The master storyteller gets inside the head of collectors and skull “experts.” Excerpt from “Skulls – A Compelling Tale of the World’s Most Bizarre Collection,” December 5, 2012.
SIMON WINCHESTER, Author, A Crack at the Edge of the World and Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection
Three years ago I had a telephone call from a friend of mine in London, Max Whitby, a former BBC producer who now has a company that makes apps. He said, “Simon, what I want you to do is read today’s Daily Mail.” The Daily Mail, as you probably know, is a British tabloid. Spectacularly unreliable, [but] it’s not one of the worst. It didn’t receive much of the attentions of the Leveson inquiry [into abuses by the British press] that just finished. It’s a pretty unreliable, inaccurate, sensational newspaper, but the most popular newspaper in the world in the English language on the Internet. He said, “Read it. Look for a story about a man called Alan Dudley.”
It turns out that this chap, Alan Dudley, collects skulls and has the most remarkable collection imaginable. He lives in a city called Coventry, an extremely dull, industrial city in the English Midlands. His job for the past 30 years has been to select the veneers that go on the dashboards of Jaguar motorcars. If any of you in this audience have a Jaguar, sit in it and admire the burled walnut: It was selected by Alan Dudley. But, like all British schoolchildren growing up, he collected newts and tadpoles and watched the television programs made by the great British national treasure David Attenborough. He was particularly, as a teenager, fascinated by wildlife.
One day, his life essentially changed when he saw by the side of the road a red fox body. He thought, “I’d like to do a taxonomic preservation of this. I’d like to stuff it.” He picked it up and saw, sadly, that it had been hit by a car and had many broken ribs and a big gash in its side and wasn’t really going to be amenable to taxidermy, but then – and this shows how Alan Dudley is somewhat different from the rest of us – he thought, “I know, I’ll cut off its head and I’ll look at its skull.” So that’s what he did. Not much of this talk is going to be grotesque, except the subject as a whole is rather macabre, but the only detail here is what he then did. He took the fox’s head and with his pen knife he scraped off the fur and the underlying muscles and removed the tongue and the eyeballs and things like that and eventually got himself a rather beautiful thing: A fox’s skull which, when the fur and everything is removed from it, is a thing of some considerable beauty.
He looked at all the various components of it. He read up on it: how the bottom part is the mandible; the upper part the brain case, the cranium; the front part is the rostrum, which could be a beak or a bill or a nose or, in our case, a face; and the thing below the eye sockets, the arches that are effectively the cheekbones; and then the auditory bullae in the back, which are big or small depending on how keen the animal is on hearing; the ridge at the very top at the back of its head, called the sagittal ridge, which is where the muscles come from that open and close the jaws. He became fascinated by this and decided that he, having collected one, would collect more.
He collected a few days later – and similarly prepared with his pen knife – a newt, which has also a rather different shape, a rather more delicate mandible, a smaller rostrum, big eyes, the arches a little bit less developed than those of the fox. Then he got a fish from the fishmongers and found a different kind of structure, much more delicate bones or cartilages, but essentially the same structure. He thought to himself that he was going to collect skulls. This would be his hobby.
As with many people I’ve met over the past few weeks talking about this book, they normally stop when they have 60 or 70 skulls. He had got to about 70 or 75 skulls by the time he was about 25 or 26 and married and had two children. The problem was, it’s the way you prepare the skulls. Some of them are extremely delicate. A lot of them have very, very fine bones inside the nose, for instance. Clearly the pen knife way is not a very good way of preparing a delicate skull. The other traditional way is to let loose on the skull thousands of maggots. You immerse it in a tub of maggots or beetles. The trouble with that is, that the maggots are often so happy to see all this flesh that they’ve just been presented with that they have a sort of feeding frenzy – I don’t know if maggots have elbows or not – but they sort of elbow each other out of the way. In this frenzy they disturb and dislodge and break and damage some of the more delicate bones.
What Alan, in the end, decided was to do the most primitive cleansing of the skull, known as cold water maceration. You put it in a bucket of cold water and you leave it there for many months. The bacteria in the water, or the ones that settle on the surface, do the work for him that he would have done with the pen knife and the maggots. The trouble is, the water turns jet black and it really smells absolutely dreadful. It was during this period that his wife left him. [Laughter.]
Poor old Alan. He didn’t have a wife now, and he had an increasing number of skulls, but he did have a spare bedroom. He put into this spare bedroom this collection, which he rapidly accelerated in size until it grew to what it is today, which is about two and a half thousand skulls, all kept in the bedroom of this house in Coventry in England.
And yet he is unsung.
No one knew about this chap. They came to know about him for the reason that Max Whitby had called in the first place. The reason he was in the Daily Mail is that he’d gotten into trouble. The fourth of March in 2008, he was getting up for another day of veneer choosing and skull collecting, when there was a rap on the door and he went downstairs in his dressing gown to find four policemen standing there.
They identified themselves. There was one from the Customs and Excise Department, there was one from the Wildlife Protection Department, who had come all the way down from Edinburgh, and there were two uniformed policemen – not armed, of course, because this was Britain – in case the situation turned ugly, which was most unlikely. Alan is an extremely gentle, retiring sort of chap. They said, “Mr. Dudley, we have reason to believe that you have a number of skulls in your possession which you shouldn’t have under the convention of the international trafficking of endangered species. I’m afraid you have to sit down in your kitchen while we go upstairs to your former wife’s bedroom and examine this collection.”
They were upstairs all [morning] and they came down, rather triumphantly, just after lunch and said, “We have indeed found five things that you shouldn’t have.” There was a howler monkey from Ecuador, there was a particular type of marmoset called the goldies marmoset, there was a chimpanzee, there was a kind of penguin, and there was a tiger. “All five of these are illegal,” they said. “You shouldn’t have them.”
They did a number of things. They charged him formally. They put an ankle bracelet on him, and it was sufficiently, carefully calibrated that he couldn’t leave the city of Coventry, but he also – they put crime scene tape around the entrance of his former wife’s bedroom – he couldn’t go in the bedroom to look at his skulls.
When I turned up, he was effusive and happy, but he showed me his ankle bracelet and said, “Simon, I’d love you to see the collection. You can go and see it.” I ducked under the crime scene tape and I would hand him skulls and say, “What is that?” He’d say, “That’s a walrus,” or “that’s a narwhal,” or “that’s a sardine,” all of which I might say he has, “but I can’t go in because if I went in, police cars would arrive and I’d get into even more trouble than I’m in at the moment.”
We decided, having looked at this amazing collection of about 3,000 skulls, the thing about it was that it was taxonomically impeccable. There are tens of millions of species of creatures on this planet. A mere 58,000 species are chordates – have skulls – and of those they’re divided into five classes – the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and the fishes – and Alan has a very good and comprehensive collection in each of those classes. He’s now been doing it for the better part of 35 years. He is regarded as a great authority.
An awful lot of his specimens come from zoos. When I was there a zoo rang up from the English Midlands saying, “We’ve got a hippopotamus who is feeling a bit unwell, and we think it’s probably not going to last for another week. When it pops its clogs, as we say in England, will you take away the head and put it in, presumably, a very big bucket of water for a few months?” He doesn’t date much, Alan Dudley, he’s always got these baths with… [laughter].
We decided to make this app for the iPad. We made a careful list illustrating all these animals in this extraordinary collection, and using the iPad you can do all sorts of extraordinary things with them. You can examine them, expand them, compare them and rotate them. The technological aspect of this presentation is quite remarkable. What I wanted to do was look a little bit beyond that, not just at the collection itself, but at how skulls generally fit into human society. Why are we so interested particularly in the skull?
We have done so for donkey’s years. Go back to the oldest gravesites in the world, thousands of years old, and people didn’t revere, let’s say, the rib cage, which you might argue they did because it houses the lungs or the heart, or the pelvis they didn’t revere, through which birth occurs, even the longest bones in the body, let’s say the femur, that wasn’t particularly revered by the ancients. The head always was. Even though they didn’t really know what the grey matter that it enclosed did, there was this feeling right from the very start that this brain matter was where the soul, the personality of the person, resided. Whatever protected it, this hard thing that surrounded and protected it was in some way special. Plus, it looked like the human being or the animal that it originally represented. So, we wanted to take this notion of the importance of the skull in human society and examine it in some detail.
I’ve been long fascinated by how the skull can be misused by scientists. In the early 1900s there was this American biologist who developed the science of craniometry, measuring thousands of skulls that he had access to, deciding that there were different types, different shapes of skulls, from which there was a human hierarchy of existence. For instance, very crudely, two types of skulls which you see in dogs, for instance, dolichocephalic skulls – which are rather elongated skulls – or brachiocephalic skulls – which are sort of flattened skulls like you’ll see on a bulldog. This chap Morton, who was very much a eugenicist and a racial supremacist as well, said that these skull types show a hierarchy within the human race, such that the dolichocephalic skulls of the Aryan shows it has racial and moral superiority to the brachiocephalic skull of the Jewish person. This, of course, was seized upon by the Third Reich in the 1930s and used as one of the many scientific justifications for the policies of the Nazi government in the 1930s and 1940s.
The same thing happened, using the same craniometric measurements, for the apartheid apologists in the 1950s in South Africa. The pseudoscience that attaches to skulls has been used for a long time for very wicked ends.
It’s also been used for rather risible ends. I want to talk a little bit about the science of phrenology, which is very much a pseudoscience – it’s complete poppycock. It was invented by a couple of German scientists in the 1850s who declared – they started off fairly reasonably – that certain parts of the brain are responsible for certain aspects of a human’s personality or proclivities. If you were good, for instance, at calculation, then that might be part of the brain above your left eye. If you were an old lecher, then your lecherousness would be at the back right of your head. If you were particularly honest, it would be a development of your frontal lobes. If you had love for life, that would be in the back right of your head.
Where they started making a mistake is they said that if you’re particularly good or endowed with this, your brain will swell so that you’ll get a bulge in your brain. Where they really went off the rails was to say that then your skull would change shape to accommodate the bulge underneath. That would be possible to detect by someone with very, very delicate fingers feeling the outside of your head. This is complete nonsense. The skull, basically – once you’re grown up and no longer have a child’s skull, which is very flexible – our skulls are very solid indeed. The idea that a brain can expand and cause something to bulge out is nonsense.
This didn’t stop this man Fowler, a somewhat unscrupulous man in London, opening – very near the offices of the Daily Mail, it has to be said, in Fleet Street – a consulting room. He published a booklet about the 39 areas, the bulges I can potentially feel in your head. He would invite people, on payment of two guineas a time – a not insubstantial sum in the 1880s – to come and be felt by his delicate fingers, and they would be told, “You have particular proclivities.” No suggestion that he could cure you by sort of pushing your head down and moving the bulge from one part of your head to another.
This went on for quite a number of years until another doctor pointed out, quite cogently in a paper published in the 1890s, that this was errant nonsense. The interesting thing is that this doctor is well known to you all for a completely different reason, nothing to do with medicine. It was Peter Mark Roget, of Roget’s Thesaurus. He published a paper saying that this man Fowler was a complete charlatan. A very rich charlatan by now, it should be said. It forced him to close down the business and scuttle off to the shires. Roget had the last laugh, because if you look at phrenology now in Roget’s Thesaurus, you’ll see it’s up there with palmistry and astrology as one of the scientific nonsenses that briefly flourished in Victorian England.
Another story is of Piltdown Man. The skull of Piltdown Man has been in the British Museum in London since 1912. It came about in a rather extraordinary way. A man called Charles Dawson, a lawyer in Sussex, a very pompous, very ambitious sort of man who wanted to be known and recognized by history. He was also an amateur archeologist. He was walking one day in 1908 in a quarry close to his house when he came across the fragments of a skull. He thought, this is clearly a hominid, it’s clearly an adult human being, but it’s got a very small brain case. Possibly, it has monkey-like, ape-like features, which at the time was a very interesting thing to say, because Darwin had written On the Origin of Species just 50 years before, in 1859. Teilhard de Chardin had found Peking Man; there was a general acceptance among the intelligentsia that humankind had somehow descended from or was somehow associated with the ape. Everyone was looking for the missing link, some creature that showed the features of being both human and ape-like, and this was a possibility.
Dawson took these fragments up to London to the British Museum, to the head of the Geology Department, a chap called Arthur Woodward, a very serious and revered man. He never in 42 years took a single day off work except half a day when he broke his arm. That was the only liberality he allowed himself. He very excitedly came down to Sussex and the two of them hunted in this quarry for several weeks and found another, and much better, cranium. They found a jawbone which was clearly ape-like and a couple of molar teeth, which suggested that this creature, if it was all from one creature, had a fairly omnivorous diet, didn’t have a primitive ape-like diet.
Dawson worked on this for a long time and then assembled all the great and the good of the geological world and announced that they had found the missing link. This paper said that the missing link, 975 years old, proved incontrovertibly that mankind had descended from the ape. “Wasn’t it wonderful,” said Woodward to the audience, “that the missing link was an Englishman.” He was a Sussex gentleman. This was the apotheosis, the climax of the British Empire; how wonderful. He called it, in honor of the man who first discovered it, Eoanthropus dawsoni, and it was on pride of place at the British Museum for the next 40 years. The missing link.
However, in the 1950s enough other evidence had been accumulating suggesting that this was probably unlikely. They were given permission to analyze the skull. They had come to realize that a skull that’s been buried for a long time absorbs the chemical fluorine. They tested this skull [and found] it had virtually no fluorine in it at all. Clearly, they smelled a rat.
They analyzed it more carefully and they found that of the three parts, the hominid was a 50,000-year-old, probably from Germany, fairly standard fossil of a small human being. The jawbone was of an orangutan from Sarawak that had been dyed with potassium bichromate to make it look orangey-brown color. The teeth, when looked at under a microscope, had got little bits of metal in them, showing they’d been filed down by a machine. The whole thing was a monstrous hoax.
But who had perpetrated the hoax? Initially they discounted Woodward because he was a figure of such rectitude. They thought possibly it was Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a nearby neighbor. It’s the sort of thing that Sherlock Holmes might have done. They thought of Teilhard de Chardin, who had a house nearby and had a sort of axe to grind, but they dismissed that after a little while.
Then they looked at Charles Dawson’s own personal collection. Both men had died and there was a huge memorial to Dawson for being such a hero. When they looked at his collection the heroism somewhat evaporated; they found that he was a habitual forger and hoaxer. They found all sorts of things in his house: a Chinese bronze urn which was neither Chinese nor bronze, an elephant bone scapula tool which had been cut with an electric band saw. He was a thoroughly bad hat.
They removed the Piltdown skull from pride of place and put it in the storeroom in the back. It’s now very, very difficult to see, because the British Museum is embarrassed. It’s sad to say the missing link is not an Englishman. Never was, and never will be.
scuttle off to the shires. Roget had the last laugh, because if you look at phrenology now in Roget’s Thesaurus, you’ll see it’s up there with palmistry and astrology as one of the scientific nonsenses that briefly flourished in Victorian England.
Another story is of Piltdown Man. The skull of Piltdown Man has been in the British Museum in London since 1912. It came about in a rather extraordinary way. A man called Charles Dawson, a lawyer in Sussex, a very pompous, very ambitious sort of man who wanted to be known and recognized by history. He was also an amateur archeologist. He was walking one day in 1908 in a quarry close to his house when he came across the fragments of a skull. He thought, this is clearly a hominid, it’s clearly an adult human being, but it’s got a very small brain case. Possibly, it has monkey-like, ape-like features, which at the time was a very interesting thing to say, because Darwin had written On the Origin of Species just 50 years before, in 1859. Teilhard de Chardin had found Peking Man; there was a general acceptance among the intelligentsia that humankind had somehow descended from or was somehow associated with the ape. Everyone was looking for the missing link, some creature that showed the features of being both human and ape-like, and this was a possibility.
Dawson took these fragments up to London to the British Museum, to the head of the Geology Department, a chap called Arthur Woodward, a very serious and revered man. He never in 42 years took a single day off work except half a day when he broke his arm. That was the only liberality he allowed himself. He very excitedly came down to Sussex and the two of them hunted in this quarry for several weeks and found another, and much better, cranium. They found a jawbone which was clearly ape-like and a couple of molar teeth, which suggested that this creature, if it was all from one creature, had a fairly omnivorous diet, didn’t have a primitive ape-like diet.
Dawson worked on this for a long time and then assembled all the great and the good of the geological world and announced that they had found the missing link. This paper said that the missing link, 975 years old, proved incontrovertibly that mankind had descended from the ape. “Wasn’t it wonderful,” said Woodward to the audience, “that the missing link was an Englishman.” He was a Sussex gentleman. This was the apotheosis, the climax of the British Empire; how wonderful. He called it, in honor of the man who first discovered it, Eoanthropus dawsoni, and it was on pride of place at the British Museum for the next 40 years. The missing link.
However, in the 1950s enough other evidence had been accumulating suggesting that this was probably unlikely. They were given permission to analyze the skull. They had come to realize that a skull that’s been buried for a long time absorbs the chemical fluorine. They tested this skull [and found] it had virtually no fluorine in it at all. Clearly, they smelled a rat.
They analyzed it more carefully and they found that of the three parts, the hominid was a 50,000-year-old, probably from Germany, fairly standard fossil of a small human being. The jawbone was of an orangutan from Sarawak that had been dyed with potassium bichromate to make it look orangey-brown color. The teeth, when looked at under a microscope, had got little bits of metal in them, showing they’d been filed down by a machine. The whole thing was a monstrous hoax.
But who had perpetrated the hoax? Initially they discounted Woodward because he was a figure of such rectitude. They thought possibly it was Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a nearby neighbor. It’s the sort of thing that Sherlock Holmes might have done. They thought of Teilhard de Chardin, who had a house nearby and had a sort of axe to grind, but they dismissed that after a little while.
Then they looked at Charles Dawson’s own personal collection. Both men had died and there was a huge memorial to Dawson for being such a hero. When they looked at his collection the heroism somewhat evaporated; they found that he was a habitual forger and hoaxer. They found all sorts of things in his house: a Chinese bronze urn which was neither Chinese nor bronze, an elephant bone scapula tool which had been cut with an electric band saw. He was a thoroughly bad hat.
They removed the Piltdown skull from pride of place and put it in the storeroom in the back. It’s now very, very difficult to see, because the British Museum is embarrassed. It’s sad to say the missing link is not an Englishman. Never was, and never will be.
