Dragons Of The Prime

There was a book which we loved as children. My mother borrowed it from Newport library and we made her withdraw it over and over. I suppose that I must have been four or five at the time because I think I had just started school. I haven’t seen a copy of that book since but I still remember how it made me feel. It was called ‘Dinosaurs Don’t Die’. It was written by Ann Coates and had illustrations by John Lord. It was about a little boy who befriends a dinosaur in the park across the road, an Iguanodon called Roc. This dinosaur, though, is a statue during the day and only comes to life at night. This is the first I remember of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs but my brother, Rhys tells me that he first saw them on television before even that and was desperate to visit and nagged at my Mother to take us so much that on a rare trip to London she took us on a vain hunt for them in Regent’s Park because she had no idea where to find them (we had quite a few trips like that when we were children, I don’t think we ever did find Kew Gardens). Rhys was already obsessed with dinosaurs by that time (he was born that way in fact) and so I think we already knew that these dinosaurs were ‘wrong’ but I don’t remember that ever being a problem for us despite always having been, both of us, quite… particular about such things. There were dinosaurs and there were these dinosaurs. The look of dinosaurs changes through the decades in any case as trends and fashions change and as theories and palaeontological careers wax and wane. The dinosaurs depicted in the books we had as kids bear little resemblance to the pumped-up athletic visions in vogue now. We grew up with second-hand books filled with lumbering tail-dragging things and Neave-Parker’s beautiful and terrifying Tyrannosaur with its black hole eyes (bought from the Natural History Museum shop on another of these rare excursions to London… perhaps they weren’t as rare as I remember) grimaced at us from the wall of our shared bedroom(for some reason that Tyrannosaur has always reminded me of Clint Eastwood). The truth is: Dinosaur reconstructions can date something as badly as Julie Christie’s hair.

Neave Parker's Tyrannosaurus

Julie Christie's Hair

It was all so long ago that I don’t remember how our knowledge grew or how we came to understand the importance of The Crystal Palace dinosaurs, for us it feels as though they have always been important of course. But in terms of history and science they are absolutely unique. They were the culmination of what must have been the most extraordinary period in history: just a few years before they were sculpted, the scientific establishment was perfectly content in the certain knowledge that the world was merely eight thousand years old (a figure of time painstakingly arrived at by detailed study of the bible), suddenly people were having to accept that there was this fantastical primeval period before man with gargantuan beasts and strange flora, the actual stuff of nightmare, and all that that meant for religion and an understanding of a human being’s place in the scheme of things. When Gideon Mantell gave a series of lectures at The Old Ship Hotel in Brighton in 1835 it was the first time anybody had attempted to describe this newly discovered era to a public audience and the place was packed, with people spilling out into the streets. It is very hard to imagine the impact that that must have had on those people. Mantell is a very interesting figure in his own right and someone who’s story has fascinated me for years. He was a Doctor from Lewes, East Sussex who’s real passion was for geology. It was a passion which utterly destroyed his life, ruined his career and his marriage. In 1822, at the site at Cuckfield to the north of Brighton where quarrymen were excavating stone to build the Royal Pavilion, he found some fossilised teeth which he discerned to be reptilian. Mantell had a huge struggle persuading people that he was right. Geology and science was the sole pursuit of monied gentlemen at the time and Mantell was a working doctor and the son of a shoemaker and was never really accepted by the establishment (why does that all feel so familiar I wonder...). At the British Museum he compared his fossil tooth to that of an iguana specimen newly acquired from a recent South American expedition and saw a striking similarity and so named his specimen Iguanodon, or Iguana-tooth. Later on, a more intact specimen came to him from Kent which he identified as the same species due to the similarity of tooth. This further specimen had the remains of what he took to be a horn from the nose of the creature but was in fact what we now know to be a ‘thumb spike’. Iguanodon was the first dinosaur ever to be classified and it is this, Mantell’s beast, that came to life in the book ‘Dinosaurs Don’t Die’ as Roc and who still stands proudly as his enduring legacy at Crystal Palace Park.

Gideon Mantell

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852, the year that Mantell died and were designed and sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the scientific direction of Mantell’s great nemesis, Richard Owen (I won’t go in to that ‘feud’ here but if you get a chance you should really read up about it, it’s an incredible story which led to part of Mantell’s spine becoming a grim ‘trophy’ on Owen’s desk. I thoroughly recommend ‘The Dinosaur Hunters’ by Deborah Cadbury if you would like to read more and if anybody would like to make a film about him please get in touch because I have it all sketched out in my head). Incidentally by this time, Mantell had come to the conclusion that Iguanodon had shorter forelimbs than hind and if he had been in charge of the project rather than Owen perhaps Roc would have looked more like how we know Iguanodon to look like today (though still with a horn on his nose). The year before, 1851 The Great Exhibition had been held in Hyde Park; a cornucopia of Empire boasting, innovation and wondrous things housed in a temporary pavilion of glass and iron that came to be known as The Crystal Palace. Mantell (who was living in South London at this point due to the failure of his life in Brighton, again I won’t go into that here) visited the Great Exhibition multiple times and spoke of it in his diaries with such wonder, enthusiasm and wistfulness that it is all the more poignant that he didn’t live to see how his discoveries ended up ruling the ornamental gardens of its new setting in full-sized splendour.

The Crystal Palace proved so popular that it was moved to a new permanent home on a hill in South London. As a setting, it was decided that a park would be built with ornamental gardens one of which would be a prehistoric landscape replete with sculptures, geology and prehistoric planting and starring life-sized dinosaurs. It was the first time that anyone had attempted to build full-sized dinosaur reconstructions and they are utterly wonderful things. Oh, it’s easy to look at them now and dismiss them as dated and inaccurate but they are beautiful, characterful, innovative creations and nothing short of revolutionary really. Given the information available at the time, they really are an impressive feat of scientific speculation.They are the physical embodiment of the Victorian imagination.

The Crystal Palace burned down in the 1930’s but its grounds were left as a park. We spent a lot of time clambering around its ruins as kids. A favourite place to sit and contemplate for me was between the front legs of a sphinx on the remains of its foundation steps.

The Crystal Palace

(In the picture above my sphinx is to the left of the smaller staircase at the top of the left-hand path, in front of the tower. The towers themselves -there was one on either side- survived the fire but were demolished at the start of WWII because local residents feared that such an obvious target would make them vulnerable to attack by the Luftwaffe)

We left the Isle of Wight when I was eight and moved to Southeast London. Rhys and I used to travel up to South Kensington and visit the Natural History Museum whenever we could, usually on a Sunday. It seems unthinkable now I suppose that children of that age would be travelling around on buses and tubes on their own… at that time the museum was still full of Victorian display cabinets full of the original exhibits that formed its initial collection; famous specimens excavated by Mary Anning and (though I didn’t know it at the time) Mantell’s own collection (which had formed the backbone of the prehistoric collection on the museum’s opening) and you could lose yourself in galleries empty of other people for hours on end. We adored it. It is still my favourite building in the world. Even more exciting than that: we now lived virtually next door to our old friends at Crystal Palace. Subsequently, Crystal Palace Park became a very important place to us growing up and we went there all the time.

I don’t live in London now but Rhys still does and Crystal Palace Park has continued to be a sanctuary for him. A few years ago he became involved with the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, the voluntary organisation who take care of the monuments today. The Friends are always looking for ways of publicizing the Dinosaurs and Rhys (who is an animator/3d CG effects artist) and his friend Anthony Lewis, one of the members of the board of The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (who is an historian, actor and film-maker and produces the video series Lost Valleys of London on YouTube) started to talk about making a film. Rhys got excited about the idea of bringing the dinosaurs to life with CGI (I think it’s actually something that he’s dreamed of doing forever). He hit upon the idea of 3d scanning them to help make accurate models to animate and the two of them started scanning with a drone and a camera and Rhys finally got to set foot on dinosaur island and mingle with his beloved Dinosaurs close up which was a dream come true I think. He also set foot on a journey that has turned into a monumental labour of love and has led to truly pioneering work and the production of incredibly detailed scans of these old friends of ours. I don’t pretend to really understand much about the process and technical details of 3d scanning but I know that the technology is so new that it seems you have to virtually invent your own system of doing it. Over the past couple of years Rhys has managed to create breathtakingly detailed scans and CG models. It’s been a Phenomenal amount of work and as the process developed it became apparent quite quickly that this was more important than just bringing the dinosaurs to life in a film; these scans are going to be an incredible asset in the conservation of these priceless monuments, a fact that has unexpectedly proved itself since last summer. The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are, the larger ones at least, built of brick and cement with iron frames, they are hollow inside. Quite a fascinating construction. In fact, because of their construction they are registered not as sculptures but as listed buildings! Like many old and valuable things they have gone through periods where they have fallen out of fashion or been ignored in favour of other priorities which has led them to exist through whole eras of neglect. Last summer the wonderful Megalosaurus suffered severe damage when it’s lower jaw came away. But by being on the scene immediately, The Friends were able to gather up each individual piece that had broken off and store it away safely. Rhys was able to then scan each piece and fit it precisely into place with model that he’d already built from the scan data. In fact, his scans are so detailed that it’s possible to see the fracture line from before the damage occurred. It’s incredibly fortunate that he was able to complete scanning this beast before the incident and has highlighted what a brilliant thing it is to have this information archived.

One of Rhys' highly detailed renders (taken from the film)

At the end of last year Rhys decide to make a short film highlighting the scanning work and how it will be used to help restore the Megalosaurus. Initially, a temporary prosthetic jaw will be constructed for it until a full assessment can be made of the costs of a permanent restoration and the 3d scans will be invaluable with this process. He asked if I would score this short film for him and of course I was excited at the prospect. Initially we thought of doing something quite simple and quick to produce but it didn’t seem right somehow considering the history that we both have with these things so I decided to compose something a bit more ambitious. Rhys asked if we could call the piece Dragons of the Prime after a line in the Tennyson poem In Memoriam A.H.H.:

Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime,

Tennyson lived for many years on the Isle of Wight which makes it all the more emotive for us (I haven't even talked about collecting dinosaur poo on Shanklin beach, I guess that will have to wait for another time).

The music was scored to picture and I wanted to give an air of romantic nostalgia at the opening to represent how it feels for me to look back at these iconic things. It’s not a case of just looking at something historic for me, I feel so long attached to these things that looking at them makes me dizzy with time. When the megalosaurus appears it is heralded by primeval brass and the march of the snare drum. Brass makes you think of elephants of course and huge animals and the march is meant to represent not just the relentless march of time but also the march that this wonderful creature is making back out of neglect and damage. I hope you watch the film and learn to love the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs as we do. They are such a vital piece of the world’s scientific heritage but they are also beautiful pieces of art in their own right and a unique and wonderful piece of Victoriana.