Mary Anning (1799-1847) made several important discoveries as an amateur fossil collector in the first half of the nineteenth century, including a nearly complete skeleton of an Ichthyosaur. Her findings were key to the development paleontology as a scientific discipline in Britain.

Anning was born on May 21, 1799, in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, the daughter of Richard and Mary Moore Anning. The Annings had nearly ten children, but only Mary and her elder brother Joseph survived to adulthood. On August 19, 1800, Anning narrowly escaped death during a lightening storm. She was one of four people who found shelter under an elm tree in Rack Field near Lyme Regis. Only Anning survived when the tree was struck by lightening. Local legend had it that her intelligence increased significantly after the incident.

Richard Anning made his living as a cabinet maker and carpenter. As a hobby and for extra income, he collected fossils. They were cleaned, polished, and sold to summer tourists. The area in which the Annings lived was rich with fossils. Their hometown, Lyme Regis, was located on the southwest coast of England. About 200 million years earlier, the region had been a sea bottom, where numerous dinosaur remains were fossilized after their death. As sea level fell, these fossils could be found on the beach and above it, especially in the exposed rocky cliffs. Richard Anning was among the first to take advantage of the tourist trade, which
increased as Lyme Regis became a summer resort seaside town in the late 1700s. A popular item was what the locals dubbed “curiosities,” a coiled shell. Later, it was determined that these shells were ammonites, a type of mollusk that lived in the Jurassic Period.

Richard Anning was not the only townsperson to sell collected fossils, but he did interest his whole family in the enterprise, including daughter Mary. Anning had only a limited education, perhaps only a few years in a parish school, but she learned much about the business and the fossils from her father. She developed extraordinary skills in fossil collecting. Her abilities came in handy when Richard Anning died in 1810, leaving his family destitute and in debt for £120. He had been suffering from consumption and had fallen off a cliff before his death. Her brother Joseph was already working as an apprentice to an upholsterer, so the burden of providing an income for the family fell to Anning and her mother. Anning viewed fossil collecting as their only means of support, except for charity given to the family by their local parish from 1811 until 1815.

Discovered Ichthyosaur

In 1811 or 1812, Anning made her first important discovery. Though sources differ on the sequence of events and who was involved, it is clear that Anning was primarily responsible for the finding of a well-preserved, nearly complete skeleton of what came to be called an Ichthysaurus (”fish-lizard”). Some said that her brother Joseph found the skull first, or they found the head together, separate from the rest of the body. Others believed that Anning found the whole fossil on her own. Anning then hired workers to dig out the block in which it was embedded. In any case, the ten-meter (30 feet) long skeleton created a sensation and made Anning famous. She sold it to Henry Hoste Henley, a local collector, for £23. Eventually it made its way to the London Museum of Natural History, and a debate ensued over what to name the creature, a marine reptile with a long body and tail, small limbs, and trim head. It was dubbed Ichthysaurus in 1817.

This discovery was important to science as well as Anning’s livelihood. Though life in the Anning family was difficult for the next decade, Anning herself was developing important skills. She became a good observer, who could provide vital information to scientists. She knew the area well and became expert at predicting where fossils might be found after storms. Anning also became adept at removing the fossils without causing ant damage. Though Anning and her mother were the primary fossil hunters, they was often accompanied by her brother or a local friend, Henry De le Beche, who later became a geologist. The family was also aided by Thomas James Birch, who helped them sell many of their fossils before Anning became an adult.

Discovered Complete Plesiosaurus

It’s strange how myths about people accumulate and persist. John Buchan, for example, is perceived as an anti-Semitic, imperialistic and bigoted writer, whereas it became clear in Frederick Forsyth on John Buchan on Radio Four last week (Thursday) that he wasn’t at all. Forsyth set out to demonstrate that by the standards of the time Buchan was pretty liberal and something of a polymath: novelist, biographer, poet, journalist, barrister, MP and governor-general of Canada.

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In this interesting story of Buchan’s life - a Unique production for the network -it emerged that he owed his prodigious output of 100 books to a childhood accident in which a horse and cart ran over his head. His period of recuperation turned him from being an active, almost wild outdoor boy growing up in the Borders into a studious, reflective reader. By his late teens he’d read most of Shakespeare and the classics. He wrote his first book while at Glasgow university and had published five by the time he left Oxford. There, he was considered a future prime minister. He was, as Forsyth pointed out, a man driven by the Calvinist work ethic - his father was a Presbyterian minister in Scotland.

It’s true he believed in the Empire and saw it as beneficial to the natives, but most people did in the early part of the last century. It was only much later that the Left made imperialism such a dirty word. One can’t help thinking that the doomed Africa of today could do with a bit of the old Empire. Does anyone, apart from Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, believe that the deranged Robert Mugabe is an improvement on Ian Smith? And was Buchan anti-Semitic? Well, it’s a long time since I’ve read any of his novels, but some of his characters would have uttered anti-Semitic sentiments common at the time. It didn’t mean that he was anti-Jewish and indeed his great friend was Chaim Weizmann, the founder of modern Israel. Forsyth thought that the views of some of Buchan’s writing contemporaries were hair-raising compared with his.

Most of us remember Buchan for bestselling thrillers such as The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), filmed at least twice, I believe, but many of his books were biographies. The writer and academic Christopher Hitchens said that when he was young Buchan’s novels taught him to read proper book-length books. The villains in the thrillers weren’t Jews but the German High Command. After losing close friends in the first world war, he came to believe that the war was wicked. When he entered Parliament, he wasn’t really a tame party man, choosing to align himself with liberal Tories such as Harold Macmillan and Bob Boothby. Some saw him, a thriller writer, as a bridge between the Imperial novels of Henty, Kipling and others and the later writers, Greene, Fleming and le Carré. He was held in such high esteem that when, as Lord Tweedsmuir, he died in 1940 there was a state funeral for him in Canada and a memorial service at Westminster Abbey.

It’s not easy conveying landscape on radio; you need more than a good command of words and not everyone pulls it off. This is why I tend not to listen regularly to Clare Balding’s series, Ramblings, on Radio Four (Fridays). Last week she was in an area I know well, the Cranborne Chase that straddles the Wiltshire- Dorset border before flattening into the coastal plain. She accompanied an ex-soldier, James Crowden, now a writer, who lives there tending sheep, it seems. Some people spell Cranborne differently, by including a ‘u’ after the the ‘o’, but I prefer the spelling I’ve used, after Cranborne village and the name of one of the Cecil family titles.

Somehow, the majesty and beauty of the Chase, with its undulating hills, lush hollows and dramatic amphitheatres formed by the Downs, didn’t really come across to me in this programme. At its highest point, Win Green Hill, you can see across four counties - Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Somerset - and even the top of the Salisbury Cathedral spire, shining white in the sun, is visible on a clear day. Crowden described the curve of the Downs as ‘quite voluptuous’, which is the nearest we got to a vivid evocation, though Balding did accurately say that standing on Win Green was like being on top of the world. Not all is tranquility and harmony, of course. The north-south traffic constantly increases. In their part of the walk only one of nine dairy farmers remains and only the wealthy can afford to buy houses, this being the story of southern England generally. But until John Prescott notices it, the Chase will remain arguably the most quintessentially English landscape there is.

It is commonly believed that the first (full-time) professors of accounting/accountancy in the British Isles were William Baxter at the London School of Economics and Donald Cousins at the University of Birmingham, both of whom were appointed in 1947. However, this paper argues that the distinction of being the first professor of accounting/accountancy belongs to Bernard (Barney) Francis Shields. He was appointed as Professor of Commerce and Accountancy in 1914 at University College, Galway, when Ireland was politically part of the United Kingdom. This paper details the life of the late Professor Bernard Shields.

Keywords: Biography; Bernard F. Shields; accounting history; Ireland.

Introduction

According to Carnegie and Napier (2000)’ the literature on accounting history includes contributions that detail the identification of the “first ledger”, the “first accountant”, the “first accounting textbook” in different countries, and these contributions are an important element in chronicling the diffusion of accounting. In Ireland, a number of relatively recent accounting history studies have tried to cover this dimension of “the first”. O’Regan and Murphy (1999) provide an analysis of the first signatories to the Irish Institute’s charter in 1888; Clarke (1996a,b) details the content of the first accounting publication to be produced in Ireland, while Craig, Ó hÓgarthaigh and Ó hÓgarthaigh (2004) portray the involvement of four Irishmen in the commercial affairs of New South Wales around the turn of the nineteenth century. One aspect that has been neglected in Ireland is that of early teachers and professors of accounting/accountancy. Certainly, this aspect of accounting history has been investigated in Australia (Carnegie & Williams, 2001), England (Craner & Jones, 1995), Scotland (Lee, 1983, and Walker, 1994) and the USA (Zeff, 2000). This overlooked area in Irish accounting history is surprising, given the fact that the first full-time Chair in a UK University with “accounting” or “accountancy” in its title was filled by an Irishman in an Irish university. This distinction, first reported to the academic world at large by Zeff (1997), belongs to Bernard (Barney) F. Shields, who was appointed as Professor of Commerce and Accountancy at University College, Gal way in 1914 at a time when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. Previously, it was commonly believed that the earliest full-time professors of accounting/accountancy in the United Kingdom were William Baxter at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Donald Cousins at the University of Birmingham, both of whom were appointed in 1947 (Craner & Jones, 1995). The objective of this paper is to highlight the career of Professor Bernard Shields. The first part of this paper briefly discusses the Dublin Commission which led to the creation of the National University of Ireland in 1908. A section on Professor Shields follows.

The Dublin Commission

The Irish Universities Act 1908 established two new universities - Queen’s University in Belfast and the National University of Ireland. The National University of Ireland would comprise a newly formed University College, Dublin (formerly Catholic University) together with the Queen’s Colleges at Cork and Galway. University College, Dublin would enrol its first students in 1909 (McCartney, 1999). The University of Dublin (or Trinity College as it is also known) was not affected by this legislation.