The Incidental Tourist Read online

  Particularly intriguing is his description (in the second book) of the end times for the Hungarian aristocracy, who, deprived of any real power and mortally wounded economically by the contraction of their country with the demise of the old Empire, largely disappeared after the Nazi occupation. Fermor writes sensitively of fading elegance, creeping financial hardship, and a continued sense of responsibility and noblesse oblige tempered by the realisation of their ever-increasing irrelevance. He also relates that, because of the successive regime changes (including dominion by the Ottoman Turks), documentation is sparse and much of that (no doubt rich) history is irretrievably lost for the parts of Hungary and Romania that he traversed. We know a great deal more about the destruction of the Hungarian Jewish population: the Nazis were fanatic record keepers!

  Our tourist experience ended when the Szent-Györgyi celebration opened with a big reception in the City Hall. Having given no thought to the likely guest list, it was a great pleasure to catch up with George and Eva Klein, who trained (or influenced) many of the leading Swedish cancer biologists and immunologists of my generation during their long tenure at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute. Hungarian born and working as an eighteen-year-old research assistant in Budapest, George fled rather than board one of the trains that was transporting people to their new ‘homeland’ (the body pits and incinerators of Auschwitz for many) in the ‘eastern territories’. The seventy-fifth anniversary meeting went well with set piece talks from the Nobel laureates (sometimes historic but always polished) and other prominent scientists, lots of photograph taken, interviews with journalists, and accounts published in Hungarian in Hungarian newspapers. But, in some respects, that was the least interesting part of this visit to Hungary.

  CHAPTER 25

  Cats of consequence

  THOUGH I’M KNOWN AS a basic biomedical scientist/immunologist, the first decade of my professional life from the early 1960s was spent researching infections of domestic animals. After four years at Brisbane’s Animal Research Institute and not long married we moved to Britain where I worked as an experimental pathologist at the Moredun Research Institute, Edinburgh. My research there focused on a tick-born encephalitis of sheep (louping-ill) that’s active in the Scottish Highlands. I also reported diagnostic histopathology findings from brains in bottles of formalin, submitted by field officers of the Scottish Veterinary Investigation Service. That involved learning the highly specialised art and science of neuropathology from my boss, Dick Barlow, and my Cambridge University-trained colleague, Hugh Fraser.

  Yes, there is an art of neuropathology. Viewing the networks of lines, squiggles and dots in veteran Australian painter John Olsen’s colourful 2016 retrospective at the Ian Potter/National Gallery of Victoria, it looked to me (though maybe not to Olsen) like neural networks, resurrecting memories of those Edinburgh days. Peering down a high-powered binocular microscope at brain sections stained brightly with Cajal’s gold chloride (for astrocytes, the brain support cells), variants of silver stains (show the neurofibrillary tangles of Alzheimer’s disease) or luxol fast blue (for nerve sheath damage in demyelinating diseases like multiple sclerosis or MS) I could visualise the processes, networks and structures first described by the great Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Nobel Prize 1906). Cajal provided the first ‘wiring diagrams’ that suggested how nerve cells (neurons) connect, and was greatly credited by Australian neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles (Nobel Prize 1963) who, studying cats at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra (where I next went to work with mice, not cats), illuminated the electrical basis of neurotransmission. Because their eyes look forward like ours, cats have contributed enormously to our understanding of vision.

  Inferring the basis of human function and dysfunction from what happens with other mammalian species is central to the idea of One Health or, as it was called earlier, Comparative Medicine. Science is all about information exchange and the open publication of research data – my best papers from that time are in the Journal of Comparative Pathology. In the late 1960s, Dick, Hugh and I went regularly to the human medicine-dominated British Neuropathology Society conferences, where I first got to know the emerging MS researchers I would see regularly at various immunology meetings through the subsequent decades.

  Our other, regular science conference encompassed the work of those studying the diseases of domestic animals, including companion species like dogs and cats. Along with most of the other Moredun scientists, we headed south down the straight Roman road of the A68, then drove east for a little to attend the annual meeting of the Association of Veterinary Teachers and Research Workers (AVTRW) in the North Yorkshire resort town of Scarborough. Held in the massive Victorian Grand Hotel that was built to accommodate nineteenth century spa goers, Yorkshire wool barons and vacationers arriving via the then revolutionary rail network that linked all regions of Britain, the fully catered AVTRW event featured English breakfasts and heavy dinners that offered a major calorie blowout for the (mostly) trim and generally impecunious veterinary researchers. Added to that, the attendees who, on at least one occasion, met at the Grand in about half the numbers of the immediately preceding British Labour Party Conference, consumed at least twice as much beer. No doubt the need to be sober was a greater imperative for those manoeuvring in the political arena!

  From the aspect of Comparative Medicine, perhaps the most internationally significant research presented back then at the disease-oriented AVTRW conference was on feline leukaemia (a fatal condition of cats) from the Glasgow laboratory of Bill and Oz Jarret. Bill, who was the external examiner of my Edinburgh University PhD thesis, was a significant player in the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) Special Virus Cancer Program (SVCP) from 1964 to 1980, initiated as part of President Richard M Nixon’s ‘war on cancer’. While we’d known for decades that viruses cause some cancers (leukaemia and sarcomas) in birds, it was only when these findings were replicated in rabbits, mice, cats and cows (mammals like us) that the medical establishment took notice. Though the SVCP failed to establish that most human tumours are caused by viruses (killing off early ideas of cancer vaccines) it served to develop the cell culture and diagnostic technology that, with the leadership of Bob Gallo at the NCI and Pasteur Institute researchers Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, allowed rapid progression in the early 1980s when AIDS (caused by the distantly related HIV) seemingly came out of nowhere.

  At the time of its opening in 1867, The Grand was the largest hotel and the biggest brick building in Europe. Bulking high on the cliff over the beach, this great old lady has the distinction of being one of the few British buildings to be damaged by the Kriegsmarine (German navy) during the First World War. The battlecruisers Derfflinger and Seydlitz shelled the historic Scarborough Castle, the Grand Hotel (which took thirty hits) and the Lighthouse, then moved 40 kilometres north to damage Whitby Abbey and the active port of Hartlepool. In all, 137 civilians died. Targeting Scarborough and Whitby in 1914 made no obvious sense at the time, and the British used the raid for propaganda purposes. But it later emerged that Scarborough had three radio stations serving the Royal Navy.

  Poet and novelist Osbert Sitwell used the Scarborough raid and the Grand Hotel to explore the loss of Edwardian innocence in his first book, Before the Bombardment. Also a trenchant critic, Sitwell’s observation that ‘Poetry is like fish: if it’s fresh, it’s good; if it’s stale, it’s bad, and if you’re not certain, try it on the cat’ could well be in accord with the later instincts of some AVTRW experimentalists and may also reflect an early alimentary experience from his childhood years in Scarborough. And Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most famous of the wartime poets, spent some months recuperating from war wounds in a turret room overlooking the water at Scarborough’s Clarence Gardens (now The Clifton) Hotel. His first published poem ‘Miners’, reflecting on the ‘dark pits of war’, was written there. Owen left Scarborough for Ripon Barracks then, in March 1918, France. He was killed on 4 November, a week
before the Armistice.

  Some thirty years after my last visit, I was invited to speak at the 57th AVTRW meeting. The timing worked, as we had to be at another conference in Oxford immediately before that, Penny had never been there and I was curious to see Scarborough again. This time the meeting and accommodation was in the smaller (though still ornately Victorian) Royal Hotel. Built about the same time as the Grand, the Royal has the distinction of once being owned by Tom Laughton, the brother of the actor Charles Laughton, who memorably played Captain William Bligh (opposite Clark Gable’s Fletcher Christian) in the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty movie. The diminished venue reflected that the number of attendees was also much reduced, mirroring the fate of many ‘generalist’ scientific societies over the past decades. Now, a veterinary immunologist, for example, would likely use any travel budget to speak at the annual British Society of Immunology conference, and at one or more smaller, sub-specialist meetings in Asia, Europe or the United States.

  Accommodated in a pleasant room looking over the Atlantic, we didn’t walk out onto the balcony as it was covered in pigeon droppings. The Royal was clearly going through hard times and, in fact, there were fears it might disappear completely with a declaration of bankruptcy some years later. Fortunately it was rescued by the Britannia Budget Chain and, with some renovation, remains, I believe, a pleasant place to stay.

  The hospitality included a reception hosted by the Mayor and Mayoress and, from the people we spoke with, it was clear that dedicated locals were doing their utmost to promote Scarborough and the adjacent Yorkshire coast. I’d certainly like to go back and explore Whitby just to the north. But, having peaked as a resort town in the age of rail, the linked expansion of budget air travel and massive holiday complexes in warmer climates has meant that these old seaside locations have had to find an alternative focus. With many attractive, and relatively inexpensive detached houses and Victorian and Edwardian terraces, the London Telegraph has, for instance, rated Scarborough as a ‘Best for Beachcombers’ retirement location.

  We had a couple of days to spare and, as I’m largely out of the veterinary world, the scientific program wasn’t of great interest. There was plenty of time to walk around. Trying to replace the degraded ‘toffee kipper’ I’d bought many years previously as a souvenir (discarded when it became sticky and dusty), it was sad to see that anything inexpensive, portable and locally produced had been replaced by the usual Made in China artefacts. Strolling along waterfront pathways proved to be a pleasant, but brisk, experience. And there were some families with children on the gently sloping, clean beach though, being April, the ocean was no doubt cold! We walked past the ornate nineteenth century spa pavilion and were reminded that Scarborough first became an attraction for aristocratic travellers who, from the eighteenth century, visited to partake of and bathe in the rejuvenating, mineralised waters. The idea of healing by immersion has largely given way to the reality of evidence-based medicine. But some still use such spas to restore a general sense of wellbeing – if that works for you, why not!

  When it comes to the upper echelon (both by birth and achievement) of twentieth century British society, the family most identified with (and influenced by) Scarborough is the literary Sitwell siblings – Sir Osbert, Sir Sacheverell (inherited the baronetcy on Osbert’s death) and Dame Edith, who was honoured in her own right. United by an abiding dislike of their father, Sir George, and their prodigious literary output, they were viewed collectively as The Sitwells, a kind of alternative clique to the Bloomsbury set. At least some of their dusty books are preserved at their Scarborough house, Wood End, which remained in the family from 1870 till 1925 and is now a creative arts centre and Sitwell museum. Only Edith who, like US President Abe Lincoln, suffered from Marfan’s syndrome, was born there.

  The hatred of Sir George evidently stemmed from his refusal to pay the debts of his aristocratic wife (their mother), the feckless Lady Ida, allowing her, as a consequence, to languish for three months as a bankrupt in Holloway prison. Part of the effort the siblings made over the years was evidently intended to restore the family name, which, at least in the celebrity sense, they clearly did. It’s said that one reason Sir George was so bonkers was that a Japanese chef he’d hired mistook his instructions and served him a fricassee of his favourite kitten (not chicken) for dinner, but it’s likely that there were more substantial causes.

  Both Osbert and Sacheverell served on the First World War Western Front and survived, but only Sacheverell (best known for his still respected travel books) married and had children. Always clad in black and channelling the virgin Queen Elizabeth 1 in (according to her archenemy Noel Coward) more than one respect, the most dramatic was the tall, angular Dame Edith. Among her innovative output is Façade (1922), which, read to a background of music composed by William Walton, includes the poem ‘Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone’. A poet of consequence, she can still seem relevant when, in the poem ‘Waltz’, for example, she skewers poor ‘Daisy and Lily’ (were they based on real people she knew and loathed?) for their dedication to fashion and triviality.

  But the coolest cats with a strong Scarborough connection are neither fashionable nor felines. Protected by a rocky headland, Scarborough’s constructed harbour provided a safe haven from Atlantic storms for the eighteenth century coal and timber ships (CATS) that, by 1800, were carrying two million tons of coal a year from the mines of Newcastle to London. The effect of fossil fuel burning on our atmosphere goes back well beyond the beginning in the 1880s of the instrumental global temperature records! Built in Scarborough and Whitby to load and unload on sloping beaches, the robust, beamy, flat-bottomed CATS could be sailed in close at high water to then settle on the sand as the tide ran out.

  A Fishburn of Whitby-built (1765) CAT, the Earl of Pembroke collier, was purchased by the Royal Navy (RN) in 1768, refitted for exploration work by adding an extra layer of planking, and commissioned as His Britannic Majesty’s (George III) Bark Endeavour. Under the command of Lieutenant James Cook, the Endeavour departed Plymouth dock with a ‘supercargo’ of natural philosophers (as scientists were called at that time) to observe the 3/4 June 1769 Transit of Venus from Tahiti. Astronomer Charles Green, naturalist Daniel Solander and Cook independently measured the passage of the planet’s small, dark disc across the surface of the sun. Job done, Cook opened his sealed orders to find he was to sail on west across the Pacific Ocean and map the ‘missing’ east coast of the partly defined (by William Dampier and the Dutch) land of Terra Australis.

  A Yorkshire farm boy, Cook fell in love with the sea while apprenticed in Whitby. Starting as a seaman, then master navigator on coastal colliers before enlisting in the Royal Navy, Cook knew his Whitby CAT intimately. Holed by the corals of the Great Barrier Reef north of Cape Tribulation, he ran the Endeavour up on the beach and, after a seven-week stay and a fraught escape from the shoals, conned his battered Bark to Batavia (now Jakarta) for more permanent repairs.

  Serving later as a transport, the weary Endeavour (renamed the Lord Sandwich 2) was sunk by the Royal Navy in 1778 as part of a harbour blockade at Newport, Rhode Island. James Cook was killed the following February during his third Pacific voyage (with William Bligh as sailing master) on the Resolution. The knock-on effect of the loss of the American Colonies was, of course, that the British had to find somewhere else to send the prisoners accumulating on hulks moored in Portsmouth Harbour, resulting in the 1788 establishment of the penal colony in New South Wales and the beginnings of modern Australia. Bligh served gallantly under Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson at the naval battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar, then as Governor of New South Wales until he was displaced by the 1808 Rum Corps rebellion.

  The pre-internet, pre-mass air travel world of my childhood is, along with James Cook, William Bligh, Wifred Owen, the Laughton brothers and the Sitwell trio, as dead as the dodo. Books survive – biographical and historical information, all of Owen, and some of the Sitwell literary legacy is readily accessed in digital format
. Like the toxic Rum Corps tradition in NSW politics, Felis cati survives, too well when feral cats kill birds and small marsupials! A replica Endeavour sails the seas, but with auxiliary diesels and electronic navigational aids. Beamy New England catboats recall some of the Endeavour sailing experience. In a time more obsessed with pasta, prosciutto and prosecco than with poetry and principles, Edith Sitwell’s nephew William is a prominent food critic and writer. When the oil runs out, will old resort towns like Scarborough be rejuvenated? Unlikely. Short-haul planes at least can likely be fuelled with hydrogen or plant-derived ethanol!

  CHAPTER 26

  Ports to new worlds

  HAVING WORKED ALL MY life on infectious diseases, I’d long been aware of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, though I’d never visited the north-west England city of singer Cilla Black and The Beatles. That opportunity came with an invitation to be the School’s Leverhulme lecturer. Accepting was a no-brainer – the School was flexible about the date and I’d already agreed to be in Britain (March 1999) to speak at a Royal Society colloquium on Immunological Memory and Protective Immunity (the basis of vaccination) and then give the Royal Society’s Leeuwenhoek Lecture in London, with a repeat performance in Birmingham. The fortuitous juxtaposition between the School of Tropical Medicine and Leeuwenhoek also intrigued. In the seventeenth century, draper and ‘citizen scientist’ Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see microbes (he called them animalcules) through his simple, single lens optical microscopes, though humanity waited till the latter half of the nineteenth century before Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch established that bugs (bacteria, fungi) like those Leeuwenhoek described in murky water were the cause of infections in us.