I’ve always thought of myself as a New Naturalist – a hard-covered version of course – and with rather good reason. The series and I were born in the same year, we grew up together and I have read them all. It’s my great pleasure to own a complete set of first editions, together with all the Monographs, Country Naturalists and Countryside series. They are, however, not only among the most prized possessions in my library, they are also among the most used; no brown paper wrappers in dark places for my set. I refer to one or other almost daily and that in itself, to use an appropriate expression, speaks volumes. Whilst New Naturalists are now bought, collected and hoarded by some like stamps or coins, they are far more importantly still practical, for the most part highly readable, and certainly highly relevant compilations, and accounts of the numerous facets of British natural history. And as I pondered my response to Peter Marren’s most kind invitation to write this Foreword to the new edition of his utterly excellent and beautifully-written series tribute, two things struck me. First, that I must be reasonably typical of a whole generation of naturalists in that by profession and training I embrace one discipline (in my case botany) but in interest and activity, I take in many others; and second, that the scope of the New Naturalist series remarkably mirrors both my own career and the evolution of British natural history in my lifetime. It is all a startling testament to the vision and foresight of its creators.
I have always lived in a Country Parish, I began my natural history like so many others, by collecting Butterflies and Moths, and became excited whenever one of our British Mammals or better still, one of the few British Amphibians and Reptiles made an appearance in the garden. I became passionate about British Plant Life and started my own herbarium in order to identify Wild Flowers, especially the Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone and the Mountain Flowers in the Peak District close to where I grew up. We lived alongside a small stream and I was entranced by Life in Lakes and Rivers and, as a trout fisherman, inevitably took an interest in An Angler’s Entomology. Then, in the nineteen fifties and early sixties, I travelled to more distant areas of the country, fell in love with Mountains and Moorlands, saw the Highlands and Islands, The Weald, Dartmoor, Snowdonia and began to discover The World of Spiders, Insect Migration and Woodland Birds.
As a native of Derbyshire, arguably the most inland of British counties, venturing to The Sea Coast opened up a new world to me, the world of Sea Birds, The Open Sea and the Flowers of the Coast. As I matured as a naturalist, I began to appreciate an understanding of the earth on which we lived and became fascinated by Britain’s Structure and Scenery, by Fossils, indeed by the whole complex partnership of Man and the Land. This saw fruit at university where as an undergraduate, I read both botany and geology and then became hooked on Mushrooms and Toadstools – to the extent that years later I was to become one of John Ramsbottom’s successors as President of the British Mycological Society – and then during my research years in forestry, admired the complex interrelationship between Trees, Woods and Man. Later still, when I was engaged in horticultural research and immersed in The World of the Soil in the nineteen seventies, it was the post-Rachel Carson era, when Pesticides and Pollution were beginning to be understood and the uneasy coexistence of Farming and Wildlife appreciated. I learned about Grass and Grasslands, Weeds and Aliens and Hedges. And more recently, of course, the importance of Nature Conservation in Britain has dawned on everyone. How unerringly and accurately the New Naturalists have charted the course of my life and career, and of post-war British natural history. How cleverly the Collins founders foresaw such changes in legislation and attitude as those embodied in the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act which created the SSSIs and the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act – the ‘right to roam’ law.
For a young naturalist like me in the nineteen fifties and sixties, the New Naturalist authors were iconic figures, and it’s a great sadness that by the time I became old and bold enough to approach such people, the earlier ones had largely passed away. The first author I met was the extraordinary E. B. Ford at Oxford, but the one I came to know best and was the most influential by far was a truly quintessential naturalist. She was however one of the forgotten few, the ‘contributing’ authors whom Peter glossed over in his first edition and who were sadly never accorded a proper biography because they didn’t appear on a title page. Joyce Lambert contributed chapters on broadland vegetation and on her own seminal studies of broadland origin to the original version of The Broads and in tribute to the unsung heroes and heroines behind the New Naturalist series, I shall take just a few lines to amend Peter’s omission.
Joyce taught me ecology and instilled in me her quite perfect and utterly simple definition of what is now considered so complex a discipline. ‘Ecology’ she said, ‘is what lives where, and why’. She had learned her ecology at Cambridge under Sir Harry Godwin and once recounted to me a story of her own early undergraduate days when Godwin gave her a huge ecological tome and told her to read it and distil its critical message into a 3000 word essay by the following Tuesday. ‘But Professor Godwin’, she complained, ‘it’s by Braun-Blanquet and I don’t speak German’. ‘Then I suggest you learn it’ was Godwin’s reply. She did.
What an essential naturalist Joyce Lambert was, in the very finest New Naturalist tradition. Although a professional botanist, she was well versed in all branches of the living world and I have two enduring undergraduate memories of her. The first was on a university field course visit to Ted Ellis at his home on Wheatfen Broad. We all sat around Ted’s house, having a Sunday lunch picnic among the reeds on a sweltering August day, with most of the insect life of the Norfolk Broads taking a serious interest in our meal, while Ted and Joyce, utterly oblivious to being eaten alive, argued the identity of some of the largest and most vicious species of Diptera I have ever seen. The second was watching with dismay in the New Forest as our teacher, this short, stout woman, missed her footing while lecturing her charges on the structure of a Schwingmoor or floating bog and began to descend downwards through the raft of peat with slow and graceful inevitability towards the cold watery depths below. Joyce’s proportions however meant she became wedged at the waistline and later, having been hauled free from the filthy black hole by a small army of students, expressed equal anxiety at having possibly disturbed the breeding site of a rare dragonfly and at the soggy state of her Woodbines. As may be said so accurately of so many early New Naturalist authors – they don’t make them like that any more.
Since that meeting with E. B. Ford, I have been privileged to meet, know or correspond with other series authors and most recently, was delighted to receive much help from the only one to have three bars to his distinction. Eric Simms, who penned four bird titles, was a fount of information and anecdote when I was writing my Fauna Britannica. It has been suggested however that Eric Simms’ contributions, marvellous as they are, in fact highlighted a series flaw – that if the Monographs are included, there have been disproportionately too many bird books. Possibly, but there are after all plenty of birds – far more than mammals, reptiles and amphibians put together and here too, I think the editors – under James Fisher’s tutelage – spotted a trend early on. If membership of the RSPB charts the progress of a national interest in birds, the figures speak for themselves. When the series began in 1945, there were but a handful of members; they only passed 10,000 in 1960. Today there are over a million, ample justification I would have thought for the New Naturalists being generous with ornithology. I must add that whilst sadly I never met James Fisher, I treasure my all too brief friendship with his son and editorial successor Crispin, a marvellously personable and gentle man although one who I don’t think ever forgave me my fondness for fuchsias, plants that he abhorred beyond all reason.
In mainstream botany and zoology, there is a constant argument between the protagonists of regional floras and faunas on the one hand and the protagonists of monographs on the other. The New Naturalist series has very gingerly trodden a median path. The Monographs themselves were an erratic adjunct to the main series, were published for only 23 years; and sad to relate, included only one botanical title. But I do hope the present editors will continue to weave a little monography into the main series and not perceive the monograph as a purely scientific publication rather than genuine natural history. Although in saying this, I confess to not really knowing where science ends and natural history begins and that perhaps is the secret of the New Naturalists’ success. They are neither popular natural history nor hard-core science. They are quite simply unique, and that really is their enduring merit and appeal.
As they created the yardsticks by which the progress of natural history in Britain can be charted, the huge talent of the founding New Naturalist authors was that although they were of an earlier and older generation, most of them instinctively understood how to communicate with a modern and younger one. Not many were teachers in a professional sense, but it was in the skill of the editors to have found men and women of science who bucked the trend – because, let’s be honest, most scientists have traditionally been abysmal communicators. Perhaps things are becoming a little easier as the modern author generation has grown up with more immediate access to a wider range of communication media. I do hope so, as I look forward with some anxiety to joining this distinguished throng with my forthcoming Garden Natural History. I reassure myself that when people have asked me what are my driving passions, I have always replied, with genuine honesty, ‘Living things – and telling people about them’. And that does seem after all to be the very ethos of The New Naturalists, the books and the people.