published 1984
The Secretary has for some time been suggesting that I should write a short piece on the 'old days'; Robert Stainforth's delightful reminiscences served to prod me.
I cannot write of the Society's youth for my brother, E.V. Wright, and I only joined in the early thirties. By then the impression we got was the opposite of youth. Most of the members we met and talked to seemed to us to have come from an earlier world. The Secretary, Stather, we knew had held that office from the foundation of the Society and his name appeared already in nineteenth century works. C.B. Shillito from Brocklesby, agent to the Earl of Yarborough, wore a stiff shirt front, tweed knee breeches and a flat cloth cap with a large button on top; his ancient air was increased by the fact that he always referred to his grey-haired friend as 'young Mr. Parks'. Tom Sheppard, too, Director of the five or six Hull museums, wore a black jacket and striped trousers, with a dark homburg, in the field as well as in town, and had a raffish and Edwardian air. So we few young members felt slightly up against age.
The Society's major interest was in glacial deposits. Stather was still active here and Bisat, a world authority on Goniatites and later Fellow of the Royal Society, had begun to interest himself in the classification of glacial deposits, especially the associated shell beds. However, W.C. Ennis, a schoolmaster, was wisely encouraging detailed study of the Wolds chalk pits, before they became overgrown or filled in and instigated a series of field meetings for this purpose. Toyne had collected from many pits and his notes and some important specimens eventually found their way, via Stainforth, to us and were used in our paper on 'The Chalk of the Yorkshire Wolds', which we published in Proc. Geol. Assoc. in the war, before our work was complete, in case we didn't survive.
My memories are of great friendliness and helpfulness to the young member. We used to visit Stather to identify our specimens from his collection and regularly called on Ennis to discuss identifications, but usually we did not get very far. Belemnites were a particular interest and, before Swinerton’s Pal. Soc. monograph on the Speeton Clay belemnites, there was not much hope of getting good determinations; and there still is no monograph on the English Chalk belemnites. The lack of palaeontological literature was our main difficulty, but we found our way to the appropriate shelves in the Hull Reference Library; Stather gave us a copy of Pavlow and Lamplugh's "Argiles de Speeton" and Sheppard gave us Mantell's "Fossils of the South Downs" and Dixon’s "Geology of Sussex", all very helpful and valuable works. Sheppard, too, suggested that we should join the Palaeontographical Society and, as schoolboys, my brother and I became, and remain today, the only two-person member of that Society.
In the absence then of a Department of Geology at the University the Society lacked to some extent the stiffening of professionalism, though members of the Survey Office at Leeds were most helpful and became officers of the Society. Tom Sheppard did a great deal to keep us going. He used the facilities of the museum (and probably of the Naturalist too) to help the Society produce its printed Transactions, in which a number of important papers were published. He always knew where to get for a member expert opinion on particularly interesting specimens, and it was through him that we got in touch with W.K.Spencer of Ipswich when we found the fine starfish at Danes' Dyke which Stainforth mentions in his recollections (incidentally it did survive the war having been recovered from the museum in 1939). The friendship with Spencer culminated eventually in joint authorship of the Asterozoa in the Treatise on Invertebrate Palaeontology.
Sheppard, of course, managed to be President of the Society at its Jubilee in 1938 and organised the production of a large bronze medal with a not bad portrait of himself on the obverse and a Speeton ammonite on the reverse, which was supposed to be Toxoceratoides sheppardi but was not.* Many of us felt that the medal should have had the face of Stather on it, who had been Honorary Ssecretary for the whole 50 years of the Society's existence.
The '39 -'45 war not only broke the Society's continuity to some extent but it also marked the end of an era by the destruction of most of the admirable geological collection held by the Hull Museum, which included, with many individual specimens collected by members of the Society, the whole of the collections of Stather, of Mortimer from Driffield and of Chadwick from Malton. The loss to science was severe, particularly in the case of Stather's Speeton and Claxby ammonites and Mortimer's unparalleled material from the Chalk of the Wolds pits. My brother and I had unpacked, washed and arranged in a preliminary way on shelves in rooms above the Subscription Library, next door to the Museum in Albion Street, the Mortimer Collection when war broke out. All that is left is our increasingly vague recollection of marvelous complete inocerami up to 3 feet long and other treasures collected by Mortimer riding along the Wolds roads in his business of corn dealing, 'salting' the pits with the odd sixpence or shilling so that fossils would be put aside for his next visit.
It was through the Society and its individual members that we found our way about the geological sites of East Yorkshire and learnt the rudimentary stratigraphy and the identification of fossils. The specimens we collected in those days still serve as the basis for papers and monographs. Some of them may be seen this year in an exhibit at the entrance to the new "British Fossils" exhibit in the Geological Survey museum in London.
(* Patrick Boylan tells me that it is the Lower Lias Metarnioceras sheppardi. K.F.)
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