Like most small boys brought up in a religious community, as would have existed in the Methodist enclaves of Gateshead at the turn of the twentieth century, Arthur Holmes and his friend Bob Lawson did not often find their favourite reading in the Bible. But in years to come Arthur well remembered his parent's Bible, and the magic fascination of the date of Creation, 4004 BC, which appeared in the margin of the first page. ‘I was puzzled by the odd “4”’, he wrote. ‘Why not a nice round 4000 years? And why such a recent date? And how could anyone know?’ But all he learnt from his parents was that to question the ‘Word of God’ was simply ‘not done’. This Biblical time barrier was further reinforced in Arthur's mind at Sunday School through the teachings of Philip Gosse, a Victorian naturalist who considered he had reconciled Hutton's geological findings with the Scriptures in his distinguished book Omphalos. In this work no compromise was called for. It was only necessary to believe that the Earth was created about 6000 years ago, in strict accordance with Biblical chronology, ‘exactly as it would have appeared at that moment of its history, if all the preceding eras of its history had been real’.

During the Second World War, as the Blitz raged over Britain, sixty thousand innocent civilians died and fifty thousand were injured, either caught under a direct hit or trapped in a burning building. Night after night the bombs rained down as more than a million homes were destroyed, an immense amount of damage was caused to industrial installations and many public institutions were ravaged or obliterated. Consequently, all over the country, teams of voluntary fire-fighters were set up to help in emergencies. These volunteers were risking their lives. In universities staff took it in turns to sit and ‘fire watch’ in case the building was bombed or set alight. Blackout instructions were rigorously adhered to and special permission had to be obtained before work in the laboratories could be continued after dark.

Holmes took his turn fire watching in the Durham Science Laboratories along with the other members of his staff, and during the day he lectured large batches of RAF cadets who now came through the department every six months as part of their course. Unfortunately, unlike during the First World War when the call to arms reduced student numbers and increased research time, the need to ‘cram’ these RAF cadets meant that the long vacations disappeared and precious research time was almost non-existent.

Once a year scientists of all disciplines came together to parade their most recent discoveries, their ‘wild miracles’. Held in a different place each year, meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were a forum for hot debate on current controversies. Consequently, in the 1890s, as arguments raged about the age of the Earth, most BAAS meetings had an ‘Age’ discussion, and the Liverpool Meeting in 1896 was no exception. That year it was the turn of the biologists to defend their corner and Professor Poulton did this with fierce opposition to Kelvin and his meagre twenty million years. Responding to a challenge from Kelvin – ‘the burden of proof [falls] upon those who hold to the vaguely vast age derived from sedimentary geology’ – Poulton brilliantly put the case for an ancient planet, and suggested that for biological purposes the Earth must be more than one thousand million years old. He argued that in order for the oldest fossils then discovered to be as highly evolved as they were seen to be, inordinate amounts of time must have previously elapsed while life forms evolved to such a complex stage of development.

Unfortunately, Kelvin was not listening because he was attending the session held in the Physics and Mathematics Section where all the talk was of ‘mysterious rays’.

At Victoria station on Saturday 18th March, 1911, Holmes met up with Wayland and Wray and a fourth member of the Mozambique prospecting team, a mining engineer called Wilson; the two leaders of the group, Reid and Starey, having gone ahead a couple of days previously. Despite a rough crossing from Dover to Calais the team were in high spirits and managed a fine dinner in Paris where the train stopped for four hours before continuing on through France, over the Alps and down the length of Italy to breakfast in Rome. They disembarked in Naples where they had arranged to meet Starey and were to board their ship.

At every stop on the journey to Naples Holmes had sent his parents a postcard ‘to make the land part of my journey as real as possible to you’. None of the family had ever been abroad before, so even Europe seemed exotic and remote. As an only child Arthur was devoted to his parents, and they to him, and he was genuinely concerned for their worries about this trip to somewhere so distant as Mozambique. But he was an excellent and frequent letter writer, and almost everything that is known about this trip derives from the surviving letters he sent to his parents and to his friend Bob, as well as a diary that he kept for most of 1911.

Ardnamurchan, on the south west coast of Scotland, is the remains of an ancient volcano. Its unique rock formations open a window into the interior of the Earth and provide geologists with a singular opportunity to observe the processes, now frozen in time, that occur deep within the crust and which have been slowly brought to the surface over the last sixty million years. In 1930, when James Richey of the British Geological Survey published his completed geological map of Ardnamurchan confirming that it was an ancient volcano, it caused much interest amongst geologists. Consequently, the following year, Richey agreed to run a field trip so that those interested could look at the volcano in some detail and augment their understanding of the Earth's interior.

Kingsley Dunham drove his professor all the way from Durham to Ardnamurchan in his two-seater Morris Cowley. Maggie never accompanied Arthur on these trips because their son Geoffrey was still only small and needed someone at home to look after him, but as the new fashion of the time was to grow tomatoes, the students joked that the real reason she stayed behind was to water the precious tomato plants. The truth was that Maggie did not enjoy university life: the lunch parties, the afternoon calls, and the expectations of a professor's wife did not sit well with her.

On a bitter November day, Arthur and Maggie arrived back in Gateshead on what should have been Norman's fourth birthday. They went to stay with Maggie's parents having no money, nowhere to live and no child to brighten their days. On the journey home they had instinctively looked for Norman, expecting to see him come running. Habitually they would turn to see what he was up to; look up in response to another child's cry, or reach down for his hand that was no longer held out to them. Then remembrance and grief would sweep over them. Over the following months they wished over and over again that they had left Burma at the same time as Stanley Hunter. Had they done so their son would still be alive. But Holmes had taken his role as manager very seriously and had tried hard to obtain the wages owed to Yomah Oil's employees. He had hung on as long as he could. Too long. Now they both bottled up their grief; Arthur in particular was unable to speak to anyone of Norman's death, not even his oldest friend Bob Lawson.

By the time he had left Burma Holmes himself was owed nearly a whole year's salary, which he tried to salvage through solicitors in London, but LCT, by then on the verge of bankruptcy, had gone into hiding.

The Earth is very old – present estimates put it at 4.54 billion years, ±45 million. Most of the rocks we see today have been recycled many, many times. They have been down to the bottom of the deepest oceans, buried kilometres below the surface of the Earth, before being uplifted once again to form the very highest peaks of the Himalayas, the Andes, the Rockies or the Alps, where erosion starts them on their weary way again, back down to the sea. The cycle goes on unceasingly. It has done so for billions of years in the past and will continue for billions of years to the future. At the same time the continents have moved around the globe, effortlessly, like so many birds on migration – once buried under glaciers at the poles they soon find themselves passing the equator en route to another destination.

Given all this mobility, it is hardly surprising that initially Holmes did not find very ancient rocks on Earth. Most of the evidence has disappeared long ago – but not all. In 1915 he predicted ‘It was in zircon that the hope of the future lay, for that mineral was widespread in time and place, and stable and resistant to external forces.’ Indeed, he was right; crystals of the mineral zircon have been found in Western Australia that, at more than four billion years old, are only a few hundred million years younger than the age of the Earth.

Back in 1913 Arthur Holmes, then a young man of twenty-three, had just published his first book on The Age of the Earth. While writing it he had come across a theory with regard to formation of the Earth recently put forward by an American geologist, Thomas Chamberlin, who considered that the Earth had been created by the accumulation of cold solid particles which Chamberlin called ‘planetesimals’. In Holmes' mind the most important feature of the Planetesimal Hypothesis was that Chamberlin rejected the assumption shared by Kelvin and other scientists that the Earth had begun as a molten globe. Instead, Chamberlin proposed that although heat would initially be generated by planetesimals falling into the Earth as it consolidated, during the later stages that heat would be dissipated into space leaving the Earth a cold and solid body. The particular attraction of this theory for Holmes was that it discredited Kelvin's arguments in favour of a cooling globe and a very restricted geological time scale.

Thrilled that someone else shared his views of an ancient Earth, Holmes wrote to Chamberlin in 1912 to tell him ‘how much your work on cosmogenic geology and causal processes has inspired me in my geological work. You have done more probably than any other living geologist to clothe the dry bones of geological fact with the fascination of co-ordinating theories’.

By the end of the war Holmes was still at Imperial College, still only a demonstrator and still on a salary of £150 a year, despite having published three books and gained a significant reputation for his work on radiometric dating. His finances were permanently under pressure such that when Maggie gave birth to their son Norman within two weeks of Armistice Day in 1918, they became critical. He had tried to get other jobs but despite being awarded the doctorate dreamt about in his letters from Mozambique, somehow no job had materialised either before, during or after the war. Watts had tried to get him a position as lecturer in petrology at Oxford ‘but naturally failed!’; he had testimonials from many eminent geologists for his application to Cardiff; but in 1919 he could not even get a teaching job at Aberystwyth. He wrote to Dr Prior:

I am glad to tell you that Aberystwyth failed to appreciate my qualifications for the geology post and appointed a student (Welsh!) instead. The department is very small and crowded and its chief objective appears to be to train girls to pass examinations to be teachers. So I am well out of it!

I have always been a collector. I blame my parents. As very small children my sisters and I would be taken on warm sunny afternoons to the beach we overlooked from our house in Devon. Hours would be spent sifting through the sand and debris hunting for shells, the prize of which was the cowry. Rare and elusive, not much bigger than my thumb nail, the exotic, whitelipped and pink-backed shell, sometimes dotted with brown spots and sometimes not, was the greatest treasure on the beach. Somewhere in the attic a boxful of cowries awaits my retirement when I shall use them to make shell pictures and decorate little wooden boxes. These I shall give to my grandchildren for Christmas who will give me a kiss then hide them in a cupboard with embarrassment: ‘Oh, it was just something Granny made.’

From then on I was addicted. I walked around with my eyes on the ground just in case I missed some treasure – an unusual stone, a rare wild flower, a pretty feather, a sixpenny bit; nothing was overlooked and I collected it all. Aged eight and we were living in Iraq. We went for walks on the edge of the desert and one day I picked up a crimson stone.

Primrose Hill in Gateshead was a modest street of single-bay Victorian brick houses, terraced in tiers down the steep hill of Low Fell. If you stood in the middle of the road the view below was of green fields and a large sky, despite the town's location in the industrial heartland of northern England, but the houses were sideways on to this view and austerely faced each other across the road, their front doors guarded from the street by three feet, the occasional hydrangea, and an iron railing. In January 1900, in the wintry dawn of a new century, Arthur Holmes was ten years old and living at number nineteen, the only child of staunchly Methodist parents. His father was a cabinet maker and worked as an assistant in an ironmonger's shop. Consequently they were of modest means.

Not far away was Gateshead Higher Grade School where Mr John Bidgood, the school's visionary headmaster, teacher of biology, and world expert on tropical orchids, made sure that provisions for the teaching of science were not exceeded by any other municipal school in the country. It was, for example, the first of those schools to have science laboratories specifically designed and fitted for that purpose. In 1901, the year that Queen Victoria died, shy and retiring young Arthur Holmes joined this exhilarating school environment, and blossomed.

The route south that Holmes and Mr Barton followed had last been taken by Henry O'Neill in 1881, some thirty years previously. An adventurous British Consul, O'Neill was the first white man to penetrate beyond the coastal zone and although he lived on in the memory of some of the older natives, many of them, particularly the women, had never seen a white man before. Consequently Holmes and Barton were often followed by a shrieking mob for mile after mile. But this was the least of their difficulties. After a month of fruitless wanderings they stopped for a few days at Nacavalla where Holmes found time to write a letter to Bob explaining the problems:

The object of our expedition has been to find an old Arab Sultan, named Moravi, who, a quarter of a century ago was the ruler of the Makua over all the coastal district south of Mozambique. [The indigenous peoples of Mozambique are of Bantu origin, but by the tenth century the Arabs had established themselves on the coast.] This man was attacked by the Portuguese, but instead of blotting him out they were themselves defeated. This however, was an unstable state of affairs and presently Moravi had to fly inland. He surrounded himself with Makua chiefs on all sides and these have kept strangers from him all these years.

For scholarship students in London, college life was a permanent struggle against financial hardship. Sixty pounds a year was just not enough to survive on and Arthur Holmes' parents were not in a position to subsidise him financially. While he earned the occasional ten shillings reviewing books for The Times, the cost of living in London was a continual strain, and he was always on the lookout for ways of making money to fund himself and his studies. When halfway through the first year of his geology course Holmes saw an opening advertised for an ‘assistant of the second class in the Department of Minerals’ at the British Museum, he decided to apply and continue his studies part-time.

Appointments to permanent positions at the British Museum were then made by the three Principal Trustees of the Museum who were none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the speaker of the House of Commons. Holmes no doubt asked himself what on earth these somewhat inappropriate individuals knew about geology. A candidate had to be nominated by one of these Trustees, get on their ‘list’ – Holmes was on the Archbishop's list – and then

undergo before the Civil Service Commissioners an examination in the following subjects:

1. 1. English Composition

2. 2. Translation from 3 out of the 4 following languages: Latin, French, German and Greek

3. 3. […]