Why didn’t I become a geologist?

by Dr. M. Nicholson

On 28^th Dec 2025, we heard of the death of Brigitte Bardot, perhaps one of the greatest sex symbols of the 20^th century. Yet fame doesn’t always last: neither my younger wife nor my two youngest daughters had ever heard of her.  But I am glad our editor has such a good memory because he reminded me of a story that I told him more than half a century ago. The story takes me back to 1966, two years before I left school. A friend had come to stay and we tore around our part of Scotland on our bikes looking for things to do.

Tantallon and the Bass Rock            (Credit: Vincent Guy)

We fished for mackerel round the Bass Rock at the entrance to the Firth of Forth and we would explore the local castles, getting up to mischief. Two of the nearby ruins, Dirleton castle built in 1240 and the fourteenth century Tantallon[A1]  castle were regular haunts, not I confess for any historical interest but because we thought we could make some money. Both places had deep wells into which tourists (in those days just called visitors) would drop half-crowns (the highest denomination British coin then in circulation and £2.50 in today’s money) for good luck. We decided that our source of good luck would be to fish the money out again. We tried magnets attached to a long string which didn’t work on the old cupro-nickel coins. Then we tried a golf ball covered in strong glue which we would let down 10 or 20 m or so to the base of the dry well. After many covert attempts over many days, I think our haul amounted to one half-crown and one sixpence. We even considered abseiling to the bottom but we were not able to remove the heavy iron grill and anyway, what if we got down but couldn’t get up again?

Later in life, I appreciated Tantallon, a red sandstone fortress of the clan Douglas, for its history. Almost impregnable both from land and the steep cliffs above the beach, it is historically more interesting of the two castles. Some people believe that the USA is run today by a Cabal[1] of nasties but the Cabal of lowland Scots which ruled Scotland in the mid-16^th century was far nastier. In 1566, the young and beautiful Mary Queen of Scots, a  French-speaking Roman Catholic in a fiercely Presbyterian country, visited Tantallon for the first time. In February 1567, the vain, promiscuous Lord Darnley, regent and second husband of Mary was murdered in Edinburgh, an act organized by the cruel and ambitious James Hepburn, later Lord Bothwell, who was keen to occupy the vacant position of regent. He laid a trap to abduct Mary and force her to accept him as her third husband. As the widowed Mary traveled nervously from Stirling, Bothwell suddenly appeared with a force of 800 men claiming that if she continued to Edinburgh, she would be in grave danger. The new entourage skirted the capital, stopped off secretly at Tantallon and made their way Dunbar Castle where Mary was apparently raped by Bothwell. I don’t believe in ghosts but there are many accounts of a woman in Elizabethan dress who appears at one of the ‘windows’ of  Tantallon. The castle again made history during the end of the Civil war in 1650 when a small group of royalists held out against 10 days of siege and bombardment from 2000 soldiers of Cromwell’s army and artillery. The castle was destroyed and was never inhabited again. 

Early one summer’s day three hundred years later, my friend and I arrived at Tantallon to find the place seething with cars, trucks and cables. A film was being made and the rumour going round was that the star of the film was to be Brigitte Bardot (known in France as BB), then at the zenith of her acting career and widely regarded as the sexiest woman alive. From then on, Tantallon became the daily destination for two innocent, sex-starved teenagers until we returned unwillingly to school. Our aim was to meet this sex-symbol but we had no idea how to do it.

One day I sneaked behind one of the caravans where the actors could relax and change between scenes. I managed to get a shot of her with my smart Rolleiflex box camera which took square photos. I hope she never spotted me. To this day I cringe with embarrassment at my insolence and would probably deserve the sobriquet of ‘Father of the paparazzi’. I have had to search for the photos in an album I haven’t opened in a quarter of a century.

We were helped in our quest by a British actor, James Robertson-Justice, whom we first found kilted and leaning against the boot of his new Bentley. At first, I received an earful for trying to photograph him without permission, which he thought was very rude but eventually he relented and became friendly. Then we asked him how we could get to Mme. Bardot and he advised us to try after the day’s filming. She was apparently staying in the village pub, a rather upmarket place called The Open Arms in Dirleton. That evening we arrived at what one now would call the ‘boutique hotel’, armed with roses filched from our garden. We got as far as the door to her room. The door was opened by a bodyguard and all we got was a quick “Oh là là! Merci beaucoup” and a rather tired smile from the screen goddess before the door was gently but firmly shut in our faces.

The story doesn’t quite end there. There was another slightly older but still handsomely beautiful lady occasionally wandering around the film set. We heard someone calling out to her as “Irina”. She had an unidentifiable accent but was clearly a friend of James Robertson-Justice. It later transpired that she was Baroness Irene von Meyendorff, an Estonian-Russian aristocrat, reputedly a mistress of Goebbels before the war, a friend of Hitler’s and one of the Aryan glamour girls of the Nazis. We were later told she had become Robertson-Justice’s mistress the previous year and she looked after him for the next ten years, before marrying him a week before he died.

The following year we went and watched the result, an utterly unmemorable film called ‘Two weeks in September’, which I think was one of BB’s worst flops. BB played the part of a woman married to a dull and much older man but who then falls for some attractive young geologist (played by Laurent Terzieff, whom we hated, of course).

In real life, it seems that BB was never happily married or even happy in any human relationship. She came from a wealthy, strict, conservative and unloving Catholic family in Paris. She was clearly rebellious and certainly never wanted a family, though she did have one son. Her third husband was Gunther Sachs, the owner of Playboy, a marriage lasting under three years. Apparently she turned down Sean Connery’s advances claiming that she was not a ‘Bond’ girl. Many more men lusted after her: John Lennon called her “the girl of my dreams”.

Yes, she was staggeringly sexually attractive but was she an attractive personality? Physical beauty seldom lasts but an attractive personality is a lifelong gift. She was notoriously right wing, anti-Muslim, racist and disapproved of miscegenation.

By 40, she had retired and devoted the rest of her life to animal rights. She tried stopping all forms of hunting, be they on land or sea. She saved the lives of countless dolphins, seals, dogs, bulls and gave generously to animal welfare organizations.

Her life reminds me of some of Somerset Maugham’s stories: both The Painted Veil and one of his short stories when he took the daughter of a friend to lunch with a very old lady. The daughter was a budding and beautiful model and the old lady was in her nineties. The daughter ended up in tears when she learns that the old lady was also a noted beauty of her day. The punchline of course was “Beauty fades”. 

Here are the opening lines of Maugham’s The Lotus Eaters:

 “Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation.” 

BB had a very difficult ‘lot’ to accept and she rebelled in every way she could. To be thought of as the sexiest woman alive by the majority of men on the planet sounds fun but I bet it wasn’t. It must have been boring, tedious and hateful at times. But to most of my generation she remains the ultimate female sex icon.

[1] For non-British historians and others, the Cabal ministry was a coterie of politicians who ran England after the restoration (1666) and so was named after the initial letters of their surnames (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley-Cooper and Lauderdale, the only Scot). A century earlier, Scotland was run by a bunch of five incompetent, power hungry, aristocratic thugs including Lord Darnley and Lord Bothwell, both of whom married the unhappy Mary, Queen of Scots. I leave it to others to devise a mnemonic for the current five who seem to run the USA: DT JVD PH PB and RFK.

 [A1]