Clifford Emmens: Aquarist, Endocrinologist and the Natural History of Bombing

Clifford Walter Emmens
(from Biographical Memoir, AAS)

To anybody keeping and breeding tropical fish from the 1950s until the 1990s, the name C.W. Emmens would have been familiar as the author of a number of the better books on the subject. Few amateur aquarists would have realised that Emmens was professor of veterinary physiology in the University of Sydney and even fewer that he had an important rôle in one of the key developments of the Second World War.

Clifford Walter Emmens (1913-1999) was a member of Solly (later Lord) Zuckerman’s famous Oxford unit studying the effect of bombing on the civilian population. From studies on damage to industrial effectiveness and civilian morale after German attacks on British cities, Zuckerman and his team turned their conclusions around to consider what Allied attacks on German cities would achieve. The conclusion—very little—was anathema to the 'Air Barons' in the Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force (the latter being desperate to become independent of the army) who had convinced themselves as well as powerful figures in and around Winston Churchill that Germany could be brought to submission by ‘strategic’, in other words, area-bombing. The story is now well known even though Zuckerman exposed later attempts to whitewash the failings of the senior officers of Bomber Command in reports and official histories. Throughout of course there had been the snide comments of the ‘what do a bunch of biologists think they can tell us about air warfare’ type, a view even promulgated by Churchill’s personal friend and scientific adviser, the physicist, Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, who was a firm believer in strategic bombing—an example of the many things he got completely wrong.

Emmen’s job in Zuckerman’s unit and how be escaped the National Institute of Medical Research in order to take a more active rôle in the war effort is told in his biographical memoir for the Australian Academy of Science and by Zuckerman in the first part of his autobiography.

After tackling the problem of assessing the effect of bombing on the civilian population in Germany, Emmens joined Zuckerman and other members of the unit for bombing surveys after the invasion of Sicily. This detailed work informed the bombing plans for the run-up to the D-Day landings in June 1944. Those plans resulted in the now well-known confrontations with ‘Bomber’ Harris and his acolytes of Bomber Command—and with Lindemann—on using the heavy bombers to destroy rail communication hubs and their associated repair shops, rather than for attacking the ‘strategic’ targets by area-bombing German cities which Harris et al. believed would lead to the capitulation of the enemy. Zuckerman’s prediction based on results of the bombing surveys that such disruption to the movement of men and materiél was the way to success received the solid support of Arthur Tedder with whom Zuckerman had worked closely in the Mediterranean and who was by then Deputy Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Tedder, in turn, convinced Eisenhower, the supremo of the Expeditionary Force.

Emmens was then involved in the analysis of bombing in support of the breakout from Normandy and the advance through France into Germany. One job, assigned to him by Zuckerman, was to assess the destruction of the bridges over the River Seine in impeding the escape of German forces from the Falaise Pocket. ‘Bridge interdiction’ was in favour, particularly by the U.S. Army Air Force, arguing that it would reduce troop and supply movements drastically. Zuckerman and his team were not convinced. With USAAF and RAF Bomber Command represented in Emmens’s small team, they found, after considerable work, that 90% of vehicles, 70% of tanks and at least 95% of the men who reached the Seine succeeded in crossing the river, despite the blown bridges.

Emmens was in charge of the post-war survey of town bombing—as a member of the newly named British Bombing Survey Unit. By then it was possible to compare the various estimates of the effects of the bombing on German cities, estimates including those made by Bomber Command, the scientists acting on the results of the surveys, as well as the real information from German sources. As his biography reports:

According to Emmens, the scientists came out of it very well and were nearer to the truth than any others, whose estimates were in general excessive. He was in charge of the survey of town bombing, which made it clear that until the chaos in Germany right at the end of the war, the Allied offensive had had little effect on either morale or production. Concentration on communications or fuel at an earlier stage would have been much more useful. At the start of the war, towns were about all that could be hit but, according to Emmens, rigorous training for greater accuracy and a switch to other targets should have followed.

Emmens (front row left). From Zuckerman 1978
Although civilians, members of the survey were given honorary commissions in the Royal Air Force

From the Natural History of Bombing and the heart of the scientific analysis of military operations, Emmens returned to the National Institute of Medical Research. His statistical nous was such that he became involved in a number of activities that used those talents in addition to working on deep-freezing spermatozoa with Alan (later Sir Alan) Parkes. Emmens had first got a job in Parkes’s laboratory in 1937. He had graduated in Zoology with Physiology as a subsidiary subject (having swapped Agriculture at Wye College for Zoology at University College London. He had then worked as a research student with J.B.S. Haldane on biometry but gave up that studentship when he was offered a permanent job with Parkes. His job was to establish biological assays for human sex steroids and gonadotrophins, biological assays because no other methods were available for these substances, often of unknown chemical composition, at the very low concentrations present in blood and urine. Defining the dose or concentration of a hormone by its biological activity was essential and required considerable statistical input. Emmens, in the then burgeoning field of endocrinology, also began work on the biological effects of oestrogens.

In 1947, Emmens was invited to join the new department of veterinary physiology in the University of Sydney. He accepted and sailed for Australia in March 1948 with his wife and family.

From Centaur (Journal of the Sydney University Veterinary Society) 1948

In Sydney, he had a hard time from some members of the veterinary profession in the vet school: ‘Emmens was not a vet, was not a blood and guts physiologist, was not even a physiologist’. So entrenched in view were these vets—echoing it has to be said their counterparts in the U.K.—that I have been told stories of their anti-Emmens antics by former members of staff and by former veterinary students. Many of the latter, I became aware, thought Emmens and his departmental staff from several science disciplines, a breath of fresh air. The research output of his very small department exceeded that of all the rest of the veterinary school.

Emmens was highly active in Australian and international science, continuing for some time his own interests in bioassays and biological standards and in the actions of oestrogens and anti-oestrogenic compounds. He is remembered as always in a hurry, not to suffer fools gladly, and of ‘incandescent temper’. Present-day university ‘managements’, spouting HR platitudes from every orifice, would be horrified—and wrong.

Although his biographers report that he first became interested in pond life at the age of 10. He then started to keep freshwater species while at school and tried to keep marine species collected during family holidays to the coast. It was on his move to Sydney that he began fishkeeping in earnest. He bought a large house by the shore of Sydney Harbour. The basement he filled with over 70 tanks ranging from 20 to 450 litres. As he became successful in keeping and breeding fish* he began writing about them in magazines for aquarists. His first book, published in 1953, was entitled Keeping and Breeding Aquarium Fishes. It was published by Academic Press in New York (not as stated in his biographical memoir). Thereafter his books were published by TFH Publications, owned by the later disgraced and infamous Herbert Axelrod who was sometimes Emmens’s co-author, with an increased number appearing after his retirement from the university. These book covered freshwater and marine aquaria. Axelrod is described as Emmens’s friend by the latter’s biographers. If that was so, then perhaps stories of Axelrod’s dubious business methods and nomenclatural shenanigans over the naming of the Cardinal Tetra, Paracheirodon axelrodi, had not spread from the U.S.A. to Australia.

As far as I can ascertain it was Emmens who suggested in 1958 that ‘lactation’ in Discus fish, where the young feed on a skin secretion produced by the adults, was likely to be controlled by the hormone, prolactin, like milk secretion in mammals and crop ‘milk’ in pigeons. That suggestion was borne out by subsequent experimental work in Japan and Germany.

Clifford Emmens died in Sydney on 18 June 1999. An obituary in Tropical Fish Hobbyist, the magazine then owned by Herbert Axelrod, described Emmens as “scientist, teacher, author, aquarist, judo black belt, ballroom dancer” His biographers considered that ‘an apt summary of this complex and remarkable man. What could have been added is that he was a much respected and admired colleague’.

*For a long time I thought Emmens had been solely concerned with keeping and breeding fishes. However, I found an article he had written for the old Water Life magazine in the UK in 1955. It was on keeping the small Australian frogs (or ‘toadlets’) of the genus Pseudophryne. Some of these species are now classed as ‘critically endangered’ or ‘endangered’. Emmens photographed P. corroboree (the Southern Corroboree Frog) for his article. It is ‘Critically Endangered’ with only tens of adults being recorded now being recorded in the wild.

Stone GM, Wales RG. 2004. Clifford Walter Emmens, 1913-1999. Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.15, no.1, 2004 (see here for the version as a biographical memoir).

Zuckerman S. 1978. From Apes to Warlords. London: Hamish Hamilton.