Who was Alfred Leeds?

Alfred Nicholson Leeds was the person that found the first ever Leedsichthys fossil fish bones. He was a pioneer in methods of collecting and preserving fossil skeletons in the latter half of the 19^th Century. For nearly half a century he devoted his leisure to recovering the remains of fossil reptiles and fishes from the brickpits in the Oxford Clay near Peterborough.

Alfred Nicholson Leeds and Charles Edward Leeds were brothers, part of a farming family based at Eyebury, just outside Peterborough. As children they would collect some of the old fossils bones they found lying in small holes in the clay dug to make bricks at Tanholt, across the road from their home. When they grew up, one of the two brothers had to take the responsibility to take over running the family farm or pursue a different career, and as Charles was the oldest he had the right to choose.

He chose instead to go to Oxford University to study to be an engineer- leaving Alfred to look after the farm at Eyebury. This was a disappointment to Alfred who had hoped to go to university to study medicine. Instead Alfred began to indulge his interest in anatomy through excavating fossil skeletons that were starting to come out from some of the large scale clay excavations that began in the early 1870’s to the south of Peterborough.

The clay excavated by the brick companies contained many fossilised remains of animals from the bottom of an ancient Jurassic sea around 150 millions years ago. With the sudden expansion in brick pits around Peterborough, more of these skeletons started to be discovered than ever before. Alfred Leeds took to collecting the fossils from the clay workers as they came to light, paying the clay workers in return for alerting him to the discoveries, and for allowing him to personally dig up the material rather than the clay workers. He did this for two reasons – firstly because Alfred wanted to see the disposition of the bones in case they gave clues to how the bones had been related to each other in life. Secondly, Alfred believed that he could dig up the fragile bones with more care and skill than any of the pit workers- so the careful payment of a shilling might make his task of reconstructing the skeleton much easier in the long run.

A Family Business

Alfred would take skeletons back to his home at Eyebury, where his understanding wife would often help him clean the clay from the bones. Then he would try to reassemble the skeletons in his ‘bone rooms’. Alfred was entirely self-taught as far as his understanding of skeletal anatomy was concerned, and considering most of the creatures he was reassembling were at that time unknown to science, his effectiveness is a tribute to his aptitude for this subject.  The palaeontologists that described his new creatures recognised this and named several after him, including Leedsichthys (which means ‘the fish of Leeds’).

When Alfred excavated the tail specimen of Leedsichthys in March 1898, some of the delicate tail rays diminished in size to the diameter of a knitting needle, and only came out of the clay in tens of thousands of pieces. Alfred enlisted the help of both his son Thurlow and his wife Ferry to help him glue every piece back together. It took the three of them nine months to complete it, and they one and all swore they would never repair a Leedsichthys tail again!

Fossil Dealer to the World

Alfred Leeds kept most of his substantial collection in the ‘bone rooms’ in the attic of his Eyebury home. It is said that his understanding wife, every so often would reach the end of her patience and insisted that Alfred remove some trays of bones that had accumulated downstairs in the more public rooms of Eyebury House. By his death in 1917, Alfred Leeds had excavated and sold literally thousands of Oxford Clay vertebrate fossils from around Peterborough to museum collections in countries around the world including Germany, Sweden and the United States.