Like most small boys brought up in a religious community, as would have existed in the Methodist enclaves of Gateshead at the turn of the twentieth century, Arthur Holmes and his friend Bob Lawson did not often find their favourite reading in the Bible. But in years to come Arthur well remembered his parent's Bible, and the magic fascination of the date of Creation, 4004 BC, which appeared in the margin of the first page. ‘I was puzzled by the odd “4”’, he wrote. ‘Why not a nice round 4000 years? And why such a recent date? And how could anyone know?’ But all he learnt from his parents was that to question the ‘Word of God’ was simply ‘not done’. This Biblical time barrier was further reinforced in Arthur's mind at Sunday School through the teachings of Philip Gosse, a Victorian naturalist who considered he had reconciled Hutton's geological findings with the Scriptures in his distinguished book Omphalos. In this work no compromise was called for. It was only necessary to believe that the Earth was created about 6000 years ago, in strict accordance with Biblical chronology, ‘exactly as it would have appeared at that moment of its history, if all the preceding eras of its history had been real’.