Historians love counter-factuals. What would the world have been like if Lincoln didn’t go to the Ford Theater. So here’s a counter-factual for those who are interested in fisheries history, what if Sidney Holt had followed through with his 1945 intention of becoming a veterinarian? Fortunately his tutor at Reading College steered him towards marine science. E. S. Russell and Michael Graham offered him a job, and the rest, as they say, is history. This memoire features more detail about Lowestoft between 1947 and 1950, when Beverton and Holt hammered out the Bible of fisheries science, On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations.