‘Most of us were old enough to remember the disaster of the early twenties, following the First World War, when there was a dismal failure to produce the promised world fit for heroes. All during the years of the Second World War was the determination to be ready for peace.....
‘A bright new series [of books] was a godsend to harassed seekers after presents as well as to a public hungry for peace and forgetfulness of war. What better than natural history?’
L. Dudley Stamp. From original Author’s Preface of Nature Conservation in Britain
(1969)
The first informal meeting between the publisher, the producer and the future editors of the New Naturalist series took place in June 1942, at a point, as Billy Collins expressed it, when ‘this country’s fortunes were at their most perilous hazard’. Rommel had taken Tobruk and driven the 8th Army back into Egypt, Britain was losing the Battle of the Atlantic, and three German capital ships had steamed through the English Channel unharmed and in the process had shot down a lot of British torpedo planes. It was not the most immediately threatening moment of the war, but militarily it was one of the low points. The earliest New Naturalist meetings were in that sense an assertion of optimism – Dudley Stamp referred to them as ‘a form of escapism’. If Germany were to win the war, the British people would presumably have more pressing matters on their mind than natural history.
For the planned series of books, Billy Collins turned to Wolfgang Foges, the director of Adprint, with whom he had collaborated recently on the ‘Britain in Pictures’ series (see Chapter 3). Foges, an Austrian refugee from Hitler’s Third Reich, specialised in colour reproduction and believed that the camera would shortly revolutionise publishing in the natural sciences. Foges was to be responsible for commissioning the colour pictures and also for the production of maps and diagrams, based on the authors’ sketches. It is to Foges and Adprint that we owe the exquisitely lettered maps in the earlier New Naturalist titles.1
Some time before the first meeting, but certainly after April 1942, Collins and Wolfgang Foges had approached Julian Huxley to try to gain his active support for the proposed series. The idea of blending the fresh insights of ecology and ethology (the study of animal behaviour) with traditional British natural history and presenting the results to the public was, they knew, very much Huxley’s own forte. The 54-year-old Julian Huxley had by degrees abandoned an academic career to take a more active part in promoting science. He was in many ways the prototype of the new naturalist, combining, in his earlier career, laboratory research on genetics and the development of embryos with his better-known field studies of grebes and divers, and above all in his writings on evolution, animal language and social insects. By successfully introducing a wide public to the latest advances of field-based science, he, more than anyone else, had literally, as well as metaphorically, brought nature study back to life. It has been said of Huxley that, almost single-handedly, he made field natural history scientifically respectable again. In the opinion of his friend the late W.H. Thorpe, he was almost the only senior British zoologist in the inter-war years who thought ecology and behaviour important. In combining the two great arms of field study, he was perhaps the most influential naturalist since Darwin.
Huxley’s achievement was helped by his own genetics: like other members of his family, he wrote well, with great elegance and savoir faire. Which is precisely what one would expect from his ancestry. His grandfather, the great Darwinian T.H. Huxley, had whetted the young Julian’s appetite for evolution studies. His father and younger brother distinguished themselves respectively as a biographer and magazine editor and as a novelist and essayist. On Julian’s maternal-side he inherited the organisational gifts of the famous Rugby School headmaster and educational reformist, Thomas Arnold; Matthew Arnold was a great-uncle, and for an aunt he had another successful novelist, Mrs Humphrey Ward. He had less cause for gratitude for another facet of the Arnold genes: a tendency for uncontrollable bursts of depression. This drove Julian’s younger brother Trevenan to suicide, and was responsible for the troughs in Julian’s own life, when he felt incapable of work and, shunning all company except that of his wife, wandered through the countryside or shut himself away in his study.
In 1925 Huxley left Oxford to chair the Department of Zoology at King’s College, London. Presumably Professorship was not his métier, for only two years later he resigned to work with H.G.Wells on a fortnightly popular science publication, The Science of Life, which Wells intended to be ‘a summary of contemporary knowledge about life and its possibilities’. In 1935 Huxley was appointed Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, that is to say he was placed in day-to-day charge of London Zoo. Over the next few years he edited two important books, The New Systematics (1940) and Evolution, the modern synthesis (1942), and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. When Billy Collins contacted him, he had just returned from a lecture tour of the United States and was about to resign his position with the Zoological Society to concentrate once again on writing and journalism.
Huxley’s reputation was at its height in the early 1940s. Billy Collins had not published any of his books, but the two evidently knew one another. In the circumstances, Collins’ approach to Huxley was exceedingly well-timed. Huxley showed interest in Collins’ proposal to publish an important series of nature books, and so the latter invited him to lunch ‘to discuss the scheme as a practical proposition’.
The ‘exploratory lunch’, at the Jardin des Gourmets in Soho, was a foursome. Collins brought with him Wolfgang Foges of Adprint, and Huxley was accompanied by his young protégé, James Fisher. With the appearance of Fisher, we meet the most dynamic member of the New Naturalist team. We also at once enter the land of legends: many readers will, I am sure, know the story of the chance meeting of Billy Collins and James Fisher in an air-raid shelter during a bombing raid on the capital. Fisher is supposed to have remarked, ‘What this country needs is a good series of books on natural history to take people’s minds off this carnage’. Collins agreed: ‘Quite right. We will need an editorial board. You see to it, and I’ll provide them with tea and cream buns’. It is a nice story. But is it true? In a letter written more than forty years later, James’ son Crispin referred to the story as if it were fact. But in his Bookseller article, written in 1946, Billy Collins says only that ‘together publisher and photographer [i.e. Collins and Foges] approached Dr Julian Huxley, who was interested, and he in his turn introduced [my italics] Mr James Fisher, the ornithologist’. It reads as though Collins had not in fact met Fisher until that time, but the sentence may be only a manifestation of Billy Collins’ rather formal style. Quite possibly the exchange did occur, but, if so, it did not at the time lead anywhere.
James Fisher’s alleged remark in the shelter was at least in character. He was a Julian Huxley’ for the masses; the New Naturalist incarnate. At the time of the Soho lunch, he was only 29, but already one of the best-known British ornithologists through his position as Secretary of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), his authorship of a best-selling book Watching Birds, and most of all through his unusual energy and strength of purpose. As with Huxley, brains were in no short supply among the Fishers. James’ father was Kenneth Fisher, headmaster of Oundle School, whose pupils included Peter Scott and Leslie Brown. He was a keen birdwatcher, though the greatest influence on the young James’ natural history was not his father but his maternal uncle Arnold Boyd, the Cheshire naturalist (of whom we shall hear more). James was bright enough to be sent to Eton as a King’s Scholar, and from thence went up to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1931 to read medicine. He soon changed to zoology: birds were by now his life’s passion. He joined the Oxford Arctic expedition in 1933 as ornithologist. This resulted in his first scientific paper and a twenty-year obsession with the fulmar. In 1936, he married Margery Lilian Edith Turner, later a writer and critic of children’s books and with whom Fisher wrote a biography of the explorer Ernest Shackleton. Their honeymoon was spent watching sea-birds on Fair Isle. The quest for sea-birds matched Fisher’s love of travel and his fondness for boating and climbing for which his tall, broad-shouldered physique was ideal. Reading about him, one has the impression that he threw himself into every project with the greatest drive and enthusiasm. Even at that time he seemed to know everyone and everything in ornithological circles. If some people found him rather exhausting, he was nonetheless a popular man. Unlike some learned people, he was out-going and affable, with a sense of humour (and hence a sense of proportion). He was by all accounts a good mixer, equally at home in the Savile Club or at meetings of the Northamptonshire Naturalists’ Trust. He was a great bon viveur. Niall Campbell recalled an evening with James Fisher on a cruise ship anchored off St Kilda, around 1950: ‘At the end of our cheerful evening I had to be lowered like a sack of potatoes into an inflatable and taken ashore to my billet. I wish that I had met him more often.’
Having gone down from Oxford with a disappointing second-class degree (having spent most of his time there birdwatching), Fisher taught briefly at Bishops Stortford before joining the staff at London Zoo as assistant curator. There he saw a great deal of Julian Huxley, both on the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour and in their joint work for the BTO, organising popular participation in bird study. James Fisher was to dedicate his New Naturalist book, Sea-Birds, to Julian Huxley ‘for his guidance and encouragement, and in recollection of the many happy days we have spent together watching sea-birds’. In 1939, the two of them had taken part in an expedition to St Kilda to survey gannets and other sea-birds. St Kilda was thereafter Fisher’s spiritual home. Had it not been for the war, he would have been back there year after year, and perhaps written a Gannet as well as a Fulmar.
Instead, Fisher spent the war studying rooks for the Ministry of Agriculture. But first he had found time to write a natural history classic, Watching Birds, which, more than any other book, established birdwatching as a popular scientific hobby. Watching Birds was a more pertinent title then than it would be now, for in 1940 more people shot birds than watched them. The book had many of the hallmarks of Huxley’s influence, with chapters devoted to topics still relatively little known to the ordinary naturalist, like migration, bird habitats, bird language and behaviour. The style also was novel in its presentation of the latest discoveries in easy, everyday language, and its confident, not to say exuberant, manner. Watching Birds was published as a cheap Pelican ‘science for the masses’ paperback, and proved a bestseller. The subscription form on the back helped to double the membership of the BTO between 1940 and 1944. Of special interest is the original preface which gives us a good idea why James Fisher became so interested in the New Naturalist books:
‘Some people might consider an apology necessary for the appearance of a book about birds at a time when Britain is fighting for its own and many other lives. I make no such apology. Birds are part of the heritage we are fighting for. After this war ordinary people are going to have a better time than they have had; they are going to get about more; they will have time to rest from their tremendous tasks; many will get the opportunity, hitherto sought in vain, of watching wild creatures and making discoveries about them.’
James Fisher. Preface in Watching Birds (1940)
Fisher had little sympathy with scientific elites. Nor had he anything but scorn for the type of ‘popular’ natural history that prevailed before the war, which he considered simplistic rather than simple and sometimes gruesomely sentimental, or, at the other pole, rather arid and concerned mainly with identification. The clearest statement of James Fisher’s views on natural history are contained in the first three pages of his ill-fated New Naturalist Journal, compiled in 1947. He probably held similar views in 1940. Essentially, it was that the amateur field naturalist had come of age; the natural history tradition of England – ‘this great stream’ – was being broadened by popular participation and deepened by the new science of ecology. It was time for the naturalist to leave his skins, slides and cabinets, and step outside to observe how wild animals, birds and plants live. Now, above all, was the time for the expert to speak to the amateur through journals, books and lectures, and for the amateur to contribute to solving the problems of distribution, ecology and life history. In a letter to Alister Hardy, Fisher expressed confidence that ‘the regrettable confusion between popular scientific writing and vulgar journalism is being swept away…In another twenty years every field of natural history will be invaded by amateurs, who will outnumber trained professionals in almost every sphere. We seem [with the New Naturalist library] to be getting prepared for this.’
Perhaps Fisher underestimated the tenacity of vulgar journalism and the malign influence of television. But it was views like these that he brought to bear on the development of the New Naturalist series, so much so that it became the written embodiment of Fisher’s new natural history. It is said that James Fisher was the only person to have been unsurprised at the astounding sales of the first New Naturalist books. In his eyes, their success was no more than a validation of the beliefs he had expressed so confidently in Watching Birds, five years earlier.
No one took notes on what was said at the Jardin des Gourmets, but an article written a few years later by Billy Collins for The Bookseller summarises his own intentions and Huxley’s response to them. His idea was for ‘a new survey of Britain’s natural history’. As Collins expressed it, this was to take the form of a complete library of nature books which would combine low price and presentation, and yet make available to the public ‘all the wealth of scientific knowledge that had been acquired during the present century’. Though no doubt commercially courageous, this was not a revolutionary idea. On the contrary, it corresponded with the mood of the time, with such projects as the Huxley-Wells Science of Life series, and popular interest in the latest discoveries of science had, if anything, increased during the war. Billy Collins believed his trump card lay in his ability to illustrate these books lavishly with colour photographs ‘to show nature in her true colours’. This was in fact Huxley’s main doubt about the enterprise. He believed that colour reproduction had not yet advanced that far, and needed a great deal of convincing that the miraculous qualities of American quarter plate Kodachrome, in which Collins and Foges had great faith and had acquired large stocks of (see Chapter 3), would overcome hitherto insuperable problems in nature photography. Fisher’s contribution to the lunch might have been to emphasise the importance of modern ornithology in the new natural history. Fisher’s remarks in the New Naturalist Journal make it clear that he wanted to get right away from the old idea of dealing with wildlife group by group, species by species, and back to what he called ‘the inquiring spirit of the old naturalist’. By this phrase – and he might have been thinking primarily of Gilbert White – he was alluding to the sense of wonder which leads to a desire to find out, by observation, deduction and simple experiment. Later these words were incorporated into a sort of New Naturalist credo, which was printed opposite the title page of each book (and also on the back cover of the earliest jackets). Its words may be familiar to readers of this book, but their assertion was the key to the series and it is worth repeating them in their original form at this stage in the story:
The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalist. The Editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native fauna and flora, to which must be added concern for their conservation, are best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research. The plants and animals are described in relation to their homes and habitats and are portrayed in the full beauty of their natural colours, by the latest methods of colour photography and reproduction.
The four seem to have had a productive lunch. It was on that day, wrote Billy Collins, that general ideas started to firm up into concrete suggestions and the rather complicated editorial arrangements for the series were worked out. Huxley and Fisher would form the nucleus of an Editorial Board (Collins usually referred to it as the ‘Committee’), whose job it would be to ‘plan happy marriages between subjects and authors’ and nurse each book through to publication. Adprint would take charge of the production of illustrative material, including photographic plates, maps and text figures, and Collins would print the book – and, it must be hoped, provide tea and cream buns. The three sections of the New Naturalist triumvirate, editors, printer and illustrator, would meet frequently to review progress and to plan the next stage in the process. And a long and exigent process it turned out to be. Nevertheless, the concept slowly limped its way to fulfilment through all the frustrations and obstructions of wartime, and by the end of 1945 the first books were rolling off the presses. ‘The New Naturalist was born.’
One matter which must have been raised at the Soho lunch, if not very soon afterwards, was the composition of the Editorial Board. It was clear that it would need to be broadened. The interests of Huxley and Fisher lay in broadly similar fields, and neither claimed expertise in botany or the earth sciences. If the library was to embrace the whole of British natural history, including the rocks, soils and landscape, it would need at least two more editors. There is nothing on record to say when Julian Huxley (for the choice seems to have been his) co-opted John Gilmour and Dudley Stamp, though it must have been at some time between June and November 1942.2 Both men would have been on anyone’s short list.
John Scott Lennox Gilmour was aged 37 in June 1942. He had contributed to the Huxley-edited The New Systematics (1940), and Huxley had probably known him for some time before that since both men were among the founder members of The Systematics Association, created in 1935 to promote the study of evolutionary relationships. Though of Scottish ancestry, Gilmour was born in London, and educated at Uppingham and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, specialising in botany in his final year. His conversion to the pleasures of botanising had taken place in his early teens, and in the New Naturalist book Wild Flowers he explained in characteristic style how it came about:
‘When I went to a preparatory school I knew and cared nothing about wild plants. At the end of the summer term each boy had to produce fifty named species. On the last day but one I had not collected a single plant. Desperation drove me to a high-speed tour of the lanes near the school, guided by a friend who had already made his collection, and on the following day I duly presented my fifty plants. This discreditable incident implanted in me, against every modern principle of education, a passion for the British flora which has never been extinguished.’
John Gilmour. Wild Flowers pp. 1-2
No sooner had Gilmour graduated than he was appointed Curator of the University Herbarium and Botanical Museum at Cambridge. He must have been highly regarded at Cambridge. The work plunged him into the world of naming and classification, then a stagnant and neglected field. With two fellow Cambridge botanists, William Stearn and T.G. Tutin, he did much to get that particular ball rolling again, and their work helped to establish Cambridge in the forefront of modern taxonomy. Gilmour’s individual contributions tended to be based not so much on experiment as on philosophy and on his wide reading. He was naturally reflective (later he became President of the Cambridge Humanists), and it is easier to imagine him discoursing from a common room armchair, puffing on his pipe, than chasing around the world after orchids or scaling cliffs in search of alpine flora. In scientific terms, he was a pragmatist. He argued that since classification is essentially utilitarian, there was no possibility of devising a perfect system that would satisfy everybody. Nor was there any need to do so, since different classifications served different purposes. In 1939, he and A.J. Gregor came up with their own method of cutting the material to suit the cloth. Their system of ‘demes’ did not gain universal acceptance by any means, but it was a useful reminder that there were more ways than one of tackling the problem.
Such work is read and argued over only by specialists. Gilmour did not in any case publish much, though when he did his writing was usually clear and well thought out. His New Naturalist correspondence was generally short and to-the-point, though written in a sprawling hand. He is remembered by a larger number of botanists for his career in scientific horticulture, which began in 1931 after his appointment to the assistant directorship of Kew Gardens at the astonishingly early age of 25. After the war was over, he took up a new senior post at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley, before returning to Cambridge as director of the University Botanic Garden. Wartime disrupted his career, as it did that of most British scientists, and at the time of the first New Naturalist meeting, Gilmour was working for the Ministry of Fuel and Power.
John Gilmour’s career, then, had taken in scholarship, science and administration. There was another side to him that might have influenced Huxley. Gilmour was, by all accounts, a pleasant man, strikingly good looking, urbane (D.E. Allen mentions his ‘suavity and savoir faire’) and cultured, not just in a scientific sense but in his wide sympathies and love of poetry, music and philosophy. He brought to the New Naturalist Board not only a comprehension of the botanical world but also a socially cohesive quality. According to his close friend and colleague Max Walters, he was good at creating an esprit de corps: ‘More than any other person in his generation, John was able to be persona grata to a very wide spectrum of colleagues ranging from the professional taxonomist to the amateur gardener.’ His liberal outlook and unfailing good manners were no doubt an equal asset at the New Naturalist Board meetings.
While one could imagine alternative names to Gilmour’s, there was one candidate for the role of geographical editor who was head and shoulders above any other. Laurence Dudley Stamp was aged 44 at the time of the first Board meeting. He looked older: a bluff, bulky, balding figure, generally dressed in tweeds, with a vaguely military air about him. Stamp, like Fisher, was a man of quite awesome energy. More or less continuous illness in childhood meant he had received very little formal schooling, but he achieved such brilliant results in the Cambridge local examinations in 1913 that he was accepted as a student at King’s College, London at the age of 15. Having gained a first class degree in geology and endured a spell in the Royal Engineers on the Western Front, he stayed on at King’s College until 1922, obtaining his doctorate in geology and dashing off another first class degree, this time in geography (by the end of his life he had amassed quite a collection of degrees). King’s was Julian Huxley’s London college. Although his time there did not coincide with Stamp’s, the two might have met later after Stamp’s return from three years of academic duties in the Far East to the Cassell Readership in Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, a post held until 1945. Huxley certainly knew of him by reputation.
Stamp is remembered for two great achievements. The first was his authorship of a remarkable succession of geography textbooks in the 1920s and 30s, written ‘at a time when good texts were urgently necessary to support the great development of the subject at home and overseas’. Some of these books are enormous tomes of 600 pages or more, and ran into many editions: The World: a general geography (19th edition 1977); Asia: a regional and economic geography (10th edition 1959); The British Isles: a geographic and economic survey (6th edition 1971); Chisholm’s handbook of commercial geography rewritten by Stamp (20th edition 1980); An intermediate commercial geography (12th edition 1965). There were many others. If Stamp was as devoted a university lecturer and family man as he was a textbook writer, he must have been a master of what today’s officer workers call ‘time management’. He was a one-man publications industry and, indeed, his New Naturalist contracts were made out to ‘L. Dudley Stamp of Geographical Publications Ltd’.
The non-geographical world remembers Stamp for other reasons. From 1930 to 1935 he organised the great Land Utilisation Survey, the first countrywide survey to map every acre of England, Scotland and Wales at a scale of one-inch to the mile. The work was organised over three seasons from 1931 to 1933 with the help of thousands of volunteers, mainly from schools and other educational establishments, representing the equivalent of 230 man-years of effort. Stamp himself spent a great deal of time being driven about in the family car, standing on the passenger seat taking notes with his head peering out through the sun roof. In this way he covered much of the British Isles, and the varied scenery and underlying rocks covered in so short a time must have made a profound impression on him. The maps were accompanied by county reports written by Stamp and his associates, in which the use of land was analysed in unprecedented detail. It was unfortunate that the survey took place during the great depression, when many farms had gone out of production, so that the survey was, in a sense, ‘untypical’. But at the least it was a valuable template for future land-use study, and it influenced Lord Justice Scott’s great report on rural planning (1941-42). Stamp later wrote a book based on the Land Utilisation Survey called The Land of Britain: its use and misuse (1948) which has been praised as a landmark in British geography for its masterly handling of complex detail.
Stamp was one of the pioneers of postwar planning. His knowledge of land use drew him by degrees into government committee work. In 1942 he was appointed Chief Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture on rural land use, for which work he was appointed CBE. As Lord Scott’s deputy, he was responsible for the drafting of much of the Scott Report, the blueprint for the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. The report also involved him in the planning for National Parks and ‘nature reservations’, all of which were to be part of the better world for which the British people had fought (see Chapter 11). Later, Stamp became much involved with the work of the Nature Conservancy, and it was he, rather than one of the biological editors, who wrote the New Naturalist book on nature conservation. In all this, a picture emerges of an energetic, practical man, a gifted textbook writer with a sure command of clear simple English, not a theorist, nor, in the narrow sense of the word, an intellectual. Stamp’s interests spanned the whole of physical, social and economic geography, and he was also a naturalist and pioneer conservationist. Perhaps he attempted too much. His obituarist reminds us that, as in the case of John Gilmour, he was less important for what he did than for what he was: an open friendly man, helpful at getting ‘lame dogs over stiles’, and a great enthusiast. After his death in 1966, his fellow editors recalled how Stamp ‘got things done by Socratic persuasion, leavened by a happy humour and the most patent love of his multifarious subjects’.
The Editorial Board’s complement was completed with the addition of Eric Hosking to act as photographic editor, and whose ‘initiation’ I describe in Chapter 3. The Board first met on 7 January 1943, and continued to meet at intervals of a couple of months throughout the war. Billy Collins and Wolfgang Foges were usually both present. It was a hard working committee. Billy Collins was at pains to point out that this was not ‘a nominal board to which a fee was paid for the use of their eminent names’. According to Collins, not one meeting was ever suspended, even during the V1 and V2 raids of 1944 when the Board became very much aware that their temporary accommodation in a studio off Oxford Street contained ‘an uncomfortable proportion of glass’. Recalling those days, Dudley Stamp said that ‘Few of our early meetings passed without an air-raid warning; we occupied a succession of temporary offices in different parts of London and rather took the view that if a bomb were intended for us that would be that.’ After the emergencies were over, the Board returned to the Collins offices in St James’s Place, and it was there that Eric Hosking took the photographs reproduced here, probably with the purpose of illustrating Billy Collins’ article. For those who are familiar with the better-known portrait of the Board taken twenty years later, the relative youth of the editors in 1945 is striking. All are smartly dressed, Dudley in his tweeds, the rest in dark city suits. Fisher and Hosking have horrible 1940s haircuts and round spectacles. Stamp is examining a brand new copy of Butterflies. Gilmour sits there to one side with his pipe, smiling like a matinee idol. Billy Collins is recognisable only by his eyebrows.
The initial task of the Editorial Board was to draw up a detailed scheme for a set of books that would cover the whole field of British natural history. Billy Collins’ original proposal was to produce a set of thirty-six titles, so that the whole library could conceivably be written and published within five years or so.3 That list was almost immediately extended to fifty titles. According to Dudley Stamp:
‘We soon realised that it would be better to have an elastic series giving our authors scope to develop their own particular fields of study, and that we could in this way interest the cream of scientific workers who would never agree to write within a framework laid down by others. We believed that the time had come to break away from the long-held belief that books on natural history must be written in popular style – a belief common to most publishers. We believed on the contrary that there was a large public waiting to be introduced to serious work and research in progress, provided it was presented in an attractive manner.’
L. Dudley Stamp. Preface in Nature Conservation in Britain (1969)
Over the first few meetings of the Board, the five members drew up a comprehensive list of titles and, in some cases at least, prospective authors. We would like to know what all these titles were, but unfortunately no minutes of these early meetings have survived. Possibly none were made. According to Billy Collins, writing in early 1946, the range of subjects was divided into four groups. They were, in his words:
‘1. Organisms; e.g. butterflies, birds, flowers, trees etc.
2. Habitats; e.g. mountains, moorlands, woodlands etc.
3. Regions; e.g. London, Highlands of Scotland, Snowdonia etc.
4. Special Subjects; e.g. Game, Art and Natural History, Conservation etc.’
In practice, of course, this rather reductive scheme was not always realised. The authors contributed their own ideas, and in most cases were wisely left to write their own book within broad and generalised guidelines. One can, by deduction, make a fair guess at the list. Table 2 is my best stab at reconstructing the original titles of 1943; and readers familiar with the titles of the New Naturalist library will see right away how far it differs from those actually printed. Some, like The Open Sea, Spiders and The Lake District took a decade or more to complete. A few were eventually combined, like Mountains and Moorlands or Lakes and Rivers. Others became fragmented, like Art and Natural History which became The Art of Botanical Illustration. A few, like The Thames Valley and Molluscs were never written at all.
The problem lay not so much in finding experts for particular subjects, but finding anyone with sufficient free time to write a book. In 1943 practically every potential author was engaged on war service of one kind or another. It was impossible to forecast when the war would end, although most people seem to have been confident that Britain would win it. The authors’ difficulties were compounded by the removal of major reference libraries, such as those of Kew or the British Museum (Natural History). Fraser Darling, stranded on the remote Summer Isles, had only his own books and experiences to draw on. Others, like Maurice Yonge (pronounced ‘Yung’), were up to their ears in work, with academic duties alternating with wartime committees and active service in the territorial army and fire service. Leo Harrison Matthews was a member of the ‘secret army’ of inventors, working on radio and radar installations for aircraft. At least one future New Naturalist author was locked up in a German prison camp. It was not a propitious time to ask someone in a senior position to write a book. Fortunately, many of those contacted seem to have been keen to write for the series, once things got back to normal, and most of them eventually did so. In the meantime, Collins resigned himself to a slower production rate than he had hoped for. At one time, he noted, ‘only one MS was being written’.
It may seem surprising that the publishers seemed to know exactly who they wanted to write the first books of the series. This was, of course, the function of the Editorial Board, without whom the publisher would have had little idea. At that time, the worlds of professional biology and natural history were relatively close-knit, thanks to the British penchant for clubs and societies in which amateur and professional mixed freely. Huxley had tutored Alister Hardy and worked with E.B. Ford; Fisher knew Fraser Darling, Arnold Boyd, Richard Fitter and others very well. Gilmour was an active member of botanical societies, and a former colleague of W.B. Turrill and Victor Summerhayes. Stamp was a good friend of Sidney Wooldridge, and knew Gordon Manley and Alfred Steers. And one did not need to be a zoological initiate to have heard of Maurice Yonge, Leo Harrison Matthews or Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald. A few names, like Ernest Neal’s, were suggested to the Board by others, but otherwise these were men who knew one another at least by repute, and were often colleagues and friends as well, through common membership of the British Ecological Society or the contemporary Nature Reserves Investigation Committee.
The first round of authors were contacted during the late summer of 1943. I have tracked down two of the initial letters in the private papers of Sir Alister Hardy and Sir Maurice Yonge, both of them written by Julian Huxley, the first on 17th August 1943, the second the day afterwards. Apart from one or two more personal paragraphs, the wording is almost exactly the same in each, the clear inference being that this was a standard letter. Since this letter is such a clear expression of the ethos of the New Naturalist series, as well as its first significant document, I reproduce the entire letter here. The notepaper is headed THE NEW NATURALIST. A Survey of British Natural History. The printed address, that of the Adprint offices on Newman Street, W1, has been crossed out and a temporary address at 16 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1 typed in.
Dr C.M. Yonge,
Department of Zoology,
The University,
Bristol.
18th August 1943
My dear Yonge,
I have undertaken to serve on the editorial board of a new series, of about 50 books, on British Natural History, and want to persuade you to write a volume in it.
The series is being published by Messrs Collins and produced by Messrs Adprints. It is planned to have two new features: (1) it will contain a large number of colour illustrations (either 32 or 48 in each volume) executed by the most up to date techniques. Black-and-white illustrations will also be included. So far as colour illustrations go, some volumes will be illustrated wholly by reproductions of paintings, etc. but the majority will be colour photographs, especially taken for the series by a body of well known nature photographers, equipped with the latest apparatus; (2) it will not adopt the traditional method of dealing with the various plants and animals group by group, but will attempt to give what I may call a survey of the natural history resources of our islands. Some volumes will deal with particular groups, not, however, from a comprehensive taxonomic point of view, but with reference to the scientific, cultural or practical interests of the group as a whole and of various selected members of it; others will deal with habitats – e.g. Moorland, inter-tidal zone, etc.; others with regions – e.g. London, the Scottish Highlands, the Thames, etc.; and still others with the human relations of the subject – e.g. sport, conservation, art. Throughout, the geology and geography will be treated as a part of the natural history, on the one hand in relation to scenery, and on the other as affording a basis for the plant and animal ecology.
The series will be addressed to the intelligent layman, i.e. the books must not be too technical and must be interestingly written, but they must not be merely ‘popular’. Each volume will contain from about 75,000 to about 100,000 words and the price is fixed at 12/6d. I enclose a preliminary note on terms; if you are interested I will send a detailed contract.
What I am hoping you will do is to write a book on the Natural History of the Sea Shore. We shall also try to secure one on the open sea as a habitat, another on fisheries – each of course being treated from quite a different angle.
There is no hurry about this book at the moment, as we have some titles fixed up for the next 12 months or so, but we should like to think that we might expect it in the Spring of 1945. Meanwhile I am most anxious to get you committed to writing the book as I am sure that nobody else could do it better, and I don’t want you to get committed to other ventures. As you will see, the financial terms are really very favourable. Furthermore, I understand that you are already doing a little book on the same general subject for Britain in Pictures. While this would not in any way compete with the larger book proposed, it would doubtless help in preparing the way for it.
If, as I hope, you are interested in this, we might meet some time when you are up in London and discuss it further. It may be that you would wish to get in a botanist to help on the plant side, either as a collaborator or simply as consultant. That could easily be arranged.
Yours ever,
Julian Huxley
Although the letters to Yonge and Hardy were signed by Huxley, not all of the early books were commissioned by him. Evidently the titles were divided between the four literary editors, each taking on those within his particular field. Huxley seems to have taken the lead for the more general ‘biological’ books, and his name must have been a factor in persuading senior biologists like John Russell, Alister Hardy and Maurice Yonge to write for the series. At this stage, James Fisher took on the more obviously birdy titles, but after Huxley’s departure to head UNESCO in 1946 he also took over much of Huxley’s role as a sort of managing editor. Gilmour and Stamp respectively edited the botanical and geological books. The idea was that each editor would themselves contribute a book to the series. Stamp immediately set to work writing Britain’s Structure and Scenery with the same speed and efficiency that characterised the production of his textbooks. Gilmour was pencilled in to write the wild flower book for the series, but failed at first to make much headway with it. Fisher was planning to write The Fulmar and Sea-Birds once he had completed his researches. Huxley never did contribute a book. A pity: he could have written a wonderful unifying book about evolution. There was also an intention for all five editors to combine in writing a book about nature conservation in Britain. This concern with nature conservation, reflected in the standard ‘credo’ of the series, reflected the involvement of ecologists and geographers in national planning in the immediate postwar years. Huxley, Gilmour and Stamp were members of one or other of the committees that produced the blueprint for nature conservation after the war (see Chapter 11). But a book on nature conservation written in 1943 would have been a very slim volume!
From the start, it was evident that the New Naturalist library would be a unique opportunity for someone like Hardy or Darling to write a really meaty, enthusiastic book, their popular magnum opus. As an additional incentive, Huxley had described the publisher’s terms as ‘very favourable’. Favourable is a relative term that academic scientists and writers of popular fiction might define very differently. They do not seem particularly generous. The standard contract for the early New Naturalist books guaranteed a minimum first edition of 10,000 copies. For these the author would be paid a fee rather than a royalty: £200 on acceptance of the manuscript and £200 on publication. In practice, however, the print-run of these books unexpectedly ran to 20,000 or more copies. The author was paid £40 for every 1,000 copies printed over the initial guarantee of 10,000. For the second and any subsequent edition he was paid a royalty of 10 per cent. For a book with a first edition print run of 20,000, therefore, the author would earn £800, irrespective of the rate of sales. Thereafter his income would be higher in terms of percentages, but pegged to sales rather than printings. At a time when £2,000 represented a comfortable annual income, a New Naturalist book certainly represented something more than mere pocket money; on the other hand, no one was likely to give up his day job on the strength of it. Moreover, these relatively favourable rates lasted only so long as New Naturalist titles were printed and sold in large quantity. Those authors who had not completed their books by the end of 1949 were sent an ‘Addendum’ to their contract which amounted to a unilateral adjustment to the terms in the light of falling sales and the rising costs of colour reproduction. In 1945, a first edition sold out in six months or so. By 1949, however, the large editions that Collins needed to print because of block-making and setting costs were unlikely to sell out in as many years. Billy Collins’ solution was to pay the author the balance owed on 10,000 books, irrespective of the size of the edition. This in effect reduced an author’s earnings to the £500 mark. By the mid-1950s, the sales were such that Collins could no longer guarantee to print even 10,000 books, and from then on the author was paid a 10 per cent royalty on the basis of half-yearly sales. This brought his income down to about £100 a year.
Table 2. The New Naturalist: original title list (1943)
The list of titles below has been reconstructed from surviving documents such as publisher’s contracts, commissioning letters and other correspondence. There were at least ten other titles (bringing the total to 50) which were listed at an early stage, but I can do no more than guess what they might have been [Wild Orchids, Limestone Flowers, Bogs and Fens, Woodlands, Migration, Seals, Caves, Ecological Communities, British Naturalists and British Islands are my best effort, but I could be completely wrong!].
INVERTEBRATE ORGANISMS |
Butterflies (E.B. Ford) |
Dragonflies (Cynthia Longfield) |
Spiders (W.S. Bristowe) |
Insects (A.D. Imms) |
Molluscs |
VERTEBRATE ORGANISMS |
Fish (E. Trewavas) |
Mammals (L. Harrison Matthews) |
Reptiles and Amphibians (Malcolm Smith) |
Sea-Birds (James Fisher) |
Woodland Birds (Bruce Campbell) |
Shore Birds (Eric Ennion) |
Birds and Men (E.M. Nicholson) |
Marsh and Freshwater Birds (R.C. Homes) |
Moorland Birds |
PLANTS |
Biology of British Flora (W.B. Turrill) |
Wild Flowers (John Gilmour) |
Grasses (C.E. Hubbard) |
Trees (E.W. Jones) |
Ferns and Mosses (F. Ballard) |
Mushrooms and Toadstools (John Ramsbottom) |
HABITATS |
Moorlands (W.H. Pearsall) |
Mountains (W.V Lewis) |
Lakes (E.B. Worthington) |
Rivers (A.A. Miller) |
The Sea Shore (C.M. Yonge) |
The Open Sea (Alister Hardy) |
REGIONAL VOLUMES |
Natural History of London (Richard Fitter) |
The Thames Valley |
Highlands of Scotland (F. Fraser Darling) |
Snowdonia (Bruce Campbell and others) |
The Broads (R. Gurney and others) |
The Lake District (E. Blezard and others) |
Dartmoor (L.A. Harvey and others) |
A Country Parish (A.W Boyd) |
SPECIAL SUBJECTS |
British Game (Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald) |
Art and Natural History |
Nature Conservation (all the editors together) |
Geology of British Isles (L. Dudley Stamp) |
Climate and Life (Gordon Manley) |
Fossils (A.E. Trueman) |
Natural History of Man (H.J. Fleure) |
In fact some other natural history publishers offered terms that were considerably better. One reason for the delicate economics of the New Naturalist series was the high production costs. Another was the system by which the five editors themselves earned a royalty from the books instead of receiving a set fee. Essentially, one quarter of the author’s earnings from each book were paid to the editors. Originally this amounted to £12 per 1,000 copies sold, but under a memorandum of agreement made in 1952 between Collins and the editors, the terms were modified to a royalty of 11/2 per cent of the published price for the first 10,000 copies printed, and thereafter 21/2 per cent i.e. half of a per cent for each editor. They certainly earned their half a per cent, but the system operated at the expense of the authors. The latter seem to have accepted these terms with equanimity. There was, however, considerably more friction over the sharing of costs for text drawings, and, more generally, over Collins’ sometimes sloppy accounting and failure to answer letters promptly, which tended to worsen over time. This is not a matter over which we New Naturalist admirers need linger. Correspondence of the sort that fills the New Naturalist files is no doubt the lot of most publishers. It is mentioned here because to do otherwise might cast an unwarranted rosy glow over the series at odds with what readers might have learned from the authors themselves.
The first New Naturalist books broke into the shops in late 1945. Billy Collins had advertised the series widely, both in the trade and in countryside magazines, and there seems to have been a widely shared sense of expectancy about them. Dudley Stamp recalled that:
‘We knew that many of the older publishers were shaking their heads and prophesying a colossal flop. But such was the obvious interest aroused, even in advance of publication of the first titles, that the initial printing order was increased from 5,000 to 10,000 and then at the last minute to 20,000 of each. The war, both in Europe and the East, came to an end while those books were passing through the press. Though publishers were rationed for paper and had to use their scant supplies to best advantage, the public were never rationed for books – if they could get them.’
Author’s Preface, Nature Conservation in Britain (1969)
Those who can remember what bookshops were like in 1945 recall the colourful impact of Butterflies and London’s Natural History (soon to be joined by British Game and Britain’s Structure and Scenery) on those drab shelves. They were the ‘godsend’ referred to by Dudley Stamp at the start of this chapter. They were topical, up-to-date, involved the amateur naturalist in new ventures and set new standards of presentation. Above all, these books were perfectly timed for the ending of the war and the hoped-for Better Britain. They had a ready market among the ex-servicemen who had spent the previous years in the desert, or on Atlantic convoys, or in the jungles of Burma and Assam. They were seized eagerly by evacuees who had had their first taste of country living during the war, and found they liked it. The interest in the series revealed by the unexpected size of advance subscriptions must have caused many publishing heads to turn in surprise. But without the stocks of paper and the team of authors and photographers built up by Collins, no other publisher was able to compete in this market. All the same, the investment in the series had been enormous. By the time the first books were on the shelves, the editors had already been busy for nearly three years. From mid-1943, their main tasks had been commissioning titles and approving the colour photographs. But as more and more manuscripts started to arrive, the bulk of their time was spent outside the boardroom, corresponding with their authors, commenting on the drafts and sometimes contributing very substantially to the completion of the book. The exact nature of their work, and the way they approached the task, is perhaps illustrated most clearly by reviewing the course of a ‘typical’ New Naturalist meeting. I have chosen one from October 1951, which exhibits a representative range of problems arising and a good mix of titles. First though, let us deal briefly with some of the broader aspects of the editors’ work.
The size of the editor’s task in nursing a title through to publication varied from book to book. One author might leave him little to do, while another might involve him in a mountain of correspondence, hours of editing and a great deal of diplomacy. Having decided on the ideal combination of author and subject, one of the editors wrote to the individual concerned and asked him to provide a synopsis of the book. This would be copied and circulated to the other editors, who might suggest modifications here, a change in emphasis there, or make suggestions of their own. The synopsis having been accepted, the author would then be sent a standard contract, tailored for that particular title. In some cases, the contract arrived long after the book was begun. The author then had one more hurdle to overcome: a specimen chapter to give the editors a better idea of the author’s style and approach to his or her subject. It was at this point that an editor would be formally assigned to the book. The editors all took their duties very seriously: as far as possible, statements and references were checked carefully, and any outstanding points were discussed with the author (often directly, for at this stage in the series author and editor met face to face). Finally, the responsible editor would write a preface for the book, introducing the author and explaining the special qualities which made author and subject, in Billy Collins’ felicitous phrase, ‘a happy marriage’.
The Editors’ Preface was nearly always left unsigned (the exception is in Nature Conservation in Britain, where all four surviving editors pay tribute to the departed Dudley Stamp). It was always the Editors’ Preface, not an Editor’s. These collective efforts help to lend the New Naturalists an intimate quality, a series of well-mannered introductions: editor introduces reader to author; author introduces reader to the book. Beneath their collective preface, the editors added words that would come back to haunt them, stating that they had taken every care ‘to ensure the scientific accuracy of factual statements in these volumes’, while resting ‘the responsibility for the interpretation of facts’ on the author alone. Confident but dangerous words. There have not been many books where an editor is willing to share in the responsibility for errors.
For the first four titles of the series, Butterflies, London’s Natural History, British Game and Britain’s Structure and Scenery, the editorial burden seems to have been relatively light; for the latter title, Dudley Stamp was indeed effectively his own editor. London’s Natural History was Richard Fitter’s idea. His BTO colleague, James Fisher, had wanted him to write a book for the series, but on the Thames Valley. Fitter replied that he didn’t know a lot about the Thames Valley but would do one on London, because that was where he lived at the time. He had also been a very active member of the London Natural History Society, and had amassed a great deal of information on London wildlife. Fisher might have been expecting a bird-oriented book, but the result was much more novel and interesting: a study of the relationship of man and wildlife in an almost wholly non-natural landscape. It was in fact the first book about urban ecology. Richard Fitter recalls writing the book methodically, two hours after supper every evening, until the first draft was ready early in 1945. He remembers Huxley enthusing about the opening of his sample chapter ‘Before Londinium’: ‘In the year 1877, at Meux’s Horseshoe Brewery at the southern end of Tottenham Court Road, a well was bored, which plunged through 1146 feet of solid rock and millions of years of London history.’ That was the kind of thing they were looking for. Fitter’s professionalism might have left the editors with relatively little to do, but John Gilmour did get Sir Edward Salisbury to contribute a list of flowering plants and ferns recorded from London’s bomb sites to balance Fitter’s list of London birds.
Frank Fraser Darling’s book, Natural History in the Highlands and Islands, involved the team in considerably more work. As Darling pointed out much later, ‘The book was very much a one-man effort, written largely during the later war years when I was living in island remoteness and when travel to libraries was difficult.’ Nor did he have much opportunity to speak to specialists. The personal viewpoint is expressed in the title: it was Darling’s own ‘plain tale of a remarkable region’ and not a textbook on highland wildlife. Darling’s closest collaborator, James Fisher, had, with his usual enthusiasm, become involved in the detail as well as the outline of the book. ‘His friendship has been sorely tried,’ wrote Darling, rather mysteriously, in his preface. Billy Collins, for his part, relates offhandedly that he, Julian Huxley and James Fisher ‘paid visits’ to remote Strontian to discuss the book with the author. Strontian was very remote indeed, if you happened to live in London. In fact, I find this the most remarkable statement in the entire history of the New Naturalist series. All three of them, all that way, and more than once! These books must indeed have been something out of the ordinary.
The editors made a number of contributions to the overall style of the library. One of these was the special distribution maps, first used in Butterflies. The editors considered that the existing maps of the British Isles were inadequate and so a new outline map was printed by Adprint under Dudley Stamp’s direction. For the purpose of pinpointing localities accurately, the map carried the National Grid for Great Britain around the margins, and it could be, and has been, mistaken for a prototype of the later distribution maps that use the standard 10km grid square (as used for the Atlas of the British Flora). However, the latter maps were devised at a conference held by the Botanical Society of the British Isles in 1950, apparently without reference to the New Naturalist maps. The similarity between the two is only superficial: while the New Naturalist maps represent actual sites, the much more methodical plotting on the BSBI maps is based on grid squares on a presence or absence basis. Nevertheless, the New Naturalist maps, first used to map the distribution of butterflies, were a significant advance on earlier efforts to map the flora and fauna, and enabled the editors to claim that ‘nothing so effective has previously appeared’.
It was at Dudley Stamp’s request that another common feature of the library appeared – the list of titles printed on the back of the dust jacket. Originally the latter had been used to advertise related or forthcoming issues, or, in the very first books, the ethos of the series itself. The first book to list all the titles (plus some forthcoming ones) was Natural History in the Highlands and Islands, but it became a regular feature only after the mid-1950s. At first the list contained all the main series titles, but from about 1967 those that had become out of print were omitted, so that a new generation of New Naturalist readers might never know of A Country Parish or Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. The listing of the Monographs was never as methodical. At least one title, the ill-fated Ants, was, so far as I am aware, never listed or advertised at all. It flitted briefly in and out of publication like a phantom in green buckram. It was only in the mid-1980s, after nearly all the older titles had gone out of print, that the full list of mainstream New Naturalist titles was reinstated – in ever smaller print as the list grows apace.
It is a measure of the dedication and team spirit of the original Editorial Board that they worked together in seeming harmony for more than twenty years, far longer than any of them had expected when they accepted Billy Collins’ invitation. Together they saw some 70 titles through to publication, and their ranks were sundered only by death: Stamp’s in 1966 and James Fisher’s in 1970. The successful idea of a team of five, with Sir William Collins or a deputy in the chair, was adhered to. Stamp was replaced by a fellow geographer, Margaret Davies, among whose contributions was the substantial revision of H.J. Fleure’s A Natural History of Man in Britain in 1970. Fisher was replaced by Kenneth Mellanby, another natural history polymath who had recently contributed one of the more successful latter-day titles, Pesticides and Pollution. John Gilmour, who retired in 1979, was replaced by his partner on Wild Flowers, Max Walters. The last surviving member of the original team, Eric Hosking, died in 1991, and his departure broke the last thread of continuity that had had its origin in war-torn London, nearly fifty years before.
In 1956, the New Naturalist library celebrated its 50th title and broke the sales tape at half a million, an average of 10,000 copies sold of each title. It was an appropriate time to take stock. The original aim of the series had been, as we have seen, for just that number of titles covering the whole panorama of British natural history. It had almost succeeded in doing so, but there remained significant gaps, such as bird migration, fossils and pollen history, mosses and lichens, and the Board was keen to publish more regional titles, like the long-delayed Norfolk Broads and the Lake District. One receives the distinct impression that no one really wanted to wind up the New Naturalist library. A special meeting was held in February 1956 to review the series and tighten up the publishing schedule by producing a programme of publications for the next five years. The editors now considered that ‘to fulfil the original aims of the series, some 90 to 100 volumes would be required…over the next 15 years’ (i.e. up to 1971). They listed some 34 desirable main series and ‘approximately’ 23 monographs; in effect, this amounted to an open-ended commitment, which continues to this day.
At the same meeting, various ideas to promote the series were discussed: a series of New Naturalist lectures, sponsored (they all hoped) by the Zoology Society of London, to which editors and authors would contribute; a ‘New Naturalist fortnight’ with window displays in the leading bookshops; a ‘New Naturalist Association’ with a mailing list. None of these came to anything. The climate had changed since the 1940s, and the New Naturalist library was no longer far out in front of its rivals. The pack was catching up.
The Editorial Board met about five times a year, in the boardroom at 14 St James’s Place, generally in the afternoon or early evening. In the early 1950s (the busiest years of the series in terms of titles) the meetings were chaired by W.A.R. Collins, or in his unavoidable absence, by his chief editor F.T. Smith. Also present were the five permanent members of the Board, the natural history editor of Collins, and a secretary to take the minutes. Frequently the Board would dine together afterwards.
The procedure followed was broadly the same each time the Board met. After the minutes of the previous meeting had been approved, Billy Collins reported on the general state of the series in terms of sales, and on the reception of recently published titles. If there was any business on the series as a whole, it was usually dealt with at this point. The business would then turn to the progress of the forthcoming titles, one by one, with the responsible editor delivering the report. The monographs and special volumes would be dealt with in the same way, and any remaining business, such as pricing, payments to photographers, foreign sales and so on would be dealt with at the end. In the early years, special meetings were held at the Adprint office to view colour slides of the latest photographs, but from about 1952 these projections took place less frequently and at St James’s Place (see below). The minutes were typed on foolscap paper, and were signed and dated by Collins or Smith. In the 1950s, the minutes were recorded in considerable detail, but they became more perfunctory later on. Here I give an abridged version (for the original is too long for reproduction verbatim) of a typical New Naturalist Board meeting, that was held on 8 October 1951 with Mr F.T. Smith in the Chair. The matter in quotes is as recorded; the rest consists of my summary and explanation.
A meeting of the Editorial Board was held on Monday, 8th October 1951 at 14 St James’s Place, SW1 at 5.30 pm.
PRESENT Mr F.T. Smith (in the Chair), Mr Fisher, Dr Stamp, Dr Huxley, Mr Gilmour, Mr Hosking, Miss Obee, Miss Reider.
MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING ‘Mr Fisher said he thought it was important in future that the minutes of the meetings should be signed by Mr Collins as Chairman as this was in accordance with normal practice.’ Stamp had proposed, with Fisher seconding, a motion that Collins would sign the minutes of the previous two meetings at the next meeting, and that it should then be regarded as binding. [This was done; the point was that some of the previous meetings had been signed before the Board had had a chance to read them.]
EDITORS’ ROYALTIES ‘It was agreed that this should be left and discussed between the Editors when they dined together after the meeting.’
BRITISH MAMMALS (L.H. Matthews). Fisher had received the author’s corrected page proofs. He ‘would have to spend quite a lot of time on them as the author had inserted corrections which could not be got on to the [printed] page’. Hosking reported that the black and white photographs had been proofed, but two would have to be reproofed. [British Mammals was published on 17 March 1952.]
CLIMATE AND THE BRITISH SCENE (G. Manley). [The line drawings had been sketched by the author for making into blocks by Miss Birch of Adprint. There were a large number, and their cost – £150 – had become an issue at the previous meeting since the Board had agreed on a limit on line drawings of a miserly £40 per book.] Fisher took the responsibility for exceeding the sum, and ‘had received a very nice friendly letter from the author, asking if there was any way in which he could help over this difficulty’. Huxley suggested that he be asked to agree that a proportion of the over-estimate be set against the author’s royalties. That would hold down the price. ‘Printing quantity to be fixed. Mr Fisher suggested 7,500.’ [Climate and the British Scene was published on 13 October 1952.]
AN ANGLER’S ENTOMOLOGY (J.R. Harris). Fisher had obtained the corrected galley proofs, after sending a series of telegrams to Harris in Dublin, but still awaited the final black and white selection and captions to line drawings and black and white photographs. ‘Mr Smith suggested that Collins’ representative in Ireland should call on Harris’ and that Fisher should brief him. [The outcome seems to have been satisfactory, for An Angler’s Entomology was published the following year.]
SEA-BIRDS (J. Fisher and R.M. Lockley). Fisher reported ‘that 200,000 words had been written, 150,000 by James Fisher and 50,000 by R.M. Lockley’. Previously, Fisher had suggested to Mr Collins that the book be published in two volumes, but although Collins thought that a good idea, Huxley and Lockley did not agree. ‘Mr Fisher said he had now come round to their view…and would have to boil down his portion of the book to around 50,000 words.’ Smith said he would get Raleigh Trevelyan to work out the maximum wordage for a book of 320 pages, and ‘Mr Fisher would endeavour to work to this’. Smith said he would like to try to interest an American publisher before printing. Huxley mentioned that Houghton Mifflin had expressed great interest in the book, and produced correspondence to that effect. [Sea-Birds took another year to complete, and was published on 1 March 1954.]
DARTMOOR (L.A. Harvey). ‘Mr Smith raised the point as to whether the recognition of Dartmoor as a National Park had affected the text.’ Fisher agreed to look into this and arrange any necessary changes. Stamp wanted to see this title in print by summer 1952, and Smith agreed ‘to expedite production as far as possible having regard to other titles’. [It took Fisher several months to read the proofs, and Dartmoor was published not in 1952 but on 31 August 1953. That did at least allow the authors to bring the book up to date.]
THE WEALD (S Wooldridge). The manuscript had been lost, and the author was using the carbon to incorporate Huxley’s criticisms. Stamp would take delivery of the manuscript (MS) and prepare it for the press. ‘The author is cutting down the number of colour from 32 to 16 and has agreed to cut the b & w’ The loss of the MS raised the matter of keeping a careful record of ‘where a particular MS was at any time’. [The Weald was published on 16 March 1953.]
MUSHROOMS AND TOADSTOOLS (J. Ramsbottom). Gilmour produced 20 out of the 24 chapters [the published book has 23 chapters]. The author had promised ‘absolutely faithfully’ to deliver the remaining four by the end of the month. Once the MS was complete, Gilmour, Hosking and Ramsbottom would meet to discuss photographs. [Drastic cuts to the draft proved necessary, and Mushrooms and Toadstools was not published until 26 October 1953.]
THE SEA COAST (J.A. Steers). The MS was too long, and cuts had been asked for to bring the book down to 288 pages. Fisher reported that this had now been done, and the MS was ready for setting. [The Sea Coast was published on 18 February 1953.]
THE BROADS (A.E. Ellis). Fisher reported that the author was making progress and had nearly finished his part of the book. Stamp had been promised a contribution from ‘Jenkins’ (sic. The person referred to was J.N. Jennings). A section by the late Dr Robert Gurney was already in hand. Stamp queried whether the book might be overtaken by the National Park issue, ‘but it was thought not as this area will not be taken over for some time’. [Not for another 40 years in fact, but the startling discovery by Lambert and Jennings that The Broads were artificial did mean substantial rewriting. The Broads was not published until 1965.]
MARSH AND FRESHWATER BIRDS (R.C. Homes). Fisher reported that the author wanted to get on with ‘the London Bird Book’ [Birds of the London Area 1957] first. Agreed. ‘He would complete the MS for [Marsh and Freshwater Birds] in 1953. In this way we would get a really good book from him.’ [The London book took longer than was envisaged and this title was never published.]
THE LAKE DISTRICT (E. Blezard and others). Fisher reported that the joint authors had after two years produced 30,000 words of script. Blezard’s own work was up to standard, but the rest was no good. The best person to write the book would be W.H. Pearsall, but he could not do it for 18 months. Huxley said this was an important title and must be first class: they decided to ask Pearsall. Fisher would write to Blezard explaining the Board’s decision to start again, and ‘they hoped it might be possible to fit Blezard into this’. [Pearsall accepted the contract, but was too busy to write the book. W. Pennington wrote the book, using Pearsall’s notes. It was published in 1973.]
DRAGONFLIES (C. Longfield). Fisher said they had narrowed down the plates to 40, but proposed to pay the photographer [Sam Beaufoy] for the full 80 he had taken. Collins felt he could not agree to this, and suggested that ‘the photographer should forego part payment for the photographs on condition that he owned the copyright’. Huxley suggested that Hosking should discuss arrangements with Beaufoy, and thought ‘payment of something like 1/2 to 3/5 of what we originally suggested might be a fair figure’. The book should be held up until the dispute with Adprint had been sorted out. [It was published on 15 February 1960.]
ANIMALS IN ART (ED. Klingender). Huxley said the author had incorporated a lot of philosophic material and that ‘Animals in Art and General Thought’ described it better, and this would make it ‘a more novel and interesting book’. The length must stay the same as in the original contract. [The author died in 1955, and the book was never published.]
TREES (? E.W. Jones). It was becoming clear that it would be better to concentrate on Forestry, for which Sir William Taylor, the recently retired Director of the Forestry Commission would be a suitable author. ‘To go ahead.’ [The title became Trees, Woods and Men by H.L. Edlin, published in 1956.]
FERNS AND MOSSES (F. Ballard). ‘Mr Gilmour to write Ballard and get it settled that we are definitely not going to do this book.’
MOTHS (E.B. Ford). ‘Huxley reported that the author was getting on with the book.’
FLEAS, FLUKES AND CUCKOOS (M. Rothschild and T Clay). ‘Mr Fisher said it had gone to the printer.’ [Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos was published on 5 May 1952.]
THE WREN (E.A. Armstrong). There was a considerable discussion about this title in relation to the amount of cutting Mr Collins was insisting on to bring the book nearer to its contracted length. The matter of the editors forgoing their royalty on this title in the interests of keeping the price down was later discussed over dinner. [After considerable argument and delay, The Wren was published within the prescribed limit of 320 pages on 28 March 1955. The Editors did waive their royalty.]
VIRUSES (K.M. Smith). Mr Smith circulated his reports on the 40,000-word MS, saying he thought ‘it was good as far as it went’ but that the book ‘did not say anything about remedies’. Nor did it say anything about the nature of viruses ‘and whether they were alive or not’. Smith ‘queried whether there would be a definite sale for this book and was assured that there would be’. In the view of ongoing research on the subject, Gilmour was to ask the author to agree to postponing publication for ‘a year or two’. Hosking found the photographs ‘rather dull’, but agreed that this was inevitable. [Two more chapters were added, and Mumps, Measles and Mosaics was published on 1st February 1954.]
THE HERON (F. Lowe). Smith circulated his report: the subject matter ‘was all right’ but suggested that the last two chapters ‘were redundant and could at least be abridged’. Huxley thought these chapters were the most interesting. The colour photos were not very good. ‘It was agreed to accept this book subject to Mr Collins’ approval.’ [The Heron was published with only one colour plate on 12 July 1954.]
THE HERRING GULL’S WORLD (N. Tinbergen). ‘Mr Fisher said that Mr Collins had asked Mr Trevelyan to cost this book and that it worked out too high. It was pointed out that we were committed to this book by Minute of 4 April 1951 and the author was pressing for an answer…Mr Smith should raise this matter with Mr Collins immediately on his return. The author has supplied all photographs and line material.’ [Collins honoured their commitment, and The Herring Gull’s World was published on 28 September 1953.]
BUILDING STONES OF ENGLAND (Dr Arkell). ‘It was agreed that this should be turned down.’
ANIMALS IN ULSTER (C.D. Deane). ‘To be discussed…at dinner. Mr Smith thought it would be too local in appeal.’ [The book was turned down.]
MISCELLANEOUS POINTS Mr Smith explained that the price of all future New Naturalist main series titles would be 25 shillings. This also applied to new editions of old titles. It was suggested that Collins should write to Adprint and suggest buying the projector which they own, and that in future the showing of transparencies should be at St James’s Place. Mr Hosking though a fair offer would be £30/£40 for the projector and trolley.
MEETING TO VIEW COLOUR TRANSPARENCIES OF ‘THE FLOWERS OF THE SEA AND COAST’ ‘To be held at Adprint office on Friday, October 26 at 2.15pm.’ [This seems to have been postponed until 5 December, when slides for The Weald, Dartmoor, Sea-birds and The Sea Coast were also viewed.]
DATE OF NEXT MEETING
To be held at 14 St James’s Place on Tuesday, 20 November at 5.30 pm.
Signature..........W.A.R. Collins (Chairman)
Date.........20 November 1951.
Table 3. New Naturalists – Proposed future programme 1956-62 (quoted verbatim from New Naturalist Board minutes 20 June 1956)
Main series | Special volumes |
---|---|
1956 *Trees, Woods and Man (H.L. Edlin) | *The Rabbit (Thompson and Worden) |
*Mountain Flowers (Ravens and Walters) | |
*The Open Sea I (A.C. Hardy) | |
1957 *The World of the Soil (Sir John Russel) | *Birds of the London Area (R.C. Homes & others) |
Insect Migration (C.B. Williams) | The Hawfinch (G. Mountfort) |
The Open Sea II (A.C. Hardy) | *The Salmon (J.W. Jones) |
1958 *Spiders (W.S. Bristowe) | *Folklore of British Birds (E.A. Armstrong) |
The Broads (E.A. Ellis & others) | |
The Peak District (K.C. Edwards) | *Bumblebees (Butler and Free) |
Shore Birds (E.A.R. Ennion) | Lords and Ladies (C.T. Prime) |
1959 Dragonflies (C. Longfield & others) | The Jackdaw (K. Lorenz) |
Rare Plants (D. Pigott) | The Trout (Frost and Brown) |
Fossils (H.H. Swinnerton) | The Rook (J. Fisher) |
The South West Coast (L. Dudley Stamp) | The Fox (Thompson and Worden) |
1960 *The Lake District (W.H. Pearsall) | The Gannet (Barlee and Fisher) |
*Marine Molluscs (C.M. Yonge) | The Peregrine (Lees and Bond) |
Bird Migration (K. Williamson) | Nature Chronology in Britain since 100BC (D.J. Schove) |
Weeds and Aliens (Sir E. Salisbury) | |
1961 *Marsh and Freshwater Birds (R.C. Homes) | The Greylag Goose (K. Lorenz) |
The Crossbill (A. Robertson) | |
Wild Fowl Resources (Severn Wildfowl Trust) | The House-Sparrow (J.D. Summers-Smith) |
The Ice Age and After (S.E. Hollingworth) | |
Land and Freshwater Molluscs | |
1962 *Woodland Birds (no author) | The Cuckoo (H.N. Southern) |
British Naturalists (C.E. Raven) | The Partridge (A.D. Middleton) |
Grasses(no author) | The Grey Seal (R.M. Lockley?) |
Pollination of Flowers (?) | The Great Crested Grebe (K. Simmons) |
The Yorkshire Dales (P.F. Holmes?) | The Pheasant (?) |
Caves (G. Grigson?) | |
Ponds, Puddles and Protozoa (A.C. Hardy) | |
Moorland Birds (J. Fisher) | |
Beetles | |
Whales and Whalers (F.C. Fraser) | |
The Art of Animal Illustration (W. Blunt?) | |
Nature Conservation (J. Fisher and J. Huxley) | |
Rivers (?) | * contracted books |