The Fishy Smiths

by Mike Bruton

  ‘Across the short passage from Mrs Smith’s door … was a little room. For a short while, a beautiful girl called Felicity Mather-Pike worked in this room. When she was shown her workplace, she asked Mrs Smith if she could pretty it up a bit, as she found the stark white not to her liking. Felicity and her current boyfriend spent the weekend painting the cupboards red and white and putting up pretty curtains with a pattern to match. On the next work day, we all held our breath, but nothing happened for a few days. Then came a day when the Prof had to go into Felicity’s room for something. “This is a scientific research laboratory, not a lady’s boudoir” he stormed at the top of his voice. “Who gave you permission to paint this room? And can I smell perfume?” Felicity’s replies were inaudible and what the outcome of the Prof’s rage was, I can’t remember, but I certainly quaked in my shoes that day. And yet he was always unfailingly kind to me and I had no fear of him. Provided one did one’s best and didn’t do anything silly, he was tolerant.

  ‘Some of the respectful fear people had for the Prof was instilled in them by Mrs Smith. She would say, “The Professor wouldn’t like …; The Professor likes …; the Professor gets angry when …” and so we learnt to be careful and keep out of his way and treat him with the utmost respect.

  ‘I was paid a shilling a day as a school girl, and at the end of the holidays the Prof would call me into his office to pay me. One pay day he asked me what I intended to do with the money and seemed surprised when I said that I was going to buy as many Mozambique fish stamps as the money would allow. I was so proud of those stamps because the Smiths were instrumental in getting the Mozambique government to issue them.

  ‘Mrs Smith had a rich and throaty voice and said that she was very interested in music (I was a music student) and would love to sing in a choir, but she had devoted her life to helping the Professor with his work and wouldn’t do anything which took her away from that. She knew how to project her voice and told me how she could call the Professor or fishermen across large stretches of water in Mozambique and make herself heard without shouting.

  ‘The Smiths had a house in Gilbert Street … The side of the house furthest from the street faced a quarry, and the Prof was afraid of flying rocks damaging his walls, so the whole side was faced with corrugated iron. People thought this was an expression of the Prof’s eccentricity, but it looked sensible to me.

  ‘Mrs Smith told me that as a child William wasn’t allowed toys. Boxes, blocks, wood, string, nails, tools, etc. were permitted, but no ready-made toys from a shop. He certainly wasn’t a deprived child though, and when he was older, he rigged up a working telephone between their house and the Hewson’s house down the road so his mother and Mary Hewson could chat without using the GPO lines’ (P Long, 1999).

  Glyn Hewson (unpublished memoir, Rhodes University Archive) also recalls the Department of Ichthyology in the early 1950s:

  ‘Through my school years I frequently visited the old Ichthyology Department. I loved it. Long, white walled and rambling with a wide verandah and no pretensions at all, it was filled with fascination. I remember a major part of it being a huge long room, like a small hall, subdivided by partitions. Communication was instant; voices merely floated over the tops of these divides. Not that there was a lot of chatting. Most communication was fairly direct and to the point, especially if it emanated from the inner sanctum at the far end of the huge room: the office and work space of the Professor.

  ‘Displays, photographs and maps adorned the partition walls – who did all the calligraphy labels and titling – Margaret Smith of course – just yet another talent she had taught herself! Can you have an affection for a distinctly unattractive smell? Certainly! A mere whiff of formalin and I am back there: walking between the shelves of fish steadily sorting, talking over a cup of tea, reading yet another pamphlet or book or press cutting on a display. Travelling the world.

  ‘Those press cuttings! One of the jobs which I had, as a twelve year old, in the time after the sensation of the coelacanth, was the sorting and compiling of all the news cuttings about the event. … There was a note of severity in Margaret Smith’s voice when she was talking to me about how they wanted to have the cuttings mounted in the files, “Remember Glyn, a cutting without a source is useless to us”. … She brought some through one morning and said with one of her infectious peals of laughter, “You must look at this, it’s wonderful, – the Professor loved it.” … And of course it was the now celebrated cartoon of the coelacanth addressing a bemused scientist against the background of key events of 1952 (upheavals in Korea, Malaya; the Cold War and Mau Mau) with the acerbic comment, “If this is the best you can do in 50,000,000 years, throw me back”.

  ‘Grahamstown boasts practically the oldest newspaper in the country: Grocott’s Daily Mail. Famous for its little printer’s blapses here and there. Intrinsically a part of the character of the publication. Very Grahamstonian. Very eccentric. Everybody wrote letters and made comments on ranges of issues. Including JLB Smith. Especially while on expeditions, we would be regaled with letters detailing the news of what was happening. With their constant focus around JLB, they did not lack egotism and often brought chuckles to my parents as they read about the adventures of “… the intrepid Professor and Mrs Smith”.

  ‘On another occasion when Grahamstown had one of its colossal forest fires on the Mountain Drive there were a number of people out fighting the fire. He wrote about it and commended the effort which had been made, but also commented, “I contemplated becoming involved, but decided that my hands were more valuable to Science than fighting fires”. That’s just the way he was: blunt, utterly focussed and unrelentingly prioritised. He had this gift though for stopping at moments and directing a question or a comment because he was interested, because in his own way he cared and made you worth his while. There was a sense of privilege in that. I asked him for a testimonial towards the end of my university career. It was written and delivered the next day: warm, affirmative and insightful. Margaret was that way too’ (Hewson, pers. comm., 2017).

  Grocott’s Daily Mail is more than a newspaper, it is an institution, the oldest continuously published family newspaper in South Africa. The letters and articles that JLB Smith published in Grocott’s (as well as in the Eastern Province Herald) covered a wide range of subjects. They included how to start a trout farm or make fish food from trawler waste, Japanese exploitation of South African tunny stocks, the exploits of Cousteau, how to settle an argument on the size reached by fishes, the electrical shocks produced by fishes, stonefish and lionfish venoms and their treatment, and how to sex a fish.

  He also wrote about the habits of sea urchins, how the weather affects fishing, whether fishes feel pain, how to treat spider, sea snake and mamba bites, unusual behaviour in octopuses, the danger posed by blaasops and button spiders, the biology of crabs and lobsters, traditional fishing methods and the economics of angling.

  Nor did he limit himself to matters ichthyological. He also wrote on race relations, how to determine whether a watermelon is ripe, the chemical properties of milk, and the dangers of pasteurised milk. It seems that the citizens of Grahamstown had an unquenchable appetite for anything that Smith wrote.

  JLB was even happy to share with readers of Grocott’s his method of packaging and sending fishes worldwide: ‘Each fish is wrapped in soft paper, then with cloth damped with formalin, and all were packed in a special flat tin made and soldered by Messrs Cockcrofts of Bathurst Street’. He also reported that one parcel of preserved mullet that he sent to Australia in February 1950 had taken two years to arrive but that the receiver found, ‘The specimens are in excellent condition, so well packed that they have remained damp throughout this long period in transit’. All these articles are preserved as press cuttings in the Rhodes University Archive.

  Like many Grahamstonians (this author included), JLB Smith was himself an enthusiastic reader of Grocott’s and insisted that it should be sent to him while he was away on expeditions
in remote parts of East Africa. In an article sent to the newspaper from Ibo in northern Mozambique, published on 4th July 1951, he explained,

  ‘To reach us the paper goes by train to Lourenço Marques, then by steamer to Port Amelia. From there it is taken by native runner 60 miles through country teeming with crocodiles, lions, leopards, elephants, buffalo and other pests. Once opposite the island the carrier waits for low tide and wades in all about 7 miles from one mangrove swamp to another until he reaches here.’

  In another Grocott’s article dated 2nd July 1956 Smith is sanguine about the criticism levelled at him by the British palaeontologist EI White, and refers to two statements he had written in the Foreword to Old Fourlegs (in anticipation of criticism), ‘I do not mind. No man is a god’, and ‘That criticism will serve the useful purpose of making it plain to the man in the street that Old Fourlegs is not a scientific treatise but a human story, which is all to the good’.

  In late 1951/early 1952 blasting took place in the quarry near to the Smiths’ house in Gilbert Street, which resulted in dust and even rocks falling on their house. One rock fell right through the roof, but fortunately no-one was injured. JLB, drawing on his knowledge of explosives to support his arguments, mounted a vocal campaign through Grocott’s to force the quarry to operate safely. In an article published in the newspaper on 14th December 1951 he also wrote, ‘Freshly crushed silica dust is as slow and deadly as leprosy – worse, there is no cure for silicosis’. But he faced legal hurdles because when the plans for the house in Gilbert Street were approved on 27th March 1951, there was a condition that stated, ‘Council cannot accept responsibility for any damage that may be caused to the property to be erected because of its close proximity to the municipal quarry’.

  After 1957 JLB and Margaret Smith did not mount any further expeditions together beyond the shores of South Africa and settled, for the first time since their marriage 20 years earlier, into a semblance of a stable home life. An important role that Margaret played during this phase of JLB’s career was to create situations in which he could relax a little, take a break from his strenuous work schedule, and refresh his mind. It was not an easy task as JLB was driven by a fierce compulsion that few could comprehend. He acquired a series of dogs, all named after fish, first Snoekie, then Sharky, Tiger and Mako, and eventually Marlin, a terrier that Margaret described as a ‘funny, chubby, ugly little dog’ (1976 SATV documentary), who became his constant companion and shadow to the end. Whenever JLB was on top of the world, Marlin would walk in front of him with his tail wagging, but when JLB was stressed or depressed, Marlin would walk behind him with his tail between his legs. Marlin would also go fishing with JLB, perched in the prow of his aluminium boat, Blikkie, or nestled in the bilges of his innovative, fold-up canvas boat, as they traversed Knysna Lagoon.

  Marlin in 1959, JLB’s faithful shadow and companion until the end.

  Although active fish collecting by the Smiths had ended, specimens still continued to pour into the Department of Ichthyology, testimony to the enthusiastic network of anglers, aquarists, divers, holidaymakers and beachcombers whom they had inspired to become amateur fish collectors. This collecting network was instigated, not only by the famous Sea Fishes book, but also by the many popular articles in magazines and newspapers, in English, Afrikaans and Portuguese, that JLB Smith published, as well as his frequent radio broadcasts.

  JLB Smith speeding across Knysna Lagoon in his aluminium boat, Blikkie, with Marlin in the prow.

  As Margaret wrote in 1969, ‘It [JLB’s books and popular articles] turned hundreds of South Africans into amateur ichthyologists, continually on the watch for interesting and valuable specimens which they report or send in from all points of South Africa’s long coastline’. In 1957 the South African Minister of Posts & Telegraphs even granted the special privilege of free postage of all fish specimens sent to the Department of Ichthyology! This public tradition of donating fish specimens to ‘Ichthyology’ in Grahamstown, continues today (although at a lower intensity) and has resulted in the discovery of numerous new distribution records and new species, genera and even families of fishes.

  Margaret Smith sorting fishes in the congested Collection Room of the original Department of Ichthyology in 1966.

  One remarkable success of this tradition was the discovery in Port Elizabeth of a new species, genus, family and suborder of stingrays by a journalist from the Eastern Province Herald, Dave Bickell, who wrote under the pen name Izaak. JLB Smith had previously corresponded with Bickell about a vessel for his coelacanth search in July 1953 and about the possible establishment of a marine reserve off Port Elizabeth in June 1967.

  The sixgill stingray, Hexatrygon bickelli, found by Dave Bickell.

  Bickell described his remarkable discovery in an ICHTHOS article in 1986:

  ‘It happened to my wife and [me] while walking along the Summerstrand tideline one evening. We spotted a stingray, and my first thought was to move it out of harm’s way in case someone injured a foot on its spike. When I turned it over I saw it to be something that I had never seen before. I checked Smith’s book and could not find a description of it, so I contacted the Port Elizabeth Museum, and Malcolm Smale collected it and sent it to the J.L.B. Smith Institute. It proved to be not only a new species but a new family of stingrays. Professor Margaret Smith and Dr Phil Heemstra who worked on it kindly gave it my name (Hexatrygon bickelli).

  ‘I often wonder how many scientific treasures are lost because the finder has not taken the trouble to check it in Smith’s book. … When Smith’s book was first published in 1949 it was hailed by scientists and laymen alike as a masterpiece. A big achievement of the book was its bringing closer together the angler and the scientist. The angler realised how much his alertness could benefit science. So he kept his eyes open to help add to man’s knowledge of the sea and its creatures. And Professor J.L.B. Smith was the right man to be at the head of things. His enthusiasm and immediate reaction to any specimen sent in, no matter how valuable or mundane, was a great incentive to anglers to look for more. … Our present knowledge of the life in the water around us owes much to the inspiration the non-scientist has derived from The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa and the living memory of the great man who produced it’ (Bickell, 1986).

  The sixgill stingray, as found by Bickell, is a flabby, heavy-bodied fish that is unique among rays in having six pairs of gill slits rather than five. It grows up to 1.7 metres long, has a rounded pectoral fin disc and a long, triangular and flexible snout that it probably uses to probe for food in the bottom sediment. Its jaws are greatly protrusible to allow it to capture buried prey, and it has a tiny brain. Specimens have since been caught in the South China Sea and off Hawai’i, and it is thought to inhabit upper continental slopes and seamounts at depths from 500 to 1,120 metres. It gives live birth, with litters of two to five pups. An extinct relative, Hexatrygon senegasi, lived during the Middle Eocene (49–37 million years ago) (Heemstra & Smith, 1980; Smith & Heemstra, 1986).

  The discovery of the sixgill stingray is a remarkable example of the successful collaboration between laymen and ichthyologists. From a taxonomic point of view it is an even more astonishing discovery than the coelacanth as it is regarded as the most primitive of all known stingrays and required the establishment of a new suborder and family (Hexatrygonoidei and Hexatrygonidae; Smith & Heemstra, 1986) to accommodate it, whereas Latimeria chalumnae required only a new family (Latimeriidae) that fitted into an existing suborder and order (Coelacanthiformes).

  Other rare fish that were sent to JLB Smith by Dave Bickell included an onderbaadjie (Lampadena hectoris, now Lampanyctodes hectoris; December 1956), redtail filefish (Pervagor scanleni, now Pervagor melanocephalus; December 1957; initially named after AR Scanlon of Rhodes University) and a Cape sandlance (Ammodytes capensis, now Gymnammodytes capensis; June 1960).

  Another amateur whose association with Smith led to a contribution to science was Arland Read, son the late art entrepreneur Everard
Read. Arland was a ‘gillie’ (fishing assistant) to JLB Smith as a 12-year old in Knysna. Thirteen years later he sent a fish that he had speared off Durban to Margaret Smith and received a typically positive response, ‘Your DERMATOLEPIS has been giving me plenty of trouble, but don’t worry it is always the most interesting things that give one the most trouble! … The species ALDABRENSIS has been known only from Aldabra, Mozambique Channel and now this specimen of yours. It is truly a remarkable achievement for you to have speared one of these so far south’ (MM Smith, in litt., 2.5.1968). For some reason, the Smiths always spelt fish species’ names in upper case in their letters.

  Cape sandlance, Gymnammodytes capensis.

  Margaret Smith developed a filing system in which the names of their individual and institutional contacts worldwide were carefully stored in alphabetical order, like a library catalogue. In their correspondence (now stored in the Rhodes University Archive) there are some strange letters. For instance, on 14th September 1960, JLB enquired from the District Surgeon in Elliotdale whether he could provide details on the death of a child who had ducked his head into a tidal pool ‘when a small fish shot into its mouth and became wedged in the throat, from which the child died before it could be got out’. In this letter he also asked the District Surgeon for any records of fatal injuries caused by devilfish [lionfish] stabs along that coast.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fishy correspondence

  One man’s fish is another man’s poisson

  THE SMITHS were famous for replying promptly to every letter that they received and also for thanking donors of fish specimens or photographs. On 22nd February 1958, JLB wrote to Mr J Davey of Umzinto: