Personal Reminiscences

Abstract

I lived for the first eighteen years of my life in Adelaide, South Australia. My father had come to Adelaide in 1886 to succeed Sir Horace Lamb as Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Adelaide University; three years later he married my mother, who was the daughter of Sir Charles Todd, Postmaster General and Government Astronomer of South Australia. My parents sent me to St. Peter’s College, a fine Adelaide school, and afterwards to Adelaide University. School education was then much less specialized than it is now. I had instruction in eight subjects to an equal standard, in fact in all the subjects which were taught at the school with the exception of German and Physics—and I have always regretted that I did not learn German. I did not have an entirely happy time at school, though no fault of the school. I was no good at games, not for physical reasons but because I had not the right temperament, lacking the drive and self-assurance necessary to a good games player. Being rather advanced in my school work I was a very young member of the sixth form, while at the same time making such a poor showing in games that I could only be put to play in the ‘sets’ with boys in much lower forms. Schoolboys only accept the normal boy into their full fellowship and, although they regarded me with kindly tolerance as a strange freak, I was very much cut off from my fellows, and driven into finding solitary interests of my own. One was the collecting of shells along the coasts and on the reefs in the neighbourhood of Adelaide. I had quite a fine collection for a youngster and amongst other rarities I discovered a new species of cuttlefish; I still feel proud that ‘Sepia Braggi’ has continued to be accepted by conchologists as a distinct species.