The Zoology department at Edinburgh University as it was when it was opened in 1928. When I arrived in 1958 it looked much the same.
After my earlier experiences of Scotland (the bicycle tour to Dundee in 1951, and the two expeditions to the Spey Valley in 1955 and 1957) I felt as though I was going home as I travelled up to Edinburgh for the interview. The interview itself was a very casual affair. It involved an informal chat with Doug Kettle, a tour of the department and its facilities, and an even briefer session with the departmental head, Professor Michael Swann who merely told me that “I might be the right man at the right time”! I seemed to be the only candidate being considered and my hopes were raised. However, nothing more was said and I proceeded to Waverley Station to catch my train back to London. In those days the station access road went right up along the platform. As I was looking out of the window, I saw Doug Kettle draw up alongside the train in his car shouting “The job is yours if you want it”! As the train left the platform I replied in the affirmative and happily proceeded to London.
I went up to Edinburgh to start my job as Assistant Lecturer in Zoology early in October 1958. I had made prior arrangements with the Student Accommodation Service for some ‘digs’ and went straight to 23 Ross Gardens where I was to stay for the next six months at Mrs Baxter’s. Mrs Baxter was a fairly formidable but kindly butcher’s widow who lived with her son, James, and took in boarders. There were four of us in the house. The ‘oldest’ resident was a Lebanese dental student Zahi Khalaf who became a life-long friend, the other two were Bruce Cattanach, just finishing his Ph.D. in Genetics, and a Chemistry student, Norman King (whose Ph.D. thesis Jean later typed). As soon as I arrived, I was whisked off to the Canmore Lounge for a pint and from then on we were a happy household, although Mrs Baxter said of me: there was never any trouble here until Saunders came! She still maintained her late husband’s butcher shop at that time, so there was a plentiful supply of meat, although often of strange cuts we had never seen before, such as flank. Her beef sausages, however, were less appealing: Zahi used to put them discreetly in an envelope only to ‘post’ them later down the nearest drain. Mrs Baxter originally came from the Black Isle and knew how to make ‘real’ porridge. This was started the night before, probably bubbling all night, and formed the basis of our breakfast. I had a room to myself for the princely sum of £4 a week.
In the Zoology department as an Assistant Lecturer
Up at the Zoology Department I was literally thrown in at the deep end. I arrived on a Tuesday and was lecturing to fourth year Veterinary students on the Thursday. Fortunately, Doug Kettle had lent me his own notes for the course and I just managed to keep one jump ahead of the students during that first year. Veterinary students in the 1950s were almost all male, and nearly all dressed formally in tweed jackets and flannels. Many of them had completed their National Service, so there I was, at 23 years old, giving lectures to students who were in many cases older than me. Doug Kettle had by this time departed to the West Indies and would not return for another two years. In his absence, the University appointed Bill Page, a tsetse fly entomologist home from T.A.M. Nash’s unit in Nigeria, as Kettle’s temporary replacement. Bill gave the lectures for the post-graduate medical (D.T.M. & H.) and veterinary (D.T.V.M.) students, whilst my responsibility was for the undergraduate vets (B.V.M. & S.), a course I continued to teach in one form or another for the next 35 years. Protozoology was taught by Mrs Adam, and Helminthology by Czeslaw Rayski, a Polish vet who had escaped from the advancing Germans as they swept across Europe in 1940 by the skin of his teeth, arriving in Glasgow reputedly with only one penny in his pocket which he gave to some local children. Assisting Rayski was another younger member of staff, Peter Wilson who, like me, was a product of King’s College. Together we formed an unofficial Sub-department of Parasitology with quite a heavy teaching load. The Zoology Department as a whole was one of the largest in the country at that time and, together with the Department of Animal Genetics under Professor C.H. Waddington proved to be a stimulating environment.
On honeymoon in Paris, April 1959.
Jean and I were married on April 11th 1959 in Sittingbourne and spent our honeymoon in Paris. After our return we travelled up to Edinburgh initially staying at 131 Liberton Brae in a flat owned by a Miss Elliot with whom we had a rather difficult relationship. After a few months we moved to 3 Kirk Brae, and then in the January of 1960 to 21 Leadervale Road which has remained our family home ever since. Our first son, Robert, had been born a few weeks earlier, in December 1959, and our other two sons, Michael and Richard, followed in 1961 and 1964. All three eventually became professional biologists which seemed quite unusual among my colleagues!
For my research in Edinburgh I was keen to start investigating the possibility of applying Detinova’s method of age determination to tsetse flies, which are important vectors of parasitic protozoa (Trypanosomes) causing human sleeping sickness and animal ‘nagana’ in equatorial Africa. Accordingly, I obtained batches of Glossina morsitans pupae from Singida in central Tanganyika and maintained the emerging adults by blood-feeding them on the shaved sides of guinea pigs, the ears of rabbits, or sometimes on the palms of my hands. Before describing the application of the age determination technique to Glossina I must say something about reproduction in these flies.