| Administrative History | Vero Wynne-Edwards was a British ethnologist and naturalist, whose writings on group selection in evolution became the focus of debate among theorists in the 1960s and 1970s. Professor Wynne-Edwards championed the theory that natural selection acts on both individuals in social groups and on each group as a whole in relation to its environment. This theory pitted behavioural ecologists against proponents of the Darwinian theory of evolution. He was appointed to the regius chair of natural history at Aberdeen, remaining in that post until his retirement in 1974. He was also Vice-Principal for the two years previous to his retirement. |
| Description | Interview with Professor Vero Wynne-Edwards recorded 2 November 1985 introduced by Duncan Heddle.
Transcript of Interview :
I served as professor of Natural History for twenty-eight years from 1946 to 1974 and I was thirty-nine when I was appointed and sixty-eight when I retired. Before I came here I had spent sixteen years in Canada. I went originally to Canada from England and I had never been to Aberdeen. My appointment, which was to a regius chair, Regius Chair of Natural History, was made by the Crown and it not only took a very long time to make but it was made unseen, without any interview.
It was a very long way away, it was just at the end of the second world war, and I had to sell a cottage in the country and spend all the capital I could muster to get myself, my wife and my two children here to Aberdeen. Everything, well almost everything, was rationed at the time including furniture, so that we had to bring everything we had and when the University Court, some months later, learned what a difficult thing it had been far us to make the move and establish ourselves here, they resolved that in future new appointees should be consulted and, if necessary, helped with their expenses. But that was for future occasions. The Principal of the university at that time was Sir William Hamilton-Fyfe. He, like me, had came to Aberdeen from Canada and was very sympathetic to our plight and, in fact, Lady Fyfe allowed us to acquire several items of surplus furniture.
In retrospect, looking back to that time, the outstanding person in the university as far as I was concerned was Lieutenant-Colonel H.J. Butchart, the Secretary. He was a man of enormous energy. He was, of course, a graduate of Aberdeen and he devoted almost all his energy to the welfare of the university and of the old town. He was a very brusque, gruff, man at first sight but in fact he concealed a heart of gold. He was extremely kind and generous and he and I became specially great friends because we were both very keen skiers and for the first five or eight years that I was here, we were very constant companions in the hills in winter. Incidentally, he had won the D.S.O. in the 1914-18 war and he had been awarded an O.B.E. for his services during the second world war. I should probably never thought of coming to Aberdeen but for the fact that among our very closest friends in Montreal were Professor David Thomson and his wife Mary, both of whom were graduates of Aberdeen, and he in fact was the youngest of the three sons of Professor J. Arthur Thomson, Sir Arthur Thomson, who held the Regius Chair of Natural History from just before the turn of the century until 1929. So that we had learned a great deal about Aberdeen just because we had these very close friends. Also there was a very good reason why I should leave McGill, because of a deadlock there, in that I, and a great friend and colleague, were joint heads of the Zoology Department and as long as that situation continued, they would never have filled the chair of zoology there, so one of us had to leave. I never met Professor Arthur Thomson but I knew the three who succeeded him and preceded me. They were Professor James Ritchie, Professor Lancelot Hogben and Professor Alister Hardy.
James Ritchie was an Aberdeen graduate who had made his career in the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh. He came in 1930 and remained here until 1936 when the chair in Edinburgh fell vacant and he went back to Edinburgh. He is someone best known for his book, an unusual and interesting book, Animal Life in Scotland, published in 1920 and also far the fact that he became eventually president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Lancelot Hogben came in 1937 and was totally different individual. He was a very brilliant man, mercurial, given to shocking unsuspecting listeners and bystanders by making terrible remarks, and he made a great many enemies, but also some very close friends. Interestingly, he had been at McGill University a few years before I went, just as he had been here before I arrived and I found in both places that there were people who, during his term of office - and he didn't stay long anywhere until his final move from Aberdeen - had been all inspired by him to tremendous research efforts. He was the author of Mathematics for the million, a best seller. He was a physiologist, an endocrine physiologist, and he typically said everybody should work, and inspired them and made them all extremely keen on what they were doing so that the stories one had were that they worked hard into the depths of the night and then went home to the professor's house to drink beer. And they looked back on that period as really the highlight of their lives, some of these people. He eventually forsook Aberdeen for Birmingham and was succeeded again after an interval of a year by Alister Hardy, who later became Sir Alister Hardy, who stayed from 1942 to 1945, when he was appointed to be professor of zoology at Oxford.
The greatest impact he left behind on the Zoology Department, which was of course in Marischal College at that time, was in the departmental museum which occupied a large hall which he embellished most dramatically with the outline of a blue whale a hundred feet long, made out of gas pipe by him and painted red, which occupied the whole length of the ceiling of the hall. He also painted an the south wall one of the largest known, the largest known pterodactyl, with extended wings and a span of twenty-one feet and in a small glass case beside it was a humming bird to show the range of size of flying vertebrates.
The Zoology Museum contains many tragedies, some of them go back to Macgillivray's time. William Macgillivray was appointed professor in 1841, and died still in office in 1852. Like Ritchie, he came here from what was then the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, where he had spent many years but he was a graduate of King's College and he came back to Aberdeen to the chair in Marischal College. His period in Edinburgh overlapped the time when Charles Darwin was a medical student there and Charles Darwin found him out and got to know him and had an extremely high opinion of him, which is recorded in Darwin's autobiography. He was also discovered by the famous French-American ornithologist, John James Audubon, the man who produced the elephant folio volumes of hand coloured plates of the Birds of North America, which is one of the most valued items in the world of books at the present time. Copies when they came on the market always change hands in seven figure numbers of pounds - passed the million pound mark, a good many years ago. Macgillivray spent quite a lot of time canvassing support in Europe and especially in England, in Scotland. He [Audubon] needed to have subscribers and he went round with his folio of plates which grew as time went on and obtained subscriptions from wealthy people who would buy the book when it was printed. He also eventually had it printed in Britain. He spent several years in Edinburgh because he had found Macgillivray there, he and Macgillivray and their wives and families got on extremely well together although people of very diverse background and he found in MacGillivray a professional zoologist with a vast knowledge of ornithology who in fact wrote a twelve volume work which came out to accompany the plates. Plates in the elephant folio, which means the size of a large newspaper opened out, was dictated by the fact that all the birds were shown at natural size and the wild turkey required that much height in order to get it an a page. MacGillivray wrote these twelve volumes which were published simultaneously and were called Ornithological Biography. They didn't appear under Macgillivray's name. He was a very kind hearted but rather self-effacing person and there's no acknowledgement of the fact that they were written by him but someone like me that got to know MacGillivray's style very well could easily tell that they were his compilation with very little from the person to whom they were ascribed, who was Audubon.
MacGillivray was a great scholar all over the field of science and a tremendous writer and producer. He was a most industrious man who wrote wonderful descriptions which one can read with great enjoyment even at the present day. His most important work was a five-volume History of British birds which appeared between 1837 and 1852 and in the last volume he was dying, and knew it, at the time the book was published. Sadly, he died when he was fifty-six. The departmental museum still possesses a small box of bird-skins, study-skins, which show, in MacGillivray's own beautiful hand writing, that they were from Mr Audubon. They're probably the oldest bird skins in Britain.
The present Zoology Museum in the Zoology Building in Old Aberdeen is in many ways a gem, not least for the artistry and skill of Dr Saida Simmons who was appointed to a lectureship chiefly as the museum curator. The museum has valuable cabinet collections in addition to the material on display which is arranged as a teaching facility.
Going back to my arrival in July 1946, the Zoology Department was then in Marischal College in the southeast corner of the quadrangle which is now at this moment occupied by the Geology and Biochemistry Departments, or parts of them. At that time, Marischal College housed all the science departments, other than the Department of Botany which was already at the Botanic Garden in Old Aberdeen. It also had the university administration and the principal's office and the court room. The principal's office and court room were on the south of the entrance arch and the secretary and his staff an the other side. And above them both was Science Library. Chemistry soon afterwards migrated out to Old Aberdeen to a new building erected on the market lands. My family and I lived far many years in 70 High Street, Old Aberdeen, and in the spring the skylarks used to sing over the market lands in sight and earshot of our front door. After the Chemistry Department moved out, it was another decade before the new Natural Philosophy Building ushered in the continuous development of the site, in the 1960s and 1970s.
As I've said, I had many dealings with Colonel Butchart. My children flippantly called him 'Uncle Harry' and I after went over to his room across the quad with its roaring coal fire in the winter and a pair of skis standing always in the corner. There's a portrait of him in the picture gallery at Marischal, again with a pair of skis in the side of the picture.
The main fabric of the Marischal College departments was about a hundred years old at that time, in 1946. Zoology ascended to two floors and a basement and since the ground floor rooms had ceilings eighteen feet above the floor, when the requirement for small rooms began to occur, the ground floor rooms were divided by a mezzanine floor into upper and lower rooms and my room, the professor's room in the department, was one of these rooms subdivided by putting in a floor, an extra floor. Our elementary laboratory and large lecture theatre were upstairs. The lecture theatre held 175 people on long tiered wooden benches, in my time painted sky blue, with stairs for access on either side. I often thought as I addressed the first-year science class on a winter afternoon that I stood where MacGillivray had stood a hundred years before and where J. Arthur Thomson had delivered what I know were spell-binding lectures which brought students in from the quad until the stairs at either side were packed and there was no room far any more. MacGillivray's students are also said to have done the same. That lecture room was an historic place but now it has been removed without a trace, in fact, I believe even the floor levels have been changed. The benches were very minimal in size, very uncomfortable, endurable for one hour but benches an which nobody could possibly go to sleep. But it was a very easy room to speak in and one seemed to have the audience in the hallow in one's hand. Before we left Marischal in 1974, we had introduced much modern equipment including electron microscopes, but space was at a tremendous premium and alterations prohibitively expensive because of the presence of old granite walls which had been, some of them, external walls inside the building.
Each new professorial appointment in the recent past had involved a gap of a whole session in which Dr R.M. Neil, Bertie Neil as we knew him, served as the interim department head. Like Colonel Butchart, he had served in the first world war and been decorated for bravery with the military cross. He was a keen fisher and shooter and his best research was concerned with the metamorphosis of young salmon as they leave their native river and migrate out to sea. He was a great support and ally to me, and to my recent predecessors, and soon after I came he was made a reader and eventually, on his retirement, he was given an honorary LL.D. In 1946 our teaching staff was eight: professor, three lecturers - one specially assigned to agricultural zoology - and four assistants. Though we had large elementary classes in zoology and biology, the production of Honours graduates was very small and in my first five years we had only sixteen in total. But after that, after the first five years, expansion was fairly continuous. By the time I had been here twenty-five years, we had a teaching staff of twenty-five, including two professors, a reader and six senior lecturers. And a staff of research officers, with research assistants and technicians totalling more than fifty, plus a secretariat as well.
A large part of the professor's job was to obtain the outside funding necessary to keep the research effort going. We had, of course, a fine new building from 1970 onwards, plus the field station at Newburgh which provided accommodation for thirty full-time workers and until 1968, we had the Unit of Red Grouse Research as well. A great part in deciding the detailed logistics of the new building was played by Dr Michael Begg who worked closely with the architects for several years in the 1960s. The success of zoology in attracting outside funds and in attracting students from far away to partake of our products in the field, especially of vertebrate ecology and population ecology, gave us the strength to merit the new building. In 1973 74, we had more undergraduates than any other science department. In 1973 74, there were in fact thirty-two students who graduated B.Sc. with Honours in Zoology, fifteen with an M.Sc. and seven with Ph.D.
End of transcript
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