Michael Graham

Biography Godfrey Michael Graham was born in Manchester on 22 February 1898, the son of the Quaker writer John William Graham (1859–1932) and Margaret Brockbank. As a boy he loved the Lake District and the wildlife he encountered on his relation's Cumberland farm. This survey represented the first ever systematic survey of one of Africa's great lakes and provides a unique baseline against which all subsequent changes can be compared.

Graham married Edith Meek in 1925, who had assisted Ministry staff in their investigation of pollution problems in the River Tyne and who was a daughter of Alexander Meek, one of the founders of the Dove Marine Laboratory, Cullercoats.

During the Second World War, Michael Graham was engaged on operational research in the RAF, for which he was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire). In 1927 Michael Graham was sent from the fisheries laboratory in Lowestoft to spend a year surveying fish populations and fisheries in Lake Nyanza (Lake Victoria) on behalf of the Colonial Office.

On 13 December 1928, Certificates of recommendation were received by the Linnean Society for election of Michael Graham to Fellowship status. Michael Graham read his paper on "The Natural History of the Victoria Nyanza", at the Linnean Society on 24 May 1929.

The Fish Gate and Graham's "Great Law of Fishing"

Michael Graham's given task on joining the Lowestoft laboratory was to study the North Sea cod fishery. He continued, with breaks for field studies in Africa and Canada, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, describing the cod's life cycle and spawning grounds, and showing the age composition of the fishery through a laborious process of scale-reading. In a 1935 paper Graham conclusively showed that the North Sea stock was overfished. His classic book, The Fish Gate reminds us that by 1939 the North Sea was exhausted and many fishermen were unemployed – the inevitable result of unrestrained over-fishing.

The problem, according to Michael Graham, was that as soon as fishermen began fishing, stocks started to decline. To compensate, fishermen bought bigger nets and engines, but after a certain point, profits would slide. Graham thought the solution was to regulate fishing so that only larger, older fish could be caught. Graham distilled the observations of 20 years at sea into his Great Law of Fishing, a simple declarative statement such that "Fisheries that are unlimited become unprofitable". This book had been written by members of the laboratory as a tribute to their esteemed former Director who had died in 1972.