‘Some of the reviewers, whose comments upon the first edition I had found encouraging, were disposed to note that the book was without an index and without any references for further reading. My views about the index remain as they were – that I cannot imagine anyone wanting to use this book as a...

Adrian Friday (Corpus Christi 1967) writes When the (New) Museum of Zoology, part of the Arup Building (now the ‘David Attenborough Building’), was reinhabited in 1970, Charles Goodhart, as Curator of Invertebrates, occupied the first room in the staff corridor, next to the foyer. Charles’s room...

In August 2015 there was a small flurry of excitement by broadcasters and the newspapers over a message in a bottle found by a retired postal worker in Germany. Marianne Winkler was on holiday, visiting the German island of Amrun, when she found the bottle on the beach in April that year. Clearly...

Sir James Gray (1891-1975) Against Alfred Newton’s tenure of 41 years as founding Professor of Zoology, the 22 years tenure of James Gray seems rather modest. Gray, however, did much to set the overall character and course of the Department from the 1930s onwards. In their booklet Professors and...

Carl Pantin, the fifth Professor of Zoology, was born in the 19th century; just, in 1899. Pantin’s time as Professor was next to the shortest; he served for seven years. (The truncated reign of Adam Sedgwick was the shortest at just two years). pantin.jpg The photographic portrait in Pantin’s entry...

Dr A.V. (Bill) Grimstone (1933 – 2018) An appreciation by Dr Brad Amos FRS (PhD in Zoology, 1970) Delivered during a walk round the Chapel and Gardens of Pembroke College, 21st June 2019 I was Bill Grimstone’s first research student and I wish to record some comments about him as a supervisor and...

Hans Lissmann: a zoologist’s zoologist lissmann_alumni.jpg There will probably be few undergraduate zoologists, or even A-level students, who have not seen classic diagrams of crawling in earthworms. The diagrams come from a golden age of collaborative work done by James Gray (later Sir James Gray...

Clive Forster-Cooper (1880-1947) by Dr Adrian Friday Imagine a tallish, slightly-stooped man, of a rather ascetic appearance, wearing spectacles with the round frames so typical of the 1930s. He is standing in front of a blackboard, with his back to his audience, and he is drawing the heart and...

Sir Vincent Wigglesworth (1899-1994) - A Lifetime in Insect Physiology A time there was when zoology in Cambridge was held to be a subject of sufficient coherence that a single series of weekly talks, the Tea Talks, was judged to be adequate to bring the whole Department together. Speakers were...