“Elizabeth David said nobody in the whole world knew more about fish than you”. This comment made to the British Food writer Alan Davidson during a Radio 4 interview is elegantly brushed off. Davidson died twenty years ago, this December. He was best known as the primary author and editor of the seminal Oxford Companion to Food, which stands at over a million words, and co-founder and first editor of this journal. But he was in his first life a diplomat. His time at the Foreign Office took him from Washington D.C to Brussels and North Africa, where in Tunis, the first sparks of that second career were lit.

To ease his wife’s confusion at the names of the fish in the market, a garbled mixture of French, Italian and Arabic, Davidson began to catalogue the species and recipes found in the region. The result was a hand-bound book stamped Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean. It includes the various names and common recipes of all the fish available in the region, each paired with an illustration to help guide the perplexed market shopper.

The 200 or so copies were pieced together on a makeshift assembly line in the British Ambassador’s office in Tunis. Davidson cooked up a trip to get the Ambassador away from his desk and free up the room so the real work could begin. The publication was met with encouraging words from the doyenne of British Food, Elizabeth David, and in 1972, his horizons expanded with the publication of Mediterranean Seafood. It is a Pliny-esque journey through the region and its cuisine. Its contents range from the initial formation of the Mediterranean 5.3 million years ago when the Strait of Gibraltar burst open; to Genoese sailors’ fondness for dried dolphin; and a recommendation for bonito served from boats by Istanbul’s Galata Bridge.

There was also a foray into fiction with the thriller Something Quite Big, which imagined the kidnapping of Nato officials by eco-zealots. When the Foreign Office banned its publication, Davidson had anonymous samizdat copies printed in Bangkok and distributed amongst friends.

The height of Davidson’s diplomatic career came in 1973 when he was appointed as British Ambassador to Laos. Despite the country’s obscurity, this was no minor position. The small and extremely poor South East Asian nation found itself on the edge of the Vietnam War. The American military had been carpeting the country in explosives for over a decade. Two aerial bombing campaigns Operations Barrel Roll and Steel Tiger mean Laos still holds the unenviable title of ‘most bombed country in the world’. Meanwhile, Laos’ own political issues were being fomented. The 600-year-old Western-allied Monarchy was being threatened by the increasingly powerful communist force Pathet Lao, bolstered by Soviet backing. Davidson’s daughter recalled a telling-off from her father after accepting vodka from the Soviet ambassador whilst still a teenager. It’s unclear whether was the issue was underage drinking or geopolitics.

Davidson did do things like head out to the Pathet Lao’s sprawling cave network for negotiations, but his duties seem to have been dominated by the hosting of meals. These proved to be opportunities for mischief. One invitation complete with a daunting list of courses went as follows:

‘The British Embassy in Vientiane in honour of the Chinese Ambassador and the staff of the Chinese Embassy – 3 July 1974

Dinner Scotch Broth

Kippers

Black Pudding and Chips

Toad in the Hole

Bubble and Squeak

Plum Pudding and Brandy Sauce

Cheddar Cheese

Gooseberries and Welsh Rarebit

Cider and Stout’

Neither the political turbulence of the period nor the fact that Laos is landlocked could hamper Davidson’s passion for fish. The urge to catalogue was unstoppable and Davidson found time between official duties to research and write The Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos. One notable entry in the book is on the Pah Beuk, The Giant Mekong Catfish, Pangasianodon gigas. A great grey beast of National Geographic and Discovery Channel fame. The Pah Beuk is the world’s biggest freshwater fish – by weight. A record breaker hauled up in 2005 was 2.7 meters long and weighed 293 kilos.

Davidson’s interest in the near mythically elusive and toothless Giant Catfish took him so far as meeting with the Crown Prince of Laos in search of anecdotes, culminating in the following story he told on Radio 4: “I got a phone call one day in Vientiane, late in the evening, from an American aid official up in Baan Huay Xai who said they have just caught a big ‘Pah Beuk’ — that was the name of this giant catfish — and the colonel in charge of the local contingent of the army has already bought most of it so he can feed his 700 men with a piece of this fish each. But we have an option on the head till dawn tomorrow because we thought you might want it.”

Davidson then scrambles for a seat on a rice-dropping plane leaving at 5 am – Laos’ rudimentary roads making air travel necessary. When he arrived “head was still there. And — miracle of miracles — they were able to produce dry ice to pack it in. There was an American helicopter flying back to Vientiane that evening and the pilot said sure he would take me and the head.” His arrival back at the Embassy, head in hand, is said to have interrupted a serene ballet performance taking place in the garden. The ensuing attempt to get the head into the Embassy freezer posed further problems “because it was full of things like steak and kidney pies for members of the staff and we had to farm these out to smaller freezers in a great hurry in order to get the head in.” Making best use of the British Embassy’s resources, he arranged “to truck it down to Bangkok, which is a day’s drive in a lorry, with dry ice being provided along the route every three hours and into the hands of British Air who nobly flew it to London free of charge in order to hand over to the Natural History Museum…where it should be. But after repeated enquiries, I have come to the conclusion that there must have been a little accident in the museum and there is nothing left to show, which is really sad.”

Davidson’s Catfish head however should remain off the list of victims in the recent spate of high-profile thefts and breakages plaguing UK museums. James Maclaine, Senior Fish Curator at the Natural History Museum, said he was ‘sorry to hear that Alan had that response because it is still very much here and I saw it relatively recently when it was put into a new tank. It is not the most beautiful specimen in the world, being as it is, a large severed head, but I can assure you we are fond of it and it is still being looked after.’

Oliver Crimmen, the head of Fish Curation, has been at the Natural History Museum since 1973 and was there when the head arrived from Laos. “If I remember it arrived frozen” he says sitting in an office the sheer fullness of which attests to five decades at the Museum; “We curators are acquisitive by nature”. “The first thing you would notice about Alan was his perfume”, Crimmen recalls, describing Davidson’s flamboyant dress and demeanour. In later years, Davidson always wore a Buddhist medallion and carried a bag, one of which was made of clear plastic slots with postcards of movie stars inserted – another obsession and subject of an unfinished book. As evidence of this flamboyant demeanour, Crimmen pulls up the scan of a Davidson sent to his predecessor Alwynne Wheeler, on blue paper headed British Embassy in Vientiane which describes another Giant Catfish specimen sent in by Davidson:

‘My Dear Alwynne,

Instead of sending you the usual Christmas card I am dispatching to you the bones of half a head of a specimen of Pangasianodon gigas. On the last occasion, when one was in the market here, I found that the cost of the entire head seemed to be too high. But the lady fishmonger pointed out that the head is symmetrical so that if she cut it into half, fore and aft, and we bought the slightly bigger half, we would have in effect a complete kit. This we did, and made soup with the half head, and got the cook to preserve with maximum care all the bones. These are what is now being sent to you, together with a section of the spine for good measure.”

In a scrapbook Crimmen pulled from the crowded shelves, a handwritten note below a photograph of a landed Giant Catfish reads: ‘Perhaps this is Alan Davidson’s fish (in Laos) from which we got the head.’ In the photo, a cigarette dangles from the mouth of a slight South East Asian man, who crouches behind a great slippery fish, much taller than him. The man’s hand rests proudly on, and is dwarfed by, its dorsal fin. To their side, a crowd of jostling boys are gathered in the evening light. The eldest boy holds the tip of the fish’s tail between his thumb and forefinger. One of the smaller boys sits atop a wooden hut watching over the scene, relaxed as a cherub. Dusty trees and low hills extend into the distance.

The Natural History Museum’s spirit collection is housed in the basement of a modern extension. There 22 million specimens bathe in steel tanks or glass jars in alcohol solution. Highlights from the spirit collection include a Common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, taken by Charles Darwin from the Cape Verde islands in 1832 and a Scarlet Honeycreeper, Vestiaria coccinea, brought from Hawaii by Captain Cook in 1779.

The room smells like brandy. Although not entirely unpleasant the chemical fumes are strong enough to disbar pregnant visitors and children under eight from entering. “It’s mainly alcohol and a little bit of fish oil” clarifies Maclaine. Running down the centre of the room is a long foggy glass tank. In the brackish liquid are suspended several ghostly, suckered and seemingly endless pink arms; a Giant Squid. The 8.62-metre-long deep-ocean dweller came in from the Falkland Islands in 2005. It took 12 people to get it into the tank; “that was one of the most unpleasant jobs we’ve ever had to do” winces Maclaine. “This one is considered very complete because the feeding arms are intact…well, one had to be sewn back on,” Crimmen adds.

In the corner of the room is a large low steel tank. Untwisting the valves and lifting the lid reveals a foamed-up liquid, the shade of cognac, with various specimens lurking in its depths, including small scaly sharks – the shade of Chesterfield sofas. “All this dark colour is from fish oils. These sharks are very oily”, Maclaine says diving his yellow-gloved arms into the liquor to bat aside the bobbing sharks and pull out a familiar face. Little black-pea eyes abreast a wide Hollywood smile. Not a tooth in sight. Weathered and tanned from half a century of soaking, it’s Davidson’s fish. The solid fleshy mass has lost its pinky youthfulness and looks something like the tip of a Giant’s thumb, or the stub of the world’s largest cigar.

“There’s not much to grip onto”, says Maclaine, grinning and hoiking the head up, “it sort of reminds me of the Eraserhead baby.” After a thoughtful pause, Crimmen says “It would have been over three metres, I’m sure.”