QI The Book of the Dead

Charles Darwin’s ‘strong prejudice’ towards the older Buckland. He disliked his ‘coarse joking manner’ and ‘undignified buffoonery’. The Bucklands, in turn, both rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, maintaining a creationist line despite having been personally responsible for putting back the geological age of the earth by millions of years.
    Eccentricity and good humour characterised the son’s life every bit as much as his father’s. Frank shared his rooms at Christ Church with marmots, guinea pigs, a chameleon, several snakes, a jackal, an eagle, his monkey, Jacko, and a bear called Tiglath-Pileser, named after an ancient Assyrian king. After the bear made several appearances in a scholar’s cap and gown at college drinks parties, the dean of Christ Church gave Frank the ultimatum to remove either ‘Tig’ or himself from the college. The bear was duly rusticated; the expulsion of Jacko and the increasingly bad-tempered eagle followed in quick succession.
    Frank graduated in medicine and in 1854 became assistant surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards. He served with the regiment for ten years but failed to gain promotion, probably because his real interests lay elsewhere, writing racy, readable accounts of his adventures for The Field magazine. The many reminiscences of Frank at this time make him seem thoroughly likeable: he was a 4½-foot-tall, barrel-chested, cigar-smoking, ginger-haired ball of energy, the self-appointed curator of all that was odd, grotesque or inexplicable. He was also a walking zoo. Wherever he appeared, he might be expected to produce a writhing ball of slow worms from inside his coat or a matchbox full of baby toads.Once, arriving at Southampton docks, he was charged 5 shillings for trying to smuggle his monkey onto a train. The clerk insisted on treating it as a dog, and issuing it with a dog ticket. Buckland rallied by producing a tortoise from his pocket. ‘Perhaps you’ll call that a dog, too?’ he asked. ‘No,’ said the clerk, ‘we make no charge for them, they’re insects.’
    As well as curiosities of natural history, Frank wrote up reports of mummies preserved in guano, fossilised mermaids, singing Siamese twins, unnaturally fat babies, impossibly tiny babies, the ‘Human Frog’ (who could smoke underwater) and the man who walked on his head. His journalism is marked by a very un-Victorian sense of sympathy for his subjects. Observing the poor mummified corpse of Julia Pastrana, the Mexican bearded lady, he wrote:
    Her features were simply hideous on account of the profusion of hair growing on her forehead, and her black beard; but her figure was exceedingly good and graceful, and her tiny foot and well-turned ankle, bien chaussée, perfection itself .
     
    Unlike his father the Dean, Frank Buckland can’t be counted a great scientist, but he was certainly a great populariser of science: in his endless enthusiasm for the new and hitherto unnoticed he often reads like a one-man Fortean Times .
    In 1867 his life changed. A Royal Commission appointed him Inspector of Salmon Fisheries. This was a proper grown-up job and within a very short time, Buckland had made himself into the UK’s ‘Mr Salmon’, mastering all the intricacies of his subject, pioneering new techniques and technology for fish hatcheries and using his great charm and energy to lead the first nationwide campaign against river pollution. He wasn’t exactly an ecologistbut he did commission first-hand research into the effect of ocean temperatures on the shoaling of fish and the importance of net mesh-size in keeping fish stocks at optimum levels. He was also single-handedly responsible for the stocking of the rivers and lakes of India, Australia and New Zealand with salmon and trout. This proved a rather more successful venture than his earlier scheme to manufacture shoes and gloves from the skin of rats.
    Home life for the Bucklands always involved at least two monkeys. Frank’s study, where the monkeys lived, was called the ‘Monkey Room’ and no writer has better captured the topsyturvy madness of keeping them as pets. He considered them much superior to all other animals in terms of intelligence: ‘almost fit to go up for a competitive examination’, as he put it. The monkeys graced all the Bucklands’ social occasions, with outfits to match: Frank particularly liked them in green velvet dresses, trimmed with gold lace. He described them as sometimes having the appearance of