by Mike Bruton
This was a difficult decision for Smith as he loved chemistry and, judging from his correspondence with other organic chemists, now stored in the Rhodes University Archive, he continued to show an active interest in the subject well into the 1950s. He also enjoyed interacting with students but realised that, if he pursued a research career in ichthyology, his teaching would probably fall away – in this he was right.
He had taught chemistry at Rhodes University College (RUC) for 24 years (1922–1946), six years longer than Cory (1904–1922), and two years longer than his subsequent ichthyology career would last (1946–1968). There was, however, considerable overlap in his two careers, as he first published on fishes in 1931 and continued to have an interest in chemistry until 1956. This overlap period therefore lasted for 25 years, more than half his active life span as a scientist.
JLB Smith and George Cory were, of course, not the only organic chemists in South Africa who went on to achieve fame in other fields. They also include Professor C van der Merwe Brink (President of the CSIR), Dr WS Rapson (Scientific Adviser to the Chamber of Mines) (Warren, 1977), Professor Reinhardt Arndt (President of the Foundation for Research Development) and Professor Christoph Garbers (President of the CSIR) (Mike Brown, pers. comm., 2017).
Smith’s life now became very complicated. On 30th September 1946 he resigned from the Department of Chemistry, but his resignation only took effect from 1st January 1947 and he then took nine months’ leave (partly unpaid) from the Chemistry Department in order to work full-time on fishes until his CSIR grant came through. On 16th May 1947 he was appointed Professor of Ichthyology by RUC, heading up a brand-new department, with the proviso, ‘though working in the Department of Zoology, Dr. Smith be independent of the Professor of Zoology’. Technically, from 16th May to 30th September 1947, he was simultaneously a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry (on leave) and a Professor of Ichthyology.
That same year the CSIR awarded Smith a Research Fellowship in Ichthyology and funds for travel and, later, for clerical assistance and publications. Rhodes University College appointed him as a Research Professor1 and provided equipment and accommodation in an old wood-and-iron building in Artillery Road that had been used as a military barracks during the South African War (1899–1902). Some of these buildings dated from 1828, nearly 120 years earlier, and they came in for criticism from an early historian of the university, Ronald Currey (1971):
‘The troops left for the front, and once more the Drostdy buildings, with the horrid recent additions, were left unoccupied. So they remained for the next five years. (Traces of the red-brick scourge, now decently shrouded in whitewash, are to be found tucked away in odd corners of the present, so different, buildings. The most significant of these remnants now houses the Ichthyology Department).’
It was a very humble habitat for the epochal scientific events that would unfold there over the next 22 years. According to Margaret Smith (1987), ‘It consisted of one room, then two, then the old Zoology building, when Zoology moved, housed the Department of Ichthyology for 25 years’. JLB Smith refused to abandon the old building as he said that it would be too time-consuming to leave but, after he died, ‘Rhodes was to supply a new building, as the other was too old, too cramped and a tinderbox’.
Margaret Smith was appointed as a Scientific Associate in the Department of Ichthyology, a position she held until after JLB’s death in January 1968. The funds provided by the CSIR and university were not sufficient, however, to cover all the costs of their numerous fish-collecting expeditions and JLB and Margaret had to raise further support, financially and in kind, from private donors and local officials in the countries they visited.
The original Department of Ichthyology in Artillery Road at Rhodes University College.
The CSIR’s research grant to Smith of £800 per annum included no pension or other benefits. At the same time, he lost the government pension that was due to him after 25 years of university teaching as he had resigned before reaching retirement age, and refused to claim that he had retired from teaching on medical grounds. This combination of circumstances would cause financial stress to the Smiths in later years and even forced them to send many letters to angling clubs asking them to provide financial assistance for their research. Rhodes University College, too, was having financial problems; it nearly went bankrupt in the late 1940s due to the global depression, the aftermath of the Second World War and an internal crisis (Gon, 2001; Maylam, 2017).
The research grant to Smith by the fledgling CSIR was one of the best investments they ever made. Another, equally far-sighted investment made by the CSIR at the time was to the Telecommunications Research Laboratory (TRL) at the University of the Witwatersrand. One of its staff, Trevor Wadley, arguably became South Africa’s greatest inventor, our own ‘Thomas Edison’. 2
South Africa’s science and technology glitterati during the 1940s and 1950s also included HJ van der Bijl (1887–1948, establishment of Eskom and Iscor, co-inventor of the thermionic valve) and Dr JH van Eck (1887–1948, establishment of Eskom, Iscor, Sasol and the Industrial Development Corporation). JLB Smith knew, and was admired by, all of them.
In October 1946 Smith wrote to the CSIR, informing them that he intended to resume his search for the coelacanth off East Africa. They approved the idea in principle and appointed a committee (to JLB’s horror) to plan the way forward. Smith, of course, wanted to hunt for the coelacanth alone but the ‘powers that be’ had more grandiose ideas for a comprehensive oceanographic expedition, with the capture of a coelacanth being only part of the objective. When this idea proved to be too expensive, Smith reminded them of his simpler and less expensive plan, but eventually the whole initiative was ‘bureaucratised’ out of existence.
1It would be 10 years before another South African institution (the South African Museum in Cape Town) would create a full-time post for an ichthyologist (Gon, 2002).
2Wadley had served in the Signal Corps during the Second World War and made major contributions to the development of radar, building on the work of Basil Schonland (1896–1972), then Director of the Bernard Price Institute for Geophysical Research at the University of the Witwatersrand (Bruton, 2010, 2017), who would later establish the CSIR and become Chancellor of Rhodes University. Wadley invented the Wadley Loop (a unique circuit for cancelling frequency drift); one of the first practical broadband radios in the world; the Ionosonde (for probing the ionosphere with radio waves); the first crystal-controlled radio in the world that could be set to a consistent frequency; a Transistorised Receiver (which is still a very popular radio receiver among radio hams) and a Rack-Mounted Receiver (which was extensively used by the BBC for its international radio broadcasts) (Bruton, 2010, 2017). Most importantly, he invented the Radio Tellurometer, the most accurate distance-measuring device in the world for over 30 years, which was used in over 60 countries and earned South Africa massive amounts of foreign exchange (Bruton, 2010, 2017).
CHAPTER 12
Grit and determination
The epic East African expeditions
JLB SMITH had long wanted to write a book on South African sea fishes for anglers but realised that he did not have the funds to publish it. In 1945 an interesting series of events led to the breakthrough that he had been seeking. He had the good fortune to engage with Hugh le May, who first came to South Africa from England during the South African War and made his fortune in the mining industry; he eventually settled in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique. A keen angler, Le May was frustrated, as Smith had earlier been, by the fact that there were no good books available for him to identify the fishes that he caught. Having happened on a willing author, he offered to finance the research and production of such a guide to fishes. This collaboration between Smith and his benefactor Hugh le May was to launch a classic of South African natural history.
Smith realised that it was pointless trying to produce a book on ‘South African’ fishes alone, as fish do not respect political boundaries and many species
along the south-east coast of Africa have their origins and main populations further north, off East Africa or in the western Indo-Pacific region. If he was to resolve the taxonomic relationships of southern African fishes, and understand their distributions, he would need to have a better understanding of East African fishes as well. Furthermore, he knew that the Western Indian Ocean and its islands had been subjected to very little research at that time, and he had also predicted that the main population of coelacanths would be found there. All these factors pointed to the need for him to extend his research effort into East Africa.
The Smiths and the Le Mays formed a special relationship, and Hugh le May’s son Basil joined the Smiths on their second expedition to Mozambique in June–July 1946. He proved to be a good field-worker, and also an excellent entertainer. After the expedition JLB wrote to him, thanking him for his help and recommending that he should pursue an acting career in Hollywood (Gon, 2001). Three years later Smith named a new species of moray eel after him, Lycondontis lemayi (now synonymised with Gymnothorax flavimarginatus), ‘for his appearance in party dress at the Smiths’ house in Lourenço Marques!’
With the new Department of Ichthyology established (1947), and finances for a book on the fishes of the region now secured, the puzzle pieces were starting to fall into place and Smith immediately accelerated his programme for a series of intensive fish-collecting expeditions along the coasts of South and East Africa. These expeditions included the following:
•1946: Pondoland coast.
•1946: Southern Mozambique, Lourenço Marques and Delagoa Bay (now Maputo Bay).
•1948: Southern Mozambique, Inhaca Island to Bazaruto Island. In an article that Smith (1958) later wrote on the fishes of Inhaca Island, he commented ‘… we have identified more than five hundred and sixty species from around Inhaca, of which some two hundred and thirty known species had not previously been recorded from Southern Africa. We discovered there more than twenty new to science.’
•1949: Southern Mozambique, Inhaca Island, Machangulo, Ponte Torres and Ponte Abril.
•1950: Central and northern Mozambique, the first expedition north of 20°S, from Beira to the Lurio River, with Pinda Reef (14° 10’S, 40° 40’E) being their main target. On this expedition Margaret nearly died of food poisoning and they came within a whisker of being wrecked on Pinda Reef, yet they managed to collect and record large numbers of fishes (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969).
•1951: Northern Mozambique, including Mozambique Island, Pinda Reef, Ibo and the Quirimbas Archipelago (Kerimba Islands) from Porto Amelia to Cabo Delgado. During this trip, the Smiths traversed very wild territory and encountered strong winds, treacherous currents and a tidal ebb and flow that exceeded four metres. There were no telecommunications or food supply-lines, and drinking water was extremely scarce. At Pinda they stayed in the famous lighthouse (the tallest in East Africa) for several weeks, also using it as a makeshift laboratory. Later in the trip they lived aboard a stout little diesel-engined wooden cabin cruiser, or vedeta, provided by the Portuguese authorities. They were joined on this expedition by their 13-year-old son, William, and by photographer Peter Barnett from Durban. They were constantly in fear of marauding prides of man-eating lions, as described further on (Barnett, 1953; Bell, 1969).
Peter Barnett and Margaret and JLB Smith enjoying a rustic meal on Ibo Island on the 1951 Mozambique expedition.
On this trip, Smith seriously contemplated doing the 200-kilometre open ocean journey from the African mainland to the Comoros in the little vedeta – an archipelago he had already identified as a possible site for the main coelacanth population (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969). ‘Whenever I planned any expedition and studied charts, always my eyes and mind would stray to the Comores, those mysterious blobs in the blankness of the seas, like drops left behind from a dripping Madagascar torn from the body of Africa’ (Smith, 1956). Standing at Cabo Delgado one day, JLB said to Margaret, ‘Come on, lass, let’s go to the Comoros’.
Even though he had no compass or detailed chart (the Admiralty charts he had with him were printed in 1877!), he reckoned that he would be able to navigate there and back using his watch and the sun and stars, a hare-brained scheme for such a practical man. The seas around the Comoros are treacherous, with vicious currents and strong winds, and it would have been a hazardous and probably calamitous trip in a small boat. Fortunately, Margaret’s common sense prevailed and Smith had to abandon his absurd plan and admit that the odds were against them. Throughout their many expeditions Margaret’s persuasive influence and common sense, always urging JLB to do the sensible thing, is obvious, and it probably saved his life on many occasions. She was, indeed, the power behind the throne, the rational mind when the sometimes flaky scientist became frenetic, and a strong support when the man who often questioned his own worth needed a shoulder to lean on (Bruton, 2017).
•1952: Zanzibar, Pemba Island and Kenya. Margaret took an English-Swahili phrase book with her to make communication easier. These coasts had never been explored by scientists before and the local inhabitants showed great interest in the Smiths’ strange endeavours. In Zanzibar, JLB solved the riddle of ‘a large water snake’ in a reservoir by identifying it as a giant longfin eel, Anguilla mossambicus.
•1952: South African coast at Plettenberg Bay and Knysna, and the rugged coast from the KwaZulu-Natal border to just north of Port St Johns, covered on foot. They also surveyed several previously unexplored estuaries.
•1953: Southern Mozambique, including Inhaca, Inhassoro, Bazaruto, Vilanculos, Ponte de Barra Falsa, Inhambane, Vila Joao Belo and the Bay of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo Bay). More than 80 new distribution records and several species new to science were collected. One of the reasons why Smith decided to visit Bazaruto was because a traditional Mozambican fisherman had once told him that, to the south of Bazaruto, he had caught a huge, oily fish with soft flesh and no proper skeleton, and with the same large scales and queer fins as illustrated in a reward leaflet that Smith had issued to encourage fishermen and officials to bring any coelacanth catches to his attention (Bell, 1969). After searching in vain for coelacanths at Bazaruto, Smith concluded that, if one had been caught there, it would probably have been a stray from further north.
•Seychelles and the islands and atolls between the Seychelles and the African coast, including Aldabra, ending in Dar es Salaam. On this trip Smith joined local fishermen in a dug-out outrigger canoe (galawa) for a day of deep-water fishing in treacherous seas using traditional long lines, and caught several deep-water snappers that were previously unknown from the African coast. William Smith, now 16 years old, was part of this expedition.
•1956: Their last expedition was to Pinda in Mozambique. This expedition was initiated by the colonial Mozambique government, which invited Smith to carry out experimental fishing in northern Mozambique using the line-fishing method he had learned in Shimoni, Kenya, on the previous expedition (Smith, 1957). Smith used the opportunity and the vessels provided by the authorities to collect shallow-water reef fishes.
Pinda Lighthouse, the tallest in East Africa, where the Smiths set up a camp and laboratory on their 1951 Mozambique expedition.
All these expeditions were instigated and organised by JLB Smith in the manner of a latter-day Percy Harrison Fawcett, the British geographer who forsook the comforts of English gentility in order to lead exploratory expeditions into the jungles of Amazonia in Brazil between 1906 and 1925. The words used by Percy Fawcett’s son, Brian, to describe his father apply equally to JLB Smith:
‘“Fawcett the dreamer”, they called him. Perhaps they were right. So is any man a dreamer whose active imagination pictures the possibilities of discovery beyond the bounds of accepted scientific knowledge. It is the dreamer who is the investigator, and the investigator who becomes the pioneer. … True, he dreamed; but his dreams were built upon reason, and he was not the man to shirk the effort to turn theory into fact’ (Fawcett & Fawcett, 1953).
The various fish-col
lecting expeditions that the Smiths carried out would not have been contemplated by ordinary people. They covered vast areas of unknown and hostile terrain where transport, logistics, food and water supplies and communications were a nightmare, yet they performed first-class research and brought back to Grahamstown large collections of carefully labelled fishes, many of them also meticulously illustrated.
Margaret Smith, Peter Barnett and JLB Smith on the 18-metre motor launch loaned to them by the Portuguese authorities that served as a temporary home, laboratory and artist’s studio during the 1951 expedition to northern Mozambique.
A photographer/writer, Peter Barnett from Durban, accompanied the Smiths on their 1951 expedition to northern Mozambique; it was a life-changing experience for him. He provides valuable insights into the hardships and tensions that accompanied this expedition in his colourful memoir, Sea Safari with Professor Smith (1953). After a year of exchanging letters with JLB Smith about his possible participation in the expedition, Barnett was granted an interview with Smith in Grahamstown. He overnighted in a local hotel; then, puffing away on his pipe, waited outside the hotel the next morning for Margaret Smith to collect him. Margaret arrived in a brightly-polished vintage Plymouth. ‘An even-featured, sturdy woman of about thirty-five got out, and marched briskly into the hotel. A moment later she reappeared, patently looking for someone. I ventured a cautious “Good morning”’. Within minutes she had asked him to put his pipe out as, ‘The professor does not like the smell of smoke in the car’.