Victor Eastop 1924-2012 - An Appreciation
Photo by Ge-xia Qiao
I
first met Vic in 1968 when I went to see him at the Natural History Museum,
then called the British Museum (Natural History). As a young, ambitious, and probably rather
arrogant researcher, with a Royal Society grant to study genetic variation in
aphids, museum taxonomists who spend their lives amidst dusty collections of
dead insects ranked rather low in my estimation as scientists, and I think that
all I expected from my visit was a name for the aphids that I was working on.
However, I happened to mention to Vic that I was thinking of looking at aphid
chromosomes. In those times long before Google it would have taken me quite
some time to find out what, if anything, was known about aphid chromosomes, or
how to go about the business of studying them. But Victor said “Wait a minute,
I saw something quite recently about some work on aphid chromosomes done in
Canada” and before I knew it he had looked up the reference and gone hunting
for a reprint about it. I was of course delighted and thanked him profusely,
which clearly embarrassed him rather, and after all these years I can remember
exactly what he said: “Well, that’s what we are here for”.
I
think that epitomises Vic and his attitude to work, scientific activity and in
fact to his relationships with people in general. So many scientists inhabit
ivory towers and consider imparting what they learn to others as almost an
afterthought. Victor was at the opposite end of the spectrum. He was a very
unassuming and modest man, who often said how lucky he was to be doing a job
that he enjoyed doing – almost a hobby. He had a unique knowledge of aphids –
in fact not just of aphids but other Sternorrhyncha, and also the parasitic
Hymenoptera that feed on them – but he also had a strong desire to help others
in their struggles to learn about these amazing and intriguing insects. When I joined the Museum staff and started
working alongside him on a daily basis this
attitude rubbed off on me, and eventually with his friendly
encouragement and persuasion we started to get all that knowledge and
information into the form of several rather large books on the world’s
aphids. I feel very proud and privileged
to have worked with Victor on these, and now that we have lost him I gain some
comfort and satisfaction from knowing that when he left us he knew that he had
provided a substantial legacy to future generations of biologists. I know that this was very important to him.
Vic’s
lively sense of humour and light-hearted approach to life endeared him to all
who knew him. He enjoyed explaining to people the difference between
systematics, taxonomy and nomenclature. “Systematics is a science, taxonomy is
a vocation, and nomenclature – well, that’s a “calling”! In 1981 Vic wrote a paper on “The acquisition
and processing of taxonomic data” for the first International Aphidological
Symposium in Poland. The potentially dry subject matter was enlivened by a
series of remarkably apposite quotations, each attached to a subheading of the
article. These deserve a wider audience,
and I can think of no better way of commemorating Vic’s wit, erudition,
and approach to taxonomy – and to life in general - than to reproduce them
here:
Introduction “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”– Oscar Wilde
Collecting aphids “It is very strange,
and very melancholy, that the paucity of human
pleasures
should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.” – Samuel Johnson
Preparation
of specimens “The life so short, the
craft so long to learn”– Geoffrey
Chaucer
Curation of collections “So
careful of the type she seems. So careless of the single life”
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
Different
sorts of taxonomy “Comparisons
are odorous” - William Shakespeare
Clonal
cultures
“As
is the mother, so is her daughter” -
Ezekiel 16:44
Data
banks
“Activity is the only road to knowledge” - George
Bernard Shaw
Extraction of data from specimens “Say what the use, were finer optics given,
t’inspect
a mite, nor comprehend the heav’n” - Alexander Pope
Handling
data
“What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing” - Aristotle
Interpretation of data “Nothing
sways the stupid more than arguments that he can’t
understand” - Cardinal
de Retz
Higher classification “I must create a system or be enslaved by
another man’s; I will
not
reason and compare, my business is to create” -
William Blake
Sanctity
of superfamilies “Greenfly
by any other name stink” -
apologies to Shakespeare
Parsimony and polymorphism “An accumulation of facts is no more science
than a pile
of
bricks is a house” - Henri Poincaré
Presentation of taxonomic data “He was dull in a new way, and that made many people
think him great” - Samuel
Johnson
Conclusions “ A few strong instincts,
and a few plain rules” - William
Wordsworth
Victor Eastop
was born in London and spent childhood years in Harpenden. His secondary
education was at Ashby-de-la-Zouch Grammar School, after which he went to
Reading University. However, his time as an undergraduate was interrupted by
four years in the RAF (1943-47), where he underwent training in Canada as a
navigator and served on Wellington bombers in the last year of the war.
Recently he recounted to Keith Harris how one of his duties was to substitute for the gunner and
get into the tail gun chamber on take-off in order to swing the guns clear of
the ground.
Back at Reading,
where his future wife Barbara was a fellow student, he obtained his first
degree in 1950 and then received an Agricultural Research Council grant to work
on aphids at Cambridge, completing his MSc in 1952 and PhD in 1955. One of his
first discoveries was the
stridulatory mechanism by which colonies of the aphid Toxoptera aurantii act in unison, rubbing their legs against
sclerotic ridges on their abdomens to produce audible sounds. Also at this time he made a
definitive study of a group of root aphids, the Tramini, which was notable for
its emphasis on the importance of studying morphological variation within
species in order to identify them correctly.
Much of Victor’s subsequent taxonomic work was based on the accurate
measurement of aphid body parts under the microscope, as he had a unique
understanding of how these measurements varied according to the conditions
under which the insects developed. Interpreting such variation correctly is
vital for correct identification of species, and over the years Victor
accumulated many thousands of pages of data in his precious “green files”, with
which to compare newly acquired specimens.
In 1952 Vic was awarded a Colonial Office
Research Fellowship to study aphids in East Africa. This was the time of the
Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, and Vic recounted how he collected aphids with a
Royal Enfield rifle always to hand for protection. Vic and Barbara had the
first of their five children in Kenya in 1954. Returning to England in 1955, he
joined the staff of the British Museum (Natural History) as a Senior Scientific
Officer, but was soon in Africa again (now with two children), this time on
secondment to the West African Inter-territorial Secretariat. Their third child
was born in Ghana. Barbara did all the driving in Africa, as Victor never
obtained a driving licence. While in Nigeria he did once try to pass the
driving test, at Zaria. There was one short stretch of one-way street on the
way to Zaria market, which at the time was one of the few one-way streets in
northern Nigeria. During the test Vic’s training as a navigator deserted him at
a crucial moment, and he drove down this street the wrong way, thus becoming
one of the small group of people at that time to have failed a Nigerian driving
test! His work in Africa eventually led
to publication of the first definitive accounts of the aphids of East (1958)
and West (1961) Africa, still much in use today.
Vic made many other overseas trips in
subsequent years. His time in Australia as a
British Memorial Foundation of Victoria Fellow in 1959 led to
publication of an account of Australian Aphidoidea (1966) that is still much
used by Australian aphid workers. He has also been a visiting scientist to New
Zealand (in 1959, 1972 and 1983), Israel (1982), Beijing (1985) and had visiting
professorships to Brazil (1972-73), Sweden (1973 and 1978), and Iran (1978). He
acted as an FAO consultant in aphid taxonomy in Cyprus (1981) and took part in
the RGS Gunung Mulu expedition to Sarawak (1978). In
more recent years there were visits to Japan, USA and Canada, and further
visits to Australia and New Zealand. At home he has served on the Councils of
the Linnean Society (1977-81), the Systematics Association (1977-81), the Royal
Entomological Society (1970-74, 1985-9), and been Vice-President (1971-74 and
1986-87) and President (1987-89) of the Royal Entomological Society.
Victor certainly did not conform to most
people’s ideas of a museum taxonomist. For many years he attended almost every
one of the Royal Entomological Society’s monthly meetings at 41 Queen’s Gate,
and no matter what the subject matter of the talk he could usually be relied
upon by the chairman to ask the speaker a pertinent first question. Among more than 170 publications are many
that show the breadth of his interests.
In the late 1960’s and 1970’s, as well as taxonomic revisions of several
important aphid genera, there were accounts of flight activity of aphids and of
the biology of their natural enemies, analyses of the host plants and
geographical distribution of aphids and psyllids, and reviews of aphids as
vectors of plant viruses and as pests of rice and small grain cereals.
In 1976 he produced (with D. Hille Ris
Lambers) a Survey of the World’s Aphids,
the first publication to catalogue aphids on the world scale. Until then all
taxonomic work on aphids had been restricted to particular regions of the
world, but many pest aphids distribute themselves around the world on crops and
ornamental plants, so publications that cover the whole world are most
appropriate. Vic was convinced that this was the way to proceed, and after some
friendly persuasion this led me into collaboration on Aphids on the World’s Crops (published 1984, reprinted in 1985, and
with a CD version in 1998 and a second edition in 2000). The success of this
led to further collaborations that produced Aphids
on the World’s Trees (1994) and Aphids
on the World’s Herbaceous Plants and Shrubs (2006), to complete the
coverage of the world’s aphids, the first publications of this kind on any
group of insects. The keys and
information provided in these books were made possible by the data that Vic had
accumulated so meticulously over many years, helped also by the massive data
base provided by the Museum’s aphid slide collection. Again, Vic was mainly responsible for
refining the system of tab-cards used in the collection, so that it is easy to
access information about host plants, distribution, seasonal occurrence and
variation of each species.
Victor liked to run. For many years he
was a regular competitor in the London Road Runners’ monthly 5 km road races,
and a member of the Museum’s running team in races over 4-10 km. When he lived
at Kew he was a familiar figure jogging along the Thames towpath, stopping
occasionally if an aphid colony or other insect caught his eye. He also played
a lot of cricket, opening the batting
for the Museum cricket team, and for the second eleven of Kew Cricket Club,
playing in the beautiful surroundings of Kew Green. He played for Kew C.C. for
so long that younger members refused to believe that he was the same Eastop as
appeared in early scorebooks. They thought it must have been his father! He
also spent many hours in Kew Gardens, adding numerous samples of aphids from
named host plants to the museum collection. His field work at home and abroad
was recorded in a series of pocket-size notebooks, the total number of samples
that he collected eventually exceeding 20,000!
For the last six years of his life,
after his wife’s death, Victor lived at Henley-on-Thames, where he enjoyed
leisurely walks in the countryside and visits from his children and their
families; the number of grandchildren reached ten in 2010, with the birth of
twins to the wife of his son Frank, the youngest of his five children. In the
last week of his life he was still answering e-mail queries from all over the
world, and in his last year he paid several visits to Rothamsted, discussing
projects and helping with identification of trap catches. Knowing Victor’s
character and unassuming nature, I feel sure that he left this world exactly as
he would wish to have done so, with his extraordinary memory undiminished, and
his deductive powers fully intact; quietly and peacefully and with the minimum
of fuss, leaving happy memories with his
family, friends and colleagues.
Roger
Blackman
Reproduced
from Antenna 36 (3), 155-157.