When the tide turned
FIONA GELL is a marine biologist and published poet— a winning combination, as this memoir proves. It tells how a love of the sea, inseparable from a Manx childhood, turned the author into the scientist who saw her campaign to protect Ramsey Bay (as the Isle of Man’s first Marine Nature Reserve) recognised by the Tynwald (parliament).
The achievement seems to have been her destiny. Her father was born on Man, his maternal grandfather a Manx fisherman, and after studying and teaching physics in Liverpool, he came home to teach in Ramsey. Holidays were on Man: the first of a sprinkling of black and white snapshots shows the author ‘exploring the sea in Port Erin’ aged four. The book’s title says it all: ‘Spring tides give us a unique opportunity to connect with the sea, to Nature and to our mother planet.’ Early on, she determined to be a marine biologist to protect ‘that great mother of life, the sea’, as Silent Spring author Rachel Carson described it.
Work experience at the Port Erin Marine Laboratory introduced Dr Gell to the bust of Edward Forbes (1815–54), a Manxman who travelled the world as a pioneering marine biologist and oceanographer and was also a poet. She chose York University to read biology, because it guaranteed a year’s study abroad. An undergraduate research project with the tropical Marine Research Unit took her to Egypt where she learnt to dive—‘a whole new enchantment’—revealing the sea to be as wondrous below as above.
Her PHD was on seagrass, first seen from a dhow minutes before she survived a terrifying shipwreck off the coast of Tanzania. Seagrasses grow underwater and on shore and turn carbon dioxide into harmless blue carbon. As one of ‘the blue carbon superheroes’ they are vital ecologically, socially and economically, but remain underestimated and in decline.
Dr Gell was a ‘parachute scientist’ for 12 years, latterly for the World Wide Fund for Nature, conducting a global review of how marine-protected areas can boost local fisheries. Then, like her father, and disillusioned by the carbon footprint caused by her privileged travelling, she returned to work on the Isle of Man. It seemed predestined that her ‘revered trinity’ in temperate waters—maerl (coral-like seaweed) beds, eelgrass (a seagrass plant) meadows and horse mussel reefs—should be spectacularly represented in Ramsey Bay.
Her story is lit with description (‘bright red sunstars, bigger than dinner plates and exuberant as Christmas decorations’), humour—her priority when buying a car was that ‘a dead porpoise would fit in the back’—and scientific facts and digressions: basking sharks can dive to depths of more than 10,000ft and she rates pollock a superior dish to cod. There is Manx language and custom—the revival of Hop tu Naa (Hallowe’en) —and history (excepting TT races): Josef Pilates developed ‘pilates’ when a First World War internee. The whole is spiced with useful lore: ‘Never turn your back on the sea’ and her own golden rule of seafaring, which is always to have breakfast.
Her fiercest opposition came from fishermen, especially when arguing with ‘silly scientists’; one contribution to the debate was a note saying ‘CODSWALLOP’, but her heredity and dealings with island fishermen worldwide enabled her to persuade Man’s various fishing lobbies that conservation guaranteed their future. She admits that a small independent island eased her task. On January 17, 2012, almost 40 square miles of Ramsey Bay were finally protected. Today the Manx Marine Nature Reserve (MNR) project proposes a network of MNRS around the island.
Her marriage to Rob, a historicbuildings conservationist, seems no less predestined: he ‘lured’ her to his house with the promise of showing her his dead-bat collection, interest in dead wildlife being an unforeseen parallel between their jobs. That their son, Dylan (Welsh for ‘son of the sea’), cannot believe humans will continue destroying the natural world fills her with hope that his generation will turn the tide before it is too late. Anyone bound for the sea should be armed with this exceptional and engaging book.
John Mcewen
Her priority when buying a car was that “a dead porpoise would fit in the back”
COMPARED with the young woman immortalised by Leonardo da Vinci as Lady With an Ermine, Lisa Gherardini, the Florentine merchant’s wife better known as Mona Lisa, is no oil painting. The ermine holder, forever caught in the instant of turning gracefully to see who has entered the room, is thought to be Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. She was as beautiful as Ludovico, known as ‘Il Moro’ (the Moor) because of his swarthy features, was unprepossessing: in his eyes Gallerani was ‘candid and beautiful and more than I could ever desire’. Her portrait shows that he spoke the truth.
Eden Collinsworth was similarly smitten and has written what amounts to a biography of the painting, telling its jumbled history from 1490 to the present time and narrating the lives of those who have owned it—or desired it—along the way.
At Gallerani’s death in 1536, the portrait disappeared for the best part of 250 years. Miss Collinsworth speculates that it might have been seen by Holbein and that it might have been in the possession of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, but these remain ‘mights’. In 1800, however, it was bought in northern Italy by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski as a gift for his mother Izabela, who became besotted with the portrait, even if she thought the ermine—da Vinci’s subtle metaphor for how a fierce creature (Ludovico) had been tamed by Cecilia—was a dog and an ‘ugly’ one at that.
The Czartoryskis were central figures in the struggle for Polish independence and walled it up when the Russian army menaced their estates in 1830. The same thing happened during the Second World War when Hitler demanded it. He eventually got his hands on it, however, complete with a Nazi boot mark on the panel. The picture was still not done with politics and, nonetheless, was later caught up in the cultural Cold War, too.
It is a story the author relates with brio, if occasionally overstrained prose. Perhaps what Gallerani and her pet are really looking at in the painting is not a newcomer entering the studio, but their long future unfolding. Michael Prodger
Hitler eventually got his hands on it, however, complete with a Nazi boot mark on the panel