‘Naturalist-in-charge’ was Shel-ton’s title as fisheries expert on board the Tellina, a research vessel. It holds good throughout this excellent memoir, which contains much pertinent information and few idle sentences. By page 30 I’d learned that apple wood makes the best catapult, about the guanine crystals in fish scales, about lampreys, the names of his grandmother’s two Rhode Island Reds, what the lower quadrant signal means to the railways, conjugated valve gear ditto, how to load a muzzle-loader (‘the flinty grains shining as they trickled from the measure at the head of the tooled copper flask’), and the weight of a Duchess class locomotive — 160 tons or about 140 mature Limousin bulls. We have a duty to learn, but few and far are the good teachers. Shelton is among them. This is an improving book in the best possible sense of the word. The author will make peanuts, but civilisation should make a million.
The sequence of events: fishing in the Grand Union as a boy; wildfowling; the Torrey Canyon and other waste-disposal problems; the biology of fish stocks and the mathematics of their exploitation, and finally salmon-farming.
There is a strong sporting interest throughout, from shooting a pigeon out of the lab window to instructions on how to kill an eel. It’s good to be told by a scientist that cormorants and grey seals ruin fisheries, that no reason exists for their continued protection, and that hard choices will soon have to be made. (We think that Hugh Grant should be seen flaunting a cormorant-skin waistcoat or that David Beckham should call for sealskin boots before taking free kicks.)
On the subject of the Torrey Canyon, the first of the great oil-spillers, Shelton tells us that time and tide usually do a better (and always a cheaper) clean-up job than man; and that Harold Wilson was photographed after an overflight of the wreck wearing his flying helmet back to front.
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