In the same house clearance we found my great-grandmother’s sketchbook, we also found boxes of academic papers and correspondence belonging to my maternal grandfather, relating to his palaeontological research at the Scottish Geological Survey (now part of the British Geological Survey). Among all the articles he had published on the finer points of trilobites and other Namurian and Dinantian marine fauna of Scotland, we also found a few ‘menu cards’ from the Survey’s annual formal dinners.
This grand event was the place where the scientists of the Survey could dust off the mud of field work and put on their glad rags, enjoying not only dinner but entertainment too. The attendees performed skits and songs and other party pieces, all satirically referring to happenings in the world of geological sciences and office politics, and the menu cards reflected the spirit of the occasion.


Going through the menus, I wondered if they may be of historical interest to the British Geological Survey archive, which contains many photos and records of the staff of the Survey through the ages. After some brief email correspondence, I was put in touch with their very helpful archivist, and her interest and kindness proved my personal theory that all the best people are librarians or similar!
My mum and I were invited to come and see the archive and donate the items we had. This allowed us a fascinating look through the relevant boxes’ contents, where we discovered more photos of my grandfather, as well as some of his own contributions to the formal dinner entertainment.
He had specialised in doggerel poetry of the kind written by one William McGonagall, Scotland’s unofficial Poet Dis-Laureate (and the inspiration behind awful verses written sarcastically by my family in birthday cards for generations).
These two pieces ‘A Summary of Progress’ and ‘Hazards of a Palaeontologist’ show his diabolical grasp of tortured rhyming schemes and the photo shows the sheer joy he took in inflicting this upon his colleagues!



As I was looking through the boxes and spotting that beloved, familiar face in some of the menu cards, the realisation dawned that these menus are memetic masterpieces – silly inside jokes shared by serious men of science and brought to visual life through the art of literal cut-and-paste.
I thought about how throughout the ages, there must have always been people who go to some amount of effort to make and share this kind of thing for no other reason than for the bit, to make others laugh.
One example that springs to mind are the Viking rune carvings at the Maes Howe burial chamber on Orkney, one of which is impressively rendered in the hard stone around 8ft off the ground, but not ceremonial or significant. It just reads ‘Tholfir Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up’!
There’s an entire academic book dedicated to this phenomenon in Greek vases, lots of bawdy laughs at Zeus to be had. “For the gods too love a joke,” as Socrates once quipped.
And for a meme which travelled across the world, long before the internet, how about ‘Kilroy Was Here’? A true memetic phenomenon, the British ‘Mr Chad’ and his ‘wot no bananas?’ (which itself was a new face given to an existing humorous complaint about rationing) morphing into Kilroy, who could be found daubed onto every place where a US soldier had been during WWII. It is probably apocryphal, but apparently even Hitler was familiar with Kilroy and concerned he could be a codename for a top-level spy.
Thinking about the way content is created on the internet, the 1-9-90 rule is often used, and while things have changed a little since the widespread adoption of social media made creating a little easier, it still holds fairly firm. The rule states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and only 1% of the participants add content.
So the people daubing Kilroy onto a bulkhead, the artists creating vases poking fun at Zeus and his rampant proclivities, they are the memers of history, in the 1 or 9 percent – either making the jokes or actively spreading and changing them.
I’m one of them, I plague my friends and colleagues and various subreddits with terrible memes I have thrown together. And it’s comforting for me that there really is nothing new under the sun. As long as there are humans, there will be people like my grandfather and his colleagues, and like me and the denizens of imgur and reddit.
All making fun and sharing a laugh, through the mediums of rune carving, pottery, graffiti, cut and paste and shoddy photoshop.