7
Naturalists All

As one might expect, the authors of the New Naturalist series come from a wide variety of backgrounds and vary enormously in terms of personality, outlook and career. The one thing they have in common, of course, is that they wrote a book for our series. In doing so, and bearing in mind that the majority of them were asked to do so, they were expressing no superficial aspect of their outlook. Reading about them – and by the nature of things, more is available about the dead than the living – it is clear that natural history meant a great deal to these people. In many cases, it lay at the root of things, whether they became professional biologists or remained as gifted amateurs. They were ‘new’ naturalists in the 1940s sense of embracing the recent advances of science to illuminate the workings of nature; but in another sense their approach was rather old-fashioned. Their contributions to science, though considerable, were almost entirely non-technological. Nearly all of these authors were first and foremost masters of field study, based on observation and simple experiment. They were not so much interested in data sets and theoretical modelling as in the relationships and behaviour of living wild animals and plants, or with the shaping of the scenery. The other matter that we can usefully notice at the start, because it is less common among scientists today, is that they were good communicators and could write in plain, everyday language without over-simplifying; and, in some cases, they wrote extraordinarily well. The series was blessed, in its first two decades at least, with writers who seemed to find the right level intuitively. It may not have been possible to do so on such a broad range of subject matter at any other period. These people were exceptional not only in their personal qualities but in their experiences.

We can note two broad ‘generations’ of authors: those who pioneered new academic disciplines, new ways of studying nature, and later became founders of institutions for nature conservation and field study that are still with us today; and a younger ‘generation’ who were, or are, often members of staff of those selfsame institutions. I owe my own professional background in the Nature Conservancy to the work of Max Nicholson, Julian Huxley, Dudley Stamp and other writers in the series, and have been fortunate enough to have been a colleague of Norman Moore, Morton Boyd, Niall Campbell and Colin Tubbs. In this chapter, as elsewhere in this book, I have devoted more space to the earlier than the later generation, partly for reasons of space but also because the New Naturalist ethos is rooted in those now rather distant days. Many of the older writers were among the founding fathers of ecology and modern field study. Though they also founded new institutions, they rarely became institutionalised themselves.

There are more than 100 authors in the New Naturalist series, and this chapter has to be selective. I have teased out four strands from a tangled skein: childhoods (because an interest in natural history is nearly always rooted in childhood experiences); what I have called the ‘moss-gatherers’ of the series, that is to say those who stayed in the same place for much of their working lives, relative to those in the third strand whom I have classed as the ‘world adventurers’ (arbitrary classes of course, but Linnaeus might have sympathised with that problem). Finally, I have included a postscript about Frank Fraser Darling and J. Morton Boyd who, between them, represent a Scottish tradition of natural history that I might have neglected elsewhere.

The sources for this chapter are legion, but I outline the main ones at the end of the book.

New Naturalist childhood

When reading about the lives of the ‘first generation’ New Naturalists from a gradually acquired collection of cuttings and off-prints, I was surprised at how few of them had the advantage of a privileged background. Relatively few went to Eton, Harrow or other top public schools, and many attended grammar school. They were self-made men, whose fortune was not in their pockets but in their genes (pun unintended). The ‘typical’ New Naturalist author came from a solid middle-class background around the turn of the century, often in business or one of the professions. A few, the Fords, Salisburys and Pearsalls, were scions of ancient country families (in Cumberland, Hertfordshire and Worcestershire respectively). More frequently, their background was in the prosperous urban middle-class of the late Victorian era. S.W. Wooldridge, A.D. Imms and C.B. Williams were the sons of bank managers. Alister Hardy’s father was an architect, Harrison Matthews’ a manufacturing chemist, Macan’s and the Campbells’ were career officers in the army. W.B. Turrill’s father seems to have stepped straight out of a novel by Thomas Hardy as provision merchant and sometime Mayor of Woodstock. Perhaps surprisingly, in only a minority of cases did the New Naturalists belong to families of high academic achievement. Huxley is, of course, the best known example, but Maurice Yonge, James Fisher and W.H. Pearsall were the sons of headmasters and Kenneth Mellanby might have owed much of his irrepressible self-confidence to his family background, a small galaxy of scientific professors and distinguished medical men. Men like John Raven, Mellanby and E.J. Salisbury must have grown up surrounded by brilliant, successful people. John Russell might have had a less comfortable upbringing in that his schoolmaster father is said to have displayed ‘an independence of judgement that led to frequent conflict with his employers and to consequent changes in employment’. He ended up as a Unitarian lay minister in the Midlands.

A few had to count the pennies. Ramsbottom senior was a letter-carrier in the Manchester leather trade, which was unlikely to have been particularly well-paid. His son John, the future mycologist, earned his school fees as a pupil-teacher, which enabled him to pass the Cambridge entrance exam. J.E. Lousley, too, is said to have grown up in straightened circumstances. But while there were few rags-to-riches stories among the New Naturalists, neither were there many millionaires. The two Grandes Dames of the series, Miriam Rothschild and Cynthia Longfield, came from privileged backgrounds. Miriam’s pedigree, daughter of one great naturalist and niece of another, is too well-known to repeat here (I refer the interested reader to Derek Wilson’s book on the Rothschilds). Cynthia Longfield (1896-1991) was the last surviving member of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family which held broad estates at Cloyne in County Cork. Both ladies chose, very much against the social grain, to follow a scientific career, which in Cynthia’s case took her all over the world in quest of dragonflies, supported by a modest income from a family trust. She was one of the great individualists of the series, tough and intrepid, but who seemed to retain her health and femininity throughout her adventures. Some of her sayings are remembered: ‘If you’re interested in the peoples of the world, you’ll just have to get used to travelling on local transport.’ and, ‘I do find pangas so useful in the jungle, don’t you?’ There are not many left like her.

Bruce Campbell (1912-1993), co-author of Snowdonia, in c. 1975. (Photo Eric Hosking)

The home life of many young people at the turn of the century was strongly tinged with religion. Sometimes this could be stultifying. But for the fortunate ones, like W.H. Pearsall, H.H. Swinnerton and E.B. Ford, religion led, through an enhanced sense of wonder, to nature study. For such people, natural history had a profound moral and religious dimension. Today, the former is most often expressed as a concern for endangered species and damage to the environment. Former generations were more philosophical and less wholly secular about man and nature. John Raven’s father, Canon Charles Raven wrote a biography of the French scientist-philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, whose transcendental speculations about speciation and human evolution led him into original, if theologically unorthodox, arguments that proved the existence of God. Edward Armstrong (1900-1978), Anglican priest and natural history polymath, found no contradiction between his faith and wonder at the beauty of the natural world; rather the opposite, a conviction that the first leads, hand in glove, to the second. Similar views and concomitant ethical considerations seem to have occupied the minds of several New Naturalist authors, whether Anglicans, like Alister Hardy and Sam Berry, or Methodists, like W.H. Pearsall, or Congregationalists, like Sidney Wooldridge. Bruce Campbell (1912-1993), whose religious convictions made him both a socialist and a pacifist, broadcast a sermon from the parish church at Selborne, at the beginning of National Nature Week, in 1963, on ‘Conservation and Christianity’. To Campbell, man’s ‘power to change things overnight’ carried with it the moral obligation to husband the earth’s resources. In accepting that evolution was the means God had chosen to work towards his ends on earth, Christians had a special obligation to become good conservationists: ‘Surely the exercise of the mind to the glory of God includes the study and appreciation of the whole of His world and the taking of thought to conserve it?’ Thirty years on, one seldom hears much talk about God by conservationists, and environmental issues have taken on a secular, humanist slant. But without admitting the presence of God, even if only as a symbol, can there be a proper explanation for the naturalist’s sense of wonder? And without it, what is nature writing but the repository of sickly rural longings and matter for the boring article?

Natural history is one of those vocations, like art and music, that one seems to be born into. The New Naturalist authors were no exceptions. It is said of Edward Armstrong, as no doubt it could be of many others, that ‘as a young child, he became entranced by the beauty of nature and natural things and concluded…that he could himself find out things which grown-ups did not know’. One might hazard an unscientific guess that many New Naturalists were clever but rather shy little boys who spent a lot of time on their own. The American writer Stephen Fox pointed out that a remarkable number of leading conservationists over there were ‘only children’, and perhaps there is a tendency for children to turn to nature as a compensation for less than happy human relationships. Armstrong himself declared that to study a species intensively you needed silence and concentration, which are not easily reconciled with company. Nevertheless, nature study in late Victorian and Edwardian England was a sociable, even a fashionable, activity, and many of our authors seem to have received plenty of parental encouragement. We could pick out examples almost at random. As a native of Woodstock in Oxfordshire, W.B. Turrill (1890-1961) spent his boyhood in an area rich in wild habitats and uncommon plants – Blenheim Park, Wychwood and the winding wooded banks of the lovely River Evenlode. ‘Here’, as his biographer C.E. Hubbard recalled, ‘he spent his days searching the woods, fields, broad green lanes, ponds and watercourses for natural history specimens, drawing inspiration and delight from each fresh discovery, and studying them in greater detail over the years, with an increasing specialisation on plant life.’ In this, he was encouraged by his mother, who was from a farming background and gave young William his own garden plot to grow a variety of flowers and vegetables. Turrill dedicated British Plant Life to the memory of his mother, ‘to whom I owe my love of plants’. C.B. Williams (1889-1981) was less fortunate in his surroundings, living above the bank on a busy street corner in the middle of Liverpool, where ‘there was not a living tree within a mile’. Nor were his parents at all scientifically minded. ‘But to compensate for the absence of countryside he and his elder sister were given books on natural history, they kept an aquarium, and on Sunday mornings were taken to feed the seagulls from the landing stage on the River Mersey.’

W.B. Turrill (1890-1961), author of British Plant Life, holding open his book on Knapweeds, written with his long-term collaborator, E.B. Marsden-Jones in 1954. (Photo: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)

At least three of the New Naturalist authors were fortunate enough to have for a father one of the foremost naturalists of the day: Canon Charles Raven; W.H. Pearsall senior, sometime Secretary of the Botanical Society (now the Botanical Society of the British Isles); and Colonel Ronald Campbell, ardent ornithologist and nest-finder extraordinaire. The sons took after their fathers. Charles and John Raven collaborated in a project to paint the entire British flora in watercolour; Bruce Campbell, whose earliest memory was of his father lowering him down a bank of the Itchen to look into a grey wagtail’s nest, went on to write Finding Nests (1953) and A Field Guide to Birds’ Nests (1972 with James Ferguson-Lees); and the two W.H.Pearsalls went fly-fishing and plant-hunting by boat, the one lowering a pronged and weighted dredger to haul up submerged plants, the other manning the oars. W.H. Pearsall the younger’s classic study of Esthwaite Water was begun on one of these excursions in 1914. All in all, the impression one receives from the memoirs and obituaries is that of fairly sunny childhoods, in which every sympathy and encouragement was given to the young naturalist. No doubt that is not the whole story. Some probably went through hell at public school, especially during the austere years of the First World War. But, on the whole, the flavour is closer to Bevis than to David Copperfield.

North Fen, Esthwaite Water, the scene of W.H. Pearsall’s classic study of an English Lake. (Photo: Peter Wakely/English Nature)

The precocity of luminaries like Dudley Stamp (1898-1966) and H.J. Fleure (1877-1969) might owe something to childhood illness. As we have seen, Stamp had been laid up with so many illnesses of one kind or another that he received hardly any formal schooling at all. Fleure was another invalid, delicate, blind in one eye, with pleural cavities full of fluid. Possibly this was a consequence of elderly parentage. Fleure’s father, accountant to the States, Guernsey, was born in 1803 and was aged 74 when Fleure fils was conceived (the Fleures father and son spanned a remarkable 166 years: from Napoleon to The Beatles!). At the start of a career in natural history, severe illness is not necessarily a drawback, though there is an element of make-or-break about it. For Fleure, only two pursuits were available: reading and, when he felt up to it, walking. But that was more than enough: ‘Alone with his thoughts he explored Guernsey and came to know his native island intimately, to become the born field naturalist, conscious at a very early age of the wonders of the natural history of shore animals and plants,’ wrote his biographer, Alice Garnett. Like Stamp, Fleure became an avid reader, and from his reading and love of nature there grew ‘a desire to try to understand more deeply all the physical and human features – past and present – of his native island, and from this to study current theories of evolution’. If, as has been suggested, enforced idleness as a child can lead to super-industry in the adult, this might explain the relentless dynamism of Stamp and Fleure in later life. Though frail and, on the face of it, rather meek, Fleure habitually pushed himself to the limit. Remarkably, he lived to the age of 92, becoming revered as a teacher and, through the medium of geography, a promoter of international understanding and peace.

Pencil portrait of A.D. Imms (1880-1949), author of Insect Natural History, by Paul Drury, 1945. (Department of Zoology, Cambridge)

A.D. Imms (1880-1949) was another frequent patient, laid up with attacks of asthma. He, too, was tougher than he looked. His Royal Society memoirist recalled that ‘the boy, debarred from many of the activities of his fellows, quickly devoured and assimilated all the popular handbooks for [butterfly] collectors…And then the chance purchase of Todd’s Encyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology evoked a more scientific interest…’ The way to the General Textbook of Entomology and Insect Natural History had opened. We might note the same precocity in Derek Wragge Morley (1920-1969) who, crippled by a severe illness in his early teens, began to study the ants that crawled about his wheelchair. Natural history is a good antidote to adversity.

A few authors recalled what to them was the defining moment that made them naturalists. To Julian Huxley, it was on being confronted by a toad at the age of four: ‘Out of the hawthorn hedge there hopped a fat toad. What a creature, with its warty skin, its big eyes bulging up, and its awkward movements! That comic toad helped to determine my career as a scientific naturalist.’ For Max Nicholson, at about the same age, it was ‘the sparrow-hawk seizing and making away with a favourite yellow chicken’. The young Alister Hardy had several experiences to choose from: the rock pools on the family holidays at Scarborough, a neighbour’s collection of beetles, and the mantelpiece in their study, made of fossiliferous marble and full of the remains of marine creatures from the age of the dinosaurs.

In his book, The Environmental Revolution (1970), Max Nicholson devoted several lyrical pages to his own childhood experiences, generally enjoyed in solitude or in the company of just one or two like-minded friends. Real nature was more exciting, and vastly more challenging, than the books he had read or the museums he had visited: ‘There was a special magic in visible change – a sudden fall of snow, a swirl of mist, an overnight sheet of hoar-frost on the grass, the shape of great clouds passing across with their shadows, the buds and catkins and new foliage of spring and the eagerly expected but ever surprising return of the swallow and the cuckoo.’ The theatre of such observations and feelings was often very small: ‘a chalkpit or sandpit, a little pond, a gorse thicket or the bend of a stream became a world in themselves, where time stood still’. It is in such places that naturalists are made, so long as such places exist near one’s home and one can roam without fear.

Perhaps a discussion of boyhood wonder is the place to mention what to many of the authors was the first phase of their natural-history careers – collecting. The older generation of authors belonged to a time when specimen-collecting, often of the widest kind from rocks and minerals to birds’ nests and feathers, was eagerly indulged in. Many of the authors of the series collected butterflies or birds’ eggs in their youth, and the latter became expert nest-finders in the process. A few never quite grew out of it. Part of the antipathy between Desmond Nethersole-Thompson and Leslie Brown was due to the former’s egg-collecting exploits in the 1920s and 1930s; Brown’s labelling in British Birds of Prey of Thompson as an egg-collector in the apparent present tense nearly brought a libel action (and since Brown himself collected eggs as a boy, his suit might have stood on brittle glass). One notices a broader magpie instinct at work among the New Naturalists. Lousley, Steers and Dudley Stamp were keen stamp collectors throughout their lives. It was Dudley’s influence that persuaded the Post Office to issue a set of geography stamps in 1964 (in which, incidentally, the 8d. stamp bears a passing resemblance to the jacket of Dartmoor). Steers and Pearsall were also train-spotters. Turrill collected pamphlets. Yonge amassed marine curios and illustrated books. Lousley owned the largest private herbarium in the country.

Collections of skins, seashells and microscope slides were, of course, in many cases a necessary adjunct to serious study. It is quite likely that most serious naturalists of the inter-war years were collectors of some sort. Possibly there is also some psychological impulse at work here. One sees it in a sublimated form in the obsessive ‘twitching’ of rare birds by some present-day birders – not to mention collectors of the New Naturalist books! Collecting, like gardening and fishing, binds us to the object of our devotion. The apparent absence of that same acquisitive sense among ‘conservationists’ today, except in debased forms, is rather puzzling, and it is one of the significant differences between an older generation and our own: from active field pursuits to passive spectating, from the particular to the generalised. How many amateur naturalists today study beetles, or slime-moulds, or diatoms? And if you don’t know anything about beetles, how can you hope to protect them?

Before we leave New Naturalist childhood, a word or two about Christian names. The older generation of New Naturalists belonged to a period and class where people were commonly known by their surname or, among friends and colleagues, by a nickname. Alister Hardy is an interesting example. He evidently disliked his Christian name, regarding it as a bit soppy. His second name, Clavering, was there for sentiment, not use: it was his mother’s maiden name. To many scientific colleagues, he was ‘A.C.’ or ‘The Prof’ (even ‘Uncle Prof’ to his family). His father-in-law called him ‘Ali’, old school chums ‘Glider’, and the shipmates and miners he mixed with as Acting Captain Hardy during the First World War referred to him affectionately as ‘Uncle Mac’, which suggests that he seemed old and wise beyond his years. To be known by one’s initials was not unusual at that time. Hence, Williams was always ‘CB’, Macan ‘TTM’, Edwards ‘KC’, and even Winifred Frost was ‘WEF’. I have never heard anyone refer to Pearsall as ‘William’, or, for that matter, to Tansley as ‘Arthur’. It implied no antipathy. Names seem to be formed by an unspoken, perhaps subconscious, mass agreement as to what is appropriate. We have already dealt with the troublesome etymology of E.B. Ford’s nickname, Henry. Equally inexplicable to me is the nickname, Sam, of Ford’s spiritual successor, R.J. Berry. Sam Berry told me it had something to do with his Lancashire family background – ‘Sam, Sam, pick oop tha musket’. Fraser Darling went through a period of calling himself Frank Darling, but fortunately pulled himself together and reverted to the full, fine Frank Fraser in time for the publication of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. Since the 1960s, initials have gone out of fashion and abbreviated nicknames are in universal use, though, unless we except Niko (short for Nikolaas) Tinbergen, not yet on the title page of the New Naturalist books.

Teachers and moss-gatherers

In a sense, all field natural history is self-taught. James Fisher became one of the great ornithologists by going birdwatching when he was supposed to be attending anatomy classes. Max Nicholson equipped himself as a writer and journalist by reading the works of W.H. Hudson. Richard Fitter, Ted Lousley, Ronald Lockley, Ted Ellis and Bill Condry are among the best-known British naturalists, doyens of the art of field study, but they do not have a science degree between them. Yet no one, amateur or professional, knew more about docks and knotgrasses than Lousley, or shearwaters and gannets than Lockley, or field micro-fungi than Ellis. One of the special qualities of the New Naturalist library lies in its blend of the ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, each book absorbing something of both approaches. During the 1930s, and increasingly so after the Second World War, these hitherto separate worlds were moving closer to one another. The Sea Shore is written by a professional in the enthusiastic spirit of the amateur. The ecological chapters in Ted Lousley’s book Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone or Ian Hepburn’s Flowers of the Coast could have been written by Pearsall or Salisbury. But very probably no one at the time could have written a more satisfactory book on either subject.

The majority of New Naturalist authors did have a scientific background, and the full-time university men generally held a doctorate in some relevant discipline. Cambridge was the alma mater of the majority of botanists and geographers of the series, though the three King’s College scholars – Leo Harrison Matthews, Kenneth Mellanby and M.V Brian – were, as it happens, all zoologists. John Raven read the classics at Trinity College (and later became a Fellow of King’s), W.S. Bristowe science at Gonville and Caius, and Leslie Brown a postgraduate course in tropical agriculture. Oxford and London tie for second place. The Oxford men and women included A.W. Boyd, Wilfred Blunt, Ian Hepburn, V.S. Summerhayes and Margaret Brown. The Londoners, mainly at University or Imperial Colleges, were L.A. Harvey, S.W. Wooldridge, L. Dudley Stamp, E.J. Salisbury and H.R. Hewer. Relatively few of the pre-war generation held degrees from ‘provincial’ colleges and universities, though Yonge and H.L. Edlin studied forestry at Edinburgh, Swinnerton natural sciences at Nottingham and Pearsall botany at Manchester.

Before the Second World War, university science degrees were more broadly based than today, though, unless one was fortunate in one’s tutor, the biological part was still heavily centred on anatomy and physiology. Geology, genetics and animal behaviour were not much in vogue then; indeed, New Naturalist authors were among the pioneers in those very subjects. The student specialising in botany, zoology or geology in his final year would first have received a thorough grounding in chemistry, physics and mathematics. This gave him or her a broad scientific outlook to add to the public school or grammar school education, which was likely to have been weighted towards English and the classics. What is notable is that several future authors switched to botany or zoology in mid-term, having originally read some other subject. James Fisher, Bill Bristowe and Leo Harrison Matthews all started off by studying medicine, before deciding that zoology was more their line. Pearsall switched from chemistry to botany at Manchester. Even so, they might not have received much stimulus for field study from the arid biology classes of the 1920s and 1930s. This they gained from extra-curricular activity: university expeditions to Spitzbergen and the Amazon, special courses at the marine laboratory at Plymouth, or from meeting people like Julian Huxley.

Many of those born before 1930 had to endure a major disruption in their studies – war service – whether in the First or the Second World War, or sometimes both. Alister Hardy, for example, had no sooner begun his first term at Oxford than he was busy training in the Officers’ Training Corps to gain a commission. His eyesight was not up to Western Front standards, and he spent the war in command of a bicycle battalion of Durham miners, digging trenches on the east coast, and later in the camouflage school, where his knowledge of animal camouflage came in useful (as did Clifford Ellis’ during the 1939-45 war). He did not return to Oxford until 1919, nearly five years after his first term. Some authors distinguished themselves during the war. A.W. Boyd was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery at Gallipoli. John Ramsbottom, serving with the Army Medical Corps in Salonika, was mentioned three times in despatches and appointed an OBE. Military service sometimes took people to remote foreign parts for the first time in their lives, with lasting results in the case of W.B. Turrill who, as a result of his service in Macedonia, began a long association with the Balkans culminating in his magnum opus, The plant life of the Balkan Peninsula (1929). At least two of our authors were permanently disabled: Boyd lost an eye, though that did not seem to hinder his birdwatching, and Pearsall was knocked about and permanently deafened by artillery shells (ours more than theirs). Such men probably returned from war traumatised, but with new perspectives and holding new ideals. This is expressed most clearly in the Royal Society memoir of Maurice Yonge (1899-1986). Before joining up, Yonge had intended to become a journalist, and after demobilisation had applied to Lincoln College, Oxford, to read modern history. It took a while for him to discover that his true aims had changed:

‘Those that survived the carnage believed themselves committed to bettering the world for which so many of their generation had paid such a great sacrifice. Many sought a more meaningful life, other than quiet scholarly retreat. Maurice also rebelled against his self-centred solitude and began to look at life with eyes opened by the War and the need to help his country in a more practical way. He reasoned that primary production was what was needed urgently…He burned his Oxford boats, sold his history books and persuaded his father to let him study forestry at the University of Edinburgh.’

B. Morton. Charles Maurice Yonge 1899-1986. Biographical Memoir of the Royal Society (1992), 38:382

‘A more practical way’ – practicality was the keynote of pioneer ecology: the subject became an applied science almost from the start. Some of the New Naturalists worked on problems of food production, others on tropical hygiene, agriculture or fisheries. They studied species of economic importance – herring, whales, rabbits, trout, shipworm and oysters. The Bureau of Animal Population, founded by Charles Elton, saw its glory days during the Second World War, when its studies on how animal populations are regulated suddenly took on great significance in the effort to boost agricultural production at the expense of rooks, rabbits and wood pigeons (it had already achieved a spectacular success in getting rid of the muskrat). Plant ecology was more concerned with the processes and dynamics of vegetation, as developed in the inter-war years by Arthur Tansley, W.H. Pearsall and E.J. Salisbury. Their work was ignored by agriculture departments, however, and its most significant application lay not in food production and forestry, but in the development of nature conservation during the 1940s and 1950s. Pearsall’s lake studies did have one early consequence, however, in the founding of a British centre for freshwater research, the Freshwater Biological Association, in 1929.

While a few New Naturalists, like T.T. Macan and C.B. Williams, were engaged in full-time research, the majority of those with university posts had a full teaching load. This was especially so of those, not a few, who held a chair in a newly established department. A university professorship may sound very grand, but during the 1920s and 1930s ‘The Prof’ might find himself teaching much of the syllabus himself, with only a couple of assistant lecturers, with limited office facilities and little or no secretarial help; quite likely he even did his own typing. A description of H.J. Fleure’s study reminds us of the conditions in which some of these books were written:

‘…he prepared all papers in his own immaculate handwriting. His study was always a large room with abundant floorspace. Involvement with so many coauthors and publishers, and with so much editorial work, at times would have disconcerted many; but he evolved his own simple methods of control despite the lack of mechanical aids, filing cabinets, card indexes and the like. The floor…would be covered in piles of manuscripts, typescripts, and galley proofs etc. When asked where a particular item was, he would walk slowly around the room, finally to alight on one pile and to say that it “was about an inch below the middle of that pile”; and, sure enough, there it would be.’

Alice Garnett. Herbert John Fleure 1877-1969. Biographical Memoir of Fellows of the Royal Society (1970),16:269

One of those piles might have been the manuscript of A Natural History of Man in Britain!

Among the New Naturalists were some of the most influential teachers of field study the century has known. Fleure himself ranks very high among these. He brought to his classes a philosophy: that Man was part of Nature, and that living organisms and their environment are inseparable, and so must be studied together. Half a century on, he is revered as a father of British geography, but he also taught zoology, geology, history and anthropology, in a unifying synthesis of interlocking subjects. His influence was worldwide. W.H. Pearsall (1891-1964) was another great teacher with a large number of disciples. Like Fleure, he had the knack of getting students to think for themselves. His was a versatile mind, bubbling with ideas, and he retained a boyish enthusiasm to the end of his days. Macan noted that ‘A detached lay observer watching Pearsall would have gained no inkling that it was unusual for a botanist to be capable of discussing five lines of research in three disciplines.’ Derek Ratcliffe, who was less of a devotee, suggests that part of Pearsall’s method was his mastery of what Stephen Potter called ‘lifemanship’: ‘He had a great capacity for making ex cathedra pronouncements and making other people into supplicants for knowledge at the feet of the master…He was said to come out with outrageous statements to see the effect they had on listeners, but I am sure they came to believe some of his more fanciful ideas.’ E.B. Worthington recalled that Pearsall was notably stubborn at defending his ideas, right or wrong. And that he used his deafness constructively at meetings.

S.W. Wooldridge (1900-1963), author of The Weald.

Geology and physical geography lend themselves to field work, perhaps because these subjects, stony in more senses than one, only really become alive on the field outing. One of the champions of field studies was the geomorphologist, Sidney Wooldridge (1900-1963), author of The Weald. Wooldridge is one of the moss-gatherers of the series. The son of a Surrey bank manager, he went up to King’s College, London in 1918 to read geology and remained there for most of his career, latterly as Professor of Geography. Shortly after graduation, he helped to found the Weald Research Committee, and from then on the Weald became his outdoor laboratory where he worked out the relationship between the scenery and its rocks, and particularly the role of rivers in reshaping the landscape. These studies helped to establish geomorphology as a scientific discipline. He was also interested in the human geography of the area, especially in what influenced its settlement in ancient times. He was good at getting all this across to his students with clarity and a characteristic ‘pungency of phrase’, perhaps acquired in his extra-curricular capacity as a Congregationalist lay preacher. For him, the Weald fulfilled most purposes. ‘The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth,’ he quoted. Wooldridge was an Englishman to his fingertips, ‘full of an almost Chestertonian zest for life’, especially for cricket and Gilbert and Sullivan, chapel and natural history. His happiest hours were those spent on fieldwork in the countryside of Surrey, Sussex and Kent. He had a natural eye for the lie of the land, and for clues in the rocks and landscape, and he became a leading light of the newly founded Field Studies Council. The establishment of its second centre at Juniper Hall, Mickleham, was to a large extent his doing, providing a permanent centre for south-eastern studies to take over from the Timberscombe Guest House, run by his friend and collaborator Fred Goldring.

Another apostle of field study was Wooldridge’s fellow geographer, K.C. Edwards (1904-1982) of Nottingham University. Edwards’ early teaching duties were typically onerous. In the 1920s he would spend 30 hours each week teaching geography and geology to undergraduates, trainee teachers and, appropriately enough for that county, mining engineers. He must quickly have learned a certain versatility, and soon became to Nottinghamshire what Wooldridge had been to The Weald. And like Wooldridge, the field was his true classroom. He organised regular field courses not only for his own students but also for adult education courses and he welcomed students and teachers from the Continent, especially from countries where he himself had studied, notably Hungary and Luxembourg. His field camps at Easter were a popular innovation, one of Edwards’ students recalling ‘the lasting bonds of friendship and goodwill’ forged among the tents, which helped to make Nottingham geography a notably convivial subject. ‘K.C.’ was much involved with rambling, youth hostels and footpath preservation societies, all of which made him a frequent treader of paths in the Peak District and established his credentials as the author of that volume in the series.

K.C. Edwards (1904-1982), author of the Peak District. (Photo: Department of Geography, Nottingham University)

Leslie Harvey (1903-1986), the author of Dartmoor, was a fellow spirit. Harvey, Exeter’s first and last Professor of Zoology, moved to the South-west from Edinburgh in 1930, and immediately fell under its thrall; he remained there for the rest of his life. Like Edwards, he took on a level of teaching duties that would have devastated anyone but the total dedicatee; reflecting his location, his classes varied from trainee teachers to agriculturists and meat inspectors. Like him, too, Harvey introduced field camping expeditions to the syllabus, with his wife Clare looking after the botany. After the Second World War, these courses were usually based near the sea, and Harvey became an adept at marine ecology and shore life: ‘His knowledge of marine organisms’, wrote a colleague, Tegwyn Harris, ‘was genuinely encyclopaedic and, since he was a good biologist, his teaching of them did not stop at a mere recitation of names and classification, but embraced their broader biology, ecological relationships and behaviour.’ He was, in a phrase, a New Naturalist. Almost exactly the same wording has been used in praise of Pearsall and E.J. Salisbury, and is equally applicable to other authors in the series. Harvey retired to the scene of one of Exeter’s popular marine courses in the Scillies, to a house ‘overlooking the wild headland of Peninnis and the weed-blanketed shores of Porthcressa’. There he remained, with his rock garden and his crossword puzzles, and there he died, suddenly as we would all wish, in 1986.

Local field study is par excellence the province of the moss-gatherer. World adventurers like Darwin may acquire great insights into the processes of nature, but the observance of detail, the grain of the wood, is the hallmark of one of England’s gifts to the world: the local naturalist. There can be few who lived up to that tradition more successfully than Ted Ellis (1909-1986), whose name will always be linked with his adopted county, Norfolk. Ted Ellis’ biography is aptly sub-titled ‘The People’s Naturalist’: his enthusiasm for nature was always a hallmark of his regular writings for the Eastern Daily Press, and later, radio broadcasting and television. He was a born communicator, and had that increasingly rare ability to describe exactly what he saw, with the aid of a first-rate pair of eyes and a detailed nature diary which he maintained throughout his life. Though he was, strictly speaking, a ‘professional’, as the keeper of natural history at Norwich Castle Museum, in Ted Ellis there is the spirit of the amateur English naturalist at its best. It is there in the fleeting detail of weather, light and sound in his nature notes, in his untidy study stuffed full of diaries and specimens and books and microscope slides and a thousand other things, in the steady trail of visitors to his marshman’s cottage in the wilds of Wheatfen Broad. He was an authority on fungi, especially rusts and smuts, but always remained a natural history all-rounder, interested in everything. He was offered tempting inducements to move, to the Imperial Mycological Institute in London, or the warden-ship of the Field Studies Centre at Flatford Mill. But he stayed where he was, and is remembered not only as a naturalist but as a Man of Norfolk and a great local character. The reedy wilderness where he lived with his wife and family is now a nature reserve, run by the Ted Ellis Trust, and open on every day of the year.

Ted Ellis (1909-1986) author of The Broads at Wheatfen Broad in 1982. (Photo: Peter Loughran)

Ian Hepburn (1902-1974), author of Flowers of the Coast. (Photo: The Old Oundelian)

One would never know from reading Flowers of the Coast (1952) that Ian Hepburn (1902-1974) was an amateur botanist, and in fact taught chemistry at Oundle School. It is unlikely that Hepburn, the most modest of men, volunteered for the job of writing that book. Perhaps he was talked into it by James Fisher, whose father was headmaster of Oundle at the time that Hepburn was housemaster. His friend, Ioan Thomas, remembers them going through the list of new boys, with Kenneth Fisher taking all the good games players for School House while Hepburn took all the able boys for his Laxton House. The two often went off birdwatching together, and each year ‘Hep’ used to count the herons at Titch-marsh and Milton Park. At Oundle, Ian Hepburn is remembered more for his support of school music than for his natural history, and evidently few knew that he was on the Council of the British Ecological Society and was one of our leading amateur botanists. He was by all accounts a delightful man and a born teacher. He must have loved Oundle, remaining there for 39 years until his retirement in 1964. Botanists remember him as a mainstay of local naturalist trust activities in Northamptonshire and, later, Cambridgeshire. On excursions, he always had a copy of the McClintock and Fitter Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers in his pocket which he referred to as ‘his crib’. ‘If you’re not interested in anything,’ he would warn the boys in his House, ‘you’re going to be a pretty boring person, aren’t you?’ He dedicated Flowers of the Coast to his musician wife Phyllis, ‘who loves the sea but is sometimes uncertain of her botany’.

V.S. Summerhayes (1897-1974), author of Wild Orchids of Britain, working on African orchids at Kew. [Photo: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)

Perhaps it is not quite right to include the three ‘men of Kew’, E.J. Salisbury, W.B. Turrill and V.S. Summerhayes among the moss-gatherers, for they all travelled widely, collecting plants and giving lectures, but one associates them with the stable and relatively tranquil worlds of the botanical library and the herbarium. Turrill and Summerhayes were quiet men who spent most of their careers at Kew. Victor Summerhayes (1897-1974) was the orchid specialist, assiduously building up Kew’s collections of African Orchidaceae, bottling and labelling each plant himself. By training, however, he was not a systematist but an ecologist, and in 1921 took part in the Oxford University expedition to Spitsbergen, resulting in two well-known papers by Summerhayes and Charles Elton on animal populations and food-chains. His ecological outlook is evident in The Wild Orchids of Britain, with its detailed first-hand descriptions of habitats and his interest in evolution at work among the marsh orchids. Before the Second World War, he got about the country looking at orchids in Edgar Milne-Redhead’s tiny BSA 3-wheeler; and afterwards he was often a passenger in his fellow orchidophile Donald Young’s open MG. Typically, he based the book on his own studies in the field, not the dried up or pickled specimens back at base. Milne-Redhead recalled him as ‘a small man with slight physique, but mentally always very much alive. He had a wonderful habit of gesticulating when, in conversation, he was describing the features of a particular orchid flower which he imagined before him enormously magnified.’ He always wore a dilapidated hat when botanising and insisted on pronouncing the word species as ‘svecies’ for no reason that anyone could gather.

William Turrill had joined the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew as a temporary assistant at the age of 18, and obtained his degree at evening class. He was honoured in later life as one of the great systematists, helping to turn plant taxonomy from a dusty, herbarium-based science into a modern experimental one, taking in the latest advances in evolutionary and cell biology and biochemistry. But amateur botanists remember him as one of themselves, never happier than on field collecting expeditions and in his own garden. He and E. Marsden-Jones formed one of the great amateur-professional partnerships, carrying out together the extensive investivations of knapweeds and bladder campions which were published in book form by the Ray Society in 1954 and 1957 respectively. Turrill was a natural hoarder, accumulating a fine reference library and collections of pamphlets and cuttings. He hated administration, though he does not seem to have suffered from it unduly. His was exactly the life a would-be professional botanist might dream about, but today, alas, he or she would have to go on dreaming.

Sir Edward Salisbury (1886-1978), author of Weeds and Aliens. (Photo: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)

For 13 years during and after the Second World War, Turrill’s and Summerhayes’ boss was Sir Edward Salisbury (1886-1978), the author of Weeds and Aliens, and much else besides. Salisbury’s directorship at Kew was dominated by the recovery and restoration effort after the war. There was too much to do with too little money, and Salisbury sat on far too many advisory boards, governing bodies, councils of learned societies and the like to give the Royal Botanic Gardens his full and undivided attention. Nor was he, in any case, much good at administration. Like Dudley Stamp and James Fisher, he tended to take on too much. Edward Salisbury had enormous self-esteem. He was an incessant talker and was rather obviously ‘very pleased with Edward Salisbury’. David Streeter remembers him as ‘a nineteenth century character’ in his dark clothes, old-fashioned collars and spats. Miriam Rothschild recalls the brilliance of his intellect; he always had a story to tell about every plant and he shone on field courses at Box Hill and elsewhere. It was typical of Salisbury that, when asked to contribute a book on some elevated aspect of British botany, he replied that he would much rather do one about weeds. At the heart of Salisbury was his ‘passionate interest in the living plant’ whether in the wild or in a garden, and by conveying that passion well he became a gifted populariser. His studies of woodland and coastal vegetation, written seventy years ago, are still worth reading today (for they remind us of things since forgotten or overlooked), as are his books The Living Garden (1935) and Downs and Dunes (1952). He was a rare example of a phyto-ge-ographer who retained his interest in the living individual plant. As Weeds and Aliens constantly reminds us, plants have function as well as form, and Salisbury’s weeds behave like little seed-bombs ticking over, adaptable, aggressive and quick to exploit an opportunity. Salisbury’s papers and books are usually illustrated by his own drawings and diagrams which have an endearingly home-made quality – some of his characteristic labels look like newspaper cuttings. They emphasise as much as anything that nearly all of Salisbury’s work lay well within reach of the gifted amateur. He was the last survivor among the founders of plant ecology in Britain, perhaps the last great ‘professional amateur’, and he always retained the breadth of vision he had shared with F.W. Oliver and Arthur Tansley.

World adventurers

James Fisher once described his friend Leo Harrison Matthews (1901-1986) as ‘an old-fashioned naturalist’. He meant it as a compliment. In Fisher’s opinion, British Mammals was the best book ever written on the subject, precisely because it ignored contemporary whims and fashions: he ‘pays just as much attention to the ancient and just now rather demodé subjects of anatomy, physiology and adaptation as to animal populations and animal behaviour, which are the fashionable things to be interested in’. He also, added Fisher, loved travel and adventure. ‘Old-fashioned’ in Fisher-ese meant the opposite of over-specialised. It meant seeing nature in the round, to pursue the romantic quest of the fulmar and the albatross and to have fun doing it (fun, that is, in the intellectual as well as the physical sense).

Due attention to traditional anatomy is exactly what one would have expected from Harrison Matthews, who was noted for relating form to function. From his student days, when he found a Barbastelle while bat-hunting among the rafters of King’s College Chapel, he had been fascinated by the hearing apparatus of bats. His published work on British bats was concerned mainly with their reproductive organs and sexual cycles (another obsession), but his interest in bat communication led during the Second World War to his involvement in the development of aircraft radar. As Matthews had discovered, the battle between an aeroplane and ground radar rather resembles that between a bat and a moth. (Nature has invented countermeasures in which moths can detect the sonar of bats in time to take violent evasive countermeasures. Unfortunately, a moth can do what an aircraft cannot and snap shut its wings to plummet unexpectedly to the ground). One can trace a similar quirky interest with the external bits and pieces of mammals in many of Matthews’ papers and notes written before and after the war: the ears of newly born seals, the genital anatomy and physiology of gibbons, extra nipples in chimpanzees and an inter-sexual brown rat. The ‘catch-phrase’ of his breezy, refreshing lectures at Bristol University was: ‘I don’t know what it’s for – and I don’t think anyone else does either.’

Leo Harrison Matthews (1901-1986) taken on the occasion of his 80th birthday. (Photo: Marcus Matthews)

Matthews led a full life by any standards. Apart from the war-time interlude, it could be divided broadly into his early travel years, which were probably the most enjoyable in his life, his years as scientific director at London Zoo and his busy retirement, spent writing books. He was ‘the last of the great travelling naturalists’. His university students noted something in his manner and bearing that suggested a long acquaintance with the sea and ships. He was already a fairly seasoned mariner when in 1924, shortly after graduation, he joined an expedition to South Georgia aboard Captain Scott’s old ship, Discovery. He remained in the South Seas for four years, among the world’s wildest land and seascapes, studying elephant seals, sea-birds and whales. His Wandering Albatross (1951) recalls those days of adventure, and displays Matthews’ prowess as a storyteller. The book was about real albatrosses, but in another sense the wandering albatross was Matthews himself. Characteristically, he dedicated it ‘to all bird lovers, particularly those that love them piping hot with bread sauce’. One can see why James Fisher liked him.

Matthews belonged to the last great age of world discovery, when promising young naturalists began their careers with a major ocean voyage in the same spirit as Sir Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin. We should remind ourselves that these expeditions were not the perfunctory things of today, of no more than a month or two’s duration, but major commitments that could last several years and yield results that would take several more years to analyse and write up. They could be, and often were, a crossroads in life, a test of field skills and of character, of a broadening of horizons and a change in perspectives. It is safe to say that those who embarked on these journeys while the going was good, during the 1920s and 1930s, returned home different people.

Take Alister Hardy, Matthews’ fellow Discovery voyager. A few years older than Matthews, Hardy (1896-1985) had made a name for himself as a clever and hard-working marine biologist of distinctly outdoor bent. Like E.B. Ford, he had had the good fortune to run into Julian Huxley at Oxford ‘who introduced him to the excitement of new ideas and discoveries’. His subsequent work on the food of the North Sea herring and his invention of a plankton detector had attracted attention, as had the fact that Hardy was a good team player and a good sailor. In 1926, he was invited to join the Discovery expedition as Chief Zoologist. The expedition’s science was a cross between Matthews-style form-and-function zoology and the kind of animal ecology then being developed by Charles Elton, which related an animal to its food supply. Hardy’s scientists were given the pleasant task of measuring and disembowelling whales brought back by the catchers. Although Hardy himself spent some time aboard a whaler, and later wrote a disturbing account of the killing and cruelty he witnessed, his main preoccupation was with the mystery of the whale’s food. This led him into the world of marine plankton. His team were the first to track down and sample the vast shoals of krill that abounded in the whaling grounds. ‘Imagine our excitement and joy,’ wrote Hardy in Great Waters, ‘as we saw [the] nets rising to the surface as if aglow with fire – the blue-green fire of phosphorescence; each tow-net bucket was full and the sides of each net were plastered thick with krill, all glowing brilliantly.’

Plankton was henceforward Hardy’s subject in all its biological complexity and physical demand: the tow-nets, detectors, sample bottles and other laboratory clutter pitted against the roughest seas of the world. From the pursuit of the world’s largest animals to some of the smallest, it was, as Hardy himself remarked, ‘a challenge to modern oceanographic methods’. Yet by modern reckoning, the science was simple and straightforward enough. It was Victorian methods of identification and distribution allied to the new interest in relationships: with ocean currents and depths, water of different salinity and temperature, and the teeming, ever-hungry world of grazers and predators. Hardy was a master of another Victorian skill: painting from life. Wherever he went, but particularly on the Discovery adventure, he maintained a detailed journal, crammed with delicate, beautifully realised watercolour sketches. He put them to good use when, 30 years later, he finally found the leisure to write a biographical account of the Discovery days, Great Waters, which rivals The Open Sea as his masterpiece. In writing, as in life, Alister Hardy was a likeable, engaging personality, who takes the reader into his confidence in the most natural and unaffected way. Perhaps his literary secret (and he would have denied he had one) was simply to be himself. It is departing from our theme a little, but let us pause to listen to his friend, J.R. Lucas, recall the essential Alister Hardy:

‘He was not a man to push his views either in college meetings or at dinner, but when he was persuaded to speak, he would hold his colleagues rapt with his accounts of sailing round the Horn, ballooning over England in his youth, and nearly drowning himself in his search for plankton. He could also convey his sense of excitement and inspiration in expounding his own ideas about man’s evolution and man’s relation with the Almighty…

‘Alister had a strong sense of fun. On the occasion of a special college dinner, he could be persuaded, without too much difficulty, to sing one of the songs of his youth, recalled from the days of the Gaiety Theatre. Some of the older fellows remembered him dancing a hornpipe. I remember him joining in the spirit of the occasion when an electric shock machine was used to send a current through the whole governing body, although he later assured me that I had misremembered him applying the electrodes to a medical fellow’s face to make his ears waggle. On another occasion he read to a college essay society a brilliant spoof paper on why he believed in mermaids. At the time of the Queen’s coronation he designed and constructed a hot-air balloon in one corner of the quad: work ceased in the College for a fortnight, while the paper was glued together, and heating mechanisms devised. Coronation day itself being wet and cold, every electric fire in the College was commandeered to provide extra lift, but in vain: nevertheless at a second attempt the balloon took off: it sailed across Oxford before coming to rest in the University Parks.

‘A fellow once asked him how many things were named after him. There was a boat in Hong Kong, an octopus, a squid, an island in the Antarctic and – he would add, lowering his voice in a tone of comic embarrassment – two worms.’

J.R. Lucas. Quoted in Alister Clavering Hardy. Biographical Memoir of Fellows of the Royal Society (1986), 32:257

The third great ocean traveller among the New Naturalists was Maurice Yonge, a friend, as it happened, of both Matthews and Hardy. Yonge’s pioneering work on the feeding and digestion of oysters and shipworms had brought him early recognition as a brilliant and original marine biologist. At the age of 26, he had written a natural history classic, The Seas, with his lifelong friend F.S. Russell. That book contained a chapter about coral reefs, and, since neither of its young authors had ever set eyes on a living coral, they tossed a coin over who should write it. Yonge lost the toss and wrote the chapter (it followed another Yonge chapter concerning shipworms, entitled Boring Life). This was to have unlooked-for consequences, for a year or two later, Yonge’s apparent expertise on corals helped him to be chosen to lead the Great Barrier Reef expedition of 1928-29. For more than a year, Yonge and his colleagues, who included his wife Mattie and the young physiographer J.A. Steers, lived in huts on the reef itself, surrounded by a natural aquarium and attended by aborigines. It was another stupendous adventure, the first modern scientific investigation on one of the great natural wonders of the world. On his return in December 1929, Yonge wrote a book about his experiences, A year on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as a shower of papers about reef corals, giant clams and the ingenious stomachs of snails. Though already a biological pioneer and an obvious high flyer, it was the Barrier expedition that made him. From 1930, Maurice Yonge consolidated a worldwide reputation as an authority on marine invertebrates. Like Hardy and Matthews, though in a different way, he was a great communicator, clear-thinking, enthusiastic and good-humoured, and he brought to his lectures a touch of the romance of the sea. He learned the art of teaching the hard way, overcoming shyness and a stammer, and a punishing work schedule. Like most professors of small, newly established biology departments, he bore much of the teaching load himself. He, too, developed the popular touch and his books are always highly readable. Success made him confident: a pretty, clever wife, sparkling academic achievement and a professorial chair (at Bristol) at the age of 32. He was not a field naturalist born and bred like Matthews and Hardy, rather the other way round, a biologist who could also view his charges with the eyes of the Victorian naturalists, whose works he admired and collected.

Ecology is a science that thrives on travel and a variety of landscape and seascape. The first generation of New Naturalist authors were blessed with the advantages of the steam age and a worldwide trade empire still largely at peace. Some of them were true commonwealth naturalists who spent much of their early careers abroad. As with her armed forces and civil service, Britain’s responsibilities in agriculture and forestry were imperial, and her scientists were as much concerned with tsetse fly and locust control as with home-grown concerns (indeed, possibly more so). The career of C.B. Williams (1889-1981), the author of Insect Migration is a case in point. ‘C.B.’ (as he was always known, having had the misfortune to be christened Carrington Bonser) was a born naturalist, but in his day biology usually meant medicine or agriculture. His big break came in his third year at Cambridge when William Bateson, the genetics pioneer, perhaps noting C.B.’s fondness for rearing caterpillars, offered him a research studentship in entomology. Then the First World War intervened, and the unfortunate Williams found himself engaged ‘in that unheroic branch of warfare, the examination of the stools of dysentery patients’. As the story goes, one day he was called from his grisly duties by a stranger from the Colonial Office who asked him to go to the West Indies to look into the case of a blightful froghopper that was devouring Imperial sugar cane. C.B. went, and spent the next six years among the sugar plantations of Trinidad and Central America. There he witnessed for the first time the spectacular mass migration of a butterfly, the cloudless sulphur (Phoebis eubule) which, unbeknown to him until that moment, was to form his life’s work. Butterfly migration started as a hobby aside from his main work as a travelling empire entomologist, investigating boll worm in Egypt or locusts in Tanganyika. But, by 1930, he knew enough to write The migration of butterflies, which immediately established him as the world authority (or, more accurately, the only authority) on the subject. His New Naturalist book Insect Migration (1958) is its natural continuation, with the benefit of thirty years additional experience in places as far apart as West Africa, South America and the Pyrenees. It is also a great deal more readable than the original.

Back from his travels in the Colonial Service, C.B. joined the staff at Rothamsted in 1932 as head of entomology under Sir John Russell. It was a timely move, since Russell had recently employed the great the statistician R.A. Fisher to design field trials that dragged the study of insect activity out of temperature-controlled cabinets and back outdoors. Noting C.B.’s particular talents, Russell was happy to give him his head in working out the relationship between insect activity and weather. This study occupied the rest of C.B.’s career. Essentially, it was Alister Hardy and plankton all over again, if for ocean currents one substitutes wind and air – though C.B. Williams went well beyond Hardy in developing quantitative methods, which he summed up in his magnum opus, Patterns in the balance of nature (1964), written at the age of 75. Despite the formidably mathematical nature of his learning, C.B. was at heart an amateur naturalist, though of the sort that is interested primarily in causes and principles. On retiring in 1955 to Kincraig in the Spey Valley, he immediately set up light and suction traps and a private weather station to monitor the movement of moths, blackflies and other insects. Those who have worked a Rothamsted light trap are using a device pioneered by C.B. Williams in the 1950s.

C.B. Williams (1889-1981), author of Insect Migration, in c. 1949. (Photo: Rothamsted Experimental Station)

Sir John Russell (1872-1965), author of The World of Soil. (Photo: Rothamsted Experimental Station)

Malcolm Smith (1875-1958), revered author of The Amphibians and Reptiles of Britain (1950), was a rolling stone of a different kind. One of the elder statesmen of the series, Smith was at the peak of his medical career at the outbreak of the First World War and by 1925 had retired at the age of 50 to devote more time to reptiles and amphibians. Like C.B. Williams, his boyhood was steeped in natural history, and he was often found with some toad or snake in one of his pockets. But in his day, and for long afterwards, there was no obvious career to be made from natural history. Of Smith and his age it was said that ‘The dissecting-room and the lecture of the medical school furnished the only regular training for the naturalist, while he found in the medical profession the likeliest means of earning his bread.’ And so Malcolm Smith qualified as a physician. That did at least offer opportunities to study snakes and crocodiles in tropical countries.

As it happened, it also offered to Smith the great adventure of his life as physician to the Court of Siam in the ‘The King and I’ days, before western influences finally swept away the ancient rites and mysteries of the Orient. Smith tells the story as only he could in A Physician at the Court of Siam (1947), written 30 years after the events he describes. His duties were unusual – among other things his presence was required at public executions. But he was not much interested in telling readers about himself. Instead, the book is about the customs and vivid personalities of the Court, for whom Smith had an obvious affection, though he tells his story with a certain detachment. He was blessed with an excellent memory, extending to the tiniest incidental detail, and had acute powers of observation. And while he was slicing open sickly Siamese courtiers, he was using these skills to study, collect and classify lizards and snakes. His first major work, Monograph of the Sea Snakes (1926), was based on the large collection of these animals gathered during his years in South-East Asia. He presumably made plenty of money as Court physician, for he paid collectors to hunt for his snakes and, after his retirement at the age of 50, had saved enough to support his herpetological work for the rest of his life. Reptiles and amphibians have some unfathomed capacity to inspire intense devotion among the select, to whom Malcolm Smith is a sort of patron saint. Though primarily a museum-based systematist, he also enjoyed a day in the field. British species only really occupied him at the beginning and the end of his life. His disciple (and later reviser) Angus Bellairs recalled their reptile-collecting expeditions to the Dorset heaths: ‘He was an expert at catching snakes and lizards, pouncing on them with a sudden, darting movement. He caught the first smooth snake which I ever saw in the wild. He had an ingenious method of capturing adders, picking them up with one of the side pieces of his spectacles.’

Malcolm Smith (1875-1958), author of The British Amphibians and Reptiles, holding his ‘adder-catching spectacles’, 1953. (Photo: Natural History Museum)

While most of the long-distance travellers of the series went to the tropics and the South Seas, at least one, the meteorologist Gordon Manley (1902-1980) sought the cold regions of the earth, on mountain tops and in the Arctic. Manley, who listed as his hobby in Who’s Who ‘travel among mountains’, was the pioneer of weather studies in the British uplands. Always an advocate of a ‘hands-on’ approach to weather recording, Manley is perhaps best remembered for his heroic days in a hut near the summit of Great Dun Fell in the North Pennines, ‘personally experiencing the worst of the weather conditions of which he writes’. This remote place, which later became part of Moor House National Nature Reserve, is the coldest part of England. Manley showed that its weather has more in common with the arctic regions than Cornwall or Kent. At that time his hut on the treeless wastes was the only high-level recording station in Britain (the one on Ben Nevis having closed long before). Gordon Manley was interested in a phenomenon there called the ‘helm wind’, first described by a local vicar more than 200 years earlier, which produces gusts of exceptional strength on the lee side of the hill. Such was his devotion that he used to camp in the hut for spells, including the worst winter conditions, when he might find himself completely cut off for days at a time. Although this work had to cease in 1941, Manley’s unique run of climatic data has helped to establish Great Dun Fell as one of the leading weather stations, which is now, through automation, monitoring atmospheric pollution. Manley was one of the most gifted writers of the series; his book Climate and the British Scene reveals a man of wide learning, always ready with an apposite quotation from literature or from the ancient classics of meteorology.

Gordon Manley (1902-1980), author of Climate and the British Scene. (Photo: Department of Geography, Royal Holloway)

There have been many more recent world travellers in the New Naturalist library. Leslie Brown (1917-1980) led an adventurous life as an agriculturalist and, later, a travelling ecological consultant in East Africa, and was full of stories of encounters with not always friendly animals and natives. T.T. Macan (1910-1985), though normally thought of as a fairly sedentary freshwater biologist, cut his teeth on a great voyage to survey the Indian Ocean. Macan’s main job was to sort out and preserve the catches and take care of the apparatus, but he also took the opportunity to study starfish, later basing part of his PhD thesis on them. Nor is the spirit of global travel by any means dead, though the circumstances have changed. Among the recent authors of the series, Philip Chapman has participated in no fewer than 11 expeditions to tropical caves to film wildlife documentaries and carry out ecological research. Chris Page is another seasoned expeditionary who has travelled to remote places all over the world in search of ferns, fern relatives and conifers, by air, land and sea. The world may be a smaller place than it was in the 1920s and 1930s, but parts of it are still little known ecologically, and British naturalists continue to exert an influence out of all proportion to their number.

Fraser Darling and Morton Boyd: 60 years of Scottish natural history

Britain, as W.H. Pearsall pointed out, is physically two countries, highland and lowland, almost as different in their biological aspects as Norway and Holland. From the point of view of naturalists and conservation bodies, it is a pity that this difference is not reflected in the political map, for the exploration and conservation of nature takes on very different forms in each ‘country’, the one densely populated with a patchwork landscape, the other of wide open spaces in which man is often outnumbered by sheep and deer. The different scales produce different ways of thinking. The naturalists of lowland England are used to regarding nature in terms of penny packets and are becoming increasingly willing to take on vested interests over a precious few yards of turf or ancient woodland. That landscape is reflected in New Naturalist titles like Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone, Hedges and Common Lands in England and Wales. For the other, to Pearsall ‘the better half’, one’s thoughts are drawn by the distant serrated horizon to the essential wholeness of nature, not a chequerboard partitioned by hedges, walls and roads but an obvious entity. Here the only realistic way to reconcile man and nature is to think strategically, to regard nature not as a kind of crop that is grown on ‘reserves’ but as the landscape itself, a living, growing resource capable of use or abuse. The tragedy of recent times is that nature conservation in the Highlands and Islands has been perceived of as socially divisive, when it should be a force for unity through common sense. The wholeness of vision that is the special gift of ecology, and which was expressed with the most acute perception by Frank Fraser Darling, has since become circumscribed, rather like the once open moors and the mires have been when planted with mile after mile of tax-avoiders’ spruce.

Sir Frank Fraser Darling (1903-1979), co-author of The Highlands and Islands, in the early 1970s. (Photo: Eric Hosking)

Is Fraser Darling still a name to conjure with, as it once was by naturalists in the 1940s and 1950s, and by the fledgling environmental movement in the early 1970s? He is scarcely a suitable figurehead for our contemporary conformist culture. As a philosopher-ecologist, a romantic, something of a misfit, a prophet and, in the end, a guru, Darling fitted in better with the 1960s ethos than the present day. His life was not a triumphant parade from one thing to the next, like, say, Max Nicholson’s or Peter Scott’s, and he failed in his two greatest crusades: the application of ecological principles to land-use in western Scotland and the campaign for National Parks for Scotland. He was an introspective, sometimes melancholy man with a habitual expression on his jowly face suggestive of some inner torment. He embodied an interesting set of contradictions: a hermit with a taste for jade, Persian carpets and fine claret; a great ecologist who hardly ever published work in a scientific journal; a loner who was three times married with four children; a man who loved Scotland, but took refuge in the Home Counties and in America.

He was a Scot by naturalisation, not birth. The derivation of his name is unusual. Darling was his mother’s maiden name. The absent father is said to have been a South African army captain called Frank Moss, and the ‘Fraser’ was acquired later from the maiden name of his first wife, Maria Fraser. He dropped it when she divorced him to become plain Frank Darling, but readopted it later as a hallmark of Scottishness just in time to write his New Naturalist book. He was greatly attached to his mother throughout her life, but although his childhood seems to have been happy, it was lacking in parental control. He ran away on his big flat feet at the age of 15, and was evidently a somewhat unruly boy. What he did acquire, with the help of an inspirational English teacher, was a love of the English language and literature. He also found he liked animals. He went on to train in agriculture, and after a few fruitless years as an agriculturist on Buckingham County Council, went north to Edinburgh to study for a PhD on the genetics of the Scottish Blackface sheep. In 1930, he was appointed Chief Officer of the Imperial Bureau of Animal Genetics, but this was an office job and Darling hankered after the freedom of the wild. After several attempts, he landed a Leverhulme Fellowship to study the ecology and behaviour of red deer in Wester Ross which set the pattern for the next 20 years. Darling chucked in the office job and packed his cases. From now on, he made a precarious living in some of the wildest parts of Scotland on whatever income he could scrape together from grants and from his writings. He had a theory that if one had the courage and endurance to live close to wild animals on their own ground, they would ‘unmask’ themselves. This primitive ethic drove his work: he wished to study nature face-to-face, with all sophistry stripped away. From the red deer of An Teallach, he moved on to the Summer Isles studying the social structure of gulls and other shore birds, and later to Lunga and North Rona for a different type of social animal, the grey seal. The work, which combined ecological studies with animal behaviour, was original both as a synthesis and in the long hours of animal watching it required. Unfortunately, it did not receive the recognition it deserved, partly because of Darling’s reluctance to write for the scientific press. In the meantime, in his friend James Fisher’s words, ‘he worked his small farm on Tanera in the Summer Isles in such fashion as to show that it was possible and reasonable to raise considerably the stock-carrying capacity of the West Highlands, and to grow a large amount of human food under crofting conditions’. He was fast becoming the New Naturalist version of Thoreau.

The seal study was brought up short by the outbreak of war. A pacifist, ‘embittered by the political climate of the day’, Darling found himself marooned on his Tanera croft. He farmed and wrote more books, Island Years, Crofting Agriculture and Island Farm, rather as Ronald Lockley had done on Skokholm in the 1930s. Darling’s books were widely read and admired, especially A Herd of Red Deer (1937) and A Naturalist on Rona (1940), but they were regarded as too ‘popular’ to gain the approval of the austere scientific establishment; even the more ‘biological’ Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle (1938) fell between two stools, neither popular enough on the one hand nor scientific enough on the other. His researches on deer and sea-birds were, however, accepted as a doctoral thesis, and earned him a DSc. Darling was always acutely aware of, and inhibited by, his supposed lack of scientific credentials. He was naturally deductive and had an instinctive rapport with his subjects, but he was not particularly numerate and therefore did not present ‘data’ in the approved way.

In 1944, Darling persuaded the Development Commission to fund an idea he had been nursing while working his croft: a social and biological investigation of the West Highland area which would be a simultaneous study of ‘man as part of natural history, and natural history as a large part of man’s environment’. Darling saw the West Highland landscape as ‘a devastated terrain’, degraded by centuries of human folly, and, in West Highland Survey, he discusses how the present situation came about and makes suggestions for improvement from his joint perspective as a crofter and an ecologist. In its book form, the survey is pithily written, full of Darlingesque phrases like:

‘Devastation has not quite reached its uttermost lengths but it is quite certain that present trends in land use will lead to it and the country will then be rather less productive than Baffin Land.’

‘This ecological continuum…would yield more to the nation than the subsidised devastation, rendered the more macabre by imposed mechanical industries…’

He had written Natural History of the Highlands and Islands during the first two years of this six-year survey, and was probably consciously trying out in that book some of the arguments that he later incorporated into the survey. He was, then and later, strongly influenced by the views of Aldo Leopold, an American philosopher-ecologist, who combined scientific knowledge with a breadth of vision and a mastery of the telling phrase. But the conservationist ethic of West Highland Survey was too advanced for the conservatives of the Scottish establishment. Its influence was confined to the already converted, though it was widely quarried as a source of raw material. In similar vein, Darling’s powerful advocacy, as a member of the 1945 Ramsay Committee, of a National Park system for Scotland fell on stony ground. He achieved far more with the more receptive political establishments of North America and East Africa than he ever did in his own adopted country.

The West Highland Survey was concluded in 1950, though not published until 1955 (and then, ironically enough, in southern England). Despite these disappointments, the success of British ecologists in establishing the first ‘biological service’, the Nature Conservancy, in 1949 should have inaugurated a time of glorious fulfilment for Darling. That he was to be disappointed in this too was mostly his own fault. He had already rocked enough establishment boats not to be appointed the Conservancy’s first Scottish director, as he might reasonably have expected. He was a proud and stubborn man, as James Fisher and others discovered when they wanted him to modify some aspect of his books. They all failed. He also took on far too much and dissipated his talent. After directing the Nature Conservancy’s red deer group for years, he never got round to writing up its report. He neglected his duties as a senior lecturer in ecology and conservation at Edinburgh in favour of more glamorous engagements in Rhodesia, Alaska and the American West. When the inevitable denouement came and Edinburgh University dispensed with his services in 1959, most people would have resigned themselves for early retirement. Darling, though, had a great admirer in the USA in the person of Fairfield Osborne, who invited him to become Vice-President of the Conservation Foundation, Washington D.C., a post he held until 1972. ‘In the States, I was listened to,’ remarked Darling later. ‘Here [in Scotland], I’m less than the dust beneath the wheel of the chariot.’ It was only with Darling gone, and now becoming a leading player on the world stage, that British scientists started to appreciate his contributions to ecology and nature conservation.

Not long after Darling’s removal to the New World he began to give thought to a revised edition of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands, whose original reception we noted in the previous chapter. The idea was that the mistakes of the first edition would be corrected and the book brought fully up to date with all the significant events of the previous 17 years. ‘Looking around for a suitable victim,’ wrote Darling, ‘I did not take long to come back to the figure I first thought of: Dr John Morton Boyd.’ Morton Boyd was at that time the Nature Conservancy’s Regional Officer in the Western Highlands. As the latter recalled later, ‘I realised that to say “Yes” would probably land me with the whole work (as it did), but to say “No” would be to lose the chance of a lifetime. Since its publication in 1947, I had used the book continuously, knew it well and admired it both as a working tool and also a source of enjoyment.’

Morton Boyd was as an undergraduate in zoology at Glasgow University when he first met Fraser Darling. Boyd was already an avid reader of what might be called the school of romantic biology – Aldo Leopold, Seton Gordon and Darling himself – and in deciding a subject for his Honours project, he turned to the latter Master for advice. Boyd had read in Darling’s Natural History about competition between different species of snails on the sand dunes of the Hebrides, and proposed to base his study on it. ‘The reply was brief: inter-specific competition in snails was not at all suitable for an Honours study.’ Instead, Darling suggested studying the different communities of animals and plants from the shoreline to the heathland interior. As a base, he recommended Tiree in the Inner Hebrides. In dashing off this laconic reply, Darling could hardly have known what he had started: ‘Fraser Darling’s advice contained the germ of my life’s work in ecology and conservation.’ As a young ecologist of promise, and supported by his tutor, Maurice Yonge, Boyd obtained a Nature Conservancy studentship to study the fauna of soil derived from Hebridean shell-sand. He married his wife Winifred in 1954 and they made their second home in Tiree, ‘putting down roots at Balephuil-Sanderling, our cottage on the ocean’s edge at the meeting point of land and sea and sky, our place of solace and peace between heaven and earth’. There followed for Boyd a golden decade when, perhaps in conscious emulation of Fraser Darling’s exploits, he studied not only the earthworms beneath his feet, but also the grey seals of Ronay (the first person to do so since Darling) and the gannets and Soay sheep of St Kilda. His open-air laboratory was the maze of green islands and foaming water in one of the most romantic land and seascapes in Europe. Perhaps the climax to the St Kilda years was the ascent of the sea-girt pinnacles of Stac an Armin and Stac Lee by Morton Boyd and Dick Balharry in May 1969 (see Plate 16), the first time man had trodden on this most inaccessible part of Britain since the departure of the last native St Kildans in 1930.

Boyd reveres Fraser Darling as a mentor, and has written about him in detail in Fraser Darling’s Islands and Fraser Darling in Africa: A Rhino in the Whistling Thorn, but he stops well short of hero-worship. He told me that it was not so much Darling’s science that had struck a chord with him as his style, the directness of his approach to nature, his searching powers of introspection and the many loose leads he generously left dangling for a trained ecologist to pick up. Darling himself compared the energy, physical and intellectual, of the young Boyd with his own ‘natural contemplative idleness’. While Darling was a visionary, Morton Boyd is a romantic, a passionate man with a deeply felt spirituality, which he expresses without inhibition. His life has taken on extraordinary parallels with that of Darling. Both had their island years (each lasting about 10 years), followed by extensive world travel on behalf of conservation causes, Darling in the 1950s, Boyd a decade later. But, while Darling became the vice-president of an independent foundation, Boyd became the Scottish director of a public institution, the Nature Conservancy (later the NCC), with a much more onerous administrative burden. I suspect he enjoyed his travels abroad more than his time behind the director’s desk in Edinburgh. ‘I know your job is not like mine,’ Morton once wrote in one of his friendly Christmas letters to the troops, from somewhere in the South Pacific. He could say that again! He, too, suddenly seems like a figure from a lost age: a traveller, poet, painter and mystic, someone more at home on some guano-spattered rock or palm-fringed atoll than in an office chairing meetings and dictating memos. It was not that he lacked the qualities for the latter. His personal rule was marked by passion, paternalism and sometimes prejudice. I for one remember him with affection, especially in view of what happened later (i.e. growing fractiousness and division, resulting in the abolition of the NCC and its replacement by a separate body under the thumb of the Scottish Office). Morton Boyd must have missed the outdoor island life. He supported the publication of detailed symposia on the natural history of Shetland and Orkney, to which Sam Berry contributed and later used as a source for his New Naturalist books on the northern isles. Later on, Boyd organised and edited symposia on the Inner and the Outer Hebrides, published by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. For his beloved Hebrides, Boyd decided to write a readable, single-author book himself in a style similar to that of the early New Naturalist classics by Darling, Yonge, Pearsall and others. He was unquestionably the best qualified person to do so, though the book is also a testimony to the work of the Nature Conservancy team that Boyd had led. Morton told me he had aimed to provide both a personal book and a view of things in the round; the particular word he used was ‘valency’, the combining power of separate elements. The Hebrides is a three-parter: the first, with a strong central story line, takes the reader from coast to mountain-top; the second is more of a synthesis of species and islands; and in the third he overviews the all-important human dimension, including the many famous naturalists, from Martin Martin to James Fisher, who had made the Hebrides their Mecca. After a period of ill-health, Morton decided to share the work with his son Ian, a chip off the old block, currently in charge of seal research for the British Antarctic Survey. The Hebrides was published in 1990, and is a fitting testimonial to the 60 years of Scottish natural history spanned and exemplified by Fraser Darling and Morton Boyd.

J. Morton Boyd, co-author of The Highlands and Islands and The Hebrides, in 1990.

Morton Boyd retired from the NCC in 1985, and is now a consultant on countryside and forestry issues. He was appointed a CBE in 1987, and is a pillar of the Scottish scientific and religious establishment. Frank Fraser Darling returned to work in England in the late 1960s, and, perhaps to his surprise, was greeted as an elder statesman. It was a remarkable about-turn by a scientific community that had, in Kenneth Mellanby’s words, ‘just discovered the meaning of the word “conservation”’. British Society has its ways of telling you that you have arrived. Darling was invited to deliver a memorable series of Reith Lectures under the title ‘Wilderness and Plenty’. The following year he collected a knighthood, received a clutch of honorary degrees and was invited to join the first Royal Commission on environmental pollution. And, of course, he was in great demand as a speaker, especially by student bodies who saw him, with some justice, as one of the great latter-day prophets. By then, though, his health, hitherto robust, was failing and in his last years he was unable to travel far. On 20 September 1976, he wrote to Billy Collins about a new revision of The Highlands and Islands, mentioning that he himself was ‘waning. Some quality of judgement remains, but the punch has gone.’ As an afterthought, he asked: ‘was New Naturalist your original idea? If so, it was brilliant and in these thirty years has made it possible for a number of gifted men and women to use their minds towards a wholeness of conception…The present vivid interest in natural history among a broad band of folk owes much to the New Naturalist series.’ Billy Collins never read this letter. He died the day after Darling had sent it. Darling himself died at his home in Forres on 22 October 1979, aged 76. But:

‘Still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’

Table 7. The age of each New Naturalist author on the publication of their book (arranged in approximate chronological order)
The best-known portraits of New Naturalist authors are mainly of men and women of mature years, and nearing the end of their public careers. This can give the impression that most of these books were written by elderly people. In fact their ages at this time ranged from their early thirties to their eighties, and an average age would be mid to late forties – in mid, not late, career. The average age has not changed significantly over the past 50 years.

E.B. Ford	44 (Butterflies)
Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald	45
Richard Fitter	32
L. Dudley Stamp	48 (Structure & Scenery)
John Gilmour	48
Max Walters	33 (Wild Flowers)
Frank Fraser Darling	44
A.D. Imms	66
Ernest Neal	37
W.B. Turrill	57
A.W Boyd	66
W.H. Pearsall	58
C.M. Yonge	49
Bruce Campbell	37
F.J. North	60
Wilfred Blunt	48
John Buxton	37
Stuart Smith	42
T.T. Macan	41
John Ramsbottom	67
J.E. Lousley	42
E.M. Nicholson	46
H.J. Fleure	73
VS. Summerhayes	53
Malcolm Smith	74
L. Harrison Matthews	50
Gordon Manley	50
D. N’sole-Th’pson	42
Miriam Rothschild	43
J.R. Harris	42
Ian Hepburn	50
J.A. Steers	53
James Fisher	40 (The Fulmar)
Derek Wragge Morley	33
E.A. Armstrong	54 (The Wren)
Sidney Wooldridge	52
L.A. Harvey	50
Ronald Lockley	50
Colin Butler	40
Monica Shorten	31
Niko Tinbergen	46
H.L. Edlin	39
John Raven	41
Alister Hardy	60
Sir John Russell	84
C.B. Williams	68
WS. Bristowe	47
Guy Mountfort	52
John Free	31
Cynthia Longfield	63
Norman Moore	37
H.H. Swinnerton	84
C.T. Prime	41
Sir Edward Salisbury	75
J.D. Summers-Smith	42
K.C. Edwards	58
J. Morton Boyd	39 (Highlands and Iss)
A.E. Ellis	56
William Condry	48 (Snowdonia)
Ian Moore	61
R.K. Murton	33 (The Wood-Pigeon)
Kenneth Mellanby	58 (Pesticides & Poll’n)
Eric Simms	50 (Woodland Birds)
Michael Proctor	44
Peter Yeo	44
Ian Newton	32
M.V Brian	58
Leslie Brown	58
R.J. Berry	43 (Inheritance)
Christopher Perrins	43
W.G. Hale	45
Nigel Webb	44
Colin Tubbs	49
Christopher Page	45
Niall Campbell	67
Peter Maitland	54
Brian Davis	58
Philip Chapman	43
Michael Majerus	39
Peter Marren	44