A Passion for Crustaceans

You could easily be put off reading The Longshoreman. The title, which instantly brings to mind a New York dock-worker, does not fit the text. The subtitle – A Life at the Water’s Edge – is also misleading, for the author has spent most of his life working in research establishments. The illustrations are ridiculously small. The text skips without break or warning from one subject to another.

And yet, such is its author’s charm, that he has made his life-story thoroughly engaging. Part of his secret is that he writes most attractively, part that he does not worry for a moment whether or not he may be boring his reader: he simply fires off his enthusiasms like blasts from one of his beloved black-powder shotguns, taking it for granted that everyone will be interested. The Longshoreman is the story of an obsession with fish, beginning when, as a boy in the 1940s, Richard Shelton explored the streams around his home in Buckinghamshire, and continuing right through the twenty years he spent as head of the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory at Pitlochry, in Scotland, from 1982 to 2001. Together with his brother Peter, he developed an early fascination with the natural world, but also with steam engines, awestruck at the thunderous impression created by the mighty, 160-ton ‘Duchess’ Pacific class at the head of the Royal Scot. He found it ‘tempting to imagine that our distant ancestors felt a similar thrill in the presence of a mammoth’. Moreover, he maintains that the comparison between a steam locomotive and a large herbivorous animal is by no means superficial: ‘Both derive their energy through the oxidation of plant material, fresh in the case of the mammal and fossil in the case of the locomotive.’ Outbursts of piscine science, always expressed with perfect clarity, and often with a few good jokes, recur throughout the book. So too does Dr Shelton’s incorrigible love of guns and shooting. The hunter’s instinct burned in him from earliest youth, when he and Peter – ‘savage innocents’ – roasted sparrows impaled on sharpened sticks over their open fires and enjoyed the ‘heady scent that lingers in a newly-fired cartridge case’. Then, and later, he made a point of eating what he shot or caught. From his father – a keen wildfowler – he inherited an absorbing interest in guns, especially eight-bores and ten-bores, the huge weapons designed mainly for goose-shooting. When he grew up, he still slipped off whenever he could in search of a pigeon, rabbit or pheasant, or, if he were close to the sea, a duck or a goose. One of the best moments in the book comes when, as he labours away in the Gatty Marine Laboratory at St Andrews, he spots a woodpigeon on the stubble field outside, and, unable to resist the temptation, reaches for his gun:

I eased open the window and slipped a cartridge into the left barrel . . . The report of a twelve-bore is surprisingly loud to those unused to it. The report of a twelve-bore fired indoors is louder again. My door shot open and a white-faced Laverack [one of the lecturers] rushed in, convinced that a major item of apparatus had exploded. His reaction to what had really occurred was less sympathetic than it might have been. I put this down to his urban upbringing and said no more about it.

Between bouts of shooting and recreational fishing, he carried out serious research into many forms of marine life and became an expert on lobsters, for which he developed a powerful admiration, scientific rather than culinary. In particular, he discovered much about the way in which lobsters sense their surroundings through their extremities, and himself acquired what he describes as ‘unrivalled knowledge of crustacean toenails’. When his work took him to the Scottish Office’s Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, he settled with his wife and two young sons in a cottage far out in the wilds. There his retired-farmer neighbour liked nothing better to drink than ‘a fifty-fifty mixture of Bell’s whisky and milk, the bottles side by side on the table’. The veteran of many hair-raising voyages in trawlers and research vessels, Dr Shelton writes with authority about the rise and fall of the British sea-fishing industry, and the failure of successive governments to secure adequate protection for our fishing grounds. Although alarmed by the decline of cod, herring, salmon and other key species, he is in general sustained by his faith in the regenerative powers of nature, which, he feels confident, will restore the balance if given a chance. His interests range freely from the ice ages to the present, and his work has given him a wonderfully wide understanding of life in the water, both salt and fresh. He rarely criticizes a species on the grounds of anti-social behaviour – but one that does catch it in its snaky neck is the cormorant, the voracious predator now protected by law and damned by innumerable anglers as the curse of lakes and rivers. For the government to give the bird immunity was, he writes, ‘a thoroughly bad decision, for which the inland fisheries of Britain are now paying the penalty’. Hear, hear! Although only a part-time fisherman, I salute the author’s robust common sense, and I am with him in spirit whenever he picks up his trusty musket and heads for coast or marsh with murderous intent.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Duff Hart-Davis 2004