FRANCIS BUCKLAND

Food

GROTESQUE GOURMAND

Olivier Woodes-Farquharson discovers that there is a happy medium between saving and eating every animal possible – at least, there was if you were Francis Buckland, a scientist whose confusing legacy hid a greater contribution to ecological thinking than was first apparent

ir David Attenborough is on screen, inform-

Sing us of the charming quirks and perilous life challenges of the animal beside him, which happens to be, say, a shrew. In his inimitable tone, he lovingly discusses its reproductive cycle, its mating habits, and more. And then, without pausing from his monologue, he picks up the creature, gently throttles it, pops it into a frying pan for a few minutes, before casually telling us in detail how it tastes. It is a scene that is unlikely to play out anytime soon. But incongruous as these two behaviours of naturalist and omnivore seem to us now, they were two halves of the same walnut to Victorian oddball Francis Buckland. Much as he would love to have been remembered as a fisheries expert and “While other young children would ride a hobbyhorse, Francis instead happily made do with riding the corpses of dead crocodiles. His first forays into proper natural history – at least as he saw it – was by sampling different animal urines and gradually being able to distinguish each one at blind tastings”

“Moving to a new home near Euston Station gave Buckland extra pleasure, as it put him within relative proximity of London Zoo. He ensured that he had good contacts there, who would tip him off if an animal were soon to shuffle off its mortal coil, giving Buckland a chance to put the oven on”

scientist, instead we now think of him overwhelmingly as keeper of a ludicrous and ever-changing menagerie, who would eat pretty much anything which once had a pulse.

Born on 17th December 1826, Francis Trevelyan Buckland was fortunate enough to grow up within the confines of Christ Church College, Oxford. Unquestionably it was his father William, future Dean of Westminster and one of the godfathers of geology, who instilled in him his bizarre eating habits. Buckland junior’s childhood was one where mice were served up on buttered toast as an afternoon snack, while Buckland senior experimented with eating boiled mole – ‘ghastly’ – and what he believed to be the worst dish that he had ever tried: stewed bluebottles.

The lunch menu at Francis Trevelyan Buckland’s house

Theirs was a household where the dining table would have chunks of lava from Mount Etna in one corner and lizard faeces in another. While other young children would be pleased to ride a hobbyhorse, Francis instead happily made do with riding the corpses of dead crocodiles. His first forays into proper natural history – at least as he saw it – was by sampling different animal urines and gradually being able to distinguish each one at blind tastings.

Yet Buckland Junior would outdo his father in nonconformist behaviours with animals. Sent to board at Winchester School, and with an aversion to the school dinners, he kept a mini-zoo in his room to supplement his calorie intake, with squirrel pie, boiled hedgehog and mice in batter featuring regularly. He was told to cease these habits when classmates complained that he had left a dissected cat rotting under his bed. But the trend continued when he went back to Oxford to study, with his rooms being home to two monkeys, a jackal, an eagle and a sugar-loving bear called Tig. The less health-and-safety-conscious deans of the day seemed astonishingly to have accepted this as acceptable, right until the day when the eagle decided one Sunday to attend the morning Eucharist, launching its massive body around the church and providing harmonic screeches to the Te Deum which was already well underway. The monkeys, Jacko and Jenny, were barely better, biting almost anyone who approached – unsurprising when one considers that Buckland gave them beer every night and a glass of port on Sundays.

By this stage, the short, rotund but robustlybuilt and cigar-chomping Buckland had also chosen what would be his primary outfit for life: a bowler hat was usually perched on his heavy-set head, with an old flannel shirt largely hidden by trousers raised almost to his armpits by absurdly short braces. He loathed wearing shoes and boots unless absolutely necessary, so was invariably out and about barefoot. It made for quite a sight among the usually quite conservative dreaming spires of Oxford.

Yet he didn’t shine at university, with pure academia proving to be too constraining for his bohemian instincts. He struggled to complete his essays, and was likely the only person to have ever told his teacher – with no hint of irony – that his

marmoset ate his homework. His love of pulling animals apart being clear, it was perhaps no surprise that he chose instead to become a surgeon, enrolling at St George’s Hospital in London. Surgery remained a deeply unpleasant and hideously unsanitary business at the time, but his gentleness and jolly demeanour made him popular with patient and fellow surgeon alike.

In parallel, being a natural showman, Buckland was now selling himself as an expert in natural history, giving talks on ‘nature’s curiosities’, with audiences at his lectures lapping up his ‘fascinating facts’, which, as one biographer wryly observed, were more fascinating than factual. Unsurprisingly, he drew the ire of a certain Charles Darwin – his polar opposite in terms of scientific method and humour – who found him vulgar and coarse: ‘He was incited more by a craving for notoriety, which sometimes made him act like a buffoon, than by a love of science’. Buckland, in turn, made it clear wherever possible that he thought that Darwin’s new-fangled Theory of Evolution was codswallop. Buckland was a man of action, not philosophical thought, so he immersed himself instead with publishing popular ‘science’ articles with titles such as The author poisoned by a cobra – a narrow escape, The head of poacher shot dead, and A queer mode for dislodging a newt from a man’s stomach. Ludicrous nonsense, thought Darwin, yet conspicuously it was Buckland to whom the great man turned to verify a claim that a dog and a lion had successfully bred in a remote corner of Russia.

Moving to a new home near Euston Station gave Buckland extra pleasure, as it put him within relative proximity of London Zoo. He ensured that he had good contacts there, who would tip him off if an animal were soon to shuffle off its mortal coil, giving Buckland a chance to put the oven on. ‘Cooked a viper for luncheon’ he casually remarked in his diary, adding that he supplemented it with elephant trunk’s soup which, despite considerable boiling, still left the trunk itself inedible. When the zoo’s panther died, he managed somehow to persuade the curator to dig it up and send him some panther chops, which, to his surprise – but perhaps not to ours – ‘were not very good’. Buckland was the only happy person in London when fire ravaged the zoo’s giraffe house, as it would provide him with weeks’ worth of pre-roasted giraffe, which tasted, according to the guests at one of his famed dinner parties, similar to boa constrictor.

Buckland’s lack of genuine understanding of nature’s balance led him, in 1860, to formalise his zoophagic tendencies and become a founding member of one of the strangest initiatives, even by the standards of Victorian Britain: The Acclimatization Society. It was his belief – shared, it seems, with a few others – that the UK’s rising post-industrial population needed nourishing with new and cheaper sources of meat. What better, he figured, than to introduce yak, bison, kangaroos and reindeer to Britain? He envisioned ‘…troops of eland gracefully galloping over our greensward, and herds of kudus and other representatives of the antelope family which are so numerous in Africa’. Yet most failed to breed, and capybara steaks weren’t the juiciest. The one critter that did succeed in repopulating in vast numbers after introduction was the grey squirrel, which has remained the scourge of parks, bird feeders and red squirrels ever since.

The 1862 annual dinner of the Society had a huge menu including roast curassow and deer sinew soup, all leading up to the one that Buckland was most excited about: Japanese sea slug. ‘They are said to be the most succulent and pleasant food, not unlike the green fat of turtle’, wrote Buckland in his diary, his mouth watering in Pavlovian anticipation. The next day’s entry was less positive: ‘It tasted like something between calf’s head jelly and the contents of a glue pot’. But one positive development did occur from this lunatic venture, namely the establishment of trout, perch and salmon fisheries and rearing ponds, with the first hatchery set up in his house in Albany Street.

Buckland selflessly put his money into founding The Museum of Economic Fish Culture in South Kensington, impressing none other than Queen Victoria. She, in turn, invited him to her Windsor home at Frogmore where, we hope, he was

“Buckland selflessly put his money into founding The Museum of Economic Fish Culture in South Kensington, impressing none other than Queen Victoria. She, in turn, invited him to her Windsor home at Frogmore where, we hope, he was coerced into wearing shoes”

coerced into wearing shoes. Around this time, he managed somehow to find a wife, Hannah Papps, who displayed near-industrial levels of patience in tolerating her husband’s idiosyncrasies, not least when his pet monkey Jacko died, Buckland ensuring that he would not be forgotten by having him skinned and turned into a tablecloth.

This more realistic and constructive line of fishery work led to him being appointed Inspector of HM Fisheries in 1867, where his developing knowledge, boundless energy and endless experimenting ensured that he made life more comfortable for salmon in particular, building salmon ladders in every corner of the country to help them negotiate weirs and other obstructions. Many parliamentary Acts were subsequently passed as a direct result of Buckland’s reports, resulting in better quality water for fish and human alike. He used the lengthy railway journeys as a chance to write these reports, guaranteed not to be disturbed, for by now his luggage and his very personage stank so remorselessly fishy that he was invariably given a carriage to himself.

But Buckland’s lack of self-care sadly proved to be an eccentricity too far. He seemed superficially ambivalent when wading, year in year out, barechested through icy rivers. Even in the harshest winters, he would merely rub himself in hair oil and don a supposedly waterproof suit, which itself would usually freeze solid. Once, when challenged on why he was sitting half naked on an opentopped London bus, he simply responded: “I like to get wet through, and the harder it rains or blows the more I enjoy my ride.” Such a positive embrace of what others would deem a deep irritation was undoubtedly charming but, being an asthmatic and heavy smoker, this behaviour could only end one way. In January 1879 his lungs enflamed and haemorrhaged, leaving him near bedridden for months, during which time he wrote more ‘scientific’ insights. Then, nearly recovered by November, he promptly went out in a huge Norfolk snowstorm in utterly inappropriate clothing.

By now he had dropsy, bronchitis and gradually failing heart and kidneys. The end was near, yet this extraordinary and possibly slightly insane man seemed unperturbed, and wrote in his will: ‘God is so good, so very good to little fishes. I do not believe he would let their inspector suffer shipwreck at last. I am going on a long journey where I think I shall see a great many curious animals… this journey I must go alone’. Sweet release finally occurred on 19th December 1880, when Buckland was still only 54.

Buckland’s legacy remains a complicated if entertaining one. His left-field takes on anatomy and natural history are so far from modern scientific thinking that he is seen by some as an embarrassing showman. Yet this perhaps misses the greater point. Buckland’s fisheries work alone forms the basis of global fish husbandry, and his genuine appreciation of nature’s bounty, either as something to interact with or to roast and scoff with gravy, demonstrates the first green shoots of ecological thinking in what was then a desert, as far as nature was concerned. And which of us now wouldn’t, given half a guilty chance, try a piece of Buckland’s rhinoceros pie? The man himself described it as ‘like very ancient, very strong beef’, which is exactly what some of us pay a fortune for at Waitrose. n

“God is so good, so very good to little fishes. I do not believe he would let their inspector suffer shipwreck at last. I am going on a long journey where I think I shall see a great many curious animals… this journey I must go alone”