The Fifteen Mile Journey that took three weeks (or so it seemed)

I do occasionally muse on the way that our perception of time changes as we ourselves age. Last weekend Mary, our daughter Jenn and I drove to Reading for an Overnight stay – either side of visits to Oxford and Bath. The journey was a bit longer than 2 hours, but sat in the back of the car, with a book, it seemed to absolutely fly by. That was a journey of 138 miles. I remember what seemed to be the two longest journeys I took as a kid were both on London buses and both of them were only about 15 miles. The number 65 bus from Ealing Broadway went all the way to Chessington – just Chessington Zoo in those days before the World of Adventures. That journey – a couple of hours at most, seemed to last about a fortnight. The journey that seemed to last about 3 weeks was the journey from our house in Hanwell to Crystal Palace Park.

We changed buses more than once, and so for this early 70s journey my parents bought red bus rover tickets. If these are a mystery to you, I guess they were a kind of forerunner to the one day travelcard. As the name suggests , this was a ticket that enabled you to use as many different red London buses as you needed on a particular day.

Why Crystal Palace Park? Hey, it was a nice place to visit – still is – but for the 8 or 9 year old me, the number 1 attraction was the dinosaur models. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Crystal Palace Park, but if you have, I wonder whether your reaction to the dinosaur models was the same as mine? You see, the models were made in the 1850s, and they were the ‘best guess’ as to what these creatures really looked like according to the fossils that had been found. And for some of them, the best guess did not prove to be a particularly good one. I really didn’t think much of them.

It wasn’t as if there wasn’t a lot of thought put into them. The models were sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, working under the scientific direction of Richard Owen. Look, I know that you’re all intelligent and knowledgeable people, so please accept that I’m not trying to insult your intelligence by telling you a little about Richard Owen. But how many people owe a lot of their place in our collective memory to a single word, like Owen does? That word, of course, being dinosaur.

Of course Richard Owen achieved far more in his life than just coining the word dinosaur. Not least among his achievements was being the driving force behind the British Museum’s Natural History collection being given its own separate establishment in South Kensington. It’s rather appropriate that Owen coined the term dinosaur, when you consider that in some ways he was a little bit of a dinosaur himself. I’ve seen it said that Owen was a staunch creationist who viciously opposed Darwin’s theory of Evolution through natural selection. That does not appear to be the case. Owen felt that species could and did change over time, but through other processes than natural selection. He was a vocal proponent of the argument that Man could not be descended from apes, and some of his contemporaries believed that he twisted and misrepresented facts to fit his argument.

On a personal level, Richard Owen does not seem to have been much liked. He was not above withholding credit for his contemporaries. For example, he wrote about prehistoric marine reptiles without once mentioning that the first ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons were discovered by Mary Anning. Well, he was not the only early palaeontologist who displayed this misogynist attitude to Miss Anning. However Owen would also claim other men’s discoveries as his own. He famously claimed credit for the discovery of Iguanadon, completely ignoring the fact that it was in fact the discovery of Gideon Mantell. At one point he was even dismissed from the Royal Society’s Zoological Council for plagiarism. So maybe, just maybe, being remembered for inventing the word dinosaur is actually the best thing that could have happened to him.

I may be doing his memory a little bit of a disservice here. In everything I’ve read he comes across as a mean, austere and exceptionally humourless sort, but then maybe he did have his lighter side. On New Year’s Eve 1852 he and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins hosted a celebration dinner inside the body of the Iguanadon model – the top of which was open for the occasion. Contemporaries including even Gideon Mantell were present. Maybe Owen was in a good mood because he was sitting at the head of the table, where the creature’s brains would have been. Mary Anning was not there, but then that wasn’t so much of an omission since she’d been dead for five years.