Stone masons beware! As geologist and science writer, Nina Morgan discovered, you never know who might be watching.
Geoscientist 20.03 March 2010
As any architect worth their salt will tell you, when carrying out repairs to historic buildings, it always pays to keep a close watch on the workforce. This point was not lost on William Buckland, who became the first Reader in Geology at the University of Oxford in 1819. In 1825, when Buckland was awarded an additional appointment as a canon at Christ Church, Oxford, he was delegated the additional responsibility of supervising repairs to the college buildings. In a letter written on 10 September 1825, he confided to the Reverend W Vernon Harcourt, a leading light in the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, that "I find the hunting of bricklayers and carpenters for the present entirely supersedes that of crocodiles and hyenas."
And once the workmen had been hired, the supervision began. When the turrets of Tom Tower at Christ Church were undergoing repair during the long vacation, Buckland suspected that the workmanship might not be up to scratch. So, recalls his daughter, Mrs Gordon, in The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., FRS, "from the windows of his house at Christ Church, he [Buckland] bethought him of watching the masons through an excellent telescope, which he used to examine distant geological sections, etc. At last the unsuspecting mason, working, as he thought, far above the ken of man, put in a faulty bit of stone. Buckland, on the watch below, detected him through the telescope, and almost frightened the man out of his wits when, coming into the quadrangle, he admonished him to bring down directly 'that bad bit of stone he had just built into the turret.'" When it comes to stonework, you just can't fool a geologist.
- Notes: Thanks to Philip Powell of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History for alerting me to this story, which appears in The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., FRS by his daughter Mrs Gordon, published by John Murray in 1894.
- If the past is the key to your present interests, why not join the History of Geology Group (HOGG)? For more information and to read the latest HOGG newsletter, visit the HOGG website.]