Gunn achieved much in his five years as Director. But to show just how much I must outline the locust problem and the state of the International Red Locust Control Service when Gunn took over. Locusts are just grasshoppers. Locusts though when numbers increase “learn” to behave gregariously. They form bands at the wingless stage that march across country eating anything and often everything. The flying adults form swarms that migrate great distance born along on the wind. Since winds have a season pattern swarms emigrate and they or rather their progeny, often reappear about the same time the following year. This can go on for many years but eventually the plague sequence comes to an end. Most species of locust are quite different in the gregarious phase, that is when they are in bands and swarms, than in the solitary; Brown Locust gregarious females are twice the size of the males although the solitaries are about the same. Brown Locusts in bands are bright scarlet; they are called “red coats”, but the solitaries are a drab brown.
A plague of Red Locust afflicted nearly all of Africa south of the equator throughout the nineteen thirties. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the plague had started where Red Locusts survived as solitaries between plagues in relatively large numbers. Expeditions led by Arnold Lea, A J P Michelmore and Hans Bredo set out to find these “outbreak areas”. The plains bordering Lake Rukwa in south west Tanganyika, and the Mweru wa Ntipa – Mweru means lake so Lake Mweru means Lake Lake and Meru wa Ntipa means Lake of Mud, which is apt- in the extreme north of Northern Rhodesia close to the Congo border, seemed by far the most likely. The colonial powers and South Africa banded together to set up the International Red Locust Control Service at Abercorn with Bredo as Director. That would have been about 1948. Bredo was a tough, well connected, superficially charming Belgian - and a complete disaster. Bredo is a demonstration of the truism that nothing succeeds like failure. After each catastrophe Hans has after an interval, emerged in a yet more prestigious and well paid job.
No one knew how to tackle the task of preventing swarms forming in the outbreak areas and escaping. The best bet seemed to be to try to kill the bands by dusting them with a persistent pesticide. That called for hundreds of labourers who had to be fed and organised in some of the remotest parts of Africa. As his number two Bredo appointed an ex SS officer called Obermeryer. Obermeryer did not actually shoot recalcitrant blacks but he did make them dig what he told them would be their own graves! The rest of the staff was recruited from the chancers of whom central Africa had a very large number at that time. Ivory poachers, diamond smugglers, failed prospectors from the Lupa gold-field that was itself a failure, and assorted drifters. I am told it was like the Wild West. When the “locusts” hit town the shopkeepers boarded up their stores and the residents locked their doors. In I think 1952 while Bredo was on leave the Accountant decamped with the outfit’s cash. He was chased to Mpulungu but managed to back track and get to the Copper Belt. The Police waited for him to return to his hotel. He didn’t show up though. His luggage proved to be full of bricks. The chap was last heard of in Iran.
Inevitably there were control failures and Bredo’s equally inevitable response was to blame someone and fire him. Matters came to a head in 1953 or it may have been ’54, with the suicide at Muse of one of the few decent Field Officers. The details are unclear but two reliable people I came to know well, unequivocally blame Bredo. What is certain is that Bredo and Obermeryer drove through the night to Muse and burnt records including the radio log-books. Shortly after, Bredo loaded anything he could find that was valuable and portable onto a couple of trucks, and headed off over the Congo border. Bredo was not heard of for a couple of years but he then surfaced with a lucrative United Nations post in Mexico.
Gunn was dispatched from London, where he was Assistant Director to Uvarov, later Sir Boris Uvarov, at the Anti-Locust Research Centre, to sort out the mess. By the time I arrived, IRCLS had become an orderly, respectable even slightly dull organisation. This was a considerable achievement but perhaps less difficult than you might suppose. The riff-raff was sacked and young graduates recruited from England and South Africa. A Mechanical Superintendent was appointed and a number of good mechanics. Four young scientists were recruited all of whom went on to have careers of some note.
Gunn left in 1959 to become Director of the Ceylon Tea Research Institute, where he annoyed everyone. He wanted me to join him as the Statistician but his Board opted for a local who was then better qualified in the subject. I recall saying to Gunn, “But you don’t know anything about tea.” to which he replied, “I’ve read a book about it”. A couple of days before he left, the two of us were having a sun-downer at Kafukola the base for South Rukwa. It was as close to being convivial as one was ever likely to get with Gunn. I said, “I can’t imagine why you appointed me. I can only assume there were no other candidates”. Gunn looked at me over his half glasses and remarked, “There was one other candidate”.
Some years before he died Gunn offered his library to the Australian Plague Locust Commission of which I was the first Director. I like to think that meant to me, and I took it as a great complement. His library was though wasted on me. I am interested in research at least in my own research, but “science” rather bores me. Scientific papers usually deal with something trivial in a way that is both pedantic and obscure. Fortunately very little has been written on the subjects I have studied. Most scientists are not like me. Zena Waloff, Uvarov’s first assistant, used to get all of a twitter at a Conference marking her programme like a deb at a May ball.
Sometime in the late ‘eighties I received a postcard addressed in Gunn’s distinctive and rather elegant hand. I turned the postcard over. It read, “We regret to announce the death of Donald Livingston Gunn.” There were no children, Barbara had died some years before. When Gunn knew death was nigh he must have put his affairs in order even down to the announcement of his own death; I’ll bet he even put stamps on the postcards. I find that touching but really the action is just too detached to be human.
There were other locust “characters” but none that I feel I must deal with separately. So I will return to our stay with Vesey. I think it was on our very first evening that Vesey took us for a stroll over the golf course and introduced us to a tall fair young man and a shorter darker one preparing to drive off the eighth tee. The tee was on a spit so you had to drive over an arm of the lake; something I rarely succeeded in doing. The taller was Alastair Carnegie, who I have already mentioned and who became and still is my good friend. The other I remember as Jeff Turner although I doubt it can have been since I never recall him ever playing golf again.
Meanwhile Gunn had departed on three months leave. He left me with the task of mapping the Mweru wa Ntipa, that he always referred to as “the Tabwa” for reasons I never discovered. “If you complete that by the time I return you will have done very well.” Gunn had a distinctly Headmasterly manner. Drawing a map from aerial photographs is not a simple matter. The photos are taken on carefully controlled runs and they overlap. The proper way to proceed is to project small “diapositives” of adjacent shots through a pair of projectors that reproduce precisely the nose up or nose down of the aircraft and any deviation from level flight; what is called “tip” and “tilt”. I did not of course have sophisticated equipment but you can do a fair job graphically using vast lengths of transparent plastic tracing film, and that is what I did. It took me all of a fortnight not three months.
Although much of my life has been spent in outlandish spots – the African bush, outback Australia, the Sahara – I am not a rugged outdoor type. The experience has been sometimes interesting and more often boring but always uncomfortable, and discomfort has never held much attraction for me. Never the less I have always felt impelled to go to see, to try things out in practice, and that has proved its worth time and time again. I now decided I ought to see whether my map made sense on the ground and to annotate it; that is to identify and label the things I could see on the photographs. The Administrative Officer Karl Kuhne was against my wife going with me but Vesey told him not to be daft so we set off. A couple of days later and three weeks out from Welwyn Garden City, there we were on the far side of the Mweru being bitten by tse-tse -and do they bite - by day and mosquitoes by night with elephant walking between our beds and lion not far away. A great adventure? Much too great an adventure, and much too strange, and much much too uncomfortable.
I have always treated wild animals with respect and I have been scared only once, and then nothing happened. I was returning to our camp in the Rukwa from an evening stroll when I spotted a pack of hunting dog and at the same time the pack of hunting dog spotted me. Hunting dog are Africa’s worst killers. They are a bit bigger than an Alsatian, irregularly coloured, no two the same, evil looking and totally without fear. I looked at them and they looked at me, and I walked on steadily. As I say nothing happened but if the pack had been in an unfriendly mood I would have died and died very unpleasantly. I reached camp with relief.
I recall another unnerving experience, We had been playing bridge at Tumba; two other scientists, Claus and his wife and I suppose Godfrey and myself. I heard a noise and went out to investigate. I walked round a hut and came face to face with a very large elephant. Perhaps it was not large as elephants go but any elephant by moonlight at twenty paces looks very large indeed.
But I digress. I now had nothing to do, so to occupy the time I decided to have a look at the rainfall records and such estimates as there were of locust numbers in the Rukwa. I found that there was a clear association so by the time Gunn returned I had a draft paper for him to read. Fifteen versions later I had something to go to a Journal.
Alastair and I found we got on well so we decided to work together. We devised a research project to try to put some scientific basis under the attempt to restrict locust breeding by keeping fire out of the plains. I say “attempt” advisedly because we never could prevent the plains going up in flames. Even if some parts were preserved during one year, the next season with a mat of last year’s grass, up they went. Lightening was the usual starter. We did try to put out fires beating through the night with palm fronds. The watu were excellent. Given something with a bit of drama and they would work and work. You could see them next day acting out the best bits and rolling about laughing; they were great mimics. But regular routine was not their forte. Our plan was to see whether locusts in fact laid their eggs in the burnt areas and not in the nearby grass.
Putting out or rather starting fires, was the cause of the only time I have been airsick; I have felt uncomfortable often but without being actually sick. The plan was to burn the edges of North Rukwa before the main plain dried out, so forming a firebreak. We attempted this with the eastern edge from the air since you could not get in on the ground. Robin Crosse-Upcott, circled the Piper Cub while I leant out of a window and fired a Verey pistol into the grass. A Verey pistol is designed to fire flares to guide rescuers. I have a feeling this must have broken a few safely regulations. We set off before breakfast and after an hour or so first on one wing tip then on the other, I was feeling none too good. But we finished eventually and I thought I would make camp. Unfortunately a swarm rose up below us and Robin forgot that he was no longer flying Spitfires. “Locusts!” he yelled. You know the manoeuvre; it occurs in all the films about the war in the air. When the enemy is spotted the pilot shouts, “Bandits!” banks his plane steeply and slips into a power dive. I tapped Robin on the shoulder. I said, “Robin if you do that again I shall be sick”. Then I said, “Correction, I shall be sick anyway,” and I was.
Robin Crosse-Upcott was not your normal pilot. He had a degree in French from Oxford and a Ph D in Anthropology, and spoke immaculate Swahili. The Crosse-Upcotts are an old and distinguished colonial family. Robin once told me that his father as a young man had ridden on his camel to the edge of his district in Sudan where he encountered an officer similarly mounted from the neighbouring District. “Where did you go to school?” Robin’s father was asked and replied Harrow, or Marlborough or whatever the notable Pubic School he attended may have been. “Oh bad show!” was the response and the other chap rode off.
We did not tell Gunn about our research because we thought he might not approve. We did not tell Vesey because we thought he wouldn’t understand. I doubt either would have much cared. We were scientists so we were expected to get on with research and that’s what we did. It is very different now. Perhaps Directors were less keen to control, perhaps they were less called upon to justify what was done to administrators, perhaps young scientists were more independent. I doubt research has benefited though from tighter control, and I am sure it is now less fun. Research ought to be fun and if it is any good it will be.
Alastair left soon after to become the Government Entomolgist for the Eastern Districts of what was then Southern Rhodesia. I planned to take the next step, which was to find out whether locusts if given no choice, would lay in grass covered areas even if they would prefer not to. I put the plan to Gunn since wire gauze for the large cages I needed, had to be bought. It was too late to get wire netting shipped from England in time for the next breeding season but Gunn to his lasting credit, had the netting sent out by air at considerable expense.
One of my Commissioners when I was Director of the Australian Plague Locust Commission required me to produce research plans, get them agreed and put in the budget. I remember my reply clearly. I told him that I would produce plans, which I could do in my sleep, if it would make him happy, but I undertook never to carry out any of them. Firstly, the locusts would be unlikely to oblige. Secondly, some opportunity we had not foreseen would as like as not arise. Thirdly, I expected that I, or one of my staff, would have had a better idea in the mean time. And finally I would almost certainly have got bored with a plan that had been kicking around for over a year.
I have never carried out any research planned for me by someone else and I do not see why any decent scientist should need his research to be planned for him. My research has been circumscribed by the need to be plausibly related to locusts and their control. But I have never thought it wise to interpret that narrowly, either with my own research or with the research of my staff. Senior scientists now spend their time producing research proposals and juniors in producing accounts to show how what was planned has been achieved. Both are largely spurious. It is all a monumental waste of effort and I am convinced is a major impediment to research. It is an attempt to treat research as a managed activity and research isn’t like that.
My huge cages looked very spectacular but they were a total failure. Try as I might, I could not get the locusts to survive in them for more than a couple of days. However, that did have an indirect benefit as research failures often do. I guessed that the locusts were damaging themselves flying into the netting. Many years later one of my staff was having a similar problem in Australia. I bought a length of mosquito gauze at the local store and sewed a sort of box tent that I supported with an external frame. The locusts lived happily inside for many weeks.
It was possible to hunt in the country bordering Rukwa; the Rukwa itself was a Game Controlled area, which is a level down from a Reserve. The quarry was usually buck and warthog for meat but people also hunted elephant. I tagged along on a couple of elephant hunts. I have found that most things that sound exciting, even dangerous, turn out to be a mixture of boredom, discomfort and farce. In my limited experience elephant hunting is no exception. You had to own an adequate rifle; a 0.375 magnum or better. You then needed to buy a licence that I think cost £100 and lasted a year and entitled you to shoot three elephants. To shoot more landed you in serious trouble. One fellow I know of was tempted by a big tusker to shoot one more. He tried to cover up the crime by dynamiting the carcass, but vultures homing in from half of Tanganyika on the widely scattered chunks of elephant, gave the game away and the fellow went to gaol.
The aim of elephant hunting was to make money. Ivory was reckoned to sell for a £ a lb, an optimistic figure as Alastair and I were to discover, and a really good tusker could weigh “a hundred lb a side”. People would suddenly realise that their licence was about to run out and a group would dash off into the bush in search of elephant. Finding elephants was not the problem. You would run into herds of cows and calves that would rush about trumpeting. This trek would go on for some days. Eventually some poor creature with tusks weighing thirty lbs or so would be lined up and would die messily in a hail of bullets.
I did go on one decent hunt with Alastair, although the consequence was that neither of us wanted to do another. We dug out a couple of disreputable looking honey hunters as guides and set off north of Rukwa along the base of the Mlala hills. This was testse country so there were no people, and indeed it is quite possible we were the first white men ever to go there. Our guides gave off the peculiar acrid smell of those who never wash; the smell is quite different from the B O of those who do not wash enough. We pitched camp and the next morning went in search of elephant. Two of our watu carried the guns, Alastair’s Jefferies 404 and a 9 mm with a blown barrel for me. I suppose our “bearers” must have been the two lads who looked after Alastair and who went under the names of Ambrosio and Severio. That would though not have been wise with Ambrosio since he had an extreme fear of wild animals. One had only to say “simba” that is lion, and he would gibber with fear. So perhaps we used one of our drivers. We spotted a group of four elephant, one with very respectable tusks. We turned to take our rifles from our trusty bearers only to find they had withdrawn rapidly and were well out of harms way up various trees. We got them down, collected our guns and moved off. It was very still with occasional puffs of wind set off by thermals, blowing gently first one way then another. The elephant kept moving off as they got wind of us. Eventually we got within I suppose about 30 yds. Thirty yards does not seem a great distance when there is a large elephant at the other end. Alastair shot the elephant with the tusks, in the side of the head. The animal was knocked sideways and was dead before he hit the ground. It was just as well. If Alastair had missed my 9 mm would have merely annoyed the elephant further. But then came the heartbreakingly sad part. The other elephants could not understand why their pal was lying down. They tried to raise him. They hung about for the rest of the day and we eventually had to light a fire to drive them off. I never went nor wanted to go on another elephant hunt.
A week or so later we drove to Tabora, where it was said there were Indian traders who bought ivory. Our excuse was to visit suspect locust areas to the west and east of Tabora. Tabora is at the precise centre of Tanganyika and there were once plans to make it the capital. The hotel there was built for the Kaiser as a hunting lodge. Twenty-five years ago when I last visited, it had become semi-derelict and I can’t suppose it has been renovated since. The track from the Rukwa to Tabora lay through unpopulated tsetse country. At the start was a battered and much photographed sign sporting a skull and cross bones with the legend “Have you petrol, water, spares? If not turn back. You have been warned!”
If I were to die tomorrow Alastair would be the world’s worst haggler. We approached the first trader who replied that, yes it was true he did once trade in ivory but he had given up some years ago because the trade was so poor. We tried the only other trader who spun us the same story but said out of the kindness of his heart he just might take the ivory off our hands. What price had we in mind? Our mention of a £ a lb occasioned great mirth. Ten shillings perhaps. By going back and forth we beat the price up to sixteen shillings. The other trader and his family then emerged out of a back room! What we had thought was our hard-nosed dealing had been quite irrelevant.
It was on that trip that Alastair and I dropped in at Urambo where it had been hoped to base a grand scheme for growing groundnuts. The scheme was a total failure and became a standing joke. I do not know the reasons for failure; mismanagement, unsuitable soil and climate, uncooperative locals used to subsistence agriculture perhaps. The fiasco killed the concept of grand development schemes in Africa; I am unsure whether that has been a good thing. There were at Urambo sheds full of toilet paper, others full of fridges and so on, and a rank of immobile D 8 Caterpillar tractors; in Red Locust we ran only to a D 2. To start one you would have needed a functioning D 8 and there wasn’t one. Our guides kept saying, “If only Blaster was here”. Alastair met Blaster by chance a full 30 years later but sadly he turned out to be unremarkable.