The Great Cat Massacre (19 page)

In 2003 a group of researchers from Cranfield University with a lot of time on their hands built a replica of Pilcher’s flying machine. It worked, and flew for more than a minute.

Sixteen-year-old James Chadwick enrolled at Manchester University in 1907 (not an unusual age to matriculate in those days). He joined the queue to study mathematics, but soon discovered he was in the wrong one – it was the line for physics. But he liked the tutor who interviewed him and so on a whim decided to give physics a go instead. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for discovering neutrons and was a lead scientist in the design of America’s nuclear bomb.

Experimenting on animals generates some strong feelings, and results in the occasional nutter breaking into a laboratory – but that’s nothing compared to what happened in London in the summer of 1907.

It all began with a lecture and a couple of Swedes. Since 1876, use of animals in scientific experimentation had been regulated, and in 1903 Swedish anti-vivisectionists Louise ‘Lizzy’ Lind-af-Hageby and Leisa Schartau enrolled in the London School of Medicine for Women in order to record what was happening during lectures.

One of the demonstrations they attended was being taken
by Dr William Bayliss.
*
The lesson was to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure, and this would be shown by electrically stimulating the exposed nerve of a live dog’s salivary gland. Doing so was perfectly legal. However, there was an aspect to this particular demonstration that was definitely illegal, the women later claimed. The brown terrier brought into the demonstration room had not been anaesthetised. Furthermore, the dog showed an operation scar from a previous demonstration, when the law said animals could only be used once. They added, in their diary, that the dog tried to get away and the other students around them laughed at its attempts. This wasn’t actually illegal, but it certainly wasn’t very nice.

They took their case to a leading anti-vivisectionist lawyer, Stephen Coleridge,
**
and he made a public speech about the affair without mincing his words and making the full allegations put to him by the women. The speech was reported in the newspapers, angering Bayliss, who demanded a full retraction of Coleridge’s allegations. Coleridge declined, and Bayliss sued for libel.

The trial took place on 11 November 1903 and hit the headlines. One of the witnesses, Professor Ernest Starling of University College London,
***
admitted that he had
previously performed a demonstration on the dog and had allowed a second – illegal – demonstration in order to avoid a second animal having to die. But he stated that the dog was anaesthetised during the demonstration, his accusers just hadn’t seen the pipe under the table delivering the anaesthetic. It would have been impossible to perform such a delicate procedure had the dog not been asleep, he argued.

The court also learned that the experiment with the salivary glands was, in fact, a failure, with Bayliss giving up halfway through. The dog was later killed, it was admitted, by a student named Henry Dale, who was not licensed to euthanise animals.
****
Bayliss’s case was conducted by Rufus Isaacs.
*****

Isaacs successfully argued that Bayliss had done nothing illegal and the jury awarded him libel damages and costs in the region of £400,000 in modern currency. Most people thought it was going to end there but they were very much mistaken.

Coleridge established a public appeal for the money, and received it in double-quick time. Bayliss gave it all to the university for medical research – perhaps including just the sort of experiment Coleridge objected to. Then Coleridge’s brothers-in-struggle demanded there be a memorial to the brown dog. They decided it should be a fountain with a statue of the unfortunate mutt, carrying an inscription:

It was a canine
cri de coeur
but it proved difficult to find a sympathetic local council willing to accept the monument. In the end, in 1906, Battersea, famous for its dogs’ home, agreed to play host to one of the odder memorials in London. George Bernard Shaw was a guest at the unveiling.

Controversy continued to reign, though, and a guerrilla war broke out between groups of medical students who would creep through the hours of darkness to attempt to destroy the statue, opposed by a standing police guard presumably made up of Battersea’s least-precocious officers and backed by a motley alliance of trade unionists and suffragettes, who identified with the ground-down and disenfranchised dog. The ‘anti-dogger’ gangs thought it a dangerous insult to medical research, whereas their opposition saw it as a monument to Spartacus-like defiance of despotism.

Things escalated. Soon there were public marches in support of, and opposed to, the statue. On 10 December 1907 an anti-dogger march sported more than 1,000
participants and ended in the Brown Dog Riots – running battles around Trafalgar Square between them, the pro-doggers and 400 police.

Battersea Council eventually announced that it had had enough of paying for round-the-clock protection for a statue of a dog, and in 1910 it had the memorial broken up by four workmen and a police guard 120-strong – despite a petition signed by 20,000 pro-doggers.

Accurately, all that is now left of the old statue is a hump in the pavement and a sign that reads ‘no dogs’.

In 1911 a skull was unearthed on Piltdown Common in Sussex that had the bone-loving community climbing museum walls in excitement. It seemed that Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur palaeontologist, had discovered the Missing Link. His finding would quieten the religious freaks who refused to believe man and monkeys had a common ancestor.

Dawson was quite well known, having previously found a number of important relics, including no fewer than three new species of iguanodon (as everyone knows, the iguanodon was the second dinosaur formally named, after megalosaurus, and, together with megalosaurus and hylaeosaurus, it was one of the three genera originally used to define dinosauria) and had a good reputation among his fellow scientists. He had also briefed the local quarrymen that, if they found any bones in the ground, they should let him know.

Thus, in late 1911, a group of workmen digging out
gravel to use on roads showed him a piece of skullbone. It intrigued him and he looked for the rest of the structure in a shallow gravel pit. Over the next six months, accompanied by a strange Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he found the rest of the skull, half a lower jaw and a human tooth. Buried with them were the bones of prehistoric animals and some flint tools.

The skull was of a new species. It appeared to be essentially human, but with some characteristics of a young chimpanzee. This suggested that the long-term evolution of the human skull had reflected the changes that take place within a chimp’s skull as the animal goes from infant to adult. It was very exciting.

The find and its implications were announced to the London Geological Society, which could barely contain itself. The skull was deemed to be a female from a hitherto unknown species of human that represented the common ancestor of cave people and modern humans. In tribute to its discoverer (not the quarryman), it was named Eoanthropus dawsoni – Dawson’s man of the dawn. Dr Arthur Smith Woodward of the Geological Society declared: ‘The most significant thing about this discovery lies in the fact, proved by the shape of the jaw, that the creature, when alive, had not the power of speech. Therefore in the evolution of the human species the brain came first and speech was a growth of a later age.’

Dawson died in 1916, and in 1924 Woodward was knighted for his work analysing the bones. Piltdown Man was even cited in the famous Monkey Trial of 1925 that held the American State of Tennessee up to ridicule for
prosecuting a biology teacher who had taught his class evolutionary theory.

In 1926, however, things began to unravel. A detailed survey of the land showed that the gravel pits were much younger than thought – younger, in fact, than the apparent age of the relics. Then, over the coming decades, archaeological finds in other countries established a timeline in evolution that left Piltdown Man with nowhere to hide – he just couldn’t have existed. People took another look at the bones. Material testing showed that the cranium was human, but only about 500,000 years old – a mere whippersnapper in evolutionary terms. The jaw, it turned out, was from an orang-utan and the tooth came from a chimp. It was as if a fight had broken out in a zoo. The animal bones found beside the skull weren’t even British. But what exposed the skull as a deliberate hoax was chemical testing that showed it had been stained with chromium compounds and the teeth artificially rubbed down to imitate a pattern close to normal human wear.

No one is sure who created the hoax, but in 1953
The Sussex Express
ran an article which read: ‘Mrs Florence Padgham, now of Cross-In-Hand, remembers that in 1906, aged thirteen, her father gave Charles Dawson a skull, brown with age, no lower jaw bone. Dawson is supposed to have said, “You’ll hear more about this, Mr Burley.”’

The lasting importance of Piltdown Man is the precise opposite of its original importance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was cited by Darwinian evolutionists as evidence that Creationism was based on a
myth. Now it is cited by Creationists as evidence that Darwinian Evolution is a hoax.

In 2000 a letter was discovered that showed that brave, heroic Scott of the Antarctic was really a fool, largely responsible for his own fate. It was written by one Lieutenant Edward Evans, a navigator who was part of Scott’s attempt to reach the South Pole. He reveals that part of the reason for Scott’s failure was that he insisted on dragging scientific and geological specimens and records with him to the Pole and back. Evans and the others had quietly suggested perhaps he would like to leave them at the base camp and collect them on the way back, especially since they were already short on food and things were looking pretty bleak, but they were rebuffed.

Evans had accompanied Robert Scott to within 150 miles of the Pole, at which point Evans and two others turned back. In his letter, he described what happened: ‘I had a narrow squeak, thank God I was not included in the advance party. It seems to me extraordinary that they stuck to all their records & specimens. We dumped ours at the first check. I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores, not eatable. Apparently Scott did not. His sledge contained 150lbs of trash, he ought to have left it, pushed on and recovered the specimens and records this year.’

Scott and the advance party reached the Pole only to discover sneaky Norwegian Roald Amundsen had already
been there and left his flag. They trekked back, half of them dying on the way. When Scott expired, he was only 11 miles from a big food store – without the scientific equipment weighing them down, he would almost certainly have made it.

On the way back to base camp, Evans developed scurvy, but he survived and eventually commanded the Australian Navy.

Labs are supposed to be clean environments that prevent contamination of biological samples. So when Alexander Fleming one day left a petri dish containing staphylococcus bacteria – which you really don’t want to get too close to – beside an open window it was bad practice. But he noticed that some of the mould spores which had flown in and were now growing in the dish were killing the nearby bacteria. For a while he called the substance ‘mould juice’ but he soon moved on to ‘penicillin’.

‘When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928 I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did,’ he observed later, with his trademark modesty.

In 1930 a young RAF officer designed the world’s first jet aircraft engines. Frank Whittle was only 22 when he
patented the design and handed the idea to the Air Ministry. Not only did the Ministry take no action, it also failed to classify such a useful military tool. Ten years later both Italy and Germany had jet aircraft, beating Britain to the goal.

Inventor Percy Shaw was driving home from the Old Dolphin pub in Clayton Heights through the Yorkshire fog one night when he suddenly saw the glint of a pair of cat’s eyes through the gloom. He swerved to avoid the moggy and realised that in so doing he had probably just saved his life – the cat was sitting on the fence along the side of the mountain road and, had he not turned sharply, he might otherwise have gone right off the side. He patented his design for reflectors embedded in the road surface and soon they were being installed all over the world.

As Shaw grew older, he had all the carpets and furniture taken out of his house and kept three televisions on at all times – one tuned to BBC1, one on BBC2 and one on ITV. All had the sound muted.

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were never meant to be the first men to reach the top of Mount Everest. They were the back-up team to the completely forgotten pair Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, who had been selected
for the honour by the team leader, Colonel John Hunt. Bourdillon was chosen because he had designed the breathing equipment that they all relied on.