ADAM Hart-Davis, President of the Tavistock Music and Arts Festival, gave the seventh Russell lecture at The Wharf in Tavistock last Frida.

The subject of the lecture was The Lunarticks of Birimingham: an eighteenth century informal learned society of industrialists, philosophers and intellectuals. They met when there was a full moon as this made their journey home safer at a time before street lighting.

Adam Hart-Davis's entertaining talk highlighted some members of the society which included Erasmus (father of Charles) Darwin and William Withering.

Darwin a physician and poet had studied at Cambridge and Edinburgh and already acquainted with William Withering, who became a member of the society in 1776. Withering discovered the drug digoxin, which is extracted from foxglove leaves and used in heart failure.

Adam Hart Davis is a scientist, author, photographer, historian and broadcaster, well known for presenting the BBC television series Local Heroes and What the Romans Did for Us, the latter spawning several spin-off series involving the Victorians, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Ancients.

He attended Eton College and studied chemistry at Merton College, Oxford. He is a direct descendant of King William IV and his mistress Dorothea Jordan and is therefore fifth cousin once removed of Elizabeth II, second cousin once removed of the British Prime Minister David Cameron.

At the end of the lecture Adam cut a cake to celebrate the tenth birthday of the Tavistock Music and Arts Festival and was assisted by Christopher Kirwin, chairman of Tavistock Music and Arts Festival and Dr Ann Pulsford, chairperson of the Friends of the Wharf.