Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS

Presenter0:00

This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:08

So Alastair, you went to school at Oundel. You were already a naturalist. You said a child, so presumably you joined all the scientific societies at school. Yes, indeed. And then up to Exeter College, Oxford. What did you read?

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS0:12

Yeah files

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS0:16

And yes, cool.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS0:20

Well, I w I went up uh actually in october nineteen fourteen just for one term and I was in the OTC and then off to the war, came back in nineteen nineteen and then read zoology and took my degree in

Presenter0:33

Okay.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS0:33

Several

Presenter0:34

During the war, having served in the army, you became a camouflage officer.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS0:37

Uh yes, first of all I was in a Saxe battalion, but I finished up uh as as a came off

Presenter0:42

No, you've illustrated your own books and done thousands of detailed drawings of all sorts of creatures. Did you have any art training or or did you teach yourself?

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS0:52

Uh not really. Some some extent at school. But and uh I never went to an art school at all. But I I've always been keen on drawing. Drawing and and painting in watercolour have been my great hobby. And I have used it, as you say, for my sand.

Presenter1:03

Yeah.

Presenter1:05

What a big work. Well, illustrating a book like your The Open Sea, that two-volume work with hundreds of drawings of various marine organisms, must have been a

Presenter1:14

Great work. It took a tremendous

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS1:15

time'cause I they're all drawn from actually living specimens and I went to a number of different marine stations, went down on on research ships to draw some of these deep uh uh sea forms uh brought up to the surface. Uh it all took a great deal of time. I think it was as much time spent in doing the drawings as actually writing the book.

Presenter1:34

Yes, much more detail than your broad brush for army camouflage.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS1:38

Oh, well, yes. What was your regiment, by the way? Well, uh to begin with I was in a Saxe Battalion and there I had a wonderful company of Geordies, Northumberland and Durham uh Pittman. Uh and I still keep in touch with them. Every year I go back. The

Presenter1:53

And have a reunion.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS1:54

Uh

Presenter1:54

So when you automobilize back to Oxford again, and then what?

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS1:57

Well, I left after graduating. I I got the Oxford Biological Scholarship to the Stazione Zoologica, which is the great marine station at Naples, and worked there on research. And it was there that I really became fascinated in marine life.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS2:12

particularly the plankton. And that rather changed my career, because in a way I should have been going back to Oxford, but I was invited to become a naturalist in the new scientific staff of the Ministry of Fisheries, and so I went to knock about the North Sea.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS2:26

I was invited to go on this expedition to study the biology of the South Polar Seas in relation to the development of the Great

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS2:34

Whale fisheries. And we were using

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS2:36

Scott's old ship, the Discovery, the one that's lying uh anchored uh at the Temple here in London.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS2:43

We bought her back from the Hudson Bay Company, who had had her since Scott had her.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS2:47

And she was converted into a a first-class research ship.

Presenter2:51

Yes. Whales and of course plankton.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS2:54

Well, I was studying particularly the the plankton in relation to the distribution of the whales, because these great whales are feeding on actually the the plankton. It's the most extraordinary relationship of the largest animal in the world feeding on very small.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS3:07

Could plankton become an important item in man's diet? It can be an accessory item, certainly. But uh I I think it's been shown, in fact in the early days of the last war, I was trying to gather it when we were very short of protein to turn into a sort of meal for poultry food.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS3:22

But the uh amount of fuel that he's used in collecting it it wasn't really economical. But uh uh anyone in a life raft with a a net to catch blank can certainly supplement his diet and I've paid on it many times. It's quite like a good uh sort of shrimp paste. It's really if you've got the right uh The constituents in the plan

Presenter3:41

Thanks, Don. Yes. Um, with all our overfishing and and and pollution and so on, and we're not restocking the sea, are we going to run out of fish?

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS3:50

But

Presenter3:50

Again the Uh

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS3:50

We shall well run out of fish, we shall be short of it, and it'll become less and less economical to fish in the way we do. And then I think we've got to take rational means of limiting uh the amount of uh fishing and allow the stock to improve. In the two wars we had the wonderful experiment of closing a large part of the North Sea and the recovery of the fish stocks was quite amazing. They were grossly overfished before the wars and then they came back again and I think that'll happen again.

Presenter4:16

Now you probably know as much about life in the sea as as any man living. Do you mind if we go off at a romantic tangent? What are your feelings about the existence of sea monsters?

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS4:20

Blue white

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS4:27

Well, I think it's very unlikely that there is anything like uh the Loch Ness monster yet to be discovered. I think we shall get some uh very remarkable fish not yet found in the depths of the ocean, and possibly certain kinds of squid.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS4:41

We've never really caught the giant squid. We nerve it from its remains, from the stomachs of sperm whale or the few damaged ones washed up on certain coasts. But these gigantic squid, going to sixty feet in length with a taking the length of the of the tentacles, have never been caught in any man made net.

Presenter4:59

So there's no lock nest monster, that's not the same.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS5:01

I don't believe there is myself, but uh

Presenter5:05

So Alistair, in addition to your work in original research, you've held academic posts in a number of universities.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS5:11

Yes, uh after I come back from this expedition on the discovery, I became professor of zoology and oceanography at the new University College of Hull. Then I became

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS5:22

The Regius Professor of Natural History, a title I always very much liked, at Aberdeen, had the oldest chair in the country in zoology fifteen ninety three.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS5:33

And I was there for a number of years and then went back to be head of my old department where I was an undergraduate at Oxford, the Lineker Chair of Zoology.

Presenter5:42

Yeah.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS5:42

Uh which I had a main till I

Presenter5:44

Richard. In your research work you've never followed the party line, as it were. You've never minded being controversial. In particular, I'm thinking of your

Presenter5:53

rather sensational theory that man evolved from the ape In the sea.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS5:58

Uh

Presenter5:59

Yeah.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS5:59

Yes, it is rather unorthodox, and I I think some of the uh older anthropologists rather frowned upon it, but some of the younger ones uh I I I think are are quite favourable uh uh to it. My idea is that man uh only came down from the trees, uh driven by competition to uh seek food in the sea, living on shellfish and mussel, then going further and further out.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS6:20

You see, in almost every group of uh mammals we see representatives going into the water, uh the seals of course, the other of course the whales and the uh things like the sea cow have gone entirely into the water. The seals are parted there, the polar bear, uh half there, and and so on. It wouldn't surprise me if man spent a long time in the sea, going further and further out, and so he developed his erect posture, just as the monkeys are in Japan that are being taught to feed in the sea.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS6:46

And

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS6:47

He would then, gradually, this is taking place in the tropics, lose his hair going out swimming. Hair is a resistance in the water, but he'd keep the hair on top of the head, which is the water line, giving protection against the sun. And also, man has a layer of subcutaneous fat that is unique among all the other primates. This takes the place of the hair when he comes out of the water. It acts as an insulating overcoat.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS7:16

And then a hick man uh actually got his tool making uh on the shore. Here you get all the pebbles that he first used. You don't get pebbles out in the in in the ordinary uh jungle.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS7:25

And the only mammal that uses a tool like man is the sea otter that picks up a stone and breaks open shellfish, crustacea, and other things to get his food. And I think man began in that way.

Presenter7:37

Well, to me those arguments sound very convincing.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS7:39

Well, there are a great many more, but I might even give a let you take a lecture too.

Presenter7:40

And that's it.

Presenter7:42

You're now director of a research unit you established yourself in Oxford for research into religious experience. Will you tell us about the work you're doing there?

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS7:51

Well, here again I'm playing the part of a naturalist. You see, I feel that religion is something very deep in man's nature.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS7:59

There's nothing equaling it in emotion except sex. The wars of religion have always been far more bitter than those for economic ends. The clash we see between Hindus and Muslims in India, Muslims and Jews in the Near East and in our own country, alas, between Catholics. There's something very deep-rooted here. And I think we want to look at it as naturalists and get records of experience and see, analyse, compare, contrast them. We're very humbly following in the footsteps of those two great American pioneers, William James and Edwin Sarbou.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS8:35

But they've never really been followed except by the social anthropologists. We know far more about the religious feelings of Polynesians or of certain tribes in Africa, like the Dinkard and the Newer, than we do about the inhabitants of Manchester or London. And I think it's time we found out in making a systematic study of these

Presenter8:52

Yes. It's been said that you're preparing a sort of Kinsey report on religion. That is a fairly important thing.

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS8:58

I think that's a fair statement. That is what we are trying to do. Getting an enormous number of records. And I hope we shall, from them, convince the intellectual world that here is something that is very real. Whatever the psychologists may say about its actual cause. But it's something that does influence the lives of people. People feel themselves in touch with something transcendental that...

Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS9:19

gives them strength, power and encouragement to do things they would not otherwise do. And in this I think it has a biological significance, a survival value in the original tribes that had it. It gave them more courageous, more powerful.