Lough Ine (Hyne) before Kitching and Ebling: Louis Renouf

Louis Renouf (from Kearney*)

The first to develop Lough Ine (or Hyne) in southern Ireland as a marine biological research station was Louis Percy Watt Renouf (1887-1968) while he was Professor of Zoology at University College, Cork between 1922 and 1954. The whole story is told in Terri Kearney’s book*. During the late 1920s and 30s Renouf promoted Lough Ine as a place for visiting research workers, having succeeded in erecting first a packing case and then, in 1928, an old army hut as a laboratory. He attracted some big names in British biology including Nellie Eales (1889-1989) and Julian Huxley, who published the work he did there on regeneration in the polychaete, Sabella, in 1933.

I came across an article in Zoo magazine (soon to be renamed Animal and Zoo Magazine)(Volume 2  (3), August 1937) which also contained a map of Lough Ine. Renouf was a regular contributor to the Zoological Society of London’s magazine (Huxley, as Secretary, was Advisory Editor) and was listed as a patron of the ‘Zoo Club’ run by the magazine and the Society; he was described as ‘President of the Guild of Catholic Biology’ and appears to have been one of that church’s adherents who was trying from the inside to persuade the catholic hierarchy that evolution was something they should not oppose; in modern parlance he was an accommodationist.

Animal and Zoo Magazine, June 1938 (3(1)) contained brief biographies of contributors between June 1937 and June 1938. Here is Renouf’s entry (the editors or printers omitted his initial ‘L’):

With the arrival of the Kitching-Ebling expeditions each summer from the late 1940’s there appear (from the brief summaries of the archived letters between Kitching and Ebling) to have been tensions with Renouf over finances and between Renouf and University College, Cork. It appears that Kitching bought land on the lough for a hut to overcome the problem of paying what he thought were excessive fees to use the facilities provided by Renouf. My impression is that Ebling and Renouf remained on fairly friendly terms, with John Ebling writing Renouf’s obituary for the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Renouf had been elected in 1936).

Whatever, the difficulties Renouf’s efforts at Lough Ine were completely overshadowed, scientifically and organisationally from the early 1950s by the Kitching-Ebling show.

There is no doubt though, that it was Renouf, who was told of Lough Ine and its potential on his arrival in Cork in 1922 who worked under difficult conditions—financial, political and geographical—to get Lough Ine up and running as one of the places for marine biology.

Lough Ine was designated as Europe’s first Marine Nature Reserve in 1981.

Julian Huxley (centre right) at Lough Ine in 1933 (from Kearney*)

* Kearney T. 2011. Lough Hyne. The Marine Researchers - in Pictures. Skibereen Heritage Centre. Obtainable from here.

Ebling FJG. 1969. Louis Percy Renouf BA, Dip Agric (Cantab), DSc (Nat Univ Ireland). MRIA. Yearbook of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1967-68, 54-55.

The Kitching-Ebling split, Lough Ine (Hyne) and Reflections on a Summer Sea

Scientific divorces, whether of long-term collaborators, scientist and technician or scientist and past research student,  are horrendous—both to both the parties involved and to onlookers and friends. The reasons are often obscure and may take years to come to the boil. Jealousy, perceived slights, perceptions of unequal work load can all come into the mix.

One of the saddest cases was that of Jack Kitching* and John Ebling†. Their exploits each summer in exploring the ecology of Lough Ine, or Hyne as it is now known, a sea-loch in Ireland, with zoology students initially from Bristol and then, when Kitching moved, from the University of East Anglia, was known more widely and it was a constant feature in both of their lives from 1937 and 1938. Kitching was then a young lecturer and Ebling an undergraduate. They published many papers together and pioneered an experimental approach to ecology. Ebling moved from Bristol, had a short spell in Hull and then established himself in Sheffield where he rose through the ranks to the second professorship in zoology—then a vary rare promotion. Throughout, he headed the logistics of getting the equipment and people to Ireland each year and organising the supplies of food and alcohol. There seems no doubt, though, that Kitching regarded Loch Ine as his show and as his territory.

The Kitching and Ebling Summer Show at Loch Ine was captured superbly by Trevor Norton’s 2001 book, Reflections on a Summer Sea. He began it by quoting a letter he had written to Jack Kitching in 1994:

I have begun to write the story of Lough Ine. I want to tell of the stunning scenery and terrible history of the place, the myth and the magic, and to recapture all the fun and excitement we had in those summers when we waded and dived in the lough. Perhaps I can convey the wonder I felt when I first came to Lough Ine in the 1960s, and maybe slip in a bit of marine biology too…

and continued:

This is the story of the menagerie of eccentric and talented ecologists who, as a hobby, established a privately owned field laboratory in south-west Ireland and took part in one of the most unlikely projects in the history of marine biology.

I heard of the Kitching-Ebling split around 1987 from John Ebling himself. I found him or, more correctly, heard him, holding forth in the Staff Club at Sheffield in, I think 1987 or ’88. I left my host and went over to talk to him. In our student years in the 1960s, John had waxed lyrical about the summers on Lough Ine and so I asked him if he was still going. ‘No’, was the reply and he went on to explain that Kitching had cut all ties with him some years earlier and that he was no longer welcome. He was clearly distressed and utterly bewildered about the whole affair. We moved on to pleasanter matters and I left him to resume his conversation. That was the last time I saw him.

Trevor Norton saw at close hand the whole relationship between Kitching and Ebling and the eventual break up. The immediate cause appeared to be Kitching’s proprietorial attitude to Lough Ine and his attempting to hang on in research after his retirement against a background of tightening funding and lack of recognition of the importance of work there. It would also seem that Kitching came to resent his former student’s success in other fields, for John was at home with errant polychaetes, moulting patterns of mammals, hormonal effects on the skin, clinical dermatology and the effects of cosmetics.

So while it seems pretty clear that John Ebling was the injured party, as was Trevor Norton himself when he disagreed with Kitching on the direction the research should take, there did come a sort of and rather sad rapprochement. Trevor described a symposium in Cork in 1990 on the research at Lough Ine. Kitching and Ebling were both invited:

Although it was a relief to John to have an invitation and a chance to visit the lough, he was nervous about meeting Jack again. He needn’t have been, for Jack was no longer formidable. John was a ebullient as ever, but a stroke had stolen Jack’s vigour. He looked and sounded frail, a ghost of his old self. I feared his lecture might be a disaster, but on stage he rose to the occasion and spoke well. I saw John helping him across the road. They were chatting, perhaps about old times.

There Trevor left it and so I was delighted to find that a book of photographs illustrating the history of the people who made Lough Ine famous—now the subject of over 450 scientific publications had been published in 2011. Many of the photographs are Trevor Norton’s but it covers work from 1885, when the first studies of the lough were made, until 2010. When I received my copy I was delighted to recognise people I had met and worked alongside in parallel universes without knowing they had spent one or more summers there.

I cannot help but end with a John Ebling story. Trevor Norton explains how Jack Kitching disapproved of John’s ribald sense of humour especially in front of the students, “these tender plants”. My abiding memory is of Venice at Easter 1964. We had arrived by bus from Rovinj where we were being exposed to a marine biology field trip (Lough Ine lite is the best description I can think of with hindsight). The bus journey had taken several hours and we were dropped off at a vaporetto-stop where we found public lavatories before heading for St Mark’s Square. Italy at that time had the lira and inflation had led to massive numbers of lira being needed for everything. The relatively small number of men and the larger number of women lined up with John heading the queue (student prostates were smaller and bladders possibly bigger) to pay and enter. After several minutes inside he re-appeared. ‘I am reminded of that old rhyme written behind the door in gents’ lavatories’, he said. And continued:

Here I sit, broken hearted, 

Paid two-thousand lira and only farted.

I cannot enter a public lavatory anywhere in Europe without repeating that incantation. Kitching would not have been amused.

These are photographs from Terri Kearney's superb book of photographs:

Jack Kitching on his first visit in 1938

Ebling and Kitching on the front row at the conference in Cork when they met again in 1990

*John (“Jack”) Alwyne Kitching OBE FRS (1908-1996)
†Francis John Govier Ebling (1918-1992)

Norton T. 2001. Reflections on a Summer Sea. Century (paperback 2002, Arrow Books)

Kearney T. 2011. Lough Hyne. The Marine Researchers - in Pictures. Skibereen Heritage Centre. Obtainable from here.

Rovinj Marine Biological Laboratory in 1964. Part One

A SECOND PART has been added on 11 August 2020. It can be found HERE.
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A marine biology field trip was part of every zoology degree in the 1960s. For those of us in second year at Sheffield in 1964 we were not to enjoy the delights of the Robin Hood’s Bay Marine Laboratory—the usual venue—and the temperatures of the North Sea in March. Instead we were going Yugoslavia and the Marine Station at Rovinj on the Istrian coast. The Adriatic seemed much more appealing than the North Sea.

How the trip to Rovinj came about was, we recall, down to a former Sheffield student married to a Yugoslav who had become manager of the new hotel a short walk from Rovinj. Visiting Sheffield she persuaded John Ebling (1918-1992) of Rovinj’s possibilities not only for the marine life but also for side visits including the nearby Limski ‘fiord’, the Roman amphitheatre at Pula and, just within reach for a day, Venice.

When I scanned all my old slides a few years ago I came across the photographs I had taken on the Rovinj trip. I also realised that I knew nothing of the history of the Rovinj marine laboratory, or indeed whether it had survived to the present century. I do recall that the Sheffield staff (faculty for American readers) found it difficult to make contact with the inhabitants of the laboratory, of which I remember seeing only two, both dressed in those immense white labcoats that nearly reached the floor and favoured by Central and East European scientists of the time. We were asked not to wander from the large laboratory into the nether reaches of the building but one day John Ebling did venture back there to make some degree of contact with the locals and on his way seen a very large glass tank containing a shoal of cuttlefish. He managed to persuade those in charge that we lesser mortals should see that sight and it was one not to be missed. The shoal moved as if joined by invisible thread with the individuals changing colour and pattern in a display that was not only bewildering but also in unison.

Here is my photograph of the Rovinj Marine Biological Station taken in late March 1964 (my old passport shows entry to Yugoslavia on 17 March and exit on 1 April):

Rovinj Marine Biological Station. March 1964

I now find that the Rovinj laboratory is a constituent of Croatia’s Rudjer Boskovic Institute and still operating as a marine biological laboratory. I then found papers on its history. It was founded in 1891 as a field station of the Berlin Aquarium Unter den Linden (1869-1910), a commercial operation that also displayed non-aquatic animals including the first gorilla in Germany. Rovinj as a town in Istria was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After the First World War Istria was under Italian rule and the laboratory came to fall under the aegis of an Italian-German consortium with a co-director appointed from each side by the Royal Italian Oceanographic Committee and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesselschaft. At the end of the Second World War, the laboratory was closed for three years. Istria became part of Yugoslavia and the national academy took charge. That was obviously the state when we were there in 1964. With the breakup of Yugoslavia, Rovinj became part of Croatia in 1991. With such upheavals it is hardly surprising that the laboratory, its library and its reference collections suffered. The books, papers and specimens were moved to Italy in 1943 and it would appear that the building was wrecked.

The original purpose of the Rovinj marine station was to supply living organisms to the Berlin Aquarium. It also came to supply living and preserved materials throughout Europe. The histories shown below explain how it came to acquire a research function through the activities of Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) famous as the ‘father of modern pathology’ and for cell theory but infamous for his opposition to Darwin.

In 1964 the laboratory had a small boat, Bios, shown here at Rovinj. She took us on a cruise up the Limski ‘kanal’, a ria where oysters and mussels were grown in large numbers. On a cold, damp day light relief was provided by the exploration of the set of the not-worth-watching movie, The Long Ships, which had recently been filmed there.

Bios, the laboratory's boat. March 1964

We all stayed at the Hotel Jadran. It had been built before the First World War to attract tourists to the town. Much Prošek (a name now banned by the EU) was consumed after dinner. On Easter Sunday (29 March) we were given boiled eggs for breakfast that had been died a deep, virulent purple. The lurid eggs put some of the ladies who may have consumed too much Prošek the evening before off consuming them but a male student who obviously loved eggs worked his way through them; I lost count after he got to six.

Rovinj with Hotel Jadran (centre). Photographs were Agfacolor
slides now notorious for deteriorating with time

The pace of marine biology was not taxing and we had an afternoon trips to Pula with its Roman amphitheatre as well as a whole day by bus to Venice. The countryside was alive with lizards warming themselves in the spring sunshine and breeding amphibians. The chorus of hundreds of tree frogs in the bushes surrounding a pond was unforgettable. The reptiles and amphibians of Istria were little known in the English-speaking world at that time and we published a note* on what we had found.

One of the lizards, Algyroides nigropunctatus; a male

Other photographs I took can be seen on Flickr.

PART TWO was added on 11 August 2020. It can be found HERE.

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These two papers describe the history of the Rovinj marine laboratory and include references to earlier descriptions:

Lucu, Č & Marsoni, SS. 2013. Tribute to Professor Massimo Sella - former scientist and Director of the Marine Biological Station in Rovinj - on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of marine research in Rovinj (1891-2011). Periodicum Biologorum 115, 105-108.

Zavodnik, D, Zavodnik, N & Iveša, L. 2001. The 110th anniversary of the marine research station at Rovinj (Adriatic Sea, Croatia). Reference collections. Nat. Croat. 10, 53–60.

*Peaker, M & Peaker, SJ. 1968. Spring herpetofauna of the Rovinj area (Istria, Yugoslavia). British Journal of Herpetology 4, 36‑37