Issues

Edinburgh built its commercial reputation on banks, biscuits, books and beer. I used to know my bank manager well, but now my friendliest point of contact is a hole in the wall. Fortunately I have had happier experiences with biscuits, books and beer. You might find this erratic progress of interest.

I finished my geological studies in Glasgow University in 1946. Sir Arthur Trueman, Head of Geology and about to become Chairman of the UGC, offered me the job of Baxter Research Demonstator in the department at a salary of £120 p.a. Manna! He added that I should do research and gave me Charles Elton’s book on Animal Ecology to read. ‘Craig, it might give you some ideas’. And that is how I started work on palaeoecology. Originally I had intended to become a chemist, but dull chemistry and inspired geology helped to change my mind.

Biscuits

Neville George, formerly Professor at Swansea, succeeded Trueman. Within a few months he said to me ‘Craig, there is a job going at Edinburgh. Go and talk to Professor Holmes’. I did. Holmes outlined the job in his oak-panelled room in the Grant Institute of Geology and then Dr Finlay, the retiring palaeontologist, showed me his three dedicated laboratories, his very own dark room, and the fossil collections. After lunch – staple post-war fare of sausages, potatoes and processed peas cooked by his wife Dr Doris Reynolds - Holmes offered me the Lectureship in Palaeontology. No advertising, no application, no short leet. My . . .

It is not every year that we cross the threshold of a New Millennium! For reasons unknown, governments around the World decided that when midnight struck on the last day of 1999 we would move through this mystical timewarp. The Royal Greenwich Observatory would have preferred us to wait another year. Whichever, such an occasion does provide an opportunity for looking back in time and for trying to look ahead.

Inevitably, reminiscences are personal. However, the more I explored my thoughts the more I became aware that my most acute memories are not just personal, but are inextricably interwoven with apparently disparate events in the history of Scottish Geology. These have a bearing on local heroes, the path of the Industrial Revolution, Scottish lighthouses, a weather station on Ben Nevis, the Geological Society of Glasgow, Professors of Geology, Geological Survey maps, and concerns about climate change.

‘The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order’. Eudora Welty’s words are profoundly relevant. It is the interconnectedness of events with each other and with my most vivid personal recollections, that forms the basis for this Millennium article. Like the history of the Earth, the story of these events is written in rock. Initially, in a small piece of non-descript brownish-black rock picked up by a casual prospector 150 years ago in a field some 2 miles east of Armadale, West Lothian. This was originally thought to be coal . . .