Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the Coelacanth

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is a topic I've had on my list forever, but I kept getting distracted, and a big reason was because at first glance, it just kind of seemed like there might not be enough information to really make it work. So whenever this topic would come back to the forefront, as I was figuring out what was going to come next, it was just very easy to get pulled onto something else instead. It turns out plenty of information did not need to be worried. I also thought this episode was mostly going to be about a fish, specifically the selacanth, which scientists in Europe and North America believed had gone extinct about sixty six million years ago until one was spotted in South Africa in nineteen thirty eight. Naturalist and museum curator Marjorie Courtney Latimer played a key part in that, and I'm just gonna say I've heard people say her last name slightly different ways, depending on exactly where their accent is from. Uh. I always planned for this episode to be at least partially about Marjorie Courtney Latimer, because she's the person that you know spotted this fish. Uh. Turns out though, she became one of my favorite people to have researched on the show in a long time, so now it became her episode. Marjorie is a gift. Uh. Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtney Latimer was born on February twenty fourth, nineteen oh seven, in East London in what was at the time Cape Colony. As a child, friends and family called her Margie or my Genie, and after she grew up most people called her Marge. The family was white. Marjorie's father, Eric Courtney Latimer, was born in British India, and her mother, Willie Fulton Rait, was born in South Africa to British parents. Willie was a widow who had two daughters from her first marriage, and she and Eric had seven more together, although one of those children died as a baby. Marjorie was the oldest of Eric and Willie's daughters. Marjorie was born about two months premature after her mother experienced a serious fall during her pregnancy and was just very badly injured. They weren't sure she was going to survive. Today, babies born that early who have access to modern medical care often do really well, but baby Marjorie was not expected to survive. She had to be dressed in doll clothes and fed with an eye dropper because she was just so tiny. Even so, the whole family moved to Cape Town about a month later after Eric got a new job, and they moved a lot during Margie's early life. Eric worked at an assortment of jobs before inheriting some money that he used to try to start a diamond mine. That mine failed. He eventually got a job working for the railroad, and for the next couple of decades they all moved from one outpost to another as the job demanded it. These outposts often were kind of remote. Sometimes there wasn't a school in the place where they were living, or if there was a school, it didn't really offer a full curriculum. So Willie really tried to make sure her daughters always had something at home to interest them and learn from. She had been raised on an ant's farm without any other children around, and she'd spent most of her time as a kid exploring nature and befriending the African laborers who worked on her aunt's farm, so while Willie didn't have formal education beyond being tutored by a governess, she became something of an amateur naturalist and ethnographer, and these were often the things that she really focused on with her children. Family members described baby Margie as small and frail, and as she got older, she was sick a lot, including several serious illnesses like whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and the nineteen eighteen pandemic flu. But she also took her first steps at the age of only seven months, and from there quickly grew into a very bright, relentlessly curious child with a deep and fearless love of the natural world. She was tomboyish, but she also loved to wear pretty dresses and was known to gather up ducklings and kittens in her pinafore to carry them home with her. From a very early age, she collected shells and rocks, and bird eggs and flowers, and she developed a thorough knowledge of all the plants that grew where they lived. Sometimes this fearlessness and curiosity could be dangerous. Family diaries and correspondents describe a number of pretty close calls, including when Margie was too an encounter with a cobra on the family's porch. Apparently, the family thought had that cobra not been separated from her by the porch rail, she probably would have been bitten. When she got a little older, she and one of her sisters accidentally poisoned another sister by feeding her mud pies that had been seasoned with seeds that turned out to be from a deadly nightshade. Margie also nearly died after climbing up a windmill, only for the windmill veins to start turning after a sudden gust of wind. But there were also times when young Margie's fascination with the natural world helped her family survive. This was a violent and uncertain time in Southern Africa, with the British South Africa Company and British colonists waging war against African peoples and against the Boors, who were people of Dutch, German and Huguenot ancestry. When Marchie was about seven, five was called a serve during a Boer uprising against the British government that would eventually grow into the Third Anglo Boer War. The family had no way of getting supplies after the boor sabotaged the railway lines, and Margie taught her sisters how to forage and which mushrooms were safe to eat. I would probably be hesitant to trust the mushroom gathering of a seven year old who also accidentally fed a sister deadly nightshade, but this worked out for everyone. When Margie was about fifteen, she and her three oldest sisters were sent to boarding school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in East London, South Africa, and in spite of their erratic education up to that point, all four of them did really well there. Margie particularly excelled in biology. When she was sixteen, she caught the attention of naturalist doctor George Ratre, who was one of the examiners in her end of year tens. He thought that she would be well suited for a position working in a museum, and he really encouraged her parents to send her to college, but that was something that the family could not afford. It was also still fairly unusual for women to go to college. The assumption was that they would get married and become mothers after leaving the Convent of the Sacred heart. In nineteen twenty five, at the age of eighteen, Margie got a part time job at a grocery store so she could pay for art supplies, and she continued to live at home, spending a lot of free time building her collection of things like flowers and bird eggs, and carefully painting what she observed in the natural world. In June of nineteen twenty eight, Margie became engaged to Alfred Hill, known as Alfie, but it turned out Alfie didn't want a wife who went tromping through the woods picking up bird eggs. He wanted a wife who would stay home and keep house, so she eventually broke off their engagement, and then turned down her proposal from another suitor when it was clear from the very beginning that he was not looking for a naturalist wife. Eventually she started training as a nurse, but then in nineteen thirty one, she was invited to apply for the position of curator at the East London Museum. This natural and cultural history museum had been founded by the East London Museum Society, and its president was George Ratre. Although the museum had technically existed since nineteen twenty one, its first physical location was a one room shed rented in nineteen twenty six. When Margie was approached about the position, it was preparing to move to a new purpose built location, which was the first purpose built museum in East London. George Rattray, of course, was the person who recommended that Marjorie Courtney Latimer apply for this role of curator. She was only twenty four and she hadn't gone to college. It's not even clear whether she took her matricula exams from the Convent of the Sacred Heart before leaving that school, but the hiring committee was really impressed by her thorough knowledge of the natural and cultural history of Southern Africa. She and her family had also visited a lot of museums all around as they had been moving through her father's work. She had very definite opinions about what museums should be like. She thought they should be fascinating and engaging to all of their visitors, not moldy and dusty and boring. The committee also liked her enthusiasm and her very obvious dedication to the idea of running the museum. After she was offered the job on July fifteenth, nineteen thirty one, she left her nursing training, although she kept wearing her homemade nurses uniforms because it just didn't make sense to her to throw them out. Repurposed nursing uniforms were a staple of her wardrobe for the next couple of years, and for the rest of her life. She often wore outfits that we're in a very similar style. She started work at the museum on August twenty fourth, nineteen thirty one, which was a month before it opened at its new location. Although there had been other women applicants to the position in East London, this made her one of only two women in South Africa to be running a major museum. For the next twenty two years, she was the museum's only professional level employee. The other people who worked there were things like custodians and gardeners and a general assistant. More about the museum is coming, as well as the celycanth after we paused for a sponsor break. When Marjorie Courtney Latimer started working at the East London Museum in nineteen thirty one, it really did not have much of a collection, and some of the specimens that it did have had to be destroyed because they had been very badly damaged by a beetle infestation, so she supplemented what was already there with her own family's collections, like her collection of bird eggs, which was substantial, and her sister's collections of butterflies and pressed plants. Her mother, Willie, also had a collection of African cultural items that she had built well before Marjorie was born with the help of the African workers on the farm where she had grown up. These became the foundation of the museum's ethnographic collection. In addition to providing many of the items for the museum's displays, Courtney Latimer also reworked the displays themselves. In her opinion, some of the display cases were completely unusable. In one case, she got an axe and chopped out the central beams that were in the way and used evening dresses belonging to her and her sisters to make backdrops for a display of china and historical items that belonged to her mother. The museum's born was impressed with what she was doing, but also recognized that she needed some more training, so she was sent to other museums to get more experience in things like mounting and labeling specimens. In nineteen thirty four, Courtney Latimer was part of an expedition to excavate a fossil skeleton, which turned out to be a nearly complete Canemiria that's a large herbivore from the Triassic period. Excavating and mounting the skeleton was an extremely long process, and during that time she got to know Eric Wilson, whose father was a member of the museum board, and whose sister, Bess, she knew from school. This really seems to have been the only time that Marjorie was courted by somebody who truly shared her interests and encouraged her pursuits as a naturalist and a museum curator. But in nineteen thirty five, Eric was called up to the military, and while he was serving, he contracted pneumonia and died. Marjorie was heartbroken. In her words to an inter you were later on quote, he was the love of my life and I never fell in love again. To make things worse, Eric's mother was asking for her after his death, but she was too sick herself to travel. She had both bronchitis and the flu. Marjorie recovered and she kept on with her work at the museum. One day in July of nineteen thirty six, she saw a woman sitting out in the museum's garden with her head in her hands. She asked this woman what was wrong, and she said she had a terrible headache. So Courtney Latimer invited her into her office for a cup of tea and some aspirin. They had a very nice conversation about how much this woman liked museums. After she left, Courtney Latimer saw her name in the guest registry and it was Amelia Earhart, who was in East London refueling her plane after making an emergency landing nearby. By that point, Courtney Latimer had spent five years working almost entirely on the museum. Whenever she took time off, she spent it studying the natural world and gathering specimens for its collection. She never wore trousers to do this work, and she was also never bear legged, so she usually came home from all of these excursions with her stockings in shreds. This is like thing number four that made me go, I love you so much. In nineteen thirty six, the museum board insisted that she takes some actual leave and then, of course she spent that leave on her work as a naturalist. She arranged a trip to Bird Island in Algoa Bay. This is a place that had fascinated her since she was a child, and she could see the light from its lighthouse when visiting her grandparents, but Bird Island was not a place that women visited. In nineteen thirty six, the superintendent of the islands in the Union government literally told her that women were not allowed there. Finally, he said that if Courtney Latimer found another woman to accompany her, he would permit her to go. So she asked her mom. Willie agreed to make the trip, but then Marjorie's dad tried to put a stop to it, saying, quote, I do not approve of this escapade at all. Eventually he agreed, and then at the last minute decided that he would join them. Yeah. I read on all this is that the superintendent thought there was no possible way she would get another woman to agree on this to go on this trip, and that that would just mean he wouldn't have to allow it. But he got caught, and now he had so many women on bird Eyelid. Now there were twice as many women as before. This trip was an absolute dream come true for Marjorie. She gathered fifteen cases of specimens there, including birds and their eggs and nests, sea life and mammals, but her father quickly regretted his kind of last minute decision to also go. He found this whole trip incredibly boring. And then on top of that, while they were there, King Edward the Eighth abdicated the throne so he could marry Wallace Simpson. They were almost completely cut off from the news, so his dad was like, there's this drama happening and I can't even get it on the radio. I can't watch my programs. During this trip, Courtney Latimer met Hendrik Housen, captain of a supply ship who would stop at Bird Island to get rabbits so that his crew could have something to eat besides fish. He and Courtney Latimer developed a friendship, and he eventually helped her get those fifteen cases of specimens back to East London, carrying them one at a time when he stopped at port. Courtney Latimer wrote a paper based on her research from this trip called Observations of Turns on Bird Island, and one of the tools that she implemented in the research she did. There was banding, also called ringing, so that's just placing a small ring or band on a bird, usually on the leg, to identify it in later study. Courtney Latimer's notes from this trip describe her as doing this on Bird Island as early as December of nineteen thirty six, which was more than a decade before banding became a standard practice among ornithologists in South Africa. After she got back to East London, Courtney Latimer kept in touch with Hendrik Housen. She'd already developed a network of local birders and nature enthusiasts to keep her informed about their observations and to collect specimens for her. When Husin moved from the packet ship to a trawler called the Nereene, she asked him to keep an eye out for anything unusual in his nets. He even had a tank on board for keeping potential specimens until they got back to shore. On December twenty second, nineteen thirty eight, Courtney Latimer got a call at the museum letting her know that the Noreene was at the dock with a load of like one and a half tons of potential specimens. She really didn't want to go down there though, While she did really like looking for new fines for the museum, she had reached a point where the fishing boats were mostly bringing her things that she already had. It was also summer and it was particularly hot that day. She was trying to finish cleaning and mounting the Canemiria skeleton that we mentioned earlier, but she finally decided that this really might be her only chance to pass along holiday wishes to Housin and the crew. She considered all of them to be friends, so she stopped what she was doing and headed down to the docks. She took her assistant, Enoch with her. Some accounts give his family name as Thought and others as Elias. Enoch was Josa and his work at the museum involved whatever needed to be done, but he was also a big part of Courtney Latimer's work with the African cultural objects and ethnography. Biographer Mike Bruton describes Courtney Latimer as ahead of her time in developing respectful relationships with the local African population and recognizing that their lives and cultures were actively under threat from European colonial and military efforts. Brutin also cites her experiences with different African cultures as honing her instinct for storytelling and with a realization that every object she encountered had a story to tell. When they got to the dock, Courtney Latimer didn't initially see anything of interest among all of these fish, some of which were very large. But then she saw a beautifully colored fin sticking out from the pile, and at first she thought this might be a lungfish. But then, in her words, quote, I picked away in a layer of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was a pale, movy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots. It had an iridescent silver blue green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb like fins and a strange puppy dog tail. This fish was very big, measuring roughly five feet or one and a half meters long and weighing about one hundred and twenty seven pounds. It's roughly fifty seven kilograms, way too big for Husan's tank or for any kind of storage available at the museum, so she and Enoch wrapped it in the green sack that they had brought with them, and they loaded it into a taxi, something the taxi driver was understandably not especially happy about. They took it back to the museum while they figured out what to do with it. A lot of people they encountered with this fish were like, I'm not taking that stinking fish, and she was like, the fish does not stink like it was a live hours ago. At this moment, it is fine. Please chill out and let me put the fish in the trunk or the boot, as she would have called it. Uh as often happens when somebody is called to recount the same story for years and years after it happened. There are several somewhat different versions of what Courtney Latimer did when they got back to the museum with this fish. One is that she consulted some of their reference books and concluded that it might be somehow related to Sela Cants, but some later research suggests that the reference book that could have told her that was not one that was in the museum's collection. Another is that, in like thing number five that I love about her, she remembered some lines she had been made to copy as punishment in school. When she had been caught not paying attention, and that lesson was about fossil fish and the lines she had to write out where something like a fossil fish has ganoid scales, a fossil fish has limb like fins, and still other retellings. She really did not know what it was. She did bring up this fish to the head of the museum board, who said that he thought that it was just a rock cod, and then he left for the Christmas holiday. Courtney Latimer could not ignore the possibility that this fish might be important, though. She sent Enoch to borrow a hand cart and together they loaded the fish into it. First, they carted the fish to the morgue at the Hospital, one of only two places in East London that could keep something that big cold. After being turned away from the morgue, they went to the Cold Storage Commission, which also refused to store the fish. Then they took the fish to taxidermist Robert Center. He agreed to hold on to it if they could find some way to preserve it. So Courtney Latimer went home, where she got some old sheets from her mother. Then she went to a chemist to get some formalin, which is a preservative made of formaldehyde and methanol. She took all this back to where center was. They tore the sheets into strips and then wrapped the fish up in them. They soaked all of this in the formalin and then covered it up with newspaper, and then she went back to the museum where she tried to call James Leonard Brierley Smith at Rhodes University. Courtney Latimer and Smith had known each other since nineteen thirty three. He was a chemistry professor, but he had also become an expert in ethology. Smith was not in so she left a message, and when she had not heard back from him the next day, she sent a letter with a rough sketch of the fish asking what he thought. What followed was an incredibly frustrating and stressful series of delays and missed communications. Courtney Latimer would later describe it as the greatest trauma of her career, and we will get to it after a sponsor break. Rhodes University, where j LB Smith worked, was about one hundred and sixty kilometers or roughly one hundred miles from East London in but they were connected by rail. He and Marjorie Courtney Latimer even had an arrangement with the local railway superintendent to send marine specimens from the museum to the university at no charge. She was basically sending him duplicates of things that the museum already had when they came in on the fishing boats. Smith, though, was not actually at the university when Courtney Latimer tried to call about the fish she had found. He was in Nicna, which was much farther away, recovering from an illness. He and his wife had a second home in Nicsna, and this home had a laboratory for his research, but no phone. There was a phone at the museum, installed just about a month before all of this happened, but Courtney Latimer also did not have a phone at home. Even if they had both had phones, the long distance lines in South Africa at this point were such that it could take hours for calls to go through, and then long distance calls were also very expensive, and letters between East London and Nisnak could spend up to a week in transit. Courtney Latimer looked for a response from Smith and checked on the fish every day, since she didn't know he was away. When she hadn't heard from him by the twenty sixth, She thought he must not have thought the fish was important. By then, the fish was exuding large amounts of oil, which she thought was probably keeping the formulin from doing anything to preserve it, so she told Robert Center to go ahead and try to mount it with the hope of preserving its external parts. Center was self taught as a taxidermist, and he had very little experience mounting fish. Courtney Latimer directed him to make his incision through the fish's belly rather than down the side, as was typically done at this time when mounting fish, because she wanted to preserve as much of the skin and scales and like external identifying marks as possible. He started his work on the fish on the twenty seventh. Smith finally got Courtney Latimer's letter on January third, after a friend came to Nisna and brought the mail in. In Smith's words, when looking at the sketch she had drawn, quote a bomb seemed to burst in my brain. He did not think he would be able to get a long distance call through to the museum before it closed for the day, so he sent her a telegram reading quote, most important preserve skeleton and gillsfish described. Smith then sent a letter with some more detail, saying that this looked like a fish that had been extinct for quote many a long year, but that otherwise he had no idea what it could be. He said he hoped that she had retained the gills and the viscera to help him identify the fish. Then he got up early on January fourth to call her from a nearby shop, and this call took almost three hours to actually connect. When she told him that the viscera had been discarded because they were rotting. At that point, he offered to hire a plane and fly to East London himself so he could pick through the dump to look for them. She called him back on the fifth to let him know that she had learned East London's trash was disposed of at sea. That's its own issue, but that meant there would be no picking through trash looking for fish guts. It was days after this that Courtney Latimer finally received Smith's letter, meaning she got a letter saying he hoped she'd kept the fish's organs long after they'd been discarded, and after they had already had multiple phone calls about it. And this was really how their correspondence progressed over the next few weeks. She kept getting letters telling her not to do things she had already done, and suggesting that the things she'd already done, which of course Smith didn't know about yet, would be the wrong thing to do. Like Smith sent a letter on the ninth saying the fish must not be stuffed before it had been examined. That was a week and a half after the taxidermist had started work, and five days after she'd sent a letter that made it clear that the taxidermy work had started, but he had not received her letter yet when he wrote his on the ninth. Smith's own accounts of this time describe him making himself sick with worry over this specimen. I'm not judging him for this, I absolutely understand the feeling. But he was not shy at all about letting her know how anxious he was about it. And he also told her that the loss of the fish's organs was quote one of the greatest tragedies of zoology. This was something he said to her after she had already gotten a telegram and a letter and two phone calls about needing to retain the organs. Meanwhile, she was trying to deal with so many things that were totally outside her control, like the lack of refrigeration or a professionally trained taxidermist in East London, and the fact that the photographer who took pictures of this fish on the deck of the fishing boat had accidentally dropped the film into the mud and ruined it. Smith eventually decided to cut his trip to Niceness short by a week, leaving on February eighth, although he noted to Courtney Latimer that he didn't really think he needed to hurry since he wouldn't be able to examine the fish's internal organs. He planned to go directly to East London, but torrential rains meant that he did not get there to see the fish until February sixteenth. By that point, based on Courtney Latimer's sketches, her very detailed descriptions of everything about the fish, and some scales she had sent to him, he had concluded that this fish must be some sort of sela canthd. This fish had first been described and named by Lewis Agassiz in eighteen thirty nine, with a name coming from words that meant space and spine. Which referenced the hollow spines along the fish's backbone as we sat up at the top of the show. Though Western science had believed selacanthed fish to be extinct and to have gone extinct all the way back in the late Cretaceous period. After looking at the mounted fish in East London, Smith asked for it to be sent to the university so that he could spend more time studying that. But before that it was put on temporary display at the museum, and on February twentieth, nineteen thirty nine, more than fifteen hundred people came to see it. Local newspapers covered the event and published photos, something Smith was concerned about because he was afraid that someone else would try to claim credit for the fish's discovery. A LB. Smith published a letter in Nature on March eighteenth, eighteen thirty nine, titled a Living Fish of the Mesozoic Type. This described the fish as a close enough relative to the Mesozoic selacanthods as to be included in that family, and he named the fish Latimeria Chalumney after Marjorie Courtney Latimer and the Chelumna River, near where Hendrik Housen had caught it in his trawling nets. When Smith called Courtney Latimer to tell her he had named this fish for her, she said the credit should have gone to Housen, who was the person who actually found it. After spending some time studying the fish at Rhodes University, Smith sent it back to the East London Museum. By that point it had become clear that Robert Center had done his best on the taxi Derby, but that it really needed to be remounted by someone who had experience with fish, particularly very oily fish. So Courtney Latimer person escorted the selacanth to the South African Museum in Cape Town to be remounted by taxider Miss James Drury. Meanwhile, she was facing backlash from the scientific community about how she had handled the fish, as scientists and researchers jumped to the conclusion that she just hadn't known what she was doing, or had been inattentive or thoughtless or unaware of the specimen's potential importance. Smith acknowledged this criticism in a longer piece published in Nature on May sixth, writing quote, several letters from overseas have contained very harsh criticism about the loss of the carcass of this fish. Few persons outside South Africa have any knowledge of our conditions and the coastal belt. Only the South African Museum at Cape Town has a staff of scientific workers, among whom is an ichthyologist. The other six small museums serving the coastal area are in extremely poor circumstances and generally have only a director or curator who cannot possibly be an expert in all branches of natural history. There are not uncommon fishes in the sea which to any of the latter would appear as strange as, if not stranger than a cela canthid. It was the energy and determination of miss Latimer which saved so much, and scientific workers have good cause to be grateful. The genus Latimera stands as my tribute. This did not really quell all the criticism, though, and scientists kept taking potshots at Courtney Latimer in their papers. For example, on July thirteenth, nineteen forty, Arthur Smith Woodward published a paper in Nature which claimed the specimens quote scientific value was not appreciated, saying this was why only its external parts had been preserved. Woodward's name may sound familiar because he's come up on the show before he and Charles Dawson published work on a skull that came to be known as the Piltdown Man, which was revealed to be a hoax after both of their deaths. Courtney Latimer was deeply hurt by these criticisms. I mean, she had gone above and beyond trying to save as much of this fish as possible, but she also had other things to worry about. The United Kingdom and Germany declared war on one another the day she returned to East London after escorting the fish to Cape Town. She had helped establish a chapter of the Red Cross in East London, and she became actively involved in it during the war, including being elected chair of the East London Chapter. She eventually had to step back from a leadership role with the Red Cross to keep up with her work at the museum, but she remained active in it for the duration of the war. As the war was ongoing, the East London Museum received a grant from the Carnegie Trust which allowed a display to be made for the taxidermy fish, as well as a cast. Part of the money was used to compensate Who's in for his work in collecting the specimen. Smith desperately wanted to find another selacanth to study, but the war put a complete stop to his efforts to find one. After the war ended, he tried to establish the African Selacanth Marine Expedition or ACME to find another specimen, but he couldn't get funding for it. In nineteen forty eight, he started distributing pamphlets to fishers offering one hundred pound reward for a specimen, with very clear instructions not to cut or clean the fish, but to get the entire thing into cold storage right away. The East London Museum moved into a larger space in nineteen fifty, by which point Courtney Latimer's title had changed from curator to director. In the nineteen fifties, the museum also started hiring additional professional staff, so it was no longer just her and an assistant doing everything themselves. In nineteen fifty two, Achman Hussein caught a selacanth off of the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean. Captain Eric Hunt, who was one of the people who had distributed some of those pamphlets, contacted Smith about it. Smith was in a weird coincidence once again traveling. This time, he was away on a fish collecting expedition. Word reached him about the find four days after the selacanth was caught, basically the next time he came to shore. This is kind of like how when you're at a sporting event, your team will only score if you go to the bathroom. Yeah. Getting to the specimen was a challenge this time because there were no commercial flights connecting where he was on the eastern coast of South Africa to islands that were between the north parts of Madagascar and Mozambique. Smith convinced the Prime Minister of South Africa to deploy a military aircraft for this purpose, which then required negotiations with the government of Mozambique to explain why a military flight needed to cross its airspace and make a refueling stop there. It did not seem believable that all of this was to get a fish. Marjorie Courtney Latimer really was not involved in this effort to find another selacant specimen, but she was there on December thirty first, nineteen fifty two, when Smith arrived with it along with his wife Margaret, and their son William, on a South African air Force, Dakota. Marjorie Courtney Latimer was awarded an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University in nineteen seventy one. She retired from the East London Museum in nineteen seventy three, at which point she moved to vittelsboth South Africa. She did a lot of hiking and bird watching and grew a garden full of indigenous plants and expanded the kitchen of her home herself, and she also worked with museums in the area. She had been kind of worried that if she stayed in East London she would never actually leave the museum and her successors wouldn't get to fully step into their roles. And the fact that she was soon doing museum work in her retirement, I think her impulse was correct. Yeah. She did move back to East London around nineteen eighty seven at the age of eighty, as her family members became concerned about her living in an area that was so much more remote and very far away from them. She had a heart attack in nineteen ninety five and experienced some other health issues afterward, including developing shingles. In two thousand and one, she had a pacemaker implanted. After having another heart attack, she was eventually diagnosed with osteoporosis, and after a fall, she was moved into Fairland's Frail care Home. Marjorie Courtney Latimer really wanted to go back home, but for a number of reasons, her pension was very small. Her stay at Fairland's Frail Care Home was subsidized, but she couldn't afford the care that she would need to live at home. Eventually, her friends worked out a plan to arrange for the care she would need to live safely and comfortably at home, and a plan to pay for it, but she died on May seventeenth, two thousand and four, at the age of ninety seven before she could be told about these arrangements. Speakers at her funeral included Nossimo Ballindela, Premiere of the Eastern Cape. Marjorie Courtney Latimer worked at the East London Museum for more than forty years, shaping it into one of the most respected museums in South Africa and developing our reputation both for its permanent collection and its temporary exhibits, which she always tried to make very lively and engaging. During her career, she also published forty two papers on ornithology, and she became known for her conservation advocacy. There is some irony here, since collecting all these specimens for the museum involved killing animals and removing plants and other objects from their environment, but she wrote extensively about clean water and air and habitat conservation and environmental protections. She also advocated for domestic cats to be licensed because of the impact they have on bird populations when they're kept outdoors. The June two thousand and four edition of the Selacanth, the Journal of the Border Historical Society, was dedicated to Marjorie Courtney Latimer, and Latimer's Landing Docks in East London are named after her. The East London Museum also still exists, and it has a seilacanth on its logo. Today there are two recognized species of selacanth. Latimia chelamney lives in the Indian Ocean near the coasts of southeastern Africa, Madagascar and the Comoro Islands, and Latimara mennaedoensis lives near northern Sulawesi in Indonesia. Although Western science had believed these fish to be extinct, they were known to people in the Comoro Islands and Sulawtan, Although since they usually live in deep water and they only feed at night, they were not fish that were just routinely seen all the time. They weren't caught or observed all that often. Because of their habitat and behavior. Not much is known about them, but Latimria Chelimnay is considered to be critically endangered and Latin Maria Menadonsis is considered vulnerable. As a way to sum it all up here is something Marjorie Courtney Latimer wrote in nineteen seventy nine, quote this story is one of the most astounding records of a woman's intuition. For had I never gone to Bird Island, had I never met doctor J. LB Smith, who, of all the scientists I meant as a young girl struggling with meager funds in a small museum, always gave encouragement and never criticism. And had I not gone to the wharf to wish the men a happy Christmas, there never would have been a Sela camp discovery in South Africa on twenty two December nineteen thirty eight. I love her, She's great. I also have some great listener mail. This is from Kelly and it was written after our episode in the London Frost Fairs, and Kelly wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm a high school history teacher for twenty seven years. Not sure how that happened, as I am as young as the day I started. I teach APUs history to sophomores and accelerated humanities to seniors. I started listening to the podcast during the pandemic. I listened in the many walks I took with my sweet dog Charlie, who has sadly passed away. I went all the way back to the really short episodes, and I will earn my PhD in stuff you miss in history class later this month or in early March. I am finally writing to you both to first of all, thank you for an amazing podcast. I don't know what I will do when I don't have a seemingly endless que to listen to. But I was recently listening to the episode on Frost Fairs and you mentioned that you were interested in frozen water stories. I live in Michigan, and the Jewel of up North, as we Michiganders call it, is Mackinaw Island. The island is in the Straits of Mackinaw, which is where Michigan's Upper and Lower peninsula are joined by the beautiful Mackinaw Bridge. Yet the spelling changes in case you are not familiar. The first Mackinaw I've been saying is m acki Nac. You're right, it doesn't match. And then the bridge is m acki Naw. Macinaw Island is a quaint place that does not allow motor vehicles except for emergency vehicles. All transport is done with horses and bicycles. It is also well known for its fudge, which comes in many varieties and are so delicious. The island is also well known for the Grand Hotel, which has served the rich and famous, and was the backdrop for the movie Somewhere in Time starring Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour. Ferries run from the mainland in the late spring through fall, but historically in the winter, when the straits would over they would line an ice path from the mainland with the discarded Christmas trees from the holiday season. Macinaw has a rich history. It might be a great episode for the future. Thank you for all you do, Kelly ps attaches my pet tax. This is Quincy, my two year old pity mix. This dog is so cute. We have a dog sleeping on a little bed that's been made of what looks like a cushioned bed type thing of some sort and some blankets, sleeping in an almost catlike position there. And then we have puppy face looking in a window and looking over what I think is the arm of a chair. I love these dog pictures. I also love earing stuff about Mcinaw Island. As you probably noticed when I spelled the word, it is not spelled Mackinaw. And every time I'm listening to a podcast or the radio or whatever and I hear somebody say Mackinac, I'm like, oh no, your emails, your mansions, they're gonna be full of corrections. There are a couple of places that prompt that response for me one hundred percent of the time when I hear someone say them that one, I would probably never mess up because that is a place my mom and dad used to go a lot when they were recording. Yeah. Yeah, it is a place that if you live locally, you know how to say it, and if you live anywhere else and you sound it out as how it is spelled, it would be Mackinac. I think at some point, many many many years ago we might have even said it Mackinac on the podcast. Uh So, anyway, I love these dog pictures. I love hearing about making an ice path and lining it with the leftover like with the Christmas trees from the season. I love all of this. Thank you so much Kelly for this email. Uh if you would like to write to us about this any other podcast or a history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're all over social media on mist in History, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.