Needless to say Frank continued his father’s gastronomic tradition. Kangaroo ham, rhinoceros pie, panther chops, horse’s tongue and elephant’s trunk were carved for his guests, who discovered that the best technique was to bolt a mouthful of meat and chase it with a beaker of champagne. Not all his dishes were a success. Chinese sea slugs were said to taste like calf’s head and glue. But through the Acclimatisation Society and other clubs the craze spread. After the siege of Paris, when it was known how near starvation the defenders had been, rat dinners were given in London and Cambridge. At one time donkey featured on menus: one of Buckland’s successors said that it was ‘delicious … like Tyrolese venison’. But that formidable Victorian society hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill, who had a penchant for baked guinea pig, declared, ‘I tried eating donkey too but I had to stop that for it made me stink.’
And yet there is something instructive and sad in this merry search for freaks and curios. Frank Buckland’s career reminds one that the offspring of academic families are not by any means destined to follow their father’s footsteps. The Annexe about the intellectual aristocracy (see page 304) records those who lived up to their parents’ expectations, but it does not record the many who did not inherit their academic genes – or their firmness of character. Everything comes too easily to them. Frank never had to work at science, he absorbed it in childhood, he never had to work his way in the world. Winchester and Christ Church and his own good nature opened all doors; while his father kept hyenas as part of a scientific experiment, Frank assembled his menagerie for fun. He had become a typical example of the son who follows his father’s calling but without the talent and inner compulsion to carve out a name for himself.
Then suddenly his life changed. For nine years he had been contributing numerous articles to the well-known periodical the Field, articles which formed the bulk of his book Curiosities of Natural History. The editors got bored and told him they had had enough. A few years previously he had failed to get the vacancy of full surgeon to the Life Guards: owing to a change in regulations, it went to the most senior man in the brigade. These two reverses made him take stock. He may also have appreciated how his father, after becoming Dean of Westminster and reaching the age when even the best scientists cease to produce their most original work, turned his mind to practical matters: the application of science to agriculture, sewage and water supply problems in London and Oxford – and the reforming of the antediluvian Westminster School. Frank Buckland got himself appointed an Inspector of Fisheries and at last began to play his role as a ‘benefactor of mankind’. In the 1860s he was primarily concerned with hatching freshwater fish; in the seventies he was using all his charm and energy on a crusade up and down the country to stop river pollution, and by studying the habits of fish to learn how to make them multiply and to stop over-fishing. He was the first to predict for practical purposes the seasonal position of the shoals of fish in the North Sea. He began to study the balance of life within the sea and the effect of ocean temperature on migration. He saw to it that the inspectorate interested itself in the mesh of fishermen’s nets so that fry fell back into the sea. He understood, as his predecessors had to, that to understand the life of sea fishes you must study their food and what affects its abundance. He therefore got the fishermen themselves to make observations and by a modest outlay in prizes filled log-books with their reports of fish culture in the North Sea. He fought the maltreatment of animals that often sprang from ignorance, once saving a swarm of elvers in Gloucestershire from massacre; on another occasion at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ‘made a speech about cruelty to seals. Much applauded. Deo gracias.’
In 1848 William Buckland and his wife had been injured when their coach overturned in France: Buckland was thrown out on his head and shortly afterwards he fell into a torpor for eight years, never reading a book but The Leisure Hour or the Bible. He directed that his body should be buried in limestone deposits and at his head should stand a slab of Aberdeen granite, one of the oldest of British rocks. The earth which had rendered so many of its secrets to him seemed reluctant to receive him in the biting frost and his grave had to be blasted by dynamite out of the ground. But his head is missing. His son had insisted on a post-mortem: the base of the brain lay in a pool of pus. Twenty-five years later, when the tubercular bacillus was discovered, the cause of death was attributed to tuberculous disease of the cervical vertebrae. Very properly in the interest of scientific medicine his skull was bequeathed to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.
CHAPTER THREE The Charismatic Don – John Henry Newman
In the first decades of the nineteenth century there were among the Oxford colleges two centres of learning in particular: Christ Church and Oriel. Christ Church was wealthy, large and in Dean Cyril Jackson’s time selected as many of its undergraduates as possible by merit. Oriel was far smaller, but Provost Eveleigh broke ranks by selecting its fellows not solely by patronage or performance in examination. He asked: did this man show intellectual sparkle? His successor, Copleston, carried on this tradition, and Oriel became known as a society of liberal intellectuals – Noetics, as they were called – who enjoyed dialectical dispute so much so that fellows of other colleges complained that the Oriel common room stank of logic. Thomas Arnold was one of this band until he left, later to become headmaster of Rugby. John Keble, the saintly churchman, whose hymns became part of Anglican worship, was another. The undergraduates, too, benefited from the good teaching of their tutors. When Copleston was Provost Oriel won twenty-seven first-class honours in examinations, though the far larger Christ Church won eighty-two.
Many college tutors taught the Latin and Greek texts in a perfunctory way, sometimes as baffled by their intricacies as their pupils. Some years later Leslie Stephen* at Cambridge gave a satirical account of a tutor, more renowned as the coach of his college boat than as a scholar, construing a Latin text with his class: ‘Easy all. Hard word here. What does it mean? Don’t know? No more don’t I. Paddle on all.’ But the Oriel tutors were different. Among them was a rough-tongued, ill-dressed, unconventional logician, Richard Whately, who took his pupils for early morning walks and regarded them as an anvil on which to hammer out his ideas. When a shy young man from Trinity was elected a fellow of Oriel, so tongue-tied that he could not bring himself to speak to his hero Keble and the others, Copleston told Whately to take him under his wing and draw him out. He did so to such effect that four years later, in 1826, John Henry Newman was appointed a tutor at Oriel and considered to be a fine addition to the college’s liberal tradition. But he was not. He spent his days discussing theology, patristics and doctrine with a group of newly elected fellows: Edward Pusey, Robert Wilberforce and above all with Hurrell Froude, a militant High Churchman. It was Froude who sowed in Newman’s mind the seeds of a hatred of Protestantism. The Oxford Movement was forming and it was to change the face of Oxford.
The first sign of this moral intensity soon appeared. In the Oriel tradition a tutor should help his men to construe Greek and Latin texts: it was up to them to make something of what they read, not for him to tell them what they should believe. But this was what Newman thought it was his duty to do. More than that, he held himself responsible for his students’ conduct. He was unique in treating them as friends,