Humberside Geologist no 3
published 1980
A recent letter from my sister (Gwyneth de Boer) requested notes on the old days of the Hull Geological Society. The result was an abrupt flood of memories, surprisingly sharp despite lying dormant for well over forty years.
I can't try to give any sort of sequence of events, but just few vignettes. The over-all flavour of the memories is now old-fashioned, even though my schoolboy world of the mid-‘thirties seemed then to be an up-to-date and stable place. The H.G.S. field excursions went mainly by steam-driven trains on now-defunct branch lines. Few members owned motor-car and up to the time I left England for good (1938) I believe it was still exceptional to use them for the excursion, rather than public vehicles. The field clothes were in the "stout tweeds" category and blue jeans were then unknown outside America. The winter meeting place was a room in the recesses of the Albion Street Museum, and I recall it as a Victorian relic where we sat in or on upholstered chairs to hear the monthly lectures. The membership was almost entirely amateur, in the good - and again faintly Victorian - sense of the word: if any of the regulars were professional geologists, I was unaware of it.
My interest then was entirely in fossils, which I collected as I did stamps, initially getting more pleasure from finding a rare specimen than from recognizing the stratigraphic significance of the species and assemblages. Consequently I enjoyed most the excursions to fossiliferous quarries and cliffs, and was somewhat mystified when the objective was in the realm of geomorphology or palaeogeography. I still recall the disappointment of a much touted trip to see a "fiord" on the Lincolnshire side ( was it at Kirmington ?). Even to this day though living in another glaciated-area, I find reconstruction of Quaternary events less than enthralling and was amazed at the massive attendance at the I.N.Q.U.A. conference in Birmingham last year . . . but back to the H.G.S. ! -
I must be interpolate here that the brothers C. W. and E. V. Wright - Bill and Ted to me - appeared on the scene as fellow junior members, all of us still schoolboys but seriously interested in the palaeontology of the Yorkshire chalk. They had a car, so could rove far afield and would often take me with them. I suppose we had the sharp eyes of youth, because we started turning up fossils that amazed our elders in the society. First they, then I, found widespread specimens of the strange echinoid known (then, anyway) as Infulaster excentricus and could discern an evolutionary change of size and shape upwards through the chalk. At Kiplingcotes they discovered a molluscan fauna completely new to Yorkshire, fortuitously preserved under a cartwheel ammonite. We had numerous calices of Marsupites and substantial portions of the usually disarticulated Uintacrinus. If I remember rightly, it was their mother who noticed what struck her as a set of false teeth in a block of chalk - in other words an amazingly complete starfish (Metopaster). At one time that specimen was among eye-catching exhibits near the entrance to the Museum, and I have wondered if it survived the wartime destruction.
In my last years at Hymers I was the excursion secretary of the H.G.S, responsible for filling the blanks as to meeting place and time, then mailing postcards to all members likely to attend. Distance was restricted by the need to rely on railway timetables, so we seldom went outside the triangle defined by the Humber, the Holderness coast, and the Bridlington-Howden road, unless it was to cross the Humber. Some places are still visited, I feel sure, such as Flamborough Head for fossils of the chalk and the Holderness coast for its wealth of erratics. Others must have lost their interests, being now worked-out quarries. This is the fate of South Cave, where the "Kellaways Rock" quarry was a wonderful place for finding striking Jurassic fossils. There was a had packed with belemnites and another chock-full of costate brachipods, then known as the Rhynchonella bed. To the quarrymen they were waste material, thrown aside in spoil heaps where we could search, for big "football ammonites" or whatever else might turn up. For instance, one day a Mr. Kidder stumbled across block full of shiny black shapes that proved to be disarticulated scales of a large ganoid fish. (I have wondered if they were the indigestible part of a meal, as plesiosaur bones were another rarity of the place). The Wright brothers were the first to spot that many of the South Cave ammonites had well-preserved apertural features, and I still remember the thrill of cleaning matrix off some of my own specimens and thereby disclosing elegant lappets and rostra.
Occasionally an excursion would take advantage of some special opportunity. For instance, rare conditions of weather and tides would occasionally result in clean exposures at South Ferriby or Speeton of fossiliferous beds not accessible elsewhere. At the former I recall finding strange belemnoteuthid remains, looking at first glance like incomplete Pinna, and at the latter, giant crioceratid ammonites lying undeformed in the foreshore clays. A little-known Jurassic limestone was excavated during construction of the South Cave bypass and yielded large crustacean carapaces and claws and other unusual fossils such as ganoid and reptilian teeth.
Finally some random recollections of H.G.S. members in the 'thirties. Mr. STATHER was well-to-do (in "paint and paper") and had made Yorkshire geology his lifetime hobby. He loved to debate knotty points but was never argumentative. In appearance he was by then somewhat portly with a Vandyke beard. At the end of the summer season he would give me a pound note, which more than paid my postal expenses at a halfpenny per card. Mr. ENNIS was a teacher, I think, lean and tall with reddish hair. He knew the Cretaceous faunas well and was my prime source of identification of unusual discoveries. He was responsible for the first money I ever earned as the Gloyne(?)Fund had given him a grant to dig a test-pit at a zonal contact within the Speeton Clay and he designated me his labourer. Mr. BISAT was I suspect, a counterpart of Stather in being a very knowledgeable but non-professional geologist. He had errected a zonation of the marine Carboniferous in West Yorkshire based on evolution of the goniatites. He has become faint in my memory, but as a regular supporter of all the Society's activities.. Mr. Tom Sheppard’s attendances were less regular but he could not be overlooked when present, being a corpulent, flamboyant extrovert. As head of the Museum he devised methods of publicity which some considered "cheap" and unscientific, but they did attract public support " and they foreshadowed techniques now accepted as normal.
Probably forgotten by now is a lean, elderly, but ramrod-straight member named - SHILLITO, SILLITOE or something. His distinction was that he came over from Lincolnshire in all weathers for the evening meetings, shepherded by his middle-aged attendant called PARKS (?) who tried unsuccessfully not to look out of place. His hobby was washing and sieving the marl bands of the chalk for microfossils, which he sorted and mounted neatly in single-cell cardboard slides. I recall thinking of it as an ingenious variant of "real" fossil-hunting, not dreaming then that for many years I would make my own living as a micropalaeontologist in the oil industry. These names are just a few that come back as I try to remember the elders of the Society. With sadness I must mention one of more or less my own age, namely David TOYNE who was another eager fossil-hunter. His keenness led him to make a bicycle trip to West Yorkshire to find some fossils older then our local Mesozoic faunas, but on his way back he was knocked down and killed by an unknown motorist. My own father, Thomas Stainforth was certainly a member of H.G.S., but I recall him as devoting more time to the Hull Field Naturalists' Society in the summers, and during the winters he was occupied teaching evening classes in the natural sciences, one of these classes being a class in Geology possibly the only one in the district until the University was built.
DR. ROBERT M. STAINF0RTH was educated at Hymers College, then took his B.Sc. at the Royal School of Mines, London University. He became an oil mining Geologist in Trinidad, Bolivia and other S. American countries. He retired to Vancouva Island where he is now a consultant Geologist working for Esso. [Editor]
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