The Deer & The Hangman

This story begins in the all too familiar climate of economic downturn.  In 1711, the South Sea Company was set up with monopoly trading rights in South America.  While the company failed to realise any profits from this monopoly, there was huge speculative investment in the company, causing an expediential rise in its stock.   This effect became known as the South Sea Bubble when it inevitably burst in 1720.  What followed was Britain’s first modern economic crisis as investors lost millions of pounds.  Sir Isaac Newton reportedly lost twenty thousand pounds (£2.4 million in today’s terms) in the crash. He was quoted as saying “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”

The South Sea Crisis quickly became a target for satire in the press and in engraved prints by artists such as William Hogarth.  It also led to a rise in crime.  Highway robbery increased, although it had declined again by 1724.  There was also a sharp increase in deer poaching.  Furthermore, in the 1720s England had no police force and even the Bow Street Runners would not exist for another thirty years.  Watchmen and parish constables, many of them quite elderly, were meant to keep the peace in towns, but there was little provision for fighting crime in the country.  The primary means of catching criminals was offering rewards for information leading to their capture.  Members of gangs who gave evidence against their cohorts were pardoned.  Land owners armed their game keepers to defend against the deer stealers, leading to violent clashes.

Forests like Waltham Chase were a source of cheap meat, yet only the wealthy land owners were permitted to hunt in them.  The depression inevitably increased social tension and this became apparent in the activities of two particular gangs of deer stealers.  The gangs became famous for covering their faces with gunpowder to disguise their features and frighten people.  Because of this they became known as the ‘Blacks’. 

These gangs, one operating in Windsor, the other in Hampshire, went into forests in daylight armed with pistols and rifles to shoot and take deer.  The Hampshire gang primarily targeted the Bishop of Winchester’s park in Farnham.  The first major incident occurred in October 1721 when 16 poachers raided the park. Five deer were killed, a deer stealer shot (although he recovered) and four other poachers were soon caught.  Two were released and the others made to stand in the stocks, sentenced to a year and a day imprisonment and given a twenty pound fine.

The gang sought revenge.  They broke into the park at Farnham again and shot or stole more than twenty deer.  The deer stealers passed through the nearby town in triumph and without any opposition.  After this attack, rewards were offered for information leading to their capture and soldiers were stationed in Farnham.  So the deer stealers turned the focus of their attacks to Waltham Chase.  It took only two months for them to deplete the deer herds there.  These Waltham Blacks also sent letters to the local gentry, threatening to burn down their houses if there was any opposition to their hunting.

It was widely claimed that the deer stealers were Jacobites - supporters of the Catholic pretender to the throne James Stuart, who were attempting to incite rebellion against the Hanoverian George I.  The gentry and the government stoked public fears over Jacobitism to turn opinion against the Blacks.  However, there is little evidence that the Waltham Blacks supported the Jacobite cause.  Their leader, an unidentified man known as ‘King John’ distributed a pamphlet asserting that the Waltham Blacks were loyal subjects of King George.

That is not to say that they were not politicised. Shortly after the printing of this pamphlet, 16 of the deer stealers - armed, faces blackened, some wearing coats and caps of deerskin - converged on a public house near the Chase.  ‘King John’ appeared and proclaimed that they were loyal to the king and that their aim was justice.  They wished to see that the rich did not oppress the poor.  They were determined to remove the deer from the Chase because the area was intended for grazing cattle, not to fatten deer for the tables of the wealthy.  Three hundred people had gathered to see the Blacks.  No one tried to catch them as they rode away.

Their attacks diversified, often suggesting socio-political motivation.  When an estate owner near Farnham charged poor people for picking small firewood on his estate (customarily free) the Blacks destroyed a stand of trees on his land and warned they would pay him a second visit if the money he had charged was not returned.  Soon afterwards a shipment of venison and wine for the Prince of Wales was intercepted outside Winchester.  Following this, a significant reward was offered for the capture of the Waltham Blacks.  With arrest being a real danger, the deer stealers went to ground.

Almost immediately, a gang of deer stealers began to operate in the royal Windsor Forest.  Maybe some of the Waltham Blacks moved north or perhaps they were copycats, but the attacks they carried out in 1722 and 1723 were as violent, although no proclamations of social justice were made.

The crimes of the Berkshire Blacks reached a peak in spring 1723 when an old poacher was prosecuted for killing game, being fined 10 pounds and his guns deposited with a church warden.  A group of Blacks sought out the church warden and in the ensuing confrontation the warden’s son was shot through the head.  In the wake of such violence, Parliament was spurred to act against the poachers.

The government introduced an Act of Parliament designed specifically to target the poachers.  Formally titled ‘An Act for the more effectual punishing wicked and evil disposed Persons going armed in Disguise and doing Injuries and Violence to the Persons and Properties of His Majesty's Subject, and for the more speedy bringing the Offenders to Justice’ the bill became more widely known as the Waltham Black Act.  It came into effect on the 27 May 1723.  Going into a forest with your face blacked or in any other disguise; wounding, killing or stealing red or fallow deer; and sending a letter without a name or signed with a fictitious name that made monetary demands all became offences punishable with death.  It also made poaching fish or hunting hares in a forest, as well as damaging trees or setting fire to buildings capital offences.  In short, the Blacks could now be hung for most of their actions.

The Secretary of State sent two agents to Berkshire who succeeded in capturing three of the gang’s ringleaders.  A week later 21 other Blacks were arrested and sent to Newgate Prison.  They were returned to Reading for trial on 6 June.  Four of the accused were hanged for murder and six others were transported to the colonies.  The others were discharged due to insufficient evidence.

This put an end to the Berkshire Blacks, but soon the Hampshire deer stealers returned and renewed their actions.  They made numerous attacks in different parts of the county during the summer, including their final attack on Waltham Chase.  On Sunday 1 September 1723, seven men with blackened faces entered the Chase in search of deer.  One of their number, Edward Elliot, an apprentice tailor from Guildford, was captured by armed gamekeepers.  The rest of the gang came to his aid.  Closing to just a few yards, a poacher named Henry Marshall shot one of the keepers ‘unexpectedly in the breast and out the back’.  He died immediately.  More shots were exchanged, during which a keeper received a broken thigh from a shot to the hip and one of the deer stealers was also injured.  Marshall, Elliot and two others were captured in the running battle that ensued.  The remaining three were subsequently caught in their home town of Portsmouth.

Due to the infamy of the gang, they were moved under armed guard to London and kept in the notorious Newgate Prison.  They were tried at the court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall and found guilty of deer stealing and given the death sentence.  They were executed at Tyburn on 4 December 1723.

The Waltham Black Act remained on the statute book for a century, finally repealed in 1823, with the exception of the provisions against arson and shooting a person.  During its time in force, countless people were sent to the gallows for offences that it contained.  However, like many Draconian measures it failed to solve the problem it was devised to address.  The Berkshire and Waltham Blacks orchestrated their own downfall through the audacity of their final raids, while the Act that they had inspired was over-zealously interpreted by the courts to allow them to order the execution of thousands over the next century. But deer-stealing still continued after the law came into force. In the 1730s a large gang began taking the deer from Epping Forest, selling their ill-gotten meat through a butcher named Richard Turpin.  But that’s a different story.

Megalosaurus – the rise and fall of the first dinosaur super star

Megalosaurus is one of those classic dinosaur names that encompass the schoolboy ideal of how dinosaurs have long been regarded by the public; -‘saurus’ suggests reptilian and ‘mega’ pertains to both great size and awe.  The name literally means great lizard.  What is less widely known is that this was the first dinosaur to be described – nearly 200 years before Richard Owen thought up the term.  In 1676, Robert Plot, first curator of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum described a fragment of leg bone (femur) too large to have come from any living British species, concluding rather that it had belonged to a giant.  This fragment was next described in 1763 by physician and author Richard Brookes, who named it “Scrotum humanum” due to its resemblance to a petrified pair of testicles. The fossil itself has been lost but the drawing of it is sufficiently detailed that it has been identified as coming from a Megalosaurus.

More fragments were discovered in Oxfordshire during the early 19^th century and were acquired by William Buckland, professor of geology and Dean of Christchurch College, Oxford.  Buckland was an eccentric character who, when he wasn’t naming new species spent much of his time eating known ones.  He was fond of mice on toast and kept live badgers in his college rooms.  After the French comparative anatomist Georges Curvier examined the remains and concluded they were from a reptile, Buckland described them in 1924, giving them the name Megalosaurus.  Two years later, geologist Gideon Mantell, who first discovered Iguanodon, gave it the two-part scientific name Megalosaurus Bucklandii in honour of its discoverer.

 

 

With the naming of Iguanodon in 1825 and the discovery of large marine creatures in locations such as Lime Regis, the notion of an age of reptiles before mammals quickly gained scientific credence.  Yet it would several more decades until it caught the popular imagination.  The next major step occurred when Richard Owen collected the giant terrestrial reptiles under the term Dinosauria; terrible lizards.  This was followed by engravings of ferocious Megalosaurus snacking on rhinoceros-like Iguanodon, regardless of the fact that the two species were separated by some 40 million years.  Megalosaurus had arrived!

The first dino-mania hit Britain in 1853, whilst the Crystal Palace was being prepared for its opening in Sydenham.  In the months preceding the opening, great interest grew around the life-sized models of extinct animals, which were the first of their kind.  Inspired by Richard Owen’s monographs and constructed by Benjamin Waterhouse-Hawkins, the stars of Crystal Palace are the three species of dinosaur; Iguanodon, the spiny Hylaeosaurus and Megalosaurus.  Although unfinished when the Sydenham Crystal Palace opened June 1854, the models were a sensation. They were accompanied by an array of merchandise, including guidebooks written by Owen, small-scale models and engraved prints and posters. They also featured in satirical cartoons, many suggesting that these ‘monsters’ were more terrifying than educational.  Those involved in making them believed the models would be an aid to geology and palaeontology. Others agreed, with The Crystal Palace Herald reporting that the models were: ‘A great visual idea, of much importance to scientific instruction, this portion of the Great Exhibition will be second to none’.

Off the back of this success, Megalosaurus gained the accolade of being the first dinosaur mentioned in a work of fiction.  In the beginning of Bleak House, Charles Dickens, describing the muddy London streets, writes "Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."  The dinosaur has unfortunately never made it into any film or TV adaptations of the book.

In a way, the Crystal Palace Park opened at just the wrong time for Megalosaurus and its other dinosaur stars.  Up until then, dinosaur discoveries were almost entirely confined to Britain and the reconstructions were based on the highly fragmentary known remains.  During the remainder of the 19th century, new finds, many from the western United States, overturned scientific understanding of these animals.  The discovery of Hadrosaurus foulkii (one of the ‘duck-billed’ dinosaurs) in 1858 and the Bernisart Iguanodons in 1882 suggested many dinosaurs were actually bipedal, rather the four-legged behemoths Hawkins depicted.

In 1912, Megalosaurus featured in the original dinosaur adventure story, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.  It is first glimpsed by the explorers in light of a flaming torch in the depth of night.  Conan Doyles describes the sight of “a horrible mask, like a giant toad’s, of a warty, leprous skin, and of a loose mouth all beslobbered with fresh blood.”

The Megalosaurus of The Lost World is as truly terrifying as it is implausible.  Despite numerous finds of the related Allosaurus showing these animals were bipedal, it walks on either two or four legs and resembles a monster toad, even bounding across the plateau in pursuit of its prey.  Most disturbing of all, when one is killed toward the end of the book, its heart continues to beat for days after the flesh has been carved up!

The Lost World in many respects marks the highpoint of Megalosaurus’ career in popular entertainment.  When the book was adapted for the silver screen in 1925 by Willis O’Brian, the predators were changed to Allosaurus for the benefit of American audiences.  The greatest blow to Megalosaurus’ popularity, (as well as that of most other dinosaur species) came in 1905 when Henry Fairfield Osborn published his description of a new species.  It was a huge carnivore, measuring 12 metres in length and he named it Tyrannosaurus rex.

 

In the unlikely event that you require convincing of the popularity of T. rex, consider this; it is the only organism in all of earth’s history to be widely recognised by its full scientific name.  For much of the hundred and eight years since it was discovered, it has been considered the largest terrestrial predator to have ever lived.  With this kind of prestige, its popularity was guaranteed.  IMDb lists 93 titles featuring T.rex.  Whenever dinosaurs appear on screen, you can bet there’ll be a tyrannosaur amongst them.  In comparison other individual dinosaur species have failed to capture the popular imagination in quite the in the same way.

Meanwhile the poor Megalosaurus fell into cultural and to some extent, scientific obscurity.  No other fossils of it have been accurately identified.  During the 20th century remains of carnivorous dinosaurs found in a variety of places and geological times were attributed to Megalosaurus, so the species became what is known as a taxonomic waste bin; somewhere to shove stuff you’re not sure what to do with.  Research during the late 20^th century and over the last 10 years has corrected this.  The species Megalosaurus bucklandii now only refers to the fossils first described by William Buckland.  These pieces are on permanent display in Oxford’s Natural History Museum.  A fragment of skull, a section of jaw bone, some vertebra, a hip and part of a hind leg, are all we have of the first dinosaur that anyone knew about.

The Beasts of Sydenham

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a phenomenal success.  In the five and a half months that it was open to the public, an estimated six million visitors passed through the doors of the Crystal Palace as the exhibition building became known – and at a time when the population of England and Wales was not quite 18 million.  But what to do with the building once the doors had closed? Suggestions ranged from simply leaving it in situ to the more outlandish scheme of rebuilding it as a tower.

Sir Joseph Paxton, the building’s architect, set up the Crystal Palace Company with the aim of moving the building from Hyde Park in central London to Penge Hill in Sydenham. The newly constructed Crystal Palace boasted 50 per cent more floor space than its predecessor and it was filled with courts representing different cultures and time periods. It was conceived as an ’illustrated encyclopaedia’ through which visitors could progress from one subject to the next. This notion of physical space as a means of presenting information was also applied to the large shield-shaped park laid out below the palace. It was here that the artist and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins decided to attempt something new. Inspired by Richard Owen’s monographs on the extinct giant reptiles of the Mesozoic era, he felt compelled to create a series of large sculptures of extinct creatures for public display.

Hawkins drew concepts for each of the animals, based on the published work of Owen and others. Satisfied with the designs, he created scaled-down clay models, which were refined to meet Owen’s standards, based on the available scientific knowledge of the time. Hawkins then made life-size clay models, from which metal casts were produced. The larger models, such as the Iguanodon, were built in situ (near the lowest lake in the park),,by pouring concrete into moulds surrounding foundations of steel and brick. Even before they were unveiled, the reconstructions were being discussed and speculated over. The Illustrated Crystal Palace Gazette reported ‘The grounds adjoining to the new road from the Rock Hills Sydenham to Penge… is the site being prepared, in hollow basin, mounds, and upheaved tumulae, for the representatives of the antediluvian world.’

This term ‘antediluvian’ refers to the biblical Great flood. One popular belief was that the extinct animals had been killed in the flood and it was even suggested that the dinosaurs’ demise was due to their being too large to fit in Noah’s ark. This, of course, wasn’t the accepted scientific theory, but it was the one presented in newspapers at the time. Another view was that these creatures were ‘the inhabitants of this earth before the abode of our first parent Adam’.

Speculation about the models came to a head on New Year’s Eve 1853, when Hawkins held a banquet at Crystal Palace Park. The table and chairs were set inside the mould used to make the standing Iguanodon, (and not inside the model itself as the famous Punch cartoon suggests). The guests included the leading scientists of the day, with Richard Owen, in his only recorded visit to the park, seated at the head of the table.

Although unfinished when the Sydenham Crystal Palace was opened by Queen Victoria in June 1854, the Geological Illustrations, to give them their official name, were a sensation and a major part of the unique experience of the park. The models were accompanied by an array of merchandise, including guidebooks written by Owen, small-scale models and engraved prints and posters. They also featured in satirical cartoons, many suggesting that the ‘antediluvian monsters’ were more terrifying than illuminating.  Those involved with the project believed that the experiment in visualising extinct animals would significantly further the causes of geology and palaeontology, among the other natural sciences. Others agreed, with The Crystal Palace Herald reporting that the models were: ‘A great visual idea, of much importance to scientific instruction, this portion of the Great Exhibition will be second to none’. Hawkins thought that children in particular responded to tangible things rather than to abstract words. He summed up the driving idea behind the Crystal Palace as being ‘one vast and combined experiment of visual education’.

On opening, the set of completed models on display comprised of Anoplotherium, Dicynodon, Hylaeosaurus, several species of Ichthyosaurus, Iguanodon, Labyrinthodon, Megaloceros, Megalosaurus, Megatherium, Mosasaurus, Palaeotherium, Plesiosaurus, Pterodactyl and Teleosaurus. These models are the most famous result of Hawkin’s labours but the park also featured three islands, each representing a different geological formation and era of time andan ‘exposed cliff face’ showing the litho-stratigraphic order of the rock formations in which the fossilised remains were found.Both Hawkins and Owen planned to introduce more extinct animals at Sydenham: there were plans for a mastodon, mammoths and a moa. Owen even suggested including a dodo.

The relocation of the Crystal Palace failed to live up to expectations.  After the great success of the Great Exhibition, it was thought that any amount of money involved would be recouped, but Joseph Paxton wished to push the grandeur of the Sydenham palace to the extreme, seemingly regardless of the cost. From the start, the Crystal Palace Company was operating beyond its means. Relocating to Sydenham left them with a debt of £1,300,000 (equivalent to £96.5 million today) that was never recovered. The building itself was not adequately insured and when the north transept burnt down in 1866, it was never rebuilt. The Geological Illustrations consumed time and raw materials and having cost £13,729 by the middle of 1855, the company decided that the range of animals already on display was sufficient.  Despite protests and their evident popularity, the project came to a stop.  Contemporary maps of the park show the site of a mastodon that never materialised. The steel frame for a mammoth was 18 foot high when work stopped. The model would have required 50 tonnes of clay.

The financial woes of the Crystal Palace Company also explain why the models were not protected from the rigors of time, either from physical damage or the more telling advances in scientific knowledge. The discovery of Hadrosaurus in 1858 showed that this dinosaur walked upright on its hind legs. A similar conclusion was drawn for Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, confirmed in 1878 by the  discovery of near-complete Iguanodon skeletons in Bernissart, Belgium. This discovery also revealed that the dinosaur’s’ ‘horn’ was actually a thumb claw, betraying the most famous ‘mistake’ in Hawkins’s reconstructions. Subsequent discoveries would further erode the reputation of the models. When American geologist Othniel Marsh visited in 1895, he said ‘There is nothing like unto them in the heavens, or on earth, or in the waters under the earth.’ They were further discredited by Henry Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Museum in the book Extinct Monsters, when he stated that Hawkins was ‘occupied for years in unauthorised restorations’. Woodward noted that the toad-like Labyrinthodon and Dicynodon should have been more akin to salamanders, while ’Iguanodon did not usually stand on all-fours but more frequently sat up like some huge kangaroo…’ This particular notion has since been superseded.

On the night of 30 November 1936, a fire tore through the palace, burning so brightly it was seen in eight counties. 100,000 people watched the Crystal Palace’s destruction in 1936.  Amongst them was Winston Churchill, who called it ‘the end of an era’.  By morning all that remained of Joseph Paxton’s masterpiece was red hot steel and pools of molten glass. Although the Crystal Palace Company attempted to maintain the park as a going-concern, the Trustees of the company were disbanded in 1951 and the park was given to London County Council.  With the building lost and the park very much altered, the models are the most visible evidence of the ‘experiment in visual education’ that lay at the heart of the Crystal Palace scheme. 

Today, the models are largely known for their inaccuracy. It is undeniable that they quickly became outmoded, but it is their outmodedness that now makes them so valuable.  By studying past attempts to communicate science we get our best record of contemporary understanding, and in setting their ideas about these animals literally in stone, Hawkins and Owen created a unique record of the state of scientific understanding at the time. Though our understanding has since advanced it does not make their attempt less valid. Rather, it shows that our understanding of the natural world is never definitive, but subject to change.  But equally any restoration or interpretation can be superseded.  A gallery or model can be outmoded after a few years or even sooner. There will always a requirement to review, more to discover and more to communicate to others.

Exploring The Lost World

First published in 1912, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle is generally considered to be the first dinosaur story. The thrilling adventure yarn – familiar to millions – is a true landmark of popular culture. 

Initially serialised in the Strand Magazine, the story is told to us by journalist Edward Malone. In order to win the love of his fiancé, Gladys Hungerford, Malone has agreed to accompany Professor Challenger on an expedition to South America to investigate tales of a plateau where dinosaurs still exist. Together with the sceptical Professor Summerlee and big game hunter Lord John Roxton, they start to find evidence to support Challenger’s theory. Accessing the isolated plateau by climbing a rock pinnacle and felling a tree to form a bridge, they become trapped when the bridge is destroyed by treacherous aids.

As Conan Doyle’s characters explore, they discover numerous prehistoric species that have survived in this isolated corner of the world. The plateau is wondrous but dangerous, roamed by vicious pterodactyls and carnivorous Megalosaurus. The explorers also discover that it is home to a tribe of natives who are at war with a species of primitive humanoid – a form of ‘missing link’ between Homo sapiens and the great apes. The explorers help the natives defeat the ape-men and in doing so win their friendship. Eventually, the chief’s son shows the explorers a way down from the plateau.

When the characters return to London to share their discovery with the scientific community, no-one believes them until they produce a young pterodactyl they have brought back. The creature quickly escapes, causing alarm, but undeniably proving their case. Hailed as heroes, they retire to Lord Roxton’s rooms where he reveals another export from the plateau: diamonds valued at £200,000. With the proceeds from these precious stones, Challenger plans to open his own museum and Summerlee retires to catalogue his fossils. Malone (rejected by Gladys, who has married a solicitor in his absence) and Roxton plan a return expedition to the lost world.

Arthur Conan Doyle had broad-ranging interests: alongside his keen advocacy of spiritualism, he was interested in judicial reform, criminology and palaeontology. His home, Windlesham in Crowborough, East Sussex, was on the Weald – an area of rock formations that date back to the Upper Jurassic (145.5–150.8 million years ago). This contributed to the author’s fascination with prehistoric life and, in the spring of 1909, he wrote to the Natural History Museum requesting an expert come and view what appeared to be Iguanodon tracks found at a nearby quarry. Conan Doyle hand-drew the tracks in his letter and the discovery directly inspired a passage in The Lost World, where the first evidence of Iguanodon on the plateau also takes the form of footprints.

In November 1911, Conan Doyle wrote again to Arthur Smith Woodward, the Museum’s keeper of Geology reporting that ‘we have something in the old quarry that is beyond me’. He claimed that this mysterious object was ‘not an impression but a body’. However, when geologist Charles Dawson was dispatched to examine it, the body proved to be a ‘mere concretion of oxide of iron and sand’. The experts perhaps viewed him as a happy amateur, but Conan Doyle persisted in his hope of finding extinct reptiles in some state other than fossilised. In September 1922, he wrote to Smith Woodward stating he had seen an ichthyosaurus in the Aegean Sea.

Conan Doyle started The Lost World in October 1911 and, for details of the prehistoric life, he referred to Extinct Animals by E Ray Lankester, then Director of the Natural History Museum. This book, described by its author as ‘[nothing] more ambitious than attempt to excite in young people an interest in a most fascinating study’, contained illustrations and descriptions of many species Conan Doyle included in his adventure. However, he interpreted some of the science in peculiar ways. In Extinct Animals an image of an ichthyosaurus skull shows the parietal foramen, a hole which in modern reptiles contains a photoreceptive organ call the parietal eye. The Ichthyosaurus in The Lost World has a visible third eye on top of its head. Also, despite a clear description in Extinct Animals of Megalosaurus as bipedal, Conan Doyle’s animal walks on either two or four legs and resembles a horrible toad.

Conan Doyle may well have been inspired by the model dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park, opened in 1854. The reconstructions, including a quadruped Megolosaurus, were already deemed obsolete by the 1900s. Like the fictional plateau, the exhibition in Sydenham featured a mixture of species from different time periods, all apparently living together around a lake. From Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs to the much more recent Toxodon and Irish elk, almost all of the species at Crystal Palace appear in Conan Doyle’s book.

Conan Doyle also took an interest in exploration. In 1909 he spoke at a luncheon for Ernest Shackleton and later appeared with Robert Falcon Scott at a fundraiser for the British Antarctic Expedition. The following May he jovially admonishing American explorer Robert Peary for making the job of storytelling much harder. Previously it had been possible to write about remote parts of the world without fear of contradiction. Now that so much of the world had been explored, he asked where ‘the romance-writer is to turn when he wants to draw any vague and not too clearly-defined region’.

The answer apparently lay in the Amazon Basin. At a time when the border between Brazil and Bolivia was poorly defined, Conan Doyle’s close friend Percy Harrison Fawcett led the Bolivian Boundary Commission, tasked with preventing border disputes. When Fawcett returned to England, he brought with him tales of the Huanchaca Plateau and an impenetrable jungle where anything could be hiding.

Conan Doyle knew that exploration had led to the expansion of the British Empire, through the acquisition of new territories. He also recognised that the Empire required defence. Covering a quarter of the globe, and home to 285 million people, it was difficult and expensive to police. Britain’s small professional army was surrounded by the larger, conscripted, armies of her European neighbours: old enemies like France and Russia, and a more recent concern – Germany. The less than glorious victory of the Boer War led to genuine fears that a future conflict might lose Britain her colonies or even her independence. These worries were countered by a brash imperialism that permeated middle and upper classes British culture. In 1907, Robert Baden-Powell set up the Scout Movement to promote health, exercise and teamwork in boys. There wasn’t an implicit military connection, but he stated that they should ‘be a brick’ in the ‘wall of Empire’.

In the years preceding The Lost World, Conan Doyle wrote several Roman-era short stories, as allegories for contemporary British issues. The Last Galley was a fable about Britain’s naval superiority in the face of expanding German sea power. The Lost World’s brash imperialism is evident the admiration heaped on Roxton’s military skills and in the plot’s focus on British explorers aiding natives in defending their territory against an inhuman aggressor. Malone enthuses that, following his adventures on the plateau, he should receive a commission as correspondent in the next Great War.

The Lost World was adapted into a film in 1925 by American film-maker Willis O’Brian, using stop-motion effects to realise the dinosaurs. The movie reduces the book’s militaristic tone by adding a female character to the party and many subsequent adaptations have followed suit, overlooking Edwardian social conventions to add romance to the story. The 1925 movie also removes the conflict between the natives and ape-men, while the belligerent presence on the plateau is reduced to an actor in an ape costume and a chimpanzee. Even the treachery that traps the explorers is replaced by a brontosaurus feeding on the felled tree. Perhaps, after the First World War, the book’s soldierly fervour was considered inappropriate for cinema audiences.

By downplaying the battles between humans and ape-men, the story is refocused on exploration and scientific discovery. Although the original text is arguably diluted, the most exciting element is retained, and even magnified. The notion of an isolated place where prehistoric animals continue to thrive was first explored in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but Conan Doyle was the first novelist to make this a central premise of his work, thus creating the archetypal dinosaur narrative. The narrative has reoccurred frequently since 1912, with tales in which people discover some remote location inhabited by creatures long thought to be extinct, become trapped and must endeavour to escape.  Jurassic Park is essentially The Lost World combined with a fear of modern technology.  At its core is the thrill of the unknown and this tale is an adventure that audiences of all ages can enjoy. As its author stated:

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.

Viewer's Commentary: Batman (1989)

00:00:00:              Despite being a confirmed Bat-fan, when I was a kid, I wasn’t interested in Batman.  I didn’t like the character or any of his stories.  The reason for this is that the only exposure I had to the character was through repeats of Adam West TV show.  Cultural historians like to claim it was ironic, archly self-aware, even subversive pop art.   But it was unexciting, emotionally empty and formulaic.  Worse still it took arguably the greatest character to come from comic book literature and reduced him to a primary coloured, jobbing idiot.  It was produced at a time when comics weren’t considered anything other than for kids, so it was irreverent and forgettable.  But the main problem was that it wasn’t remotely thrilling.  The title sequence, where an animated Batman and Robin fought a crowd of armed thugs was the most exciting part.

As for a lot of people, this film introduced me to Batman as a dark avenger and a character with a tragic origin and the psychological issues rising from that.  I won’t say this is what Batman should be like, but it was the first time I felt Batman and his world could deliver excitement and intrigue.

00:00:18:              The camera tracks through canyons etched in stone that are revealed to be the Bat insignia.  We also have Danny Elfman’s often derided theme music.  It suits this melodramatic take on the character and this main theme became pretty much definitive for a long time.  It was subsequently used in Batman: The Animated Series.  Check out this with-lyrics version by Goldentusk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPBgYeanZ0.

00:02:28:              Is the ‘Gotham City’ caption here really necessary?  We know Batman lives in Gotham City so it’s basically saying ‘this is a Batman movie’.  What have the last 2 ½ minutes been about then?

00:02:47:              This opening scene with the family being mugged at gun point echoes the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, seen later in the film.

00:04:25:              This shot of Batman on the balcony and the way the mother’s scream is faintly overlaid at the start suggest Batman is watching the mugging take place.  Why doesn’t he intervene?  He appears to wait for the crime to be committed in order to then take down the criminals.  Cool shadow effect at the end of the shot though.

00:04:50:              The exchange between the 2 muggers on the roof introduces the ‘urban legend’ element of the Batman character nicely.  The weaker, more cowardly criminals are scared of Batman, while the bolder ones don’t believe he’s real.  Both these things could work to his advantage.  But this conversation also shows one of the problems with this version of the character by suggesting Batman killed “Johnny Gobbs” – more on that later.

00:05:35:               We get our first clear view of Batman.  While Michael Keaton has a volatile intensity that suits the role, he lacks the physicality for it, being shorter than the other lead actors and not athletic enough.  Much of what he does as Batman seems to be for effect and it’s often rather slow going.

00:06:45:              Enter Billy Dee Williams, aka Lando Calrissian, as Harvey Dent.  It’s not clear what Harvey Dent is doing in this film.  This scene and a few other hints suggest he’s attempting to prosecute Gotham’s mobsters in his role as District Attorney.  The rest of the time he seems to be a glorified mayoral aide.  There’s no hint either that he might one day become the villain Two-face.  Williams did take the role on the agreement that he would play Two-face if a sequel was made.  He had a clause in his contract to that effect which Warner Bros. then had to buy out when Tommy Lee Jones played the character Batman Forever (1995).  If Williams had portrayed Two-face, you have to wonder if he would have had half a moustache.

00:07:30:              The late Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon.  At 65 when this film was made, he feels like a jobbing detective with a week left until retirement.  This James Gordon is such a non-person that he doesn’t even fill the function of providing exposition – he’s simply here to direct the uniformed policemen.

00:07:48:              Jack Nicholson as Jack Napier is smooth, sinister and vain; a very eighties gangster.

00:09:24:              Lieutenant Eckhardt, played by William Hootkins, is a combination of two comic book characters.  He has the appearance of Detective Harvey Bullock, but is corrupt and serves a mob boss, like Arnold Flass from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One.  He also has some wonderful lines: “Shoot to kill, know what I mean?”

00:09:27:              Alexander Knoxx, (Robert Whul) was created for this film.  His line about Batman being on the police payroll might be a reference to comics from the 1950s and 60s and the Adam West TV show when Batman and Robin were deputised into the Gotham Police Department in order to remove the moral ambiguity of their crime fighting.

00:11:54:              Burton’s version of Gotham is, predictably, a mixture of Brutalism and Gothic architecture, as seen in this establishing shot, with industrial buildings next to City Hall.

00:12:40:              This cartoon of a bat in a pinstripe suit and the trademark boxed signature in the corner is the closest thing to a cameo by Batman co-creator Bob Kane in any Batman film.  He was going to cameo in this film but was ill and time constraints meant his scene couldn’t be rescheduled.  Whilst he visited the set of this and the next two films, he never appeared on screen.  Kane died in 1998.

00:13:11:              Enter Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale.  The list of people that were considered for, approached or auditioned for this role is huge.  Sean Young (Bladerunner) was originally cast, but broke her collarbone filming a horse-riding scene that was subsequently written out of the film.

00:14:41:              The scene with Jack Palance as the mob boss Carl Grissom.  This scene has several things foreshadowing Jack Napier’s transformation into the Joker, such as his purple suit.  This seems to be put there to bridge the gap between the character he is now and the character he changes into, as well as to suggest the inevitability of his fate.

00:17:27:              The fundraiser at Wayne Manor.  Here we first see Bruce Wayne.  Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is suitably distracted and playboy-ish.  He’s definitely better out of the batsuit than he is in it, but there’s not sufficient difference between his public and private versions of Bruce Wayne for the playboy act to feel like an effective of a cover-up.

00:19:15:              The scene in the armoury.  The implication here seems to be that Bruce Wayne got the inspiration for the bat suit from various suits of armour from around the world.

00:23:13:              The shoot-out at Axis Chemicals.  There are some great 1940s visuals in this sequence, such as the trilby sporting gangsters and the police in their Chicago style jackets and uniforms.  The composition of some of the shots here is very similar to panels from Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke one-shot comic, one of about five landmark Batman stories that also informed Christopher Nolan’s take on the character.

00:25:09:              In a particularly vicious moment, Batman appears to fire his grapple hook into a man’s face and leave him hanging over a precipice by his ruptured cheek.

00:26:03:              The classic punching the guy without looking trick.  This was taken up by the Animated Series and used in several episodes.

00:27:42:              Napier shoots Eckhardt.  Batman is in the vicinity and does not intervene, much like he didn’t intervene in the mugging earlier.

00:28:13:              Jack falls in the vat of acid.

00:28:30:              First instance of the problem that dogged every Batman in every film until The Dark Knight; the weight and stiffness of the bat suit meant the actor had to perform a full-body ‘bat-turn’ rather than turn their necks.

00:29:53:              The scene with the giant dining table, which optimises the Keaton Bruce Wayne.

00:32:51:              The cosmetic surgery scene.  There’s a hint of Frankenstein’s monster, combined with a dig at the 1980s’ obsession with plastic surgery.

00:36:16:              Enter the Joker.  Every great villain needs a great entrance and here’s (this) Joker’s; you hear the voice, then the laugh, then you kind of see his face, but not quite.  Finally he steps into the light, all chalk-white skin and red lips and shoots Jack Palance.

00:37:33:              Bruce Wayne sleeping upside down.  Firstly, all the blood running to his head would cause brain damage, loss of motor skills and eventually death.  Secondly, Vicki Vale wakes up, so potentially sees him hanging from his feet - like a bat.

00:37:50:              Back to the Joker.  The Joker’s static grin was actually invented for this film.  The Joker never had a fixed facial expression in the comics.  In fact in his earliest stories from 1940, not only does he not have a fixed grin, but it’s not emphatically stated whether his skin is chalky white or he’s just wearing make-up.

00:38:46:              “I’ve got to go out of town for a few days.”  Why does it take ‘a few days’ to mark the anniversary of Bruce’s parent’s deaths?  Or is he dumping Vicki?  It’s not clear.

00:40:06:              The Joker in flesh coloured make-up is freaky.  His mouth looks like some sort of tropical plant.  This shot is really over-saturated for some reason, as if it was from the sixties’ TV show.

00:43:34:              Vicki finds the newspaper’s file on Bruce Wayne is empty.  As wealth and celebrity go hand in hand, especially when the person in question doesn’t seem to work for their money, (think Paris Hilton), surely there would be photos of him.  Bruce Wayne would need to stay in the public eye to some extent otherwise this reclusiveness would raise suspicions.

00:47:29:              The shoot-out at city hall.  There’s only one cop outside and he does nothing when the Joker kills the mobster right in front of him.  Bruce does nothing either, mind you.  He seems stunned at Napier’s return, but he could trip him up or something.

00:53:42:              The Joker hijacks the news transmission to announce he has put his poison into Gotham’s cosmetics.  This story device is used in most iterations of the character.  Of course it’s a useful means of exposition, but it’s more fundamental that that.  The Joker wants the attention: why else would he dress as a clown?  It also allows him to announce his crime to the general public, ensuring maximum fear and chaos.  The Joker in this film has a number of plans, most of which he succeeds in.  First he takes control of Gotham’s crime syndicates.  Then he spreads death and fear with poisoned beauty products.  Then he plans to “improve” the paintings in the museum by childishly defacing them.  Then he plans to seduce/ abduct Vicki Vale.  It’s generally held that Nicholson steals the film from Keaton’s Batman and it’s not hard to see why.  In contrast to the Joker, this Batman has no plan.  He does not proactively fight crime or corruption, nor does he prevent crimes from occurring.  This Batman is entirely reactive.  When faced with this mass poisoning he finds out how the poison works rather than tracking down the perpetrator.

00:55:37:              The news readers look terrible, but the main characters look fine.  We don’t see Kim Basinger with a massive zit on her nose.

00:57:09:              The Fluegelheim Museum.  Even the art gallery looks like a factory.  Maybe this is where they got the idea for the Tate Modern.

00:59:21:              The Joker and his thugs vandalise the museum.  The goons have gone from being 1940s gangsters to dressing like 1980s pop stars, with ray-bans and fake leather jackets: another odd stylistic turn.  Whenever I see the Joker knock over the brass of the ballerina with his arm I think ‘ouch!’  The painting that Joker spares is Francis Bacon’s ‘Figure with Meat’ (1954).

01:04:07:              Vicki douses the Joker with water.  The different make up effects on the Joker are great.

01:04:11:              “Where does he get those wonderful toys?”  This is probably the most famous line in the film.  It belies, however, the many unexplored avenues of Batman’s character.  There’s so much emphasis on the mystery that we don’t really get to know Bruce Wayne or how he became Batman in the years since his parent’s murders or where his gadgets come from.

01:04:46:              The batmobile.  Referred to thankfully as ‘the car’, it’s certainly impressive, but watches carefully and it’s not very practical.

01:05:20:              It has a very wide turning circle due to its long chassis.  In a few more seconds it uses a grappling hook in order to turn corners.

01:06:20:              This alley way, which Vicki and Batman run down, in order to have a fight with some goons, is the same one in which the mugging occurs at the start of the film.  The desire to give Gotham a very specific look meant building sets rather than using locations.  The relatively small budget, or the way it was allocated, limited the number of sets, making the film world seem rather small.

01:09:25:              Out in the country lanes, this batmobile comes into its own.  It looks very cool, as it kicks up spray and leaves in these shots filmed near Pinewood Studios

01:11:17:              Vicki compares the Joker and Batman, to which Batman retorts “he’s psychotic.”  This Batman fires grappling hooks into people’s faces and throws people off buildings, so…

01:13:11:              Batman appears to knock Vicki out with bats from under his cape.

01:15:08:              Bruce goes to tell Vicki that he’s Batman on the basis of one night together.  This seems to undermine the importance of his mission as Batman.  Still, this scene is handled pretty well, with a mixture of vulnerability and machismo.  How would you tell someone your biggest secret?  Where would you start?

01:19:21:              Bruce Wayne faces off against the Joker.  This is a great scenery chewing moment for Keaton and about the only scene where he’s not entirely overshadowed by Nicholson.  At least until the “Never rub another man’s rhubarb” line.  It’s another give away that he’s Batman.  He then leaves while the Joker and his goons are still in the apartment.  Did he stop to think they could be murdering Vicki while he does his disappearing act?

01:23:03:              Bruce looks at a map with Axis Chemicals circled.  Now, if he knew Napier/ the Joker had become the de facto owner of Grissom’s businesses, including Axis Chemicals and that he was using chemicals to attack Gotham, why didn’t he make the connection and shut down Axis straight away?  Why didn’t the police work this out?

01:26:32:              We finally see the murder of Bruce’s parents.  It’s overtly stylised, with cantered camera angles and echoing footsteps in perfect time.  When Martha Wayne is shot, she looks more like she’s slipping on a banana peel.

01:28:14:              The Joker killing Bruce’s parents was unpopular decision in 1989, but it makes some sense in the context of this film, making the main conflict, that between Batman and the Joker, personal and helping contain it to a single movie, (they could not be certain the film would be successful enough to get a sequel in 1989) as does killing him at the end.  It does however beg the question of why Bruce continues being Batman after he has avenged his parents.

01:28:29:              Alfred lets Vicki into the batcave: another unpopular element of this film.  She’s a reporter and by being let into the cave, Alfred has essentially handed her the scoop of her career.  In all the Burton and Schumacher films, Bruce is readily prepared to tell the love interest his secret, despite the obvious danger to which that information would expose them.

01:29:27:              Vale asks why Bruce needs to be Batman. “Because no one else can.” is his rather empty reasoning.  That said, with such inadequate policing in Gotham, it’s not entirely untrue.  A better reason might be that Gotham needs him to be Batman or that he has to protect the innocent.  But the reasoning for this Batman might be more along the lines of “So I can randomly kill and maim criminals to make up for the short comings of Gordon’s police department whilst simultaneously making myself feel better about my parents’ tragic but also slightly comical deaths.”

01:30:03:              Vicki Vale is in the batcave.  Why doesn’t Bruce get her to stay there?  It would save him a lot of bother later on.

01:31:40:              Batman kills six people blowing up Axis Chemicals.  If you discount the unknown number of victims of his poison, the Joker and Batman kill 9 people each.  Interpretations of Batman where he kills at will undermine the heroism of the character.  Once you have Batman killing people then he’s no longer serving the law but an arbitrary version of justice of his own creation.  As someone who has witnessed murder first-hand, he should be working to prevent that happening, rather than becoming a killer himself.  This film actually has the morality of a western.  In an apparently lawless setting (Gotham), justice is metered out by a single sheriff, deputy or bounty hunter (Batman) against an outlaw or gang of outlaws (the Joker and his goons), with only a supposed moral high ground separating them.

01:34:13:              The batwing.  Whilst Batman had used planes in the comics before, this kind of bat-shaped jet was invented for this film and then carried over into Batman Forever and the Animated Series.  Unfortunately its appearance here leads to one of the film’s weakest moments about five minutes from now.

01:37:25:              Knox jumps on the bonnet of Vicki’s car, but she carries on driving.  Knox was originally going to be killed and this seems to be a hangover from that.

01:40:25:              Despite the massive targeting system on the batwing and its arsenal of mini-guns and missiles, Batman fails to hit the Joker.  The Joker then brings down the batwing with a single shot from a handgun.  This dreadful moment entirely undermines the credibility of Batman as a crime fighter and of the film generally.  And the batwing takes ages to crash land.

01:42:05:              Batman emerges from the wreckage of the batwing and follows the Joker and Vicki into the cathedral.  Typically for a Tim Burton film, this is an absurdly Gothic set.  It looks like nobody’s been in here for 50 years.  Maybe it’s so they can fill the ten minutes until the helicopter arrives, but everyone is walking very slowly.

01:45:07:              The Joker uses his acid-spraying buttonhole to send a giant bell crashing down the tower, narrowly missing Batman.  This is a great moment, encapsulating the ingenuity and nonchalant destruction which is central to the Joker character.

01:46:14:              The Joker’s goons attack Batman in the belfry, but how did they get up here?  The Joker’s helicopter presumably hasn’t arrived yet or the Joker would have left.  With the stairway blocked by the bell, they couldn’t have used the stairs to get up either.

01:46:55:              Batman fights a goon who looks like the soul musician Ray Charles.  This is the best fight in the film, with good blows exchanged, but Batman never kicks arse as much as he has his kicked in this fight.  There’s a nice contrast between Batman fighting and the Joker and Vicki dancing.

01:48:36:              Batman throws Ray Charles down the tower to certain death.  Hurrah for Batman.

01:50:25:              Batman fights the Joker, who doesn’t resist or defend himself.  So we have a blood-smeared Batman beating up a man who hardly seems able to throw a punch.

01:50:55:              ‘I was a kid when I killed your parents.’  This would appear to mean the Joker knows Bruce Wayne is Batman.  If so, why not kill Bruce Wayne when he’s not wearing the bat suit?

01:51:53:              The Joker referring into Batman as Batsy was taken up by Bruce Tim and Paul Dini, the creators of the DC Animated Universe, (including the recent Arkham computer games) to such an extent it became a sort of bizarre pet name.

01:54:18:              The Joker falls to his death.

01:55:53:              The bat signal is unveiled.  It seems strange that the city authorities would welcome the help from a man who has dropped someone off a high building and killed eight others.  Then again, when the police force is this ineffectual, maybe relying on a murderous, unhinged vigilante is your only option.

01:57:28:              The end credit roll.  It’s easy to find fault in this film when you compare it to Christopher Nolan’s take on the character and his world, which feels so accomplished, even definitive.  Nolan’s movies were made with a far larger budget between 16 and 23 years later.  That said, much of the source material that informed Nolan’s approach was written by the late 1980s.  Setting aside the preference for style over content arguably expected from a Tim Burton movie, the shortcomings of this film are primarily due to a lack of investment in the character of Bruce Wayne/ Batman.  In 1989, a primary goal was to have a Batman that was very different to Adam West.  Burton, perhaps inspired by Frank Miller’s (vastly over-rated) The Dark Knight Returns gives us a Batman who is not merely opposed to criminal activity, but fascistic in his dealing with criminals.  The moral difference between Batman and his enemies is smeared.  This Batman is also entirely reactive – the Joker does something and Batman responds.  The Bruce Wayne/ Batman character does not set the narrative in motion, his enemies and other supporting characters do.  So what we have is a version of Batman who waits for crimes or atrocities to occur and then responds with gratuitous force.  This is not a very compelling take on the character.  Being made at the tail end of the decade of “greed is good”, the character was perhaps bound to be more self-centred than altruistic.  While more hard-line or otherwise rougher-around-the-edges interpretations of the character exist, versions of Batman that confirm his humanity and altruism rather than his focusing on his monstrous side make him a character far more worthy of our attention, who is exciting and compelling.  Batman is a reasonably accomplished and enjoyable piece of cinema.  It earns a place in movie history as a year zero for comic book adaptations and for Jack Nicholson’s Joker.  But it’s not the real Batman.