Coelacanth was a historic find for the world
SA’S Marjorie Courtenay-latimer discovered a fish long thought extinct
THE name Marjorie Courtenay-latimer will always be linked to the discovery of a coelacanth off the East London coast in December 1938.
Thought to have been extinct for 66 million years, its discovery has been hailed “the zoological find of the century”. Courtenay-latimer recounted the story countless times, as it came to define her life.
She was a friend of Captain Hendrik Goosen, the skipper of the Irvin & Johnson (I&J) trawler, the Nerine. After each catch, he would contact Courtenay-latimer, who would go down and see whether there were any interesting fish for the East London Museum where she was curator. Three days before Christmas, she received a call that the trawler had docked. Courtenay-latimer was busy and not too keen to see the catch, but went down to wish the crew the compliments of the season. Picking through the pile of fish and seaweed, she noticed a blue fin sticking out. Underneath the layers of slime lay “the most beautiful fish I had ever seen – but I didn’t know what it was”.
Courtenay-latimer instinctively knew it was special. Her first priority was to preserve the huge, 1.5m-long, 57kg fish. What followed could have been a scene from a comedy film. She loaded it into a handcart and trundled around East London, trying to find a suitable cold-storage facility. No one would help, least of all the man in charge of the mortuary at Frere Hospital. “No, no, no, no, most definitely not.” To save it, she asked a self-taught taxidermist to skin and mount the fish.
A less determined woman would have given up, particularly when a colleague dismissed her fish as a rock cod. In a now famous letter and sketch, Courtenay-latimer wrote to JLB Smith. When he saw the fish in East London in February 1939, Smith “stood as if stricken to stone. There was not shadow of doubt, it was a true coelacanth”.
Immediately it became the most famous fish in the world. Crowds flocked to the East London Museum to see it and Courtenay-latimer, terrified that it would be damaged, stood next to it for two days. A few weeks later, the Museum Board decided to sell the coelacanth to the British Museum for £5 000. She was furious and threatened to resign. The board – to its credit – backed down.
Courtenay-latimer deserved all the accolades she received for her pivotal role in the discovery of this first coelacanth, but there was so much more to her life. In a fine new biography,
Curator and Crusader, Mike Bruton gives the first full account of this remarkable woman. Although she never wrote a memoir, he had access to all her notes, diaries and scrapbooks.
She was born in 1907, the eldest of seven daughters. Courtenay-latimer herself was not expected to survive, as she was two months premature. Fed with an eye-dropper, she was kept in a shoe box and coated with sweet oil (a common treatment for premature babies). Nicknamed “Mygene” – short for My Genius – she outlived all her sisters, reaching the grand age of 97. Her father, a railway employee, moved to 24 locations over 26 years. Although she attended school, Courtenay-latimer was largely self-taught. It is doubtful whether she matriculated, but – possibly for reasons of pride – she was always insistent that she was educated and had a matric.
In 1931, she was offered the position as the first curator of the East London Museum. Something about this young, passionate country bumpkin in her floral dress impressed the museum committee. She immediately revamped the museum’s dismal display, utilising most of her mother’s material, as well as her own personal collections of seaweed and birds’ eggs, which was one of the most comprehensive in South Africa at that time.
The museum’s first major exhibit was Huberta, the hippo that had wandered 1 600 km from St Lucia in Zululand to the Eastern Cape from 1929 to 1931 when she was shot dead by four farmers near King William’s Town, provoking national outrage. Huberta was mounted by the taxidermist company
Gerrards of London and went on display in Durban and then East London, drawing huge crowds, before going on permanent display in King William’s Town. Courtenay-latimer’s approach to museum displays was to avoid stuffy exhibits in favour of accessible, popular displays for ordinary people. Other museums took notice, and not just in South Africa. In 1952 she received a request from the British Museum of
Natural History for advice on how to improve their dated displays. She happily obliged.
Courtenay-latimer never married but was undoubtedly married to her work. Forced to take leave in 1936, she opted to spend it on Bird Island, collecting 15 packing cases of specimens for the museum. She also ringed 28 birds in December 1936. There is a strong possibility that she was the first bird ringer in South Africa.
Other interests included painting and sculpture and the cultural heritage of the Xhosa. The ethnography exhibition on the Xhosa people, which was further developed by later directors, is among the finest displays in the world of their unique culture.
In later years, Courtenay-latimer was the recipient of many honours and awards. She enjoyed the limelight. Her success never made her rich. Indeed, she struggled to survive on her meagre pension but remained active and feisty into her nineties. She had never been interested in haute couture, but always wore blouses and skirts with stockings, even on field trips. She would climb trees or clamber over rocks, tearing her stockings to shreds.
She was an avid reader with a phenomenal memory, but among all those non-fiction tomes, she was not averse to a light Mills & Boon romance. When she started at the museum in 1931, Courtenay-latimer’s father wrote: “This strange little child of ours was now on the threshold of a career she had always longed to have.” And what a career it was. As Bruton observes, her legacy was much more than the coelacanth.
As in his previous books on the coelacanth, including a biography of JLB and Margaret Smith, Bruton preserves Courtenay-latimer’s legacy and the personality of this iconic woman.