Geologist (1929-1940)

In October 1929, Wager took up his position at Reading University. When he arrived, the Geology Department only had two rooms called ‘The Hut’ but they moved into new labs in 1931. Wager made a good impression on the students by being friendly, having a sense of humour and being able to make petrology seem fascinating (Hargreaves 1991). Geological excursions were considered very important at Reading and a lot of fun. Wager went on a week-long trip to the Isle of Man in March 1930 and to Skye at Easter 1932. However, in January 1930, after only one term at Reading, he was invited by Gino Watkins to participate in the BAARE Expedition of 1930-31 to East Greenland.

For the rest of his time at Reading, Wager was heavily involved in organizing and participating in expeditions and working up the results for publication (Hargreaves 1991). His time at Reading was therefore somewhat anomalous. With the students, Wager was at his best in the field unravelling geological problems before their eyes. He was not a natural lecturer but he managed to fascinate the students all the same. However, immediately after his lectures, he would stalk back to his room on the hour, bang the door shut and get on with the Skaergaard struggle. Nonetheless, the Wagers were good hosts to the groups of undergraduates they invited to their home.

On May 24, 1937, Wager was obliged to give an evening lecture to the Royal Geographical Society on the results of the 1935-1936 British East Greenland Expedition (Wager 1937). It was a black tie event with long dresses for the ladies. After the lecture, Phyl had to go up on the platform and say a few words. People thought that this was remarkable, as Jonathan had been born only three weeks earlier.

In 1936, E.A. (David) Vincent went up to read geology at Reading, a member of the first small group of students to enjoy the benefit of three years of continuous instruction from Wager (Hargreaves 1991, Vincent 1994). Vincent was to go on to become one of Wager’s closest associates at Durham and Oxford and to succeed him as Professor of Geology at Oxford after his death.

In July 1938, the Wagers spent the whole month in Norway (Hargreaves 1991) and took the opportunity to visit V.M. Goldschmidt at his home in Holmenkollen in Oslo (Goldschmidt 1943). This was to be the only meeting between Wager and Goldschmidt but it was important in view of the attention that Wager’s group at Oxford subsequently gave to testing the validity of the Goldschmidt Rules based on geochemical data from the Skaergaard rocks (Glasby 2006, 2007). On September 11, 1939, Wager wrote to Goldschmidt seeking his advice on the use of biotite as a substitute for the potassium imported from Germany for the manufacture of fertilizers. At that time, Wager was already aware of the possibility of a German blockade during the war to starve Britain out. In October, 1939, Wager visited the Macaulay Institute of Soil Research in Aberdeen to suggest to the Director,  Dr. W.G. Ogg, that trace elements on the land would be an important topic in war time. He was already collaborating on trace element distributions in Skaergaard rocks with Robert Mitchell who was later to become director of the institute.

In December 1939, Wager bought Sawyersgarth in Littondale with the inheritance left by his father. This was to be Wager’s refuge in Yorkshire for the rest of his life. In his obituary in the Times (Anon 1965), it mentions that Wager loved to spend some time at his farm in Litton, where he did much scientific writing, and would often go out with map, rucksack and hammer to map the local Yoredale rocks.

War Service

In March 1940, Michael Spender visited Wager in Reading and told him about the photogrammetric machine he had imported to England and how important it would be for interpreting air photographs (Hargreaves 1991). Wager knew Spender from the Mikkelsen Expedition to East Greenland in 1932 where Spender had made a fine map of 1,000 sq miles of Kangerdlugssuaq using the latest methods of stereo-photogrammetric surveying (Shipton 1945). Spender subsequently carried out a stereo-photogrammetric survey of the North Face of Everest during the 1935 reconnaissance expedition of Everest, which resulted in a large-scale map and accurate determination of prominent features for use on the 1936 Everest expedition (Ruttledge 1937). Spender pointed out that people were desperately needed in the development of photographic interpretation and, in late May, Wager was persuaded to join the Photographic Interpretation Unit of the Air Ministry initially as a civilian. Later he commissioned into the Royal Air Force Voluntary Reserve (RAFVR), firstly as a Pilot Officer and then promoted almost immediately to Flight Lieutenant.

In 1941, Wager was working in the Second Phase Room in charge of interpretation shifts under Michael Spender. They worked twelve hour shifts, twelve hours on and 24 hours off. Wager’s job was to allocate sorties to the various interpreters, collate the results (over 500 photos from a run) and then write up the report on each sortie.

In 1942, Wager heard that a small photographic interpretation unit was scheduled to go to Murmansk in northern Russia to keep watch on the Tirpitz and to train their Russian counterparts. He decided he was the best man to lead this team and volunteered to go but then bitterly regretted his decision. By then, Wager was a Squadron Leader but he liked to describe himself as a Squadron Leader who never led a Squadron.

Their ship left the Britain on August 14 and arrived in Murmansk on August 23 with its complement of pilots, photographic interpreters and photographic personnel. Their brief was to seek out the Tirpitz and other units of the Germany Navy. Three long-range reconnaissance Spitfires were flown out in September to join them. The Tirpitz along with the Admiral Scheer was finally located by Mosquitoes on October 19 as winter was closing in. The detachment was then ordered to return home, leaving the three Spitfires behind as trophies for their Russian counterparts. Wager reckoned that his ship only got back to Britain because its captain was due to be court-marshalled over some alleged misdemenour and drove his ship so hard that he managed to outpace the German U-boats. Wager was very glad to get back on October 29. He had survived the notorious Murmansk run and was mentioned in Despatches. The Tirpitz was eventually sunk on November 1944, in Tromsø in southern Norway during an attack by 30 Lancaster Bombers.

In 1943, Wager applied for the Chair at Durham. He was given glowing testimonials by Professor Hawkins at Reading and E.B. Bailey, Director of the Geological Survey. He was granted leave to visit Durham and was appointed but the problem was to get his release from the RAFVR. This was only achieved after Lord Eustace Percy, Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University, had written to his friend, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air in the Wartime Government, saying that Durham must have this science professor. Wager went up to Durham in November and was offerred the Vice Chancellor’s house, which the Vice Chancellor did not want, and Wager took it immediately. It was very grand. News of Wager’s appointment appeared in the Daily Telegraph on November 15. Wager was given a splendid farewell from Z Section at Medmenham. He arrived in Durham with his family on January 1, 1944, to take up his chair as succesor to Arthur Holmes.

On April 3,1943, not long after he had been flown to Britain from neutral Sweden by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), V.M. Goldschmidt had written to Dr. Wager to thank him for his offer of assistance (Goldschmidt 1943). On February 18, 1944, Goldschmidt wrote to now Professor Wager from the Macaulay Institute to congratulate him on his appointment to the Professorship at Durham (Goldschmidt 1944, Fig. 13). One senses a great deal of mutual respect between these two men but they were never to meet again. Wager was probably too preoccupied with his work in Durham and Goldschmidt became a semi-invalid after his near-fatal heart attack in December 1944.

Geologist (1944-1965)

When Wager became professor at Durham, there was only one other member of the teaching staff, Bill Hopkins. He therefore appointed Fred Stewart, who arrived in Durham in the autumn of 1943, and David Vincent, who took up his position in October 1946, as lecturers (Hargreaves 1991).

At Durham, Wager gave the introductory course of lectures for first years students, on igneous activity for the second year students and on igneous petrology for the third year students. He also gave a course on structural geology for the second year students concentrating on alpine tectonics. Wager was a somewhat nervous lecturer but his material was always superb and he did not duplicate what was in the textbooks. In these early post-war years, the students were mainly ex-servicemen who were marvellous to work with (Hargreaves 1991).

During his time at Durham, Wager played an important role in founding Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (Shaw 2003) and published his classic paper on the geochemistry of the Skaergaard intrusion with Robert Mitchell in the first volume (Wager and Mitchell (1951). In this study, the authors traced the strong fractional crystallization of the original basic magma by means of trace element analyses of separated minerals. This paper was novel at that time in presenting multi-element analyses of the samples as opposed to the single element approach preferred by V.M. Goldschmidt. Wager remained an editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta until his death.

Wager’s star pupil at Durham was Malcolm Brown. Brown had come up to Durham in 1944 on a six month RAF course intending to read chemistry after the war but had been so impressed by Wager’s course on physical geology that he had decided to read geology instead. He returned to Durham in 1947 and took first class honours in geology in 1950. Vincent (1998) has described Brown’s three years as an undergraduate at Durham as a truly exceptional rate of intellectual and personal development. Wager always regarded Brown as by far the best pupil he ever taught. Like E.A. Vincent, Brown was to go on to become one of Wager’s closest associates at Oxford.

In the period of austerity immediately after the war, continuing research in Greenland would have been out of the question. In his acceptance speech for the Bigsby Medal in 1945, Wager acknowledged this and pointed out that the time had come for reconnaissance work in distant places to be replaced by work of the same exactitude nearer to home (Wager 1945). Wager therefore began his investigations on the British Tertiary Igneous Province, firstly in the Western Red Hills Complex on Skye with Fred Stewart in the 1940s and later with E.A Vincent, G.M. Brown and J.D. Bell in the 1960s and on Rhum which was to provide the basis for Malcolm Brown’s doctoral work at Oxford (Deer 1967, Vincent 1998). Vincent (1994) has described Brown’s work on the layered ultrabasic complex on Rhum as remarkable for its meticulous detail, both in the field and in the laboratory work. Based on this study, Brown (1955) was able to characterize the Rhum and Skaergaard Intrusions as open and closed magmatic systems, respectively (Hargreaves 1991, Vincent 1998). However, Wager’s research output in Durham was limited, doubtless a reflection of his heavy duties within the university.

During his time at Durham, Wager had the signal honour of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1946.

The Chair of Geology at Oxford was advertized in the University Gazette on 8 February 1950, and Wager’s election to the Chair was announced on 6 April. Wager’s time at Oxford has been described in meticulous detail by Vincent (1994). In going to Oxford, Wager was, in fact, taking over a rather moribund department which had been run down during the war years, although it was now housed in a new conversion of the Clarendon Department which had been financed by Royal Dutch Shell (Hargreaves 1991). Wager set himself the task of creating a modern, world-class geology department. This involved dealing with a number of problems on a step-by-step basis. However, his first duty when he arrived in Oxford was to sort out his huge collection of rocks which he had brought down from Durham!

In those days, Oxford was known as a ‘soft rock’ department biased heavily towards palaeontology and stratigraphy. It was therefore necessary to broaden the base of teaching in the department to include more emphasis on igneous geology and petrology. To do this, Wager had to broaden the base of the teaching staff in the department. Over the years, he managed to attract to the department the likes of L. H. Ahrens, S. R. Taylor, E. A. Vincent, G. M. Brown, R. St. J. Lambert, H. G. Reading. E. R. Oxburgh, J. D. Bell and J. Zussman amongst others. By 1960, the academic staff had grown to about a dozen. However, the number of students graduating with honours in geology remained low, although of a high standard. In 1956, for example, five students graduated with honours in geology of whom two, David Bell and Keith Cox, stayed on to become members of staff. The number of research students remained steady at about ten to twelve until about 1960. Many were engaged on petrological or geochemical topics.

By the late 1950’s, Wager had managed to reestablish the Department of Geology and Mineralogy as a vigorous centre for research activity. He had acquired a good deal of new equipment for the laboratories and had imbued the department with a determined and enthusiastic research spirit, but he had not managed to increase the number of students graduating from the department to the level he considered necessary (Vincent 1994).

In research, Wager focussed on a number of new developments that he considered important. In particular, he became interested in geochemistry as pioneered by V.M. Goldschmidt. In the early 1950s, analytical methods were rather primitive and time consuming. Major elements had to be determined by gravimetric and volumetric analysis. Vincent (1994) reports that it took him a fortnight working very hard to generate three full analyses. As a result, sample selection became an important issue. Optical emission spectrography in Britain at that time had a precision of 30% when the standards were closely similar to those of the analyzed samples and element concentrations were greater than 1000 ppm. However, Wager and Mitchell (1951) more realistically assessed the accuracy of the method at that time at +/-50%. These levels of precision were much poorer than those obtained by V.M. Goldschmidt more than a decade earlier and Goldschmidt would never have achieved his success with such precision (K.-H. Wedepohl pers. comm.). X-ray fluorescence spectrography became an important method during this period, and was used for analyzing Skaergaard samples.

In addition, Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) was being developed at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell in the 1950s by Albert Smales and his Analytical Chemistry Group. This method gave previouly unattainable levels of sensitivity, precision and accuracy for a wide range of elements. As a result, a separate laboratory was set up at Oxford for handling and processing samples which had been irradiated at Harwell and led to an increase in the number of elements which could be investigated in Skaergaard material. The analytical work was often carried out in collaboration with Part II chemists. The joint studies with Harwell culminated in the publication of ‘Methods in Geochemistry’ edited by Smales and Wager (1960) which summarized recent advances in the principal analytical techniques used at that time. In this case, the editors followed the dictum of V.M. Goldschmidt that ‘the primary purpose of geochemistry is on the one hand to determine quantitatively the composition of the earth and its parts, and on the other to discover the laws which control the distribution of the individual elements.’ One of the principal objectives of geochemical research at Oxford at that time was to test the validity of the Goldschmidt Rules by applying them to the Skaergaard Intrusion in East Greenland (Glasby 2006, 2007). INAA was the preferred method of analysis in many of these studies. Wager’s main contribution in this regard was to get a group of very able scientists analyzing Skaergaard material with new analytical methods.

Interestingly, Paul Rosbaud played an important role in commissioning the Smales and Wager book for publication. Rosbaud was a close friend of V.M. Goldschmidt towards the end of his life and was instrumental along with Wager in setting up Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta on Goldschmidt’s behalf (Glasby 2006, 2007). However, his main claim to fame is that he is reputed to have been ‘the Griffin’, Britain’s top spy during the war. Wager and Rosbaud become good friends and Rosbaud’s gnome-like figure, with his stooping shoulders, perpetual twinkle, and drooping cigarette, became a familiar sight around the department (Hargraves 1991, Vincent 1994).

In 1960, the Diploma in Geochemistry course was established at Oxford with three students in the first batch, one of whom, C.K. (Kent) Brooks, went on to become one of the leading experts on the Skaergaard Intrusion (Brooks 1985).

Wager also became very interested in geological age determination following his contacts with Arthur Holmes and Fritz Paneth in Durham and later with Louis Ahrens in Oxford (Vincent 1994). In 1957, the department acquired a spark source mass spectrometer with Stephen Moorbath who had graduated with an outstanding first in 1954 appointed as the first British Petroleum Research Fellow to run it. Moorbath was to provide much of the inspiration for the age dating work. Over the next decade, the isotope geochemistry laboratory, later to be renamed the Geological Age and Isotope Research Laboratory, expanded rapidly. In 1960, N.J. Snelling and his group from the Institute of Geological Sciences in London were seconded to take over all geochronological work for the Colonial (later Overseas) Geological Surveys at Oxford. The first provisional radiometric ages from Kangerdlugssuaq and Angmagsalik were published by Wager and Hamilton (1964). Wager put a lot of his own research energy and enthusiasm into the age dating and gave over-riding priority to the needs of the laboratory. This was rewarded by the high international esteem in which the laboratory came to be held and fully justified Wager’s faith in this project.

Wager had therefore fulfilled his aim of equipping the department with the most modern apparatus for the chemical, physical and nuclear investigation of rocks and minerals and pushing the analysis to its ultimate limit to gain data for his petrological studies (Dunham 1966).

In 1955, Wager led the undergraduate field trip to the Lake District at Easter with Robin Oliver (Hargreaves 1991, Vincent 1994). On the way back, he felt pain in his left arm and side and was diagnosed as having had a coronary thrombosis (heart atack). He was told to be careful for the rest of his life, never to walk up hills and never to dig energetically in the garden. He went on sick leave for all of Trinity (summer) term. It must have been very galling for a man as energetic and active as Wager to have to accept these constraints. Despite this, he was forced to put in a lot of effort to convince the university authorities that he needed a new lecturer in igneous petrology to reduce his heavy teaching load and to supervize his research students, especially in Skye and Rhum, but eventually Malcolm Brown was appointed in late 1955. At this time, Louis Ahrens resigned from the Readership in Mineralogy and left what he thought was a sinking ship to take up the Chair of Chemistry at the University of Cape Town. He was replaced by E.R. Vincent. In the following summer, Wager was able to visit his students in the field in Skye but did not undertake any hard walking.

In 1958, Wager was President of Section C (Geology) of the British Association when it held its annual meeting in Glasgow (Hargreaves 1991; Fig 14). It was therefore a high priority for him to attend this meeting. For his Presidential lecture, he chose the topic ‘beneath the earth’s crust’, which was of considerable interest at that time because it had already been proposed to drill a bore hole through the Earth’s crust and into the mantle (Wager 1958).This lecture indirectly went on to form the basis for the 1966expedition to East Greenland.

In 1958, Wager was also involved in discussions with T.F.W. Barth, C.E. Tilley and P. Rosbaud about the establishment of a new journal of petrology (Anon 1966). In spite of many initial setbacks, the first volume was published in 1960 with L.W. Wager on the editorial board and G.M. Brown as one of the managing editors. Wager stayed an editor until his death by which time Brown had been promoted to senior managing editor. E.A. Vincent joined the editorial board in 1967. Wager was able to publish two major papers in the first volume of the journal in 1960 (Wager 1960, Wager et al. 1960).

By 1957, Wager and Brown had already begun discussing the possiblity of writing a book on layered igneous rocks (Wager and Brown 1967, Hargreaves 1991, Vincent 1994). The classic Wager and Deer (1939) memoir was already out of print and there was a large body of chemical and mineralogical work carried out over the preceding two decades that needed to be considered. Writing this book was to be a huge task which would take up the next ten years. In order to prepare themselves, Wager and Brown visited the Bushveld complex in South Africa and the Great Dyke of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) for two months in the summer of 1958. Wager then took the only sabbatical at his academic career. From the end of March 1959, he spent six months at Le Mazot, a chalet in one of the side valleys of the Rhône valley, where he could immerse himself in writing the book. He also spent a little time in Italy visiting some volcanic centres he had not previously seen.

With the help of Geoff Robson, one of his former students from Durham who was working at the Seimic Research Centre in Trinidad, Wager then spent the final third of his sabbatical in the West Indies where he visited a number of volcanoes including Mount Misery in St. Kitts, Soufrière volcano on St. Vincent and the calc-alkaline volcanism on Montserrat. These volcanoes were all to be studied by doctoral students under the supervision of Wager and Brown over the next few years. The sabbatical was a great success and Wager returned to the department refreshed in January 1960. When the book was finally published in 1968, about 45% was devoted to the Skaergaard Intrusion and the rest to the Rhum, Stillwater, Bushveld and other types on basic layered intrusions. Wager wrote most of the chapters on the Skaergaard and Brown most of the other chapters.

In August 1962, Wager was invited to the Soviet Union for two weeks as a Royal Society Visiting Professor to lecture in Moscow and Leningrad (Hargreaves 1991). His big disappointment was that he did not get permission to visit the intrusion in the Kola Peninsula and do field work there. During his stay in Murmansk in 1942, travel had been totally restricted.

On November 20, 1965, Wager was in London with Phyl to buy a camera and attend the wedding of Jack Longland’s son. When he returned to his club, the Farmers Club in Whitehall Court, he had a second coronary and died almost immediately. That evening, Malcolm Brown rang up David Vincent with tears in his voice, saying ‘David, Prof’s died.’ In the department on the following Monday, the news was like a thunderbolt. Later that week, I asked Malcolm Brown, ‘What did Professor Wager die from?’ ‘A heart attack. He strained his heart on Everest.’ Following his funeral, Wager’s ashes were scattered at Sawyersgarth.

When Wager died, the Wager and Brown book was almost complete apart from chapter 19 which had to be finalized for publication by Malcolm Brown. It was published in 1968 (Wager and Brown 1968). The book sold quickly and became a standard text. It was translated into Russian in 1970. Wager’s scientific legacy is now based mainly on his two major publications (Wager and Deer 1939, Wager and Brown 1968).

In 1967, Malcolm Brown was appointed to the Chair in Durham to succeeed Sir Kingsley Dunham. In 1979, was appointed director of the Institute of Geological Sciences, subsequently renamed the British Geological Survey, again succeeeding Sir Kingsley Dunham, and was knighted in 1985. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975 (Vincent 1998).

The Wager Prize was instituted by the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI) at the instigation of David Vincent in 1974 and was funded in part by a capital sum provided by Phyllis Wager and in part by the surplus from a Symposium on Volcanoes held in Oxford in 1969. The first prize was awarded in 1973 and then every four years. It was replaced by the Wager Medal in 1994.

In 1985, C.K. Brooks wrote an article on L.R. Wager and the geology of East Greenland summarizing Wager’s major achievements in Greenland. Brooks was subseqently involved in assessing the economic potential of the Skaergaard Intrusion (Nielsen and Brooks 1995; Brooks 2002). Brooks (1985) considered that Wager had two outstanding characteristics which led to his success as a leader, researcher and explorer. He was both a thinker and a perfectionist, and these two were inextricably mixed and prominent in all his doings.

In 1989, the Journal of Petrology published a Special Commorative Issue ‘dedicated to L.R Wager on the fiftieth anniversary of publication of his landmark study of the Skaergaard Intrusion of East Greenland. The remarkable interpretative insights provided by that work made the Skaergaard a classic example of igneous differentiation’ (McBirney 1989). The editor of that volume was Alexander McBirney of the University of Oregon who made numerous studies of the Skaergaard Intrusion between 1975 (McBirney 1975) and 2003 (McBirney and Creaser 2003) and, in particular, provided an excellent analysis of the various mechanisms of differentiation in the Skaergaard Intrusion (McBirney 1995).

 Following Wager’s death, David Vincent wrote that Wager had left a very different department from the one he had inherited 15 years earlier. He had achieved his aim of putting Oxford back on the map in research and had created a department of world standing which, although still very much smaller than Cambridge, was, in its way, equally distinguished. His greatest service was to imbue the department, from top to bottom, with the spirit of research (Hargreaves 1991).

Wager was the subject of a large number of obituaries in which his integrity and the high esteem in which he was held by his colleagues shine through (Anon 1965, 1966, Brown 1966, Dunham 1966, Longland 1966, Shipton 1966, Adie 1967, Deer 1967, Vincent 1968). Table 1 lists the major awards Wager received during his life time.

When he died, Wager left a large collection of rocks from East Greenland, Skye, Rhum, and other parts of the Hebridean Tertiary Igneous Province, including the remote island of St. Kilda, as well as from the Bushveld Complex in South Africa and the 1933 Everest expedition. These are now held at the Oxford University Natural History Museum (OUNHM) located next door to the Geology Department together with a collection of his letters.

Page One: Introduction
Page Two : Wager the Explorer
Page Three : Returns to Greenland
Page Four: Geology and War Service
Page Five: Conclusions
References

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