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Mary Anning

What the Papers Said

Jan 26th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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In January 1901, the captain of a Spanish steamer died after his ship was swept against a breakwater in Portland Roads. The lifeboat was manned and launched but could not get near the breakwater on account of the sea which was being swept by a violent gale.

The steamer named the Encourt, was from Bilbao and was bound there in ballast from Rotterdam. The crew of 26 were taken to the breakwater fort, and later on board another Spanish vessel. Their ship was badly holed and lay with a list, and sank in nine fathoms of water with the skipper on board.

Along the coast, the seas were high in West Bay, where a boat sank in the harbour. The gale blew down trees, took the roofs off houses, and made the streets dangerous.

Watchnight services had been held in the churches, reported the ‘Bridport News’ of January 1901. There the last moment of the dying year and the opening of the new, were spent in worship and in the parish church the hymn ‘O God our help in ages past’ was sung. Services were also held in the Wesleyan, Baptist and Unitarian chapels.

Meanwhile, far away in South Africa the Boers were making determined attacks and British officers were being killed and wounded. During a fog the Boers were repulsed with a loss of 24 killed including four officers.

In New York, influenza was raging, and a typical headline was: ‘Grip’ reigns in New York.’ Grip was the popular name for ‘flu. It was estimated that nearly 200,000 people in and around the city were suffering from it and it was now in an epidemic state all over the country. Even President McKinley was a sufferer but was recovering.

A great century of progress had closed, with momentous events concerning the British Empire. It was hoped that the enemy would lay down their arms. Dorset had provided horsemen and foot soldiers, meanwhile the Ashanti campaign had been brought to a close in West Africa, and an international force had defeated the aims of the Boxers in China.

Many Bridport bluejackets were in the thick of the fighting in the attempt to relieve Peking. While down under, Lord Hopetoun had been appointed the first Viceroy of Federated Australia. The Indian famine called for public subscription, and Paris had held its great exhibition, though at this point in history Great Britain had more friends in Germany than France. Away East, the Spanish had lost the Philippines to the United States.

Here in this country, the Conservatives had been returned to power and Lord Salisbury was Premier. Dorset again returned a quartet of Conservative members. Mrs. Gladstone, widow of the famous Prime Minister, was buried beside her husband, and the death of Sir Arthur Sullivan, called the greatest of British composers and a marvellous musician, had occurred. He was buried in St. Paul’s. The Bridport paper reflected on all this news.

On that south Dorset coast and going back a century, on August 19, 1800, three women and an infant were struck by lightning, and the infant, who turned out to be the fossilist Mary Anning, was resuscitated by being put into a warm bath. What would have been lost to archaeology if she had not been put in that bath?

Early in the 19th century fossils began to attract local geologists, especially John Crookshanks (alias Lock,) who committed suicide in 1802 because his yearly stipend for collecting fossils was discontinued! And Richard Anning (father of Mary) fell over the Charmouth cliffs by night, did not kill himself, but died soon after, in 1810, of consumption.

It was in the following year, 1811, that Miss Anning found her famous ‘crocodile’ fossil, and sold it to Mr H. Henley, lord of the manor, for £23. It was later presented to the British Museum.

The population of Lyme in 1800 was 1,535; in 1810 it was 1,925. In 1803, three seats were set up a yard from the precipice above the sea beyond the churchyard. The Church Cliffs in those days formed “the great place of resort, the Mall of Lyme, where the belles of the place and the sons of the aristocracy enjoyed the sea breeze.” There was no marine walk then.

People in the early 1800’s were still talking about  “a very singular fish” 14 feet long with a tail three feet wide, a circumference of six feet, and with long jaws, which came into the Cobb and was taken. In 1803 a great fire destroyed 42 houses near the Independent Chapel. It started at a baker’s.

In 1817, a breach of 192 feet was made in the southwest part of the Cobb, and several vessels were driven ashore or sank. The Cobb had to be repaired, and work costing well over £30,000 was carried out in the next nine years. Between 1810 and 1816 the annual average of vessels entering the Cobb harbour was 318.

We should be making a mistake if we thought that indecency offences were new: that Bridport paper at the beginning of the 20th century reported that at Weymouth County Police Court in early 1901 a sub-postmaster was summoned “in several instances for such offences of a serious character against young men.”

And a Royal Commission had been appointed to make investigations regarding the “beer poisoning epidemic.” Sickness and death had been caused in England and Wales through poisoning by arsenic.

Mary Anning – Fossil Collector of Lyme Regis

Jan 19th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Visitors to the Dorset resort of Lyme Regis in the 1820’s would most likely have noticed a diminutive brunette in a dark dress with cloak and bonnet, holding a basket in one hand and a claw-hammer in the other, picking her way over loose boulders wasted from the cliff. Probably they little realised that they were watching Mary Anning, and her business on the shore in those distant days was more than just a past time. The girl was out beach combing – not for the man made artefacts of her own time, but the astonishing profusion of fossils being weathered out by wind and waves from the wasting cliffs.

The girl began in a small way, collecting the numerous bivalves locally known as “Devil’s Toenails” (Gryphaea) and the bullet-shaped shells now known as belemnites (the skeleton of an early form of squid) but popularly called “Devil’s Thunderbolts.” Other popular names for the various fossils were “Ladies Fingers” “John Dories” or “Crocodile Bones.”

Mary was born in the town in 1799, the daughter of Richard Anning, a man living a lowly existence as Lyme’s carpenter and cabinetmaker. The family was not wealthy, and Richard and his wife (also called Mary) and their two children spent much of the time living on parish relief. Looking for a means to supplement his income, Anning conceived the bright idea of collecting and washing the myriad fossils to be found along the beach, to sell to tourists. Daughter Mary was a bright girl who took an intense interest in her father’s collecting. Before she was ten years old, she too was going out onto the beach with hammer and basket, the intention being to increase her father’s sale stock displayed outside his shop. In these forays her brother Joseph was often to be seen at her side.

Her first big break however, came in 1810 when she was eleven. In that year Richard Anning and Joseph discovered what seemed to them to be the head of a crocodile, worked loose from a recent cliff-fall. The carpenter felt certain the rest of the skeleton must have been left behind in the cliff, so he advised Mary to watch out for it when out on her regular collecting forays. But only a few months later her father was dead. In the meantime Mary continued to collect from Black Ven and Charmouth beaches. Then four months after her father’s death a violent storm caused a landslide, and the much prized “crocodile” skeleton was revealed. Mary skilfully traced out the fossil, hiring help to transport it, but it was several years before the 30-foot long creature was reconstructed.

What Mary had found was the first in a series of marine vertebrate finds which would make her name. It was in fact an Ichthyosaur, a now extinct marine reptile of the Jurassic period. Mary sold the Ichthyosaur to a Mr Henley for £23, a man who in turn would later sell it to the British Museum for twice as much. The specimen is now in the Natural History Museum. Ichthyosaurs were reptiles with a dolphin-like body, paddles, a fish-like tail and large eyes, but without a neck.

The next big find came in 1811, when Mary and Joseph unearthed the first Plesiosaur, a creature broadly similar to Ichthyosaurs, but having a long flexible neck and larger rear paddles. It could reach up to 40 feet in length. This skeleton first went to a natural history museum in Piccadilly before being purchased by the British Museum in 1819. In 1824 Mary made the discovery of the first Plesiosaur in perfect condition, though this specimen was much smaller than 40 feet. She sold this specimen for £120 guineas.

But there was to be another remarkable find in 1828; not a sea reptile this time, but a flying one. With a wingspan of 4 feet (up to 26 feet in an adult) this was the first Pterosaur, a creature called Dimorphodon, to be discovered virtually in tact. The fourth finger of each hand was elongated and supported a flight membrane. Dimorphodon probably flew by gliding.

Mary made the last important discovery in 1832, when another fine specimen of a 30-foot Ichthyosaur emerged from the Jurassic clay on the shore. On this occasion an amateur was accompanying her. This is now in the Natural History Museum, Kensington.

The fulcrum of Mary Anning’s collecting and discoveries was principally the need to make a living in hard times. As she searched Mary encountered many other people higher up the social scale than herself, who were nevertheless interested in her work. The Annings were poor, but on one occasion they did have a lucky break when Lt.Col. Birch of Thorpe Hall in Lincolnshire, hearing of Mary’s work and the family’s plight, gave the Annings £400 from the sale of his own fossil collection. She made the friendship of two sisters called Philpott, who often came to Lyme Regis to collect fossils themselves. Two men in particular, Sir Henry De la Beche, who founded the Geological Museum and School of Mines, and William Buckland, a clerical West Country geologist were influential in winning for Mary her enduring reputation and success.

In Mary’s day Lyme was becoming a popular resort and collectors were finding rare curiosities. The Anning fossils were regularly being bought by visitors arriving off the horse-coaches at the Pilot Inn. But the growing interest in the ancient animal remains was at a time when geological knowledge was in its infancy and very much framed within literal interpretation of the Bible and Creationist orthodoxy. The fossils being collected by Mary Anning and others were considered to represent thousands rather than millions of years, or were perhaps the remains of creatures, which perished in Noah’s Flood. Over the course of her short life, Mary’s work would make her well known and respected by many famous geologists of the day. She was aware – possibly ahead of her time – that fossils were not just curiosities, but were things of greater significance in the understanding of life on earth in its remoter antiquity.

Mary’s later years were spent in relative comfort. But she had never been robust, and by 1845 she had become morose and ill tempered, a trait which may have led to her becoming a lone beachcomber. The underlying cause of her disagreeable nature was probably the cancer, which was eventually to kill her. Nevertheless, this did not prevent her worth being appreciated by the scientific establishment, and she was elected a member of the Geological Society in recognition of her help to geologists of her day.

After her death in 1847 a stained glass window was dedicated to her memory in Lyme Church.