerves. Only one room in the house was in theory reserved for homo sapiens, and even this would be turned into a sanatorium for sick animals. ‘Sing up, old boy,’ your host would say to a piebald rat as one entered the room and, sure enough, ‘melodious notes could be heard issuing from its diaphragm’. Pickled snakes would be produced for you from a tank, live ones from Frank’s coat. At tea the hairy arm of the monkey would seize your muffin, while the guinea pigs nibbled your toes under the table. That incomparable memorialist, the High Church radical parson, William Tuckwell, said that ‘You felt as if another Flood were toward and the animals parading for admission to the Ark.’ The fellow-guests were equally unpredictable. Chinese, Zulus and Eskimos were all to be found at dinner. Delicate problems of etiquette presented themselves: should the bearded lady go down to dinner on the arm of Mr or Mrs Buckland? And which arm should you take of the four presented by the Siamese twins? After dinner you could be certain that Frank Buckland would keep the party going. He used to try the effect of chloroform on his