6
A Question of Style

Reviewing the New Naturalist library in The Sunday Times on 8 March 1953, Cyril Connolly wrote: ‘The New Naturalist…is a most interesting enterprise. Unlike so many popularising ventures, it consists almost entirely of the work of specialists, and of specialists who seem to be writing for advanced students rather than for the general public. Much consequently depends on the felicity of style if such books are to break through and become general reading.’ As successful examples of the latter, Connolly cited Miriam Rothschild’s Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos and James Fisher’s The Fulmar. Though many might agree with him about the former title, I doubt that I am alone in agreeing with Maurice Burton that The Fulmar is ‘so emphatic and precise that nothing is left to the reader’s imagination’; and that Fisher should have employed his worst enemy to prune it.

The first dozen or so New Naturalists evidently did ‘break through and become general reading’, judging from their sales, whereas we are told that some of the later titles were bought mostly by university students. It is hard to think of any comparable books today that succeeded so well in their broad appeal. Part of the reason must have been that these early classics were so readable. As we have seen, the original editors of the series were notably successful in persuading people of the highest calibre to write for it, and the marriage of subject and author was also singularly happy. Many New Naturalist authors of that time had a natural bent for writing: Ford, for example, with his classical training, or Yonge with his journalistic leanings, or Harrison Matthews with his natural gifts as a storyteller. The subjects were also well chosen. None were over-specialised: each book covered a broad or at least a popular subject, and the eclectic mixture of titles avoided undue repetition or a formulaic approach. Even A Country Parish represented an approach familiar to English naturalists since the eighteenth century.

Equally importantly, the timing was just right. Few of these early books could have been written before the Second World War, or at least not in quite the same way. Nor could they have been written much later, for in each case the subject soon grew too large to treat with the same totality and broad scale. One no longer (unless one is exceptionally gifted) studies the beach, but magnifies the pebbles. Compare E.B. Ford’s Butterflies, which is really a book about environmental genetics using butterflies as examples, with R.J. Berry’s book, Inheritance and Natural History, written a generation later. Both are very well written, and information is presented to the reader as simply as possible without being over-simplified. But while Butterflies is based very largely on the work of one man, the author, and on simple field-based experiments allied to natural history, Inheritance knits together much more impenetrable subjects like biochemistry, cell biology and applied mathematics. It is no criticism of Inheritance to say that it is not as readable as Butterflies. It could not possibly be so if the author was to remain true to his aim of explaining the importance of inherited properties in understanding ecological problems. It is an important book and a unifying book; it would be expecting too much for it to be an easy book as well. A carefully selected reference list in Inheritance runs to 28 micro-printed pages. When E.B. Ford started to study genetics in wild populations, the entire world literature on the subject could be accommodated on a couple of book shelves.

R.J. Berry and Orkney vole, being filmed for Granada’s Evolution series in 1981. (Photo: R.J. Berry/Granada TV)

In 1945, the frontiers of science were still close enough for people like Ford, Yonge and Imms to see from horizon to horizon. The latest findings of biology and the earth sciences could be made intelligible, in skilled hands, to the average butterfly collector or wildfowler. ‘Skilled hands’ is important. So many of the early New Naturalist authors were excellent teachers, and could write about their subject with a simple, unforced enthusiasm without resort to jargon. They also, whether deliberately or not, allowed their personalities to shine through the writing. The dour formality of scientific journals was, for the moment, cast aside. It is not difficult, when reading about these men and women, to see why they wrote as they did. These postwar writers saw it as their duty to popularise their subject. It accorded with the spirit of the age, and with their own inclinations too. Almost every writer for this series was a field naturalist at heart. There are vivid memories of Pearsall striding along the high tops of the Pennines and the Lake District, of Ramsbottom emerging for excursions still dressed in his formal city clothes, of Macan out on his yacht with his bottles and nets. There was as yet no unbridgeable divide between field natural history and scientific discovery. People of all classes retained the capacity for wonder, and most of the first dozen New Naturalists sold in their tens of thousands.

One should be careful not to generalise too far, however. The books were written by individuals and in widely differing styles. Few lend themselves to ‘soundbite’ quotation; you cannot readily detach a paragraph to exhibit as the essential Dudley Stamp or undiluted Yonge. They are, by and large, quietly written and not self-consciously ‘literary’. To remind ourselves of the disparity of subject and style covered by this series, let us savour briefly each of the first dozen titles (apart from Butterflies which has had a fair airing already), which, as it happens, include most of the books that were written and published during the 1940s. Collectively they may tell us something about the whole series; individually they are as distinct in style and approach as they are in subject matter.

In terms of hardback sales, the most successful book in the whole series is Britain’s Structure and Scenery by Dudley Stamp (though it was overtaken in Fontana paperback by The Highlands and Islands). ‘BS & S’ was used widely in schools and introductory college courses, and probably owed much of its success to Stamp’s reputation as a writer of text books. And a text book is what it pretty much is, though it tells a definite story with a nice emphasis on field observation and a convincing display of the author’s extraordinary breadth of knowledge. By combining the separate disciplines of physical geography, geology, soil science and botany (and personal acquaintance with every part of the British Isles), Stamp presents a synthesis that is almost de rigueur now, but was well ahead of its time then. Its main thrust was geological, telling (as The Observer put it) of ‘how our landscape heaved, split, settled and was pared down into countless varieties of beauty, packed within our tiny mileage’. The book remained a classic for at least 30 years, and in the preface to the softback edition in 1984, Professor Clayton described it as still useful, despite having become out of date on some subjects. Stamp seems to have written it with his usual briskness during spare moments in 1944 and 1945. The subject and its series struck a chord with him, and Clayton judged this book ‘one of the very best from this prolific author’.

British Game, published at about the same time, forms an interesting contrast: the opinionated editor behind his desk at The Field opposed to the urbane university teacher with his diagrams and slides. Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald could be described as a professional countryman, one of the last of the literary sportsman-naturalists, though his sympathies were as least as much with the poacher as with the gamekeeper. He saw things through a countryman’s eyes, and wrote British Game in the same style as his articles in The Field and his radio Field Fare broadcasts. He might almost have dictated it, so lively, conversational, and prejudiced is the book, as if Fitzgerald was at your elbow, in cloth cap, pipe and shooting garb. This was an appropriate style if the book was aimed at the readers of The Field and Country Life, but it sits a little oddly within a scientific series. Fitzgerald’s hero was Abel Chapman, the Victorian punt-gunner, and his natural history was that of the sportsman and gamekeeper, not the scientist, whom he seems rather to have despised. British Game was probably not specifically chosen to be book number 2 in the series; the title was originally listed as a ‘special subject’. But Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald was a professional writer and, unlike most New Naturalist authors, he finished on time. British Game was a successful book and is now, oddly enough, about the commonest New Naturalist title in second-hand bookshops.

Richard Fitter, author of London’s Natural History, in 1994. (Photo: Anna Fitter)

About London’s Natural History no such reservations are needed. It was, as Vesey-Fitzgerald himself noted, ‘the first real natural history of a great city, the development of a large urbanised area traced through the history of its wildlife’. The book attracted more attention at the time than its better-known companion, Butterflies, and has influenced countless urban ecologists ever since in its judicious blend of history and wildlife. For a first book, London’s Natural History was remarkably confident and accomplished. Richard Fitter had become experienced at marshalling facts and figures as a writer of government reports. He had also accumulated a very large ‘database’ on London wildlife as a leading member of the London Natural History Society. It was a book he was therefore all geared up to write, and the invitation from his friend and BTO colleague, James Fisher, to contribute to the series must have seemed God-given. In a recent interview, Richard Fitter acknowledged a debt to a book called The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland by Professor James Ritchie, which gave him the idea of analysing the influence of man’s various activities on wildlife – digging, traffic, refuse disposal, smoke, sport etc. – against the panoramic backcloth of Greater London. This was a much more interesting and rewarding approach than ‘starting at the mammals and going down to the insects, which is another way it might have been done’. And an approach, moreover, in keeping with the new vision of ecology. It was in other ways a book of its time. Surely only a book written in wartime would have devoted one of its most fascinating sections to the influence of bombs and explosives! This section is full of the sort of particular, intriguing information that characterises the book as a whole. We are told that the Luftwaffe killed remarkably few birds or beasts, and even trees often escaped serious damage: ‘A horse-chestnut tree in Camberwell that was stripped of almost all its leaves in July was in full bloom again in September, and at Reigate lilac bloomed again and a creeper came into full leaf after its first crop had been blown into the house.’ In their preface, the editors appeared to miss the point of the book in regarding the ‘progressive biological sterilisation’ of London as a sad story. Charles Elton was closer to the mark in his review, encapsulating the book as ‘the history of changing equilibrium between wildlife and man, and in some of the curious habitats and communities and changed habits that are to be found in the new conditions of this vast temperate desert’. London’s Natural History should not be judged as the editor’s ‘gloomy reading’ but as a celebration of the resilience and resourcefulness of Nature.

If Fitter’s was an ecological portrait of a city, A Country Parish was A.W. Boyd’s ‘natural history of an ordinary country parish’. The book was James Fisher’s idea; he had edited a scholarly edition of The Natural History of Selborne and wanted this tradition to be reflected in the New Naturalist library. And who better to write it than his uncle and mentor Arnold Boyd, a natural history all-rounder and one of the leading amateur ornithologists of the first half of the century? Boyd had lived all his life in Cheshire, and from 1920 in the parish of Great Budworth on the Cheshire Plain with its charming village, meres and strips of woodland known as ‘bongs’. On sending the manuscript to Collins, he remarked with characteristic modesty that, ‘I hope it will not severely let down the high standard of several of the earlier New Naturalist books; rather a fond wish, I fear.’ It did not let them down. A Country Parish has always been, it seems to me, one of the underrated books of the series, partly because it was allowed to go out of print in the 1950s and is difficult to obtain. Boyd based the book on his long-running weekly Country Diary in the Manchester Guardian, some 500 entries from which were collected together as The Country Diary of a Cheshire Man, published by Collins in 1946 (and incidentally advertising the New Naturalist series on its dust jacket). Like Selborne, A Country Parish is an ‘exploration of individuality’, and like London’s Natural History it is about man as much as about wildlife. Unlike the latter, however, A Country Parish keeps man and nature apart. The first half of the book is a social history, charmingly described, with loving attention to local customs and dialect (there is a whole chapter on the local Mummer’s Play). The honest, down-to-earth style is characteristic of Boyd, but it says something about country life too. It is full of little stories like the following:

Arnold W. Boyd (1885-1959), author of A Country Parish, on Hilbre Island, 1956. (Photo: Eric Hosking)

‘A footpath runs along the side of Great Budworth churchyard, where there was a newly dug grave just over the wall. A practical joker, so it is said, knowing that a man would pass that way late at night, lay down in the empty grave and, as his friend approached, began to moan: “Eh! it is cowd down ‘ere, eh! I am cowd.” The passer-by looked into the grave…and called out: “I don’t wonder th’art cowd; they’n none covered thee up,” and started to shovel sand over the imagined corpse.’

A Country Parish, Ch. 9 Folk-lore

The second half of A Country Parish adheres rather too closely to the ‘Country Diary’ format, dealing with the birds, plants and butterflies in the old-fashioned way, species by species. That might have concerned the New Naturalist editors more than it should bother us. This is a delightful portrait of a country parish caught just before postwar change eroded the rural traditions that had made every country village an individual and special place. Perhaps its time is now, rather than then. Collins received a number of requests to reprint it during the 1960s and 1970s; one day, perhaps.

From the Brueghel-esque scenes of A Country Parish we pass to the Landseer landscapes of Frank Fraser Darling’s Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. This was an important book, and one which perhaps few others at the time would dare to have attempted. That, in its original form, the book was rather a curate’s egg, was not surprising, given Darling’s wartime isolation in western Scotland. It is a very personal book, with elements of his natural history journals, and some of his earlier work on deer, seabirds and seals, thrown into the mix, together with the notes for his later ecological study, West Highland Survey (1955). Parts of the book are scrappily written while others are possessed of unusual lyric intensity:

‘To climb to one of these alps of grass and descend again in a few hours is not enough. Take a little tent..... The only sounds breaking the silence, if you get the best of the early July weather, will be the grackle of the ptarmigan, the flute-like pipe of the ring ouzel, perhaps the plaint of a golden plover or a dotterel and the bark of the golden eagle. These are good sounds and do not disturb what is for the moment a place of peace. See how the deer, now bright-red-coated, lie at ease in the alpine grassland. Listen, if you have stalked near enough, to the sweet talking of the calves who are like happy children. Here is new herbage over which no other muzzles have grazed; the very soil has been washed by fifty inches of rain since the deer were here before, in November. Of this short nutritious grass the deer are growing their clean bone and the good condition which will help them to face the winter. Of your charity disturb them not in their Arcadia.’

Natural History in the Highlands and Islands, Ch. 8 The Summits of the Hills

That particular passage has stuck in my mind ever since I first read it, and especially that last Roman injunction. There is a sweet melancholy about Fraser Darling at his best that, like the best wine, is balanced by sharp phrasing and firm scientific definition. This is good science still; only so imaginatively expressed that it is easy to imagine yourself on that mountain top among the peaceful sounds of nature. Darling had had plenty of time on his own among the hills in which to sharpen his quill.

Natural History in the Highlands and Islands received the best known and most bitterly disappointing book review in the history of the series. Fraser Darling had returned from an expedition to St Kilda with James Fisher, an idyll spoiled only by Darling’s appalling seasickness, to find the latest copy of The Scottish Naturalist among his mail. It included a scathing three-page review of the book by Professor V.C. Wynne-Edwards that criticised not only the author’s own lapses but also the New Naturalist editors for daring to claim that ‘every care has been taken…to ensure the scientific accuracy of factual statements’. As other reviews also pointed out, the botanical section of the book was indeed riddled with ‘half-truths and errors’. But none of them rubbed them in with quite the same abrasive skill:

‘The yarn handed out about the migration of the herring was the latest thing in the days of Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology (1761-66); it has long been regarded as an illusion…The section on salmon contains a crop of dubious generalisations…the little bivalve Pisidium masquerades as a “snail”…I cannot follow the supposed relation between irritability and humidity, even with the help of the surrealist graph.’

After a great deal more in this vein, the reviewer concluded that:

‘It would do no good to carry this uncharitable dissection further. Clearly a book like this is exceptionally difficult to write, and most of us would not have the courage to attempt it. Fraser Darling’s views on conservation I most heartily endorse; his passionate love of his chosen land, and ability to inspire it in others, I admire and respect. All human authors err (and I hope in this respect that reviewers are [not?] as inhuman as they seem); we might well have been worse off with the opposite extreme, a prosy compendium of incredible dullness, richly documented with footnotes. At least this book has warmth and personality and an infectious appreciation of the good things of life.’

This review struck Darling on the nerve since it exposed what he felt to be his weakness, his lack of formal scientific training. While it wounded him, it angered and alarmed the editors, and the fatal clause was henceforth removed from the New Naturalist credo. The criticism was justified, though the reviewer had been less than charitable in focusing on the detailed errors of fact while for the most part ignoring the grand sweep of Darling’s book, his beauty of expression and the great-heartedness of his vision. As his later reviser and co-author Morton Boyd pointed out, the licence used by Darling in interpreting his theme clearly irritated some of his academic contemporaries. Vero Wynne-Edwards, normally a magnanimous man himself, later regretted the review as having done more harm than good. It did at least have the happy consequence of bringing together two of the greatest Scottish naturalists. Despite the review, they became friends and remained so until Darling’s death in 1979. Wynne-Edwards travelled far to be present at the unveiling of a plaque to Frank Fraser Darling’s memory at Dundonnell in July 1991. Bad reviews were one reason why the original Natural History was not reprinted (though they did not seem to affect sales). The errors of fact were relatively easy to put right once Morton Boyd came to revise the book in the early 1960s. Under a new title, The Highlands and Islands (1964), ‘Darling and Boyd’ went on to become one of the most successful books in the series, with a total sales in excess of 40,000 hardback and twice that in paperback, and remaining in print for 36 years.

When the botanical titles of the series were being planned, the editors envisaged two introductory plant life books that would cover the broad field from different perspectives, followed by a series of books about different habitats and groups of wild flowers. In practice the sequence of books was broken by the late appearance of the first book Wild Flowers, so that the first botanical volume in the series was the more specialised British Plant Life (1948) by W.B. Turrill. This book broke new ground by attempting to present the evolutionary biology of British plants to the general public, covering genetics, ecology, cell biology and classification; in short, the more ‘biological’ aspects of British plants, as opposed to the more ‘open-air’ plant-hunting approach of Wild Flowers. The original title, ‘The Biology of the British Flora’ described Turrill’s book better than the adopted one. British Plant Life was the most ‘difficult’ title published so far, and helped to brand the series as ‘books written by specialists for advanced students’. Even some specialists found it heavy going. In writing of the ‘heavy demand’ parts of the book would make on the general public’s comprehension, Harry Godwin implied that it risked falling between two stools, neither sufficiently well-explained for the ordinary reader nor sufficiently rigorous for the advanced-course student. E.F. Warburg wondered whether the author was not attempting too much. British Plant Life seemed like two books crushed together: a fairly elementary one on ecology and plant history, and a difficult one on heredity and evolution. The book was worthy in intention, but sometimes clumsy in execution. Turrill had written it ‘in intervals of spare time during the past three years [1943-46] under somewhat difficult conditions’. But in those days when the New Naturalists walked on water, even British Plant Life sold quite well at first.

The tardy appearance of Wild Flowers, eight years later than planned, made that book seem more of an aftermath than its intended rôle as an introduction, but it was worth the wait. The subtitle ‘Botanising in Britain’ expresses its main theme perfectly. The book is an invitation to go botanising with Gilmour and Walters along tracks and dales, past woodland and commons. It could, wrote an anonymous reviewer in The Illustrated London News, ‘be read in a field, in a wood, or on top of a cliff’. It is, indeed, very readable. Charles Sinker devoured it ‘at a sitting’. The Listener discerned differences in the co-author’s styles: ‘Gilmour is the more poetical companion, Walters the more prosaic; but both write in clear, straightforward, unpretentious English, carrying the bare minimum of technical jargon.’ More than one reviewer picked out John Gilmour’s chapter on ‘How Our Flora Was Discovered’ for special praise. New to many readers, this was familiar ground to Gilmour, who had written the book on British Botanists for the ‘Britain in Pictures’ series ten years earlier. Another Gilmour idea was the short introductory chapter on ‘The Anatomy of Field Botany’, which, in his hands, becomes the anatomy of a passion, an expression of the spirit of the amateur. It is typical of a bright, outdoorsy and curiously cheerful book, ‘full of amusing detail’ (said another reviewer), and as splendid an encouragement to the pursuit of flowers as has ever been written. I confess it had the desired effect on me as an undergraduate, and glancing over its pages again, I find myself yearning once more for the woods and byways.

W.H. Pearsall (1891-1964), author of Mountains and Moorlands. Pencil portrait by Delmar Banner, 1961. (Photo: Freshwater Biological Association)

Godwin summed up Mountains and Moorlands by W.H. Pearsall in a phrase: ‘good ecology from cover to cover’. The first habitat book of the series (unless you count London as a habitat), Mountains and Moorlands is the classic account of upland ecology in Britain by the pioneer and master of such studies. It is possibly the most influential book about ecology in English, certainly one of the all-time classics of natural history. His colleague, A.R. Clapham, devoted two pages of a Biographical Memoir of Pearsall to the book, and clearly regarded it as a major achievement in a remarkably full and busy life. The style is plain, no prosy flourishes here, though, like Darling, Pearsall was good at conjuring up a sense of the mountain scene. A son of the cold north, Pearsall was a somewhat buttoned-up personality. His literary gifts were clarity of expression and the imagination of the big country naturalist, seeing nature simultaneously in close-up and in vistavision. Consciously or not, he planned Mountains and Moorlands as the companion to university field excursions, preferably his own (which were notorious for their mileage and indifference to the weather). His introduction, which captures something of the New Naturalist spirit, deserves quotation:

‘A visitor to the British Isles usually disembarks in lowland England. He is charmed by its orderly arrangement and by its open landscapes, tamed and formed by man and mellowed by a thousand years of human history. There is another Britain, to many of us the better half, a land of mountains and moorlands and of sun and cloud…to the biologist at least, highland Britain is of surpassing interest because in it there is shown the dependence of organism upon environment on a large scale. It includes a whole range of habitats with restricted and often much specialised faunas and floras. At times, these habitats approach the limits within which organic life is possible, and they are commonly so severe that man has avoided them. Thus we can not only study the factors affecting the distribution of plants and animals as a whole, but we can envisage something of the forces that have influenced human distribution. Moreover, in these marginal habitats, we most often see man as part of a biological system rather than as the lord of his surroundings.’

Mountains and Moorlands, Ch.1 Introduction

Those who studied ecology at university will know this book well, and would probably agree with Clapham that ‘Pearsall succeeded admirably in the task he set himself’. Winifred Pennington, who revised certain sections of the book in 1971, was in still greater awe of the master: ‘It is a classic, and must not be touched by a lesser hand.’

John Ramsbottom (1884-1974), author of Mushrooms and Toadstools, explains the finer points of a specimen to school children, c. 1955. (Photo: Natural History Museum)

Mushrooms and Toadstools, subtitled ‘A Study of the Activities of Fungi’, stands by itself as a contribution to natural history literature: a mycological tour de force, ‘an Anatomy of Toadstools’. No one but John Ramsbottom, the ‘master of strange learning’, the man ‘who had read everything mycological, met every living mycologist of note, and forgotten nothing’, could have written it. Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald put it another way: ‘I think that there is just about everything that anyone can want to know about fungi in this book’. Ramsbottom takes us on a journey through the strange Gothic world of fungi, pausing at places where mankind and fungi have clashed or cooperated, and scattering pertinent quotations from the botanical classics on every page. It manages to be what The Listener called ‘comfortably humorous’. However bizarre the tale, the author usually keeps a straight face, as no doubt he did in real life when telling one of ‘his fund of stories, both proper and improper’.

This book was another late arrival. Commissioned to write it in 1943, Ramsbottom found one excuse after another to put it off: his obituarist noted that ‘to exasperate people by procrastination was an integral part of his character’. When he finally got around to it, he produced a sprawling epic the size of a Dickens novel. Back went the manuscript with instructions to make cuts of between a third and a half, and so, to Ramsbottom’s regret, the habitat chapters became ‘but shadows of their former selves’. This might have altered the balance of book by making it less of an ecological history and more of a study of the relations of fungi and man. When Ramsbottom showed every sign of fiddling about with it indefinitely, the despairing editors resorted to subterfuge. Under the pretext of wishing to read it again, the editors sent a taxi round to the Natural History Museum with instructions to secure the text at all costs. Having done so, the taxi driver took it straight to the printer. As Mountains and Moorlands will to Pearsall, so Mushrooms and Toadstools will serve forever as Ramsbottom’s memorial.

Insect Natural History is yet another classic. With A.D. Imms, author of the standard, but notoriously dry, General Textbook of Entomology, editors and readers alike might have been agreeably surprised at its readability. And all the more so since the author was obliged to concentrate on the less appealing insects, as the more popular ones, like butterflies, moths and dragonflies, had been allocated books of their own. Even so, the insect kingdom was too vast to cover systematically in a single book. Wisely, Imms decided not to try, choosing instead to review particular aspects of insect life that were shared by all insects: senses, feeding habits, protective devices and social life. It is a very comparative book, almost a series of essays. There is a chapter on aquatic insects included for no better reason – and what could be a better reason? – than that Imms thought they were interesting. Within these general themes there are more than enough examples of the ingenious, the bizarre, the amusing and the horrifying. The book is simply written with a nicely judged balance of science and popular natural history. It has been said of Insect Natural History that the book could not have been written much earlier, nor much later either, for the subject soon outgrew the bounds of a single book. Twenty years after its publication, it was still being hailed as ‘incomparably the best-written semi-popular account of British insect lore…appealing to entomologists at all levels’. Technically, the weakest part of the original book was the chapter on insect flight. It was later rewritten by Imms’ reviser, Professor George Varley, though the latter confessed that ‘When last I had a serious thought about it, I merely succeeded in convincing myself that I could not understand how a fly worked, which was rather disappointing.’

Pencil sketch of an Aeshna dragonfly by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, the basis of the jacket design for Insect Natural History. (Private collection)

And so to the seaside and The Sea Shore by C.M. Yonge, later Sir Maurice Yonge FRS, the perfect blend of well-honed text, lovely coloured plates and fine line-drawings. Even by the standards of the previous books, The Sea Shore was uncommonly well received. One thing to emerge from its highly readable pages is Yonge’s immersion in shore life literature in the widest possible sense, from bivalve anatomies in obscure journals to the poetry of Crabbe and Southey, and the seaside natural histories of Victorian England. Geoffrey Taylor writing in The New Statesman compared Yonge’s style with that of Gosse in its economy and clear-sightedness. He added pertinently that there was in fact very little with which to compare The Sea Shore since Victorian times, a point that could be extended to not a few other New Naturalist titles. One of Yonge’s literary gifts was charm, which probably came naturally because by all accounts he was a charming man – and a good lecturer, despite his reserved nature and stammer. He was one of several authors who saw the popularisation of his subject as a positive duty. As early as 1926, he had written a natural history classic, The Seas, with his friend (and later fellow marine knight) Frederick Russell, and thirty years later wrote the best-selling Collins Pocket Guide to the Seashore with John Barrett. It may be significant that, like John Ramsbottom, he got on well with young people. He was a natural-born teacher. To Morton Boyd, one of his eminent pupils, Maurice Yonge was simply ‘The Master’.

The Sea Shore was begun in pain. Yonge’s first wife Mattie had died from a brain tumour in 1945, leaving two small children, and he began the book to occupy his mind. It bears the most poignant dedication of all the New Naturalist books: ‘In Memory. M.J.Y. Who will walk on no more shores with me.’

Sir Maurice Yonge (1899-1986), author of The Sea Shore, at work on a bivalve c. 1979. (Photo: Natural History Museum)

The first dozen New Naturalists covered British natural history in considerable breadth and with a depth not previously found in popular natural histories. They are all to some extent concerned with ecology and behaviour, while four of them, London’s Natural History, Natural History in the Highlands and Islands, Mountains and Moorlands and The Sea Shore are concerned throughout with an animal’s or a plant’s relationship with its environment. The broad brush treatment was probably an important ingredient of their success. It is perhaps fortunate that at this stage in the series there were no books specifically about birds, and that a separate home was created for the more specialised titles. Each book, in its way, reflected a peculiarly English (or Scottish) approach to ecology, concerned with living organisms in their natural surroundings, on the subtle and entangled influence of rocks, climate and scenery, and, above all, on intelligent observation as a means of discovery. At a time when Britain led the world in its happy combining of ecology and field natural history, of professional and amateur, these were the most influential books of their genre, and they captivated a whole generation of British naturalists.

The National Park and regional books

In the 1940s, National Parks were in the news. The New Naturalist editors were keen to commission natural-history-oriented guide books on individual Parks as part of a prospective series of regional volumes on ‘parts of this country that have a special appeal to all naturalists and lovers of the countryside’. Their eagerness to expand the series in this direction is not surprising given the personal involvement of Stamp and Huxley in the planning of the Parks, the former as vice-chairman (and main draughtsman) of the Scott Committee, and the latter as a member of its successor committee chaired by Sir Arthur Hobhouse. Correspondence and formal contracts for several National Park books (Snowdonia, Dartmoor and The Lake District) survive dated 1946-47, which places the commissioning of these books well in advance of the National Parks themselves. Billy Collins must have been anxious to cater for the anticipated public enthusiasm for the Parks by having guide books ready and running when the Parks themselves were designated. Unfortunately no one then knew exactly where the Park boundaries would fall. It was a matter for negotiation, in which people affected by them would have their say. The authors had to guess, and in the case of Snowdonia, they guessed wrongly. Although subtitled ‘The National Park of North Wales’, the Snowdonia book covered Caernarvonshire only, whereas the Park was to include most of Merioneth as well.

On the flyleaf of Snowdonia, published in 1949, are listed four ‘National Park Books’ then in production. These were Dartmoor, The Lake District, Pembrokeshire and The Broads (for at that time the Broads was one of the candidates for National Park status). Whether or not the Board intended eventually to produce guide books for all the National Parks is doubtful. More likely, their approach was pragmatic, commissioning books on the more popular areas first and then awaiting the public response. The books would offer a rounded portrait of the natural and social history of each region, stressing the links between man and nature, and the present with the past. In their wholeness of vision, the National Park books were of a piece with the rest of the series: each area would be given the ‘New Naturalist’ treatment.

That being so, the editors went about things in a rather odd way. With most titles in the series, they sensibly insisted on a policy of one author, one book, and strongly discouraged multi-author volumes. For the National Park books, on the other hand, they deliberately commissioned a team of three or more authors presumably in the belief that no single person could cover the whole field with the same authority. There would be a nominated lead author for each title, responsible for co-ordinating the efforts of the others and harmonising the different texts. It was a recipe for confusion and delay, and that is exactly what happened in nearly every case. Snowdonia was the only book to emerge more or less as planned. Here, Bruce Campbell was nominally the senior author, responsible for the natural history, while F.J. North, Keeper in Geology at the National Museum of Wales, tackled the rocks and Richenda Scott, an economist with a keen interest in the countryside, the social and historical background. Unfortunately, all three authors lived not in the north of Wales but in the south. Bruce Campbell made a whistle-stop tour of the region after the war, picking the brains of local naturalists as he went, but his part of the book does suggest only a superficial acquaintance with Snowdonia. Moreover, he seems to have made little attempt to edit the book, and the result was really three books inside one wrapper, with no introduction and no overview. This was not the most economical way of writing a book. Snowdonia, with 468 pages, is one of the longest in the series. Its size ensured it a short life in the shops for once the edition had sold out, it was impossible to reprint it at an economic price. Nor was there much incentive to do so, since the book was already badly out of date. Bruce Campbell seems to have been glad to wash his hands of it, though Frederick North, the most ardent populariser of geology in Wales, deplored its early demise.

William Condry in 1962, minutes after being invited to write The Snowdonia National Park. (Photo: Eric Hosking)

Instead, the Board decided to commission a new and shorter book covering the whole of the Snowdonia National Park, and asked the writer and naturalist William Condry to write it. The Condry book focused fairly and squarely on natural history. The first half deals in turn with rocks, scenery and wildlife in the traditional way, while the second offers a wildlife tour of the region. And a pleasant tour it is with Condry as a guide; the book is full of lively personal touches and good descriptive writing. There are a few healthy prejudices thrown in, such as Bill Condry’s hatred of motor cars, a point of view evidently shared by the New Naturalist editors (and also by Elgar, who, like Condry, fled west to take refuge from the internal combustion engine). The Snowdonia National Park was published inside an unfortunate laminated jacket in 1966. It was a successful book, remaining in print for 15 years, and being reprinted in paperback.

Though it barely acknowledges the existence of a predecessor, the second Snowdonia was the first ‘replacement title’ in the library. Given that the editors wanted to retain a Snowdonia book in print, they had in this case no other course of action. It does, however, bring to mind the broader question of whether it is wise to replace ‘out of date’ titles in the series with new ones. In my opinion, it is not. The classic titles of the series have a quality that transcends the passage of time, and people will go on reading them for the same reason that one still reads The Origin of Species or Tarka the Otter. The New Naturalist library represents a tradition of British natural history that does not date, and the best of the books have a wholeness and breadth of vision that would be difficult to emulate today. We can refresh the series with contemporary insights and perspectives but the library should plough new ground, not resow last year’s crop. A third Snowdonia would be a hill too far.

Of the remaining National Park books, one of the most satisfactory is Dartmoor, precisely because it was mainly the work of one man, Professor L.A. Harvey. Dartmoor had been conceived along the lines of Snowdonia, with different authors contributing chapters on natural history, customs and folklore and prehistoric remains. In practice, though, one of the contributors died, and another dropped out, and the two mellow chapters on the history and social customs of Dartmoor people by Douglas St Leger-Gordon dovetail into Harvey’s text without discord. The photographer, E.H. Ware, worked closely with Harvey, and the marriage of illustrations and text is well above average in this book, though the colour reproduction is no better than usual. Harvey admitted that it was Ware’s pictures ‘which have lifted me over the more difficult passages of my own’. Furthermore, Dartmoor had been designated as one of the first National Parks in 1951, allowing the authors time to revise the book before publication and for Harvey to include a chapter on ‘Dartmoor as a National Park’, as well as a postscript deploring its continued use for military training. The only serious weakness was the long series of species lists at the end which, as Harvey acknowledged when revising the book, ‘seem to me neither one thing nor the other. I would happily excise them.....’

Dartmoor forms an interesting contrast with its immediate predecessor in the series, The Weald. They are regions of similar size and both books were written by university professors. But, whereas Leslie Harvey’s ecological approach is well suited to the New Naturalist series and forms the consistent wholeness of view on which to hang details of Dartmoor’s bogs, moors and rivers, Sidney Wooldridge’s preoccupation with ‘land sculpture’ works in the opposite direction. Wooldridge was a geomorphologist based at the University of London, and had used the Weald as an open air laboratory to work out how the region’s scenery had evolved and formulate certain general principles of land erosion. Physical geography, therefore, forms the heart of the book; the chapters on plant and animal life, and on human settlement, have a more perfunctory, knocked-on quality, and the style is as dry as the sands of Ashdown Forest (though, in person, Wooldridge was anything but dry). Geography and geology seem to resist easy popularisation. Reviewing The Weald within the context of the series as a whole, Cyril Connolly found it ‘prickly with unfamiliar fact and theory’. The ordinary reader heads for the catalogue of fauna promised in the Appendix, ‘only to find a miserable list of earthworms and woodlice’. In writing The Weald, Wooldridge may have had his London students foremost in mind. Its use as a university textbook and as a guide to field courses ensured The Weald a steady sale, but it would be hard to claim that the book has much wider appeal.

Jacket of The Weald (1953).

What The Weald and Dartmoor did have was an author capable of seeing the book through to publication relatively speedily and efficiently. The lack of such a primum mobile bedeviled production of The Broads and The Lake District and delayed their publication for years (while Pembrokeshire seems never to have left the ground). Both books had their origin in the 1940s, although they were not published until 1965 and 1973 respectively. To explain in detail how a book can take as long as that to write would take a whole chapter (researching this book, I compiled a four-page summary chronicling the ups and downs of The Broads, which I will spare the reader). The fundamental problem with The Broads, which was never really resolved, was that of too many cooks. Ted Ellis, the doyen of Norfolk naturalists, had the unenviable task of weaving together some dozen individual contributions, written at levels ranging from popular guidebook to university thesis. Ellis lacked the requisite ruthlessness. He admitted that things had rather ‘got out of hand and my contributors would not let me edit or cut their contributions, on which they had galloped away on their own hobbyhorses’. Early on in the proceedings, the blockmakers lost all the colour plates; and then in 1952 Joyce Lambert made the startling discovery that the Broads were almost certainly artificial lakes caused by ancient turf cutting. That revelation alone meant that much of the book would have to be rewritten. Progress remained at a snail’s pace throughout the 1950s, with James Fisher contributing his bit by sitting on the draft for a year or more. Another of Ted Ellis’ problems might have been too much information. He had drawers, cupboards and cardboard boxes crammed full of Broadland matters scattered about his ‘den’ at Wheatfen Broad; James Fisher had been filled with horror at the sight of it. Eventually, after weary effort involving Stamp and Gilmour, as well as Fisher, The Broads was published in 1965. Inevitably, perhaps, it lacks coherence as a book, being full of bits and pieces by different authors. It might have been a better strategy to allow Ted Ellis to write his own book, though that modest and well-loved naturalist might have been reluctant to do so. The Broads was to become out of date very soon, through no fault of the authors, by the catastrophic pollution of the Broadland ecosystem in the 1970s. Today, when we read of ‘the fantastic water-gardens’ described by Ellis, and learn that the otter ‘is thoroughly at home in every river and throughout the broads’, the book seems older than its years.

The Lake District is a much more coherent book, indeed, technically it is possibly the best of all the regional guides, though not the easiest read. But it was not the book that had been anticipated a quarter of a century earlier. That one was to have been written by the Carlisle-based naturalist Ernest Blezard with the help of no fewer than five co-authors, who between them agreed to produce 100,000 words for delivery by 1950. Blezard’s synopsis arranged the book conventionally into chapters on topography, geology, history, plant life, birds and so on. A specimen chapter on ‘bygone birds’ written by Blezard himself was lively and up to scratch, but the other contributions were not (though the pictures by the photographer, J.A. Jenson, are said to have been ‘breathtakingly good’). The deadline passed without much further progress being made. By 1953, the Board had decided they would get a better book out of W.H. Pearsall, author of the successful Mountains and Moorlands. But then Pearsall could not get on with it either. He had evidently produced a first draft shortly before his sudden death in 1964, but was presumably unhappy with the result for he is said to have burnt it, intending to make a fresh start. When Winifred Pennington (Mrs T.G. Tutin) agreed to complete the book, she had only Pearsall’s rough notes and a handful of second-rate slides to work from. At length she completed her task with the help of eleven ‘guest writers’ on special subjects, among them the old New Naturalist hands T.T. Macan, Gordon Manley and Winifred Frost. The bulk of the book (and a bulky book it was) is Pennington’s, however, and admitting Pearsall as the first-named co-author was an act of generosity. The structure of The Lake District showed how much had changed during the past quarter of a century. Gone were the old reductionist divisions of topography, wildlife and land-use, and in their place were chapters on ecology which united the disparate elements of history, land-use and biology. In consequence, this is the most thoroughly ecological of all the regional or National Park books, and, being ahead of its time, reads remarkably freshly even today. Pearsall would undoubtedly have approved.

The last of the books to be considered here, The Peak District, by K.C. Edwards, was published in 1962. Like its fellows, The Peak District has its own particular flavour, strongly reflecting the main author’s preoccupation with regional geography. Half of this rather short book is man-centred and concerned with the villages, factories, water supplies, farms, and stone quarries of the area. Feeling less sure of himself on scientific subjects, Edwards co-opted R.H. Hall, a tutor at Nottingham University extra-mural department, to write about botany, and the aged H.H. Swinnerton to contribute two chapters on the physical landscape. While not a title to set the bookshelf on fire, The Peak District covers the field competently, if somewhat uncritically, with one extraordinary exception – there is hardly anything in it about animal life apart from short notes on birds and fish relegated to an appendix. This book seems to have been commissioned on Edwards’ own initiative. Despite the popularity of the Peak District as a weekend venue, the New Naturalist editors had doubts about the book’s saleability. Perhaps they were right, for in the event the main users of the book were university students. Fortunately, they bought it in sufficient numbers to guarantee a steady sale over nearly 20 years.

Co-authorship

About one quarter of the New Naturalist books is credited to two or more authors. In practice, however, the division between lone and multiple authorship is somewhat blurred, and co-authorship expresses different things in this series. For most titles, one person took the lead, and collaborations of equal partners are in the minority. There is little consistency in the attribution of authorship. The Broads and The Peak District have only one named author on the spine, yet the title page confirms that they were co-operative efforts. Life in Lakes and Rivers and Bumblebees, on the other hand, are credited to co-authors, but they were largely one-man efforts. The 1970 revision of A Natural History of Man in Britain is credited, rightly, to co-authors on the title page, but only the name of the original author, H.J. Fleure, appears on the jacket and spine. And so on.

The situation suggests a degree of muddle, but each case reflects the different circumstances in which the book came to be written. Life in Lakes and Rivers had been assigned to E.B. Worthington, then the director of the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA). Barton Worthington told me that ‘It was I think 1944 when Julian [Huxley] got me for a discussion with Collins and Eric Hosking to see some of the latter’s magnificent photos intended for a volume in the series. They suggested that I should do one on freshwater biology, and I set about a rough synopsis and drafted one or two chapters.’ Fate then intervened. In 1946, Worthington was ‘yanked back to Africa’ to rejoin the East Africa High Commission, and it was at this point that his deputy, T.T. Macan, was brought in as a collaborator. The bulk of the book was written by Macan during Worthington’s sojourn in Africa, though he drew extensively on the work of FBA colleagues (it was very much an FBA book). Life in Lakes and Rivers reflects Macan’s unrivalled knowledge of the invertebrates of Cumbrian lakes and streams, with an ecological slant appropriate to the series. Worthington’s overall plan is probably reflected in the structure of the book, with its emphasis on different kinds of lakes and their productivity. It was an advanced book for its day and could easily have been written in the 1960s during the vogue for production ecology, in which Worthington played a leading role.

T.T. Macan (1910-1985), co-author of Life in Lakes and Rivers: (Photo: Freshwater Biological Association)

Bumblebees had a similar history in that it was commissioned at Colin Butler’s suggestion, but written by John Free, whose PhD and recent postgraduate work on bumblebees Butler had supervised. Butler himself contributed the splendid photographs and helped to edit the book for publication. Without Butler, it is doubtful whether Bumblebees would have been commissioned at all. As always with Billy Collins, the illustrations were the key selling point of New Naturalist books, and he had been so impressed by Butler’s pin-sharp close-ups of honey bees that he had asked him there and then to write the commercially successful World of the Honeybee on the strength of them. That book must have provided cause for optimism about a similar success for Bumblebees. Unfortunately, the apiarists and university students in Britain and the United States who bought Honeybee in large numbers were less interested in wild bumblebees. Through no fault of either author, this is now one of the rare books of the series.

The Art of Botanical Illustration was another collaboration that hovered somewhere between joint and single authorship. Its commissioning had been the occasion of a celebrated New Naturalist muddle. In about 1946, the editors had decided that a volume on botanical illustration would be ‘a pleasing and useful addition to the series’. Unfortunately, while John Gilmour turned to his old Cambridge colleague, William Stearn, another editor (probably James Fisher) had quite independently approached Wilfred Blunt, the art master at Eton College. In consequence, they ended up with different authors for the same book, neither of whom knew of each other’s existence. In Stearn’s words:

‘The embarrassed Editors suggested that we should co-operate. Blunt came to the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society, of which I was then the Librarian, and we agreed on joint action. He was an unmarried art master with no marking of classwork to occupy his evenings; moreover he had long holidays and ample time and money to visit public collections in Holland, France and Italy; I, on the other hand, was a busy librarian with no such facilities and already engaged in gathering material for my Botanical Latin and bibliographical papers. We accordingly decided that he should write the book and that I should later revise and augment it.’

The Art of Botanical Illustration. Introduction to the 1994 edition

Thus began a collaboration and friendship that extended over several more books and lasted until Wilfred Blunt’s death in 1987. The editorial blunder had a happy consequence since, as Stearn pointed out, The Art of Botanical Illustration was a more comprehensive and balanced book than either author would have been able to achieved alone. They complemented each other perfectly: Blunt, the craftsman and aesthete, and Stearn, the professional botanist and bibliographer.

The Shetland and Orkney books, published in 1980 and 1985 respectively, form an interesting contrast in authorship. The Shetland book was the idea of R.J. ‘Sam’ Berry, then a regular visitor to the islands in search of genetically isolated populations of field mice, moths and other organisms (they had already formed part of the subject matter of Berry’s earlier contribution to the series, Inheritance and Natural History). There was no comprehensive natural history of Shetland in print and Berry wanted to write one. Feeling that he needed a resident collaborator, he roped in Laughton Johnston, a Shetlander by birth and, at that time, the Nature Conservancy Council’s representative on the islands. Surprisingly, in view of Shetland’s major importance as a Mecca for wildlife and its new-found prominence at the start of the 1970s oil boom, it proved hard to interest a publisher in the book. Collins at first turned it down (the mid-1970s was a thin time in the book trade, and Shetland was a long way from London). A dowry from BP made the difference. The two co-authors set to work in about 1975. Laughton Johnston remembers writing some of it in the glass-fronted verandah of his house overlooking the west shore of Shetland, now and again looking up to gain inspiration from the cavorting wildlife below, which included divers and otters. His contribution to the book were the chapters on whales and seals, birds, lochs and burns and most of the conservation chapter (chapters 6, 7, 9, 10 and 14). Berry wrote chapters 1, 3, 5, 8 and 12, and four ‘guest authors’ contributed a chapter each.

R.J. Berry (left) and Laughton Johnston (right), authors of The Natural History of Shetland, catching field mice during hay making at Quendale, Shetland c. 1972. (Photo: R.J. Berry/Dennis Couttts, Lerwick)

The book was given a leavening of editing by Sam Berry alone, but the result was something of a potpourri and the treatment inevitably uneven. As Berry himself admitted, the book contained some ‘turgid stuff’ more suited to a university seminar than a popular natural history publication. He resolved to approach the complementary Natural History of Orkney (also made possible by an oil company grant) in a different way: ‘I intend to write it as Winston Churchill used to write his books: commission individual chapters from experts, and then re-write them into a flowing whole.’ This is, surely, the right decision for books of this sort. The complications and disagreements behind the scenes remained, especially as Berry did not know Orkney as well as Shetland and was therefore even more dependent on local help. But as the product of a single hand, Orkney has a better balance and a more even flow. Its main misfortune was to be printed in a minute typeface that strains the eyes; had its readers been treated more considerately by the publisher, they might have agreed that this is one of the better written books of recent New Naturalist times.

Left John Raven (1914-1980). Co-author of Mountain Flowers. (Photo: Faith Raven) Right Max Walters c. 1965. Co-author of Wild Flowers and Mountain Flowers. (Photo: S.M. Walters)

Three botanical books were that unusual thing, a genuine fusion of two equal parts: Wild Flowers, Mountain Flowers and The Pollination of Flowers. In the pollination book, the contributions of Michael Proctor and Peter Yeo are so similar in style, that the book might easily pass as the product of a single hand. But one of the strengths of Mountain Flowers is the contrast between Max Walters’ scientific lectures and John Ravens’ exuberant botanical travelogue, rather as though British Plant Life had married Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone. It is perhaps the most perfectly realised marriage of the amateur and professional viewpoints in the whole series, and, as in The Art of Botanical Illustration, it thereby gains in balance and comprehension. There were, of course, some who would have preferred undiluted Raven. John Raven was a Cambridge classics scholar, but his life’s passion was for plants. He lived among them; he travelled hundreds of miles and scaled the remotest hills to find them; he cultivated them; he painted them; and, of course, he wrote about them with panache. He had a story to tell about every plant he found, and an artist’s memory for the form and atmosphere of hill scenery. As a botanical writer he was, in short, extremely likeable. His survey of the Scottish hills is, as Geoffrey Grigson found, ‘extremely tantalising and makes one wish to calculate miles at once on a road map. How far to Glen Doll or The Storr or the great Ben Lawers?’

It was not to be expected that people would take to Max Walters’ drier, more technical style with the same degree of enthusiasm. Grigson certainly did not:

‘The authors do separate jobs. Mr Raven (in normal English) introduces the flowers historically and emotionally. Dr Walters (in appalling professional botanist’s English) explains them. Then Mr Raven takes over again, sketching the mountain flora region by region..... Persevere with Dr Walters. When he wants to say: “The heavy falls of rain and snow are important,” he says…“Precipitation in the form of rain or, in winter, snow, is generally high, and this is of the first importance.” Inside this entanglement of barbed wire are facts and speculations about the way flowers live and maintain themselves at such heights and about the origins of our mountain flora.....’

Geoffrey Grigson. Review of Mountain Flowers, The Observer, August 1956

Max Walters retorted that ‘It isn’t a charge against which one can defend oneself – except to say, with respect to the particular example he chooses to drag from its context and set up as an Aunt Sally, that “precipitation” is a technical term, the use of which prevents one having to say throughout “rain, snow, hail, sleet or dew”.’ Reading the Walters half of Mountain Flowers today, one wonders what all the fuss was about: it is, of course, a scientific text, but a perfectly readable one which either avoids technical terms or carefully explains those which are used. In praising Raven at the expense of Walters, Grigson missed the significance of the blend of the amateur and professional naturalist which lies at the heart of the New Naturalist library. A travelogue without the ecological background would have been like a statue without a pediment, especially in the context of mountains where the physical environment is so dominating, and so extreme. It is the mixture of seminar room and field excursion which lifts Mountain Flowers above the herd. The New Naturalists were trying, gently, to guide the reader beyond mere rarity-ticking to ask why the plant was rare in the first place, and where it came from, and how it survives. In that aim, I suggest the book succeeds triumphantly. For me, at any rate, it is the apotheosis of co-authorship, and one of the best books in the series.

The evolving series

The standard of the magnificent first dozen New Naturalist titles was maintained through the second dozen and, perhaps, even the third. We cannot hope to do justice to each book here, nor even offer these books the same consideration as their predecessors. Fortunately, some of them have their place in the sun in another context, for which I must refer you to the index. Here the object is to step back from the chronological sequence of titles to pick out some highlights and see whether we can discern overall trends that have changed the nature of the series.

The early 1950s saw a pile of new titles, as authors commissioned in the mid-1940s all breasted the tape in a rush. While most of these books were written in the same spirit as their predecessors, we can note in Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone and The Wild Orchids of Britain an improvement in colour reproduction to match two of the most popular texts of the series. Chalk and Limestone is the amateur plant-finders book par excellence. It is still pretty useful 40 years on despite J.E. Lousley’s deliberate vagueness about localities. It is easy to agree with The Field that it is ‘a wonderfully friendly book’; more surprisingly, it was equally well reviewed in the scientific press. Harry Godwin was charmed by the author’s ‘obvious affection for the beauty of plants in natural surroundings’. Though plainly written – no Richard Jeffreys transports here – the book does have an air of the downs in summer and the sweet savour of thyme-scented grass. Since everything in this book is first hand, the author excels at capturing the individuality of each rare flower, and placing it into its context in the landscape. Lousley adds a couple of fairly perfunctory chapters on ecology, but he knows what most of us want and goes on to provide it in the second best botanical travelogue ever written (I’m sorry Ted, but the best is John Raven’s). Wild Orchids is more of a herbarium curator’s book, full of detailed leaf-by-leaf descriptions of the British orchid flora that relate form to function. But for all that, there is an open-air feel to this book too, helped by Robert Atkinson’s lovely colour portraits. Orchids have always had a special mystique, and VS. Summerhayes gave field botanists exactly the book they were waiting for. It judged the overlap in amateur and professional expectations perfectly.

J.E. Lousley (1907-1976), author of Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone, at Wicken Fen, 1960. (Photo: BSB1)

In the same influential league were the two vertebrate titles, British Mammals by Leo Harrison Matthews and The British Amphibians and Reptiles by Malcolm Smith. Both were the first serious books on their subject for decades, and helped to start a revival of interest in our then neglected four-legged fauna. Malcolm Smith’s book is regarded today by herpetologists as a classic, and, if now out of date in some respects, it is nevertheless still read with great respect and not a little affection. Smith had helped to found the British Herpetological Society in 1947, shortly before starting work on the book, and he more than anyone is considered the father of modern herpetology. Similarly, Matthew’s great (in more ways than one) work gave mammalogists what they needed and its publication influenced the formation of the Mammal Society in 1955. Both books reflect their period in their preoccupation with anatomy and traditional life-history. Smith’s book was continually updated through five editions, after the death of the author in 1958, by Angus Bellairs and J.F.D. Frazer (who also wrote the replacement ‘herptile’ title in 1983). Mammals, on the other hand, had grown badly out of date by 1970, and for economic reasons it proved impossible to reset this very long book. Having already produced the necessary revisions, Matthews was naturally put out when belatedly informed of this. Eventually, however, he put the work to good use by writing a new, shorter mammal book for the series, published in 1982. Mammals in the British Isles indicated how much had changed in the intervening 30 years. The second Mammals abandons the systematic treatment of the first for a comparative one on a range of topics on the behaviour and evolution of mammals in the wild, much of it gathered in recent years by radio-tracking devices and, oddly enough, by archaeologists. It was another masterly and personal review, neatly sidestepping the fund of mammal lore already available. In one respect, though, Matthews refused to move with the times. Conservation, to him, was futile. What mattered to him was not the sentimental tinkering of well-meaning naturalists but ‘the evolution of new habits and habitats and ways of co-existence between the wild mammals and man’. It was the dynamic of evolution, with the rise and fall of species, that fascinated him. His strictures about the folly of trying to preserve nature in aspic are currently unfashionable, but they deserve more serious attention and reflection than they seem to have received.

Titles of the highest quality continued to swell the series in the 1950s. There was The Art of Botanical Illustration (1950), ‘a glittering and intoxicating gallery of flowers…a new world of beauty’ (Sacheverell Sitwell in The Spectator). Forty years on, it is still a unique book, still the standard work internationally, peerless in taste, scope and style. There was Life in Lakes and Rivers (1951), perhaps exceeded only by Mountains and Moorlands as a masterpiece of popular ecology. And what about A Natural History of Man in Britain, ‘conceived as a study of changing relations between Men and Environments’, a simply written but imaginative ‘picturing of British life’ that links the progress of the human animal with the evolving landscape he creates. It is, as one reviewer noted, the first ecology of man. Gordon Manley’s Climate and the British Scene (1952) offers another synthesis, this time the relationship of earth and sky, confidently treading the no-man’s-land between the professional meteorologist, on the one hand, and the naturalist, on the other, and always with the casual observer or the walker in the hills in mind. In the choice and expression of such titles we detect lively imaginations at work. How easy it would be, and how dull, to simply knock together books on identification, landscape and weather. All these titles, and most of their peers, involve the reader in the subject because they are about things he can see and find out for himself, yet are presented in ways that were new and surprising and, above all, interesting. How well they wrote, these Blunts and Manleys and Fleures, masters of their subject and never crushed by their complexities. They were of the great age of nature interpretation, when the enthusiasm and sense of wonder of the Victorian naturalists had been informed by new learning and new perspectives, yet their message was still comprehensible to all educated people.

Perhaps the New Naturalist ethos is seen to greatest advantage in two of the last of the originally planned titles to be published: The Open Sea (2 volumes 1956 and 1959) and The World of Spiders (1958). Alister Hardy’s brief had been broad enough: ‘to write about the open sea as a habitat’. As many New Naturalist authors did, he interpreted his instructions broadly and eventually rewarded the editors with a book beyond their dreams. Or rather, two books. Hardy explained to James Fisher that ‘I wanted to produce as good a book as possible and went on adding, thinking you must be going to let me produce something getting on for the size of your Fulmar.’ [touché!]. Billy Collins grumbled about the length and the ‘complicated scientific names’ in the first part, but Fisher had his way and after some revision The Open Sea was published uncut in two instalments. To Julian Huxley, this title was the embodiment of what they were all trying to do. He especially liked ‘the unobtrusive personal note that comes in so often’ and ‘the insistence in the possibilities of amateur work…At last it seems that the regrettable confusion between popular scientific writing and vulgar journalism is being swept away…No book since The Sea Shore (and that in a different way) has given me such a boost.’

It was, indeed, as the Yorkshire Post put it, ‘a book for all naturalists’. Much of the success of The Open Sea is attributable to Hardy’s lucid, enthusiastic style, which he complemented perfectly with 40 beautiful watercolour drawings reminiscent of the Victorian nature books he so admired, as well as a large number of text figures, also mostly by the author. It was not surprising that The Open Sea had taken years of labour to complete. The two volumes represent an extraordinary achievement for any man, let alone someone like Alister Hardy who was busy with his new department at Oxford and a hundred other things. There was never any more dedicated New Naturalist than he.

W.S. Bristowe (1901-1979), author of The World of Spiders, dressed for an arachnological conference at Slapton Lea, Devon in 1977. (Photo: D.R. Nellist)

With one possible exception. The World of Spiders by W.S. Bristowe was published in-between the two volumes of The Open Sea. It, too, had been long in the making, but when the manuscript and drawings for it finally came in, they created a sensation. Fisher exclained to the board: ‘This is the best NN book we’ve ever had!’ It was something quite new in spider literature: a natural history of living spiders in their natural environment, vividly described. Bill Bristowe wrote a great deal of it in the first person since he was describing what to a large extent was his own life’s work. It seemed, and still seems, incredible that one person could manage to find out so much about spiders, and not only in Britain but all over the world. It is impossible to convey Bristowe’s delightful style, so full of modesty and humour and delightfully quirky anecdotes, in a few lines. But let us at least try with the following short extract which offers some indication of Bristowe’s dauntless quest of the eight-legged. It concerns a dreadful-looking beast called the Daddy-Long-Legs Spider:

‘Pholcus phalangioides must be well-known to people who live in the South of England…She sits unobtrusively in corners of rooms between ceilings and walls hanging motionless from a scaffolding of fine invisible threads. Her presence is not resented because she seldom moves and is regarded as an innocuous creature which may be useful in catching mosquitoes or clothes-moths. Pholcus did not live in my childhood home at Stoke d’Abernon, Surrey, although she thrived only ten miles further south, so the quest of an explanation inspired me to trace her distribution. This had to await the acquisition of a motor-bicycle and then, with the impudence of youth, I zig-zagged across England ostensibly seeking rooms in hotels or lodgings whose ceilings I viewed with nonchalant interest. My apologies are no doubt due to a host of hoteliers for gaining entry under false pretences, but in the result their unwitting co-operation enabled me to draw a map which showed that Pholcus inhabited houses coinciding with the narrow southern strip where the average temperature throughout the year exceeds 50°F. North of this strip she is normally confined to cellars…’

The World of Spiders, Ch. 10 The Scytodoidea. Spitting and Daddy-Long-Legs Spiders

There you are, a project within the means of everyone!

If the text of The World of Spiders is enticing, the illustrations are simply stunning. As if to make amends for the unappetising nature of his subject, Bristowe produced what is surely the most beautiful book in the series. The measly four-colour plates sink into insignificance compared with the magnificent gallery of some 200 line-and-wash drawings of living spiders, all of them by a leading natural history book illustrator, Arthur Smith. It is a measure of the labour of love that is The World of Spiders, that Bristowe paid for most of the illustrations out of his own pocket. He probably never made any money out of the title that will be his memorial for as long as people study spiders.

By sheer virtuosity, Bristowe turned a potentially specialised subject into a popular work of natural history. With some other titles published in the late 1950s and 1960s, we start to find an increased scientific or scholarly rigour, and a growing detachment between author and subject. At an early stage, the editors decided there was room in a successful best-selling series for a few more specialised (though not highly specialised) titles on subjects of special interest. They themselves described An Angler’s Entomology (1952) as ‘the most specialised volume in the series…to date’. A book about mayflies written for the fly fisherman, it seemed an unlikely topic for a general natural history library. But it turned out to be yet another example of an imaginative synthesis of man and nature, symbolised on the dust jacket by a living fly and a fishing fly. In terms of sales, it did quite well in Britain, Ireland and America. The author J.R. Harris had plenty of ‘river credibility’ among the angling fraternity, especially in his native Ireland, and he had the same large ‘captive’ market that The World of the Honeybee had. Two later specialised titles, Insect Migration (1958) and The Folklore of Birds (1958) represented a greater financial risk. The latter was a throwback to the optimistic days of the 1940s. The author, Edward Armstrong, had a contract, wanted to write the book and was supported in doing so by James Fisher. By 1958, however, book buying habits had changed and such a title was no longer likely to have wide appeal. Nor did it: The Folklore of Birds had the shortest shelf life of any mainstream New Naturalist book. Both it and Insect Migration are impeccably scholarly, but there is no denying that they are tough going compared with Butterflies or Mountains and Moorlands.

Philip Corbet, co-author of Dragonflies, in 1951, when a Cambridge undergraduate. (Photo: Philip Corbet)

The changing face of natural history can be traced in a well-known and much-praised title published in 1960, Dragonflies. While Bill Bristowe wrote about spiders in the same spirit as Fabre or White, much of the material in Dragonflies is based on PhD theses (as was John Free’s on Bumblebees). The more technical style was recognised by T.T. Macan who thought that ‘Perhaps more than any other in the series [Dragonflies] merits the words “new” and “naturalist”.’ By this he meant the study of the living animal in its natural setting, of which Philip Corbet and Norman Moore were keen exponents. At one point, in the book Moore follows a particular dragonfly around for hours, and when it finally goes to sleep, so does Moore, in a sleeping bag a short distance away. The material was really no more ‘difficult’ than Tinbergen’s The World of the Herring Gull, but at that time the majority of naturalists were unfamiliar with the British dragonflies. Dragonflies was too specialised a title for the intended market. A generation later more naturalists would have been ready for it, but by that time the book had retreated into the better class of second-hand bookshop.

This trend deepened with time. Weeds and Aliens was engaging, but an awful lot of it was concerned with the small print of seed weight, root length and germination period. It had a ready made market with the Botanical Society of the British Isles and ‘there were cries of grief’ when Weeds and Aliens was dropped from the list in 1972. The Common Lands of England and Wales (1963), solidly based (too solidly based) on a recent Royal Commission report was useful but scarcely exciting, despite a contribution from the normally entertaining W.G. Hoskins. Grass and Grasslands (1966) was presumably aimed at agricultural colleges, for there is hardly any natural history in it. Peter Yeo remembers John Gilmour ‘tearing his hair out’ over the manuscript, which he had had to re-write in places. The original concept of a book about wild grasses had been scuppered when C.E. Hubbard’s book, Grasses, appeared in Penguin in 1954. Gilmour decided to go instead for a predominantly agricultural book, ‘a natural history of pasture’, but in the event he must have wished he had abandoned the subject altogether.

The more technical style of the New Naturalists from the 1960s onwards can be exemplified by the series of books published by scientists working for the then Nature Conservancy at Monks Wood Field Station: Pesticides and Pollution (1967), Man and Birds (1971) and Hedges (1974). At that time, Monks Wood was a remarkable institution, almost an apotheosis of the new natural history, dedicated to habitat surveys, ways of managing nature reserves and examining the effects of pesticides on wildlife. It was, nevertheless, like any other professional institute, a place where experts spent a great deal of time in each others company, talking their own language. It was natural that their work was tailored to the critical standards of peer groups rather than elementary students or the general public. Many of its staff were gifted field naturalists, but they brought to their professional subjects the due rigour of experimental science, with its cargo of data, theory and analysis.

Pesticides and Pollution is one of the most controversial titles in the series; and also one of the shortest. It was hailed by the editors as ‘a calm book, and a deeply thought-out book, and patently a balanced book’, a kind of antidote to Rachel Carson’s best-selling Silent Spring. For some, it was a bit too calm and balanced, especially in its apparent defence of the much maligned DDT. Writing in the scientific press, G.R. Sagar was also ‘disappointed to find the ecological aspects of the subject so scattered…the reader may emerge knowing rather more about the chemicals than the ecology’. Others have found Mellanby’s treatment rather sketchy and, on some topics, superficial. It seems to me, though, that on stylistic grounds at least, Pesticides is admirable: crisp, well argued, tough talking when it needs to be and somehow managing to be simultaneously punchy and dispassionate. It is a personal book like all the best books in the series; it was also for a few years the standard work on a popular subject and therefore sold quite well, especially in the student’s paperback edition. Devoid of fussy textual references and completely jargon free, it points in a direction that the series might usefully have taken.

Jacket of Grass and Grasslands (1966).

Max Hooper, co-author of Hedges, in 1988. (Photo: Institute of Terrestrial Ecology)

Ian Newton, author of Finches in 1972. (Photo: Pamela Harrison)

Unfortunately, some of the succeeding titles were more like Man and Birds. Not that R.K. Murton’s book is a bad book by any means. It covers the subject very thoroughly, the material seems well organised and what he has to say is interesting. But it is a prime specimen of the kind of scientific writing Geoffrey Grigson and Cyril Connolly had complained about. It is laden with the sort of ‘Scientific Correctness’ which decrees that it is better to say, ‘adult birds mostly experience accidental mortality’ than ‘adult birds usually die by accident’. We notice the advance of graphs and data, and of what Klopfer and MacArthur did in 1960. The book would do very well for ecology courses at Monks Wood and at universities all round the world, but it was not the popular natural history envisaged by Fisher and Collins.

Peter Yeo, co-author of The Pollination of Flowers, in 1977. (Photo: Peter Yeo)

Even so, scientific writing need not be turgid, and even the most difficult, mathematics-based science can be made exciting in skilled hands. There is a festive, bird-nesting spirit in parts of Hedges, which is what one would expect from such excellent all-round naturalists as Ernest Pollard, Max Hooper and Norman Moore. Finches was justly praised as ‘a model of clear and logical writing’. Pollination is firmly rooted in English amateur botany. But titles like Ants (1977) and Pedigree: Words from Nature (1973) which need a light, humorous touch to make them palatable, are positively Germanic in their ponderous tones. I have tried hard with Ants, but after a few pages found myself praying for Fabre. In a long review, Maurice Richardson summed up exactly what was wrong with the series at this time.

‘…The important thing when you go to the ant is to stick to the facts. This you can rely on M.V. Brian to do…Much of the text is based on his own observations. His writing is lucid, on the dry side. He rarely hazards a metaphor and any hint of anthropomorphism is alien to him. When describing worker ants dragging big prey to their nests, he does not compare them to a gang of labourers on the lump [sic]; he gives you exact, experimentally-derived figures for their horse power: “Single workers of Myrmica rubra developed 0.8 × 10^-6 horse power and of Formica lugubris 3.2 × 10^-6 horse power. When this [measurement] was tried for pairs of ants it proved difficult. However in thirty per cent of cases the second ant contributed nothing at all”.’

Maurice Richardson, review in The Times Literary Supplement, 1977

By this time, Billy Collins, James Fisher and Julian Huxley were no more, and the most active replacement editor, Kenneth Mellanby, might have been more tolerant of this sort of thing than they. The last bestseller of the series, British Birds of Prey (1976), was, perhaps significantly, written by an amateur naturalist (though with ‘amateurs’ like Leslie Brown one needs to use quotation marks). That book deserved its success, and even survived the critical and not always friendly attention of British ornithologists (the expatriate Brown had been expecting their reviews to be ‘bad and ungenerous, if not actually libellous’). Birds of Prey was a legitimate New Naturalist title, but one has more reservations about the flocks of birds that were entering the series at this time. Eight out of 20 titles published between 1971 and 1985 were bird books, whereas among the first 40 titles, only two were wholly devoted to birds. There was some justification for this in that the editors had decided to replace the unsuccessful bird monographs with books on families of birds in the hope that they would sell better. There were also many knowledgeable and experienced ornithologists ready to contribute to the series, whereas in other areas suitable authors were harder to find. Even so, there were far too many Thrushes and Tits, Waders and Warblers for the health of the series, especially with several other publishers competing in the same market and publishing the same sort of books. Over-specialisation was a common accusation made against the series then, and understandably.

Eric Simms, author of a record four volumes in the New Naturalist series, photographed in 1971, at the time of the first of them, Woodland Birds. (Photo: Eric Simms/Stanmore Studios)

We could note one more unfortunate trend in the later books. Topical, scientific books date more quickly than broadly-based natural history. We have noted this with Pesticides and Pollution, and it was even more evident in Nature Conservation in Britain (1969), the classic instance of a title that was pensionable at birth. Moreover, while most of the earlier titles went through several editions when revision was at least theoretically possible, (Highlands and Islands, Mountains and Moorlands, A Natural History of Man in Britain, and Life in Lakes and Rivers were all given a new lease of life by this means) most of the later ones were not afforded that luxury. One near-guarantee of inbuilt obsolescence was to employ an elderly author. That was the trouble with Fossils (1960). The octogenarian H.H. Swinnerton had written a readable, well-illustrated book, and one of the few to concentrate on British fossils and relate them to the chronological sequence. But, as a colleague later pointed out, ‘the contents seem older than the book’. Fossils might have been written in the 1940s or even the 1930s: few of the references cited are of later date than 1940. The same was true to a lesser extent of Man and the Land (1955), Dudley Stamp’s sequel to Britain’s Structure and Scenery on the evolution of the landscape. Stamp wrote it with his customary efficiency, probably relying on his general knowledge of social and economic geography, built up over previous decades. His prehistoric chapters looked rather stale even in 1955 and from a modern standpoint read almost like myth. In an unfavourable review of the book, Geoffrey Grigson noted various ‘whoppers’ and claimed to have discovered others. The book was a good candidate for early oblivion, but it caught on in school and college libraries and remained in print as a sort of literary coelacanth until 1983.

It would be unfair to place Herbert Edlin’s well-known book, Trees, Woods and Man (1956), in the same bracket, but it, too, was very much a product of its time. In its dismissal of indigenous trees and woods as virtually worthless and its espousal of conifer forestry during its most ruthless phase, Edlin was doing no more than voicing current practice. He himself loved trees and traditional crafts, but as an employee of the Forestry Commission he may not have felt a complete independence of opinion. Today, of course, attitudes have changed, and a New Naturalist woodland book would now be concerned far more with native ancient woods than with parks and plantations. The best-known sentence in Trees, Woods and Man concerns elm: ‘We need not fear that these splendid trees will cease to stand as landmarks along our hedgerows.’ Shortly after that was written, the elms were all gone.

This review threatens to turn uncharitable. If I have criticised some aspects of the later books of the series, it is only to stress the very high standards of the earlier ones and on the whole, its maintenance through rapidly changing educational and commercial circumstances. The scientific pedigree of the New Naturalist series is well-nigh impeccable. On the question of style, the books vary from pedestrian to brilliant. In terms of readability, the series has, I am happy to suggest, shown distinct signs of improvement in recent years, witness Ferns, Caves and Cave Life, and Wild and Garden Plants. Perhaps, after a decade or two of ‘Scientific Correctness’, we are witnessing a revival of an older literary tradition and a reversion to the popular appeal of the founding New Naturalist authors.