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.

Arapaima ‘Milk’: Reflections on big fish and a big biological problem

Since the discovery of ‘lactation’ in discus fish, the production of mucus by a number of other species to feed their young has been described. Somewhat different has been the description of what happens in the Giant Arapaima (Arapaima gigas)—an endangered species of the Amazon basin and one that can reach a length of three metres. Locals had observed the gathering of young around the head of the male and the release from the head of a milky fluid into the water. Some work has been done on the phenomenon because these fish are bred and reared for human consumption.

Giant Arapaima (Credit: Citron / CC-BY-SA-3.0)

The fluid comes from the cephalic canals of the lateral line system. The eggs, larvae and young are in close contact with this secretion, even when the male is leading the offspring to water rich in plankton for feeding. Parental care last for three months. There are numerous possibilities for the function of “arapaima milk”. A paper published late last year* describes an attempt to set the ball rolling in this respect by taking a proteomic approach to the composition of the fluid.

The fluids from the cephalic canals breeding and non-breeding males and females were analysed since any additional substances present in the former could indicate a particular adaptation that benefits the young. To cut a long story short, the total protein content of the fluid was low, suggesting that the fluid is not important in nutrition, even if the young were to eat it. There were a number of antimicrobial agents in the vast array of peptides present. Two hormones, prolactin and stanniocalcin were detected in females.

The great problem, as with substances in mammalian milk, is to identify which, if any, substances of the hundreds present have a physiological rôle in the offspring. Fluid from the cephalic canals is bound to reflect cellular and protective systems within that system. They may be in the fluid for no other reason than they are disposable elements and have no function at all in the offspring. But protection for the cephalic canals against infection, which are open to the surrounding water, could simply being extended to provide some degree of protection to the offspring, from contact with the skin and gills and/or by ingestion.

The question of biological signals from parent to offspring through hormones or other biologically active substances has also been raised in discussions of skin or, in this case, cephalic secretions, of fish. For example, it might be tempting to speculate on whether the prolactin detected in female arapaima milk has any effect on the offspring. However, it is a hormone that one would expect to be present given its function in mediating aspects of maternal care in vertebrates and its presence in fluid could simply reflect an action on the tissues of the cephalic canals rather than any significance to the offspring.

Mammalian milk contains a large number of hormones, growth factors and the like which could have an effect on the young. So many people were—and still are—assuming that presence in milk indicates a function in the young mammal ingesting the milk that Peggy Neville and I warned against making such assumptions and published a list of criteria that would need to be met in order to demonstrate that such an effect was taking place:

1. An effect in the offspring must be obtained in response to exposure to the substance in milk.
2. The effect in the offspring must be abolished by removal of the substance from milk and restored when that specific component is restored.
3. Th substance must be shown to be present and active in milk.
4. The substance must be shown to retain its biological activity in the offspring to the point at which it is postulated to act or to be activated by partial digestion within the digestive tract.

Shortly after we wrote that commentary in 1991 only two series of studies satisfied those criteria.

The criteria for demonstrating an effect of a substance in milk on the offspring are tough to fulfil. But they have to be in order to prevent the proliferation of just-so stories masquerading as science. It would be a simple matter to modify those criteria to parental care in fish and any potential chemical communication between parent and offspring through skin or cephalic secretions.

The only clue I have seen so far for the importance of arapaima milk is: ‘Previous work suggested fingerlings raised under parental care condition would have higher survival rates and enhanced growth performance compared to in-door reared ones’*.

I also wondered—and have not seen discussed (although I have not looked that hard)—whether arapaima milk had some chemoattractant function, keeping the offspring concentrated around the head of the male when he finds plankton-rich but possibly murky water in which they can feed. But like every other suggestion that is a just-so story that ‘ain’t necessarily so’.

*Torati LS, Migaud H, Doherty MK, Siwy J, Mullen W, Mesquita PEC, Albalat A. 2017. Comparative proteome and peptidome analysis of the cephalic fluid secreted by Arapaima gigas (Teleostei: Osteoglossidae) during and outside parental care. PLoS ONE 12(10): e0186692. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0186692

Peaker M, Neville MC. 1991. Hormones in milk: chemical signals to the offspring? Journal of Endocrinology 131, 1-3.

Chapman Pincher, reds-under-the-bed journalist of the Daily Express and his earlier foray into writing about fish

Pincher's Autobiography
To keep my academic interests
in trim, in 1947 I published
A Study of Fishes, a book
intended mainly for anglers
and heavily illustrated with
my own line drawings.

I was surprised while scanning old copies of the Aquarist magazine to find the name of a Fleet Street legend. During the latter half of the 20th Century Chapman Pincher was defence correspondent of the Daily Express at a time when stories—rather like now—of Russian and other Soviet bloc agents embedded in the British government, in the security service and in the secret intelligence service, real or imaginary, were rife. Pincher’s stories mixed leaked facts on defence matters with deliberately planted fake news fed to him from all quarters of the intelligence world together with the conspiracy theories and unproven fixations of spies and spy-catchers. He was a highly successful journalist, concerned only apparently with getting a story, and noted as a thorn in the side of successive governments because of his ability to extract from contacts confidential and often accurate information. Later comments from across the political spectrum have been damning, particularly on the accuracy of many of his stories on intelligence matters. The official and independent historian of MI5 wrote: ‘The stuff he produced on the intelligence services was almost totally inaccurate’†.

What I did not know (I must have been out of the country when he died aged 100 in 2014) was that Henry Chapman Pincher started off with a degree in zoology and botany from King’s College, London, became a school teacher because no university posts were available, and after service in the army became science correspondent of the Daily Express. It was in the 1940s that I found him, ensconced in the Express as a favourite of the proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, in the pages of the Aquarist, where and seemingly presaging his entire career, his writing proved controversial in some circles.

In the March 1947 issue of the Aquarist, A.G. Evans wrote to say that he had complained to the editor of the Daily Express about an article on goldfish that was published on 21 December 1946; the text of the letter was added. The gist of the complaint was that it described research that had later been falsified to the effect that fish can absorb microparticles of food through the skin. Evans also noted but did not expand in the letter to the editor on a claim made in the Express that  ‘the skin of a goldfish secretes a substance beneficial to other goldfish’. Chapman Pincher replied but did not deal with the main complaint only to ‘substance beneficial to other goldfish’ claim. He noted that the work had been published, quoted the reference and informed Evans that he could find the journal in the Zoological Society’s library.

Then Alec Frederick Fraser-Brunner (born 1906), the Editor of the Aquarist, took up the cudgels but in doing so actually scored an own goal. He began by quoting from the original newspaper article and then explained that it was the second claim in Pincher’s article that was wrong since it had been shown that goldfish do not absorb small particles of food through the skin. Fraser-Brunner also asked why Pincher ‘chose this abstruse matter, still in the experimental stage, rather than something simpler and more instructional for the children’ and then criticised the illustration in the Daily Express, saying it was of a Crucian Carp, not a goldfish.

The own goal? Well, Fraser-Brunner quoted the paper that Pincher had suggested Evans read in his reply. The authors he said were Allen, Finkel and Hoskins. But the senior author’s name was not Allen but Allee*. This could not have been a typo because he made the mistake twice.

Looking at Fraser-Brunner’s letter 70 years later, I have some sympathy for Pincher. He was at least trying to pass on the latest information, as he saw it—albeit imperfectly, and was not taking the patronising tone in what appears to have been an article for children that Fraser-Brunner was advocating.

The matter did not end there. In his letter to the Aquarist, Chapman Pincher wrote:

Your correspondent [Evans] states that I must be hard up for what he amusingly calls “piscicultural information”. I would refer him to my “Study of Fishes,” shortly to be published by Messrs. Herbert Jenkins, Ltd.

Shortly afterwards, Alec Fraser-Brunner produced a long, scathing review of Pincher’s book for the Aquarist. It started as it continued:

A journalist steps in where ichthyologists have feared to tread. The task of collecting, collating and interpreting data from the large amount of recent work on fishes is one that would be considered by those who have made a life-study of the subject to be a formidable task. Mr. Pincher has viewed it as a little thing to be tossed off between purveying titbits to “Daily Express” readers, organising exhibitions of atomic power and writing on such matters as livestock breeding. The result, as might be expected, is superficial and undigested.

After criticising the lack of a bibliography, the diagrams, the simplification of terms and the drawings of various species, he concluded:

That it should be left to a journalist to produce this work as a pot-boiler is due to the preoccupation of ichthyologists with discovering new facts, and their realisation that the selection and interpretation of our knowledge takes a great deal more time and experience than has gone into the present work. This is very sad.

US Edition

After that excoriation, I thought it would be worthwhile finding a copy of Pincher’s book to see just what a bad job he had made of it. I found it online and was utterly surprised. It is actually pretty good for its time and its readership. Pincher had drawn his own diagrams from textbook illustrations and there are lots of them; he covered a lot of topics, some very well indeed and I ended up impressed by his breadth of knowledge and the way he had put that knowledge over to a lay readership (‘angler, naturalist, and general reader’).

Having read the snippets from the Aquarist, I can only guess at the motivation for Fraser-Brunner’s carping—(could not resist it)—criticism. That guess is professional jealousy pure and simple. I do not think that Fraser-Brunner could have been aware of Pincher’s biological background since in the review he seems to imply it must have been in general science.

Alec Fraser-Brunner

Fraser-Brunner has an interesting but incomplete history. He appears not to have had a university degree but obviously worked for a long period at the Natural History Museum. He is shown in their archives catalogue as ‘artist, aquarist and ichthyologist’ with his activity as ‘Made models and artwork for new Fish Gallery 1931. Employed part time at the NHM to work on Plectognathi from 1934 (grants supplied periodically until 1955). Worked at Godstone Quarry with evacuated spirit collections during WW2’. It appears—and I have no further information—that he must have shown such an interest in fishes as an amateur that he devoted himself to studying  and becoming accepted in the museum as an ichthyologist. He is listed in the 1939 Register (a special census in preparation for war) as ‘zoologist’. The Plectognathi are a group that includes pufferfishes, boxfishes, triggerfishes, filefishes as well as the enormous sunfishes or molas. I have found eleven papers with Fraser-Brunner as sole author. The Museum archives say he was employed part-time and I do not know what else he did over the same period except as Editor of the Aquarist from its restart in 1946 after the Second World War.

I suspect that Alec Fraser-Brunner, having worked his way up the hard way as a descriptive ichthyologist and taxonomist and as a well-known aquarist and fish fancier, was pretty put out by a stranger on the scene, Chapman Pincher, writing articles and books on what he, Fraser-Brunner, had a proprietorial interest. Pincher was, in fact, very well connected scientifically even at that time. He had produced two papers while still an undergraduate and had befriended the joint editor of Nature, L.J.F. Brimble (1904-1965).

Soon after this spat with Chapman-Pincher, Freser-Brunner got a job with the Colonial Office to survey the fish of the Gulf of Aden. He also worked for the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations on fisheries. He was appointed Director of the Van Kleef Aquarium (now demolished) in Singapore in 1956; in 1970 he became Curator of the Carnegie Aquarium (now also demolished except for a wall) at Edinburgh Zoo. He died in 1986 in Edinburgh.

Alec Fraser-Brunner left a lasting legacy in Singapore. He designed the Merlion logo for the Singapore Tourist Board which has become symbolic of Singapore since a statue of the beast was constructed in 1972.

Fraser-Brunner’s replacement as editor of the Aquarist was Anthony Evans. I assume this was the A.G. Evans who wrote the original criticism of Pincher’s piece in the Express. Evans edited the Aquarist until 1966 when he defected to a new magazine, Pet Fish Monthly.

†I have found anomalies in his autobiography. His birthplace is given there and on websites as Ambala in India. However, the British Armed Forces And Overseas Births And Baptisms Register shows his place of birth as Sabathu, a hill station and military cantonment, 97 km to the north. His autobiography reads as if he was teacher at the Liverpool Institute, a famous grammar school for boys, from 1936 until he was called up in 1940. However, the 1939 Register shows that he was living 79 miles from Liverpool, at 91 Farrar Road, Bangor, North Wales with his first wife, Margaret Stanford, and another couple.

*Warder Clyde Allee (1885-1955) of the University of Chicago. Allee WC, Finkel AJ, Hoskins WH. 1940. The growth of goldfish in homotypically conditioned water; a population study in mass physiology. Journal of Experimental Zoology 84, 417-443.

Evans AG. 1947. Misinformation. Aquarist 11 (12, March 1947), 379.
Pincher C. 1947. [letter]. Aquarist 12 (1, April 1947), 4.
Fraser-Brunner A. 1947. The goldfish and the newspaper. Aquarist 12 (2, May 1947), 40.
Pincher, C. 1948. A Study of Fishes. London: Herbert Jenkins
Pincher C. 1948. A Study of Fish. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. (U.S. edition of Pincher’s book)
Fraser-Brunner A. 1948. Book Review. A Study of Fishes by Chapman Pincher B.Sc. Aquarist 12 (12, March 1948), 365.

Pincher C.2014. Chapman Pincher. Dangerous to Know. A Life. London: Biteback.

Lady Pen’s Fish: Dr Klee revisits their identity

Thence home, and to see my Lady Pen — where my wife and I were shown a fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water, that will live so for ever; and finely marked they are, being foreign.

This sentence was part of Samuel Pepys’s entry in his diary for 28 May 1665. Since the diary has been deciphered from Pepys’s shorthand in whole or in part, the identity of Lady Pen’s fishes has elicited speculation on what they could have been. Some type of goldfish from China was the initial thought but then Christopher Coates of the New York Aquarium suggested that the fish were Paradise Fish (Macropodus opercularis). This suggestion was taken up by G.F. Hervey and J. Hems in their book, The Goldfish, first published in 1948, and it is that identity which is shown in Latham and Matthews’s definitive version of the Diary, published between 1970 and 1983, as a footnote with reference to Hervey & Hems.

Coates argued that ‘finely marked’ indicated the presence of fine markings, as on a male Paradise Fish. This species can also breathe air by using its labyrinth organ, permitting its survival in a small vessel.

Paradise Fish
Photograph used on Wikipedia. André Karwath aka Aka, edited by Muhammad 

Dr Albert J Klee has published an essay¹ in which he questions what has become the standard dogma for the identity of Lady Pen’s fish. He has shown that goldfish were imported into Europe earlier than claimed by Hervey and Hems and that the Paradise Fish first arrived much later. He also notes the close ties between Lady Pen² and family in the Netherlands, where goldfish arrived with the Jesuit, Martinus Martini, in 1653. He, and I, see Coates’s point about survival in a small vessel to be irrelevant. Even large goldfish have survived for decades in small goldfish bowls. I knew of one which had been in the family for twenty or more years; the water was changed every day.

The only real description of the fish was in Pepys’s ‘finely marked’. Klee points out that this could have meant any number of things, not just in the sense of ‘with fine markings’; attractively distinctive might just as well have been Pepys’s meaning. Indeed he could have described any of his lady friends as 'finely marked'.

I have never been content with the notion that Lay Pen had Paradise Fish. While they are relatively hardy and would have survived indoors during a London summer they are not that hardy. Lady Pen must have had the fish before Pepys and his wife visited their neighbours on 28 May (7 June in the present, Gregorian, calendar) and had they been sent from the Far East would have had to have survived at least part of the European winter and spring. That winter and spring were known to have been exceptionally cold, as those seeking the cause of the outbreak of The Great Plague of London in that year, recorded and noted. English houses were, and some still are, unless within a few yards of an open fire, freezing cold in winter. Too cold, I would suggest, for Paradise Fish but not for goldfish.

Albert Klee has done a great job in reopening the case of Lady Pen’s fish.

Modified 9 November 2019

1 The mystery of Lady Pen’s fish. Aquarium Hobby Historical Society of America, Facebook Files, May 4, 2016. See the Society’s Facebook page for a download of this and other essays.

2 Lady Pen was the mother of William Penn (1644-1718), founder of Pennsylvania.

Tropical Fish Transport in 1951 Avro York

Interest in fish-keeping has waxed and waned since the middle of the 19th Century. The trade in livestock and supplies this century is enormous at around US$M500 per annum. In Britain, all accounts stress the boom of the early 1950s. In those days air travel was extremely expensive and so I was surprised by what I read in this letter written to the Aquarist magazine in 1976 by C.D. Roe of Shirley Aquatics (a company founded in the 1930s that is still in existence). In discussing the development of artificial seawater, he wrote:

…In 1951 I used to charter every three months a York freighter from B.O.A.C. to bring fishes from Singapore to London. This was before the days of oxygen-filled bags and insulated containers, and we used to have to carry out our heating and apparatus at enormous cost, and the four or five day journey back, as it used to be, was spent in keeping the fish well aerated and at the right temperature. The bringing back of freshwater tropical fish in those days was very simple and successful and quite profitable…

The Avro York was developed from the Lancaster bomber. The British Overseas Airways Corporation (merged with British European Airways to form British Airways in 1974) operated all long-haul flights. Those of us who flew with BOAC still miss it while those of us of a certain age will also remember the Dinky diecast toy Avro York, made only between 1952 and 1954. Mine, a much-prized birthday present, had many take-offs and landings from an airfield drawn on a sheet of cardboard—none though with fish from Singapore.

BOAC Avro York
(from the British Airways Heritage Collection)