8
The Pursuit of a Species: the Monographs

The trouble with the new natural history was that it was all too easy to lose sight of individual birds, beasts and insects in all the attention being devoted to their habitat. Although the ecologists of Tansley’s and Elton’s generation were in general good field naturalists, their subject had, by the 1960s, begun to creep back indoors again. That was the ecology I learned, a curiously abstract subject seemingly obsessed with checks and balances, inputs and outputs, models and statistics. The lab man had taken over again. It is harder to avoid the sunshine when you study a particular species, or a group of related species. There, at least, field study remains a respectable science, in which the amateur can engage on equal or more than equal terms with the full-time scientist. To get to know an animal in its natural habitat needs time, sometimes a great deal of patience, and as much craft and stealth as the observer can summon up. The New Naturalist monographs were written by pioneers in this field, by people who had chosen a particular animal as their own and dedicated themselves to finding out where the animal lived, how it behaved and what its needs were. Of The Fulmar (1952), which was and remains one of the most detailed bird studies ever published, James Fisher freely admitted that his book reflected a personal obsession:

‘I have been haunted by the fulmar for half my life; and have needed no spur to explore its history, and uncover its mysteries, save the ghost-grey bird itself, and green islands in grey seas ..... Since 1933 I have lived no summer season without a sight of at least some of the great cliffs and fulmar colonies of Spitsbergen, Iceland, Shetland, Orkney, St Kilda ..... At one time or another I have seen every Scottish fulmar colony, and most of those in England and Wales .....’

James Fisher. Author’s Preface, The Fulmar (1952)

Fisher wrote this book as a tour de force, and probably intended it to be a pace-setter for future bird studies. But he was engagingly candid about his real reasons for writing it. ‘I have written this book not because I have thought it “useful” to do so, but because I like fulmars and everything to do with them.’ And in a line that might well have jolted Billy Collins’ shaggy eyebrows, he added that every kind of bird ‘is worthy of monography’, all 8,000 of them.

About half of the New Naturalist monographs were written by amateurs in the best sense of the word: by people who did what they did for the love of doing it. In 1947, when the first half-dozen of them were being written, virtually nobody was paid to study the natural history of animals or birds in the wild. For most species, surprisingly little was yet known. There was, of course, plenty of anecdotal information about foxes or badgers or eagles, but very few species had been studied scientifically. Much of what was said about such species was myth, or at least untypical. The first generation of animal ecologists had tended to cut their scientific teeth in far-away places – the Arctic, the Barrier Reef or the southern oceans. Home-based natural history was the province of amateur naturalists, including sportsmen and country curates. For a long time, serious birding was open only to people, usually wealthy people, with plenty of leisure, and access to grouse moors, pheasant coverts and wildfowling marshes. From the late 1920s onwards, the scene began to change as Britain’s large body of amateur birdwatchers organised themselves and undertook local and national surveys of breeding birds. Much of this work focused on particular species, notably the great crested grebe, heron and lapwing. The surveys were aimed at finding out the distribution and, as far as possible, the actual numbers of these birds in Britain. They did, however, also encourage some birdwatchers to look at other aspects of their subject, notably courtship and nesting behaviour, the variations of bird song and the aggressive way in which some birds defended their territory. A few began to specialise in a particular species, building up a detailed picture of their lives through hours of watching and volumes of birdwatching diaries. Julian Huxley led the way to scientific birding through his classic study of the great crested grebe, but by the late 1930s he had many disciples: Fisher on the Atlantic fulmar, Nethersole-Thompson on the greenshank and the crossbill, Arnold Boyd on finches and swallows, and Ronald Lockley on the Manx shearwater and puffin, to name but four.

Wartime interrupted the tranquil way of life that allowed such studies, but in a way war encouraged birdwatching. It is often said that war consists of five per cent wild excitement and fear, and 95 percent boredom. Stationary soldiers and, still more, prisoners of war need a hobby. Arnold Boyd found the trenches of the First World War very handy for birdwatching, during the quieter moments at least. During the Second, John Buxton watched redstarts building their nest through the barbed wire of a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Meanwhile, back on the Home Front, non-combatants restricted by petrol rationing to their home ground, also began to study the birds on their doorstep. Most of the New Naturalist bird monographs were based on a particular study area, often a very small one. The extent of Edward Armstrong’s ‘Wren Wood’ was precisely four acres, and Stuart Smith’s yellow wagtails lived in a vegetable plot by the railway in a Manchester suburb.

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Jacket of The Fulmar (1952).

The New Naturalist monographs were not altogether ‘new’, but there were not many predecessors. The first fully fledged bird monograph ever published was probably The Grouse in health and disease (1911) attributed to the Lovat Committee, though much of the work was by Edward Wilson – who might have contributed to the New Naturalist series in his old age had he not accompanied Scott to the South Pole. Another pioneer work was The Gannet, a Bird with a History (1913) by John Henry Gurney, a book which influenced James Fisher when he came to write The Fulmar. These were, however, the exception rather than the rule. More influential for the majority of British birdwatchers in the 1940s were the classic how-to-do-it books by Max Nicholson, Julian Huxley, Stuart Smith and James Fisher. They helped to transform the hobby of birdwatching into the science of ornithology, as symbolised by the founding of the British Trust for Ornithology in 1932, and the Edward Grey Institute at Oxford in 1938. By the Second World War, the stage had been set for anyone with time and intellectual resources to become a player.

Nor was the idea of natural history monographs confined to the bird world. The Biological Flora project, which encouraged the study of individual species of British plants, had got underway as early as 1928, though it did not gather speed until after the war. British mammals, on the other hand, had been neglected by all but a handful of intrepid amateurs. Their time did not come until the 1950s with the founding of the Mammal Society (which was itself partly the product of the surge of interest caused by Ernest Neal’s and Harrison Matthews’ New Naturalist books).

What was new was the production of a uniform series of books, each devoted to a single species and using the latest scientific techniques. To any publisher before 1945, the notion would have smacked of commercial disaster. Without the confidence engendered by the success of the first New Naturalist books, it is doubtful whether anyone, even Collins, would have considered publishing such ‘specialist books’, let alone a series of 22 on subjects ranging from fulmars to fleas, rabbits to wrens. The first monograph was published in 1948, but they were already the subject of animated discussion in early 1946 when only two New Naturalist books had yet appeared. The minutes of the relevant Editorial Board meetings have not survived, but the private papers of some of these most closely involved reveal in broad terms how the idea developed over the next few years. The story begins with The Badger.

The making of a natural history classic

In considering the origins of the monographs, we must recall that 1945 and 1946 were the anni mirabile of the New Naturalist library, when the public appetite for such books proved greater than Billy Collins had anticipated, even at his most optimistic. The first four books had all sold out within their first year, and reprinting them brought their total print-run to some 40,000 copies each. Billy Collins had succeeded in launching a flagship series of books, burnishing the name of his house in natural history circles and making a profit. Their success was attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the novel use of photography, especially colour photography. We can assume that Collins was at that time receptive to an expansion of the series, especially if the new books were accompanied by an impressive collection of photographs. Both Huxley and Fisher were strong advocates of what the latter called ‘monography’, and Fisher had already begun work on a book about the fulmar. If 40,000 members of the public were willing to pay a guinea for a book about butterflies or gamebirds, would not, say, a quarter of their number be interested in paying 10s. for a book about the cabbage white or the partridge…or the fulmar?

The first New Naturalist monograph, The Badger, had its origins, like the library as a whole, in a London restaurant. Over lunch with Billy Collins, Leo Harrison Matthews, who was writing the mammal book, mentioned some remarkable work on badgers being carried out by a schoolmaster he knew at Rendcomb College in the Cotswolds. Matthews had been out badger watching with him recently, had admired his photographs of wild badgers at play and been much impressed with the detailed portrait of the badger community he was piecing together with the help of his pupils. The schoolmaster’s name was Ernest Neal. Collins liked badgers, and once photographs were mentioned needed no further encouragement. He wrote to Neal soon afterwards:

‘When I was lunching with Dr Harrison Matthews this week he was talking about you and told me of the photographs you had taken and also about the book you are writing on Badgers.

‘As you may know we are now specialising in nature books, and if you care to send us up a selection of your photographs we would be very interested. We also would very much like to see your manuscript on Badgers when you are ready to send it.’

W.A.R. Collins. Unpublished letter to Ernest Neal, 25 January 1946

Collins evidently passed the matter on to the editorial board, for a fortnight later Ernest Neal received a further letter, this time from Julian Huxley.

‘Your name has been given to us as being possibly interested in doing a monograph in our New Naturalist Monograph Series on the Badger. I hope this may prove possible, as I think this will be a very interesting subject.

‘I am getting Messrs Adprint to send you a specimen contract and details of the series, to show you the length, business arrangements etc. We are publishing two different types of monograph, one with 8 colour plates and the other type with only one colour plate (as frontispiece). Perhaps you could let me have your views on this. You could also have a reasonable number of black and white plates, in either case.’

Julian Huxley. Unpublished letter to Ernest Neal, 7 February 1946

Huxley went on to ask Neal to send in a synopsis of his book, and, if possible, a specimen chapter. Neal responded with several chapters, though the promised contract did not in fact arrive until April 1947, when the book was nearly finished. In the meantime, Matthews had sent a friendly letter of his own, emphasising that ‘Collins are anxious to publish this for you’ and that the terms were not bad.

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Ernest Neal with badger cub, 1953. (Photo: Ernest Neal)

The Badger took about a year to write. Ernest Neal had begun it as science master at Rendcomb College, and completed it shortly after his appointment to Taunton School, which, fortunately, was also well placed for watching badgers. The success of The Badger was crucial to the future of the monographs. It was to some extent a pilot for the new series. If it flopped, the future of the other titles was questionable: after all, who would purchase a ‘greenshank’ if no one bought a ‘badger’? As it turned out, The Badger was so successful that it raised false expectations for the other books; no other New Naturalist monograph sold as well. Some 20,000 hardback copies were printed and sold in five editions over the next 30 years, and the rights were purchased by Penguin Books in 1958 for an equally large paperback edition in the Pelican series. Even so, after the first year the book was a steady seller rather than a best seller. It was most remarkable not for its sales, but for what it did. For Ernest Neal, it led to further work on badgers resulting in a doctorate, to many new academic friendships and to a lifetime’s devotion to wild badgers and their conservation. In a wider sense, the book stirred up a great deal of interest, and played its part in the founding of The Mammal Society and the last of the English county wildlife trusts, Somerset (for his part in which Neal was later appointed an MBE). As for Billy Collins, The Badger was his favourite book in the whole series. The Board minutes record his comments on more than one new monograph title: ‘quite good, readable and full of facts – but not as good as The Badger.

What makes a natural history classic? In the case of The Badger, it is probably the fact that most of the book consists of personal observation. Neal was writing about an animal that everyone had heard of, but relatively few had seen and about which remarkably little was known. Neal had uncovered some, but by no means all, of the facts about the badger’s secretive life, and wrote about them with warmth and simplicity. His is an exceptionally well-mannered book, taking care to inform the reader exactly how the author carried out his studies and how he had managed to photograph them with the cumbersome apparatus available at the time. It was encouraging, too, that this was all based on simple field observation within the capabilities of any sufficiently dedicated amateur naturalist (though for watching several sett entrances at once, a band of sixth form helpers was undoubtedly an advantage). Another virtue of The Badger was the direct way in which it involves the reader from the opening page. The reader is at the writer’s elbow as the sun sinks below the horizon, the wind drops and the first ‘low, quavering, yelping sound’ is heard from the depths of the earth. Neal’s evocation of one night’s expedition set an example followed by many of the later titles, engaging the reader’s interest by taking him on a badger watch, rather than by inconsiderately hurling facts at him.

As one might expect, it was the reviews in the scientific press that were the most dispassionate. J.S. Watson, in the Journal of Animal Ecology, admitted that the book ‘adds appreciably to our knowledge of the social life and habits of the badger’ but that it was not (and why should it have been?) ‘a critical analysis of the badger’s ecology, for which, however, the data available are still inadequate’. Other reviewers responded more warmly. To Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, who had become a faithful reviewer of New Naturalist titles, ‘Mr Neal’s book has thrilled me as few books have done in the past twenty years; it has held my attention for every line of the page; it has made me think ..... He has not made the mistake common to modern scientists of believing that truth to be truth must be frigid. “Cold facts” is a favourite catchphrase of the scientist. How pleasant to have the facts with some warmth for a change! How much more human!’

Turning cold facts into warm facts might be a suitable phrase to sum up the New Naturalist ethos as a whole (while not sharing Fitzgerald’s antipathy to ‘modern scientists’ tout court). Since 1948, the facts about badgers have, of course, been added to and elaborated to a considerable degree. But the warmth of The Badger remains: it is still a good read, and surely that is the quality we look for first in a book. As a scientific milestone, its importance lies in the effect it had on Neal himself and on his disciples and successors. In a recent eulogy, from today’s standpoint, Pat Morris explained why this book has been so influential.

‘Today, with the benefit of hindsight and a wider perspective, I can appreciate The Badger better, not so much for what it contained as what it did. Looking at it now, this small volume seems pretty ordinary stuff – lots of people could write as much. But that’s not the point. We can easily write about badgers now because of what Neal triggered off years ago.

‘Today, we have a countrywide assortment of badger groups, there are lectures and meetings attended by hundreds of people, and lots of books and scientific research. All this had to start somewhere, and few would dispute that its seeds were planted between the green buckram covers of Ernest Neal’s classic ..... Neal showed later authors the way, and succeeded so well that (to my mind at least) none of Collins’ subsequent books have been better. That series spawned other popular mammal monographs, and there is now a significant body of British mammal literature – whereas before 1948 there was almost nothing ..... Ernest Neal’s book was a powerful catalyst.’

Pat Morris. BBC Wildlife ‘A Natural Classic’, July 1993

Monography

There are 22 New Naturalist ‘monographs’, beginning with one underground mammal, The Badger, in 1948 and ending with another, The Mole, in 1971. They were not planned as a 22-volume set, nor are those the only titles that were considered for publication in the series. As with the senior series, the monographs started slowly, built up speed in a cascade of titles in the early 1950s, and then, decelerated gradually. The titles came out in no particular order, nor were they necessarily concerned with the most popular or accessible subjects. The editorial board commissioned not so much subjects as authors. There was never any particular line drawn as to which species were acceptable and which were not, and a series that could include, say, the hawfinch, might include almost any breeding bird. Nor was it entirely clear where the dividing line lay between main series subjects and the monographs. The World of the Honeybee in the main series is, after all, concerned with a single species. And why place Ants among the monographs but Dragonflies in the main series? The British Amphibians and Reptiles was originally listed among the monographs, but rightly finished among the mainstream titles. Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos made the opposite journey. It is difficult in fact to find much logic behind some of these decisions, but if there is any it probably has more to do with sales than species. There was a large enough market of beekeepers to make the prospective sales of a Honeybee look attractive, but the world of The Hawfinch is likely to be smaller. The monographs were not expected to sell in the same numbers as the main series; their editions were smaller, and they were not promoted as much. Only The Badger, The Herring Gull’s World and the two fish books did well in the shops. Most of the others, through no fault of their authors, were commercial failures.

The editor most responsible for the monographs was James Fisher, who took over much of the correspondence after Huxley’s appointment to the first scientific directorship of UNESCO in 1946. It was a task which this great advocate of monography must have regarded with relish. In the 1940s and 50s, Fisher’s contribution to the growth of the New Naturalist library was enormous, and nowhere more so than with the monographs. He read and commented on the majority of manuscripts with perfectionist zeal, and in one or two cases even re-wrote entire chapters himself. Without his energy, knowledge and boundless enthusiasm, it is open to doubt whether the monographs would ever have taken off. And when Fisher died in 1970, the monographs died too.

The surviving record suggests that, while some titles might have been contracted for as early as 1946, the monographs did not gather steam until the following year. By February 1947, it was time to start thinking about design matters. Fisher wrote to Clifford Ellis to inform him that ‘We are extending the series to include a series of monographs. One of the first of these is to be ‘The Fulmar’ which I’m in the middle of writing myself’. The Ellises were asked to produce a new design for the dust jackets, and also to devise a special colophon. Judging from the pencilled doodles at the bottom of this letter (reproduced here) Clifford Ellis started work straight away, perhaps over the breakfast table. He decided to keep the basic attributes of the main series jacket designs, but to replace the title band with coloured ovals on the front and on the spine. In place of the conjoined Ns of the main titles, he devised a new monogram – NMN – placing it at the top of the spine. On the title page, the ‘M’ was added as a kind of badge at the point where the main series colophons bore sticklebacks and caterpillars. On Redstart and Yellow Wagtail the ‘M’ on the spine was lettered by hand.

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Letter from Ruth Atkinson to Clifford Ellis, with the latter’s sketches for a Monograph colophon. (Private collection)

The monographs were supposed to be smaller and slimmer than the main series – about 50,000 words compared with 80,000 and with 8 × 51/2 inch pages as opposed to 83/4 × 6. They would have fewer colour photographs, and would sell for about half the price. Inevitably there were exceptions. When they came to be written, The Fulmar and The Wren were each well over 100,000 words, and they had to be printed in the larger size.7 The monographs also included three ‘special volumes’ in plain jackets, two of which were also printed in main series size. For these reasons, the monographs do not make such a satisfactory set as the main series, and the bigger books stick out like battlements when they are arranged on the shelf in numerical order. It is a great pity, too, that the Ellises were not allowed to design all the jackets. Those three blank spines of Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, Mumps, Measles and Mosaics and Birds of the London Area, which have had New Naturalist collectors cursing ever since, were cost-cutting expedients.

The titles which Huxley or Fisher had commissioned in 1946 and 1947 took at least a year to complete. The first past the post was The Yellow Wagtail, which was ready by spring 1948, but not published until 1950 (as number 4 in the series, the numbered sequence of the monographs not always corresponding with the order in which they were written). Possibly Collins had decided to wait and see how The Badger fared before printing further titles. The Yellow Wagtail and The Redstart were published together in March 1950. They appeared at a bad time for the book trade, with rising costs and plummeting sales. Neither book sold well, though they were favourably reviewed. Ten years later, there were still large stocks of The Redstart and The Yellow Wagtail lying about unbound in the Collins Glasgow warehouse. At one point, the publishers considered remaindering them, having failed to persuade the Readers Union to accept a batch, and in 1962 took the decision to pulp 1,000 uncut quires of Wagtail. These books remained technically in print until 1972, but they seem to have disappeared from the shops long before that and I suspect they were quietly remaindered.

It was soon clear that a public which bought Honeybees and Badgers in commercially viable numbers, did not entertain the same enthusiasm for bird titles. The bird books that sold were identification guides about the British and European species generally, not those on individual birds. The experience of The Redstart and The Yellow Wagtail suggested that even an edition as small as 6,000 was to over-estimate the market rather wildly (one has to remember that even the RSPB had no more than a few thousand members in 1950). The sales of The Greenshank were unlikely to be as high, and even fewer people were likely to fork out 35s. (soon raised to 42s.) for 500 pages on the fulmar. The choice of four rather unfamiliar birds to blaze a trail was unfortunate. Perhaps if the series had included David Lack’s book on the robin, or if the books had been about waders and sea-birds, rather than greenshanks or fulmars, they would have been more successful. Who knows? We need not mourn unduly. Though they were not a bookselling sensation, these early bird monographs were important for the same reason that The Badger was important. They were remarkable books in their day, and they reached and impressed the market they were written for.

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Jacket of The Wren (1955).

There were considerably more ructions over the next three books, The Wren (1952), Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos (1952) and Ants (1953). Billy Collins seems to have been willing to countenance making a loss over The Fulmar – it was Fisher’s reward for being a good editor. But when Collins heard about the length of The Wren and saw the setting costs of another ornithological marathon, he made his displeasure known. The time lag between the completion of The Wren (1951) and its eventual publication (1955) suggests a considerable wrangle behind the boardroom door at Grafton Street. Edward Armstrong had written a scholarly and meticulous book, covering every aspect of wrens, and above all their curious nuptial life, with nests built by the cock bird and polygamous marriages. The text was liberally sprinkled with references and in general tone it amounted to ‘almost a treatise’, as Richard Fitter put it in his review for Nature. He added that ‘if it were necessary to standardise monographs on birds, this would make a very satisfactory book on which to base the standard’. Satisfactory in academic terms, that is.

The editorial board received the 125,000 word manuscript in May 1951. No formal contract survives – there may not have been one – and Armstrong had evidently not felt constrained by considerations of length. Dudley Stamp asked in some bewilderment: ‘Who will read monographs of this length?’ Fisher and Huxley were asked to look into the matter, and to recommend cuts. They were further encouraged to do so by what was described as a ‘strong letter’ from Billy Collins. In this delicate undertaking, Huxley wrote to Armstrong’s friend, the distinguished ornithologist W.H. Thorpe, requesting his help in reducing the book to more saleable proportions. Indignantly, Thorpe refused, offering his opinion that Armstrong had been badly treated, and adding that he had advised him to withdraw the manuscript. James Fisher said that for his part he was prepared to accept the manuscript as it was, and if necessary forgo his editor’s royalty. And Huxley, though he thought the book too detailed ‘on comparative matters’, agreed that the problem was not literary nor scientific, but commercial. Various ruses were used, such as increasing the number of lines per page, to reduce the pagination from 378 to 302, and Armstrong agreed to make various changes that entailed retyping the whole manuscript. But even so, this was not one of Billy Collins’ favourite books. In a memo to his editors shortly after publication he wrote:

‘I was appalled when I saw the setting costs of this book was £750…Even if we sell out all our first edition, we will still show a loss of £160. The present loss must be much higher. There are some very bad features of this book, and there must be an absolute rule that we never get in this position again with a New Naturalist title…I think practically every bird monograph has shown a big loss.’

W.A.R. Collins. Internal memo to editors, 27 July 1955

The publication of The Wren coincided with a newspaper strike. Macmillan took on a few hundred of the small edition of 3,000 for the US market, but since they refused to reorder after the book went out of print in 1964, there was no possibility of Collins reprinting it. The Wren was respectfully reviewed, and remained the standard world monograph on our smallest bird for many years. Today, and for many years past, The Wren has become a scarce book and a gap on many shelves. It has moreover a tendency to auto-destruct with big rusty damp-stains spreading over the Ellises exquisite jacket design. Perhaps it is just an unlucky title.

The sad story of Ants

We have reached monograph number 8, Ants, which, as many readers will know already, is the book that was supposedly withdrawn from sale after receiving bad reviews. I have heard other stories about it, some of them certainly incorrect. What are the facts? Ants was contracted for in 1947, completed in July 1952, and published on 8 June 1953. Its author, Derek Wragge Morley, was a remarkable young man. As a boy he developed a lifetime’s interest in ants, studying their behaviour in his parents’ garden and publishing his first research paper at the age of 16. A year later, he chaired a session for the International Congress of Entomology in Berlin, reading two of the contributing papers. The story is still told of the stir created by the bespectacled, shock-haired schoolboy limping up to the lectern. In 1942, Morley was made the youngest-ever Fellow of the Linnaean Society. This precocity was achieved in spite of – perhaps because of – a debilitating illness he suffered while in his early teens. It was while he was recovering from this illness that Morley began to study ants.

Ants were one of Julian Huxley’s kaleidoscopic interests; he published a book about them in 1930. In his preface, Morley tells how ‘Huxley answered the letters of a pestering schoolboy [i.e. himself], and encouraged his childish experiments.’ It was probably Huxley, then, who spurred Morley on to write a book for the New Naturalist series. He should have known better. Morley had a genuine enthusiasm for ants, but not nearly enough experience to write a serious book about them, and especially not for a series that included books of the weight of The Fulmar and Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos. His tragedy was that he might well have written a good book in time.

The first draft was no good. As Morley put it, James Fisher had made some ‘candid criticisms which made me tear up my first manuscript. How right he was!’ The revised script passed muster, however, and it is doubtful whether anyone but an expert in ants would have found much wrong with it. F.T. Smith, Collins’ principal editor, had pronounced it ‘a very good book’ on the whole, but, of course, he was not an ant expert. Unfortunately Huxley, who would have spotted the mistakes, had recently suffered a nervous breakdown, was absent at the crucial time and probably never read the manuscript. By the time he resumed attendance at the Editorial Board in September 1952, Ants was already being set in type. The Ellises designed a handsome jacket for it, and the book contained some good professional photographs by Raymond Kleboe of Picture Post, where Morley was science editor, and some excellent close-ups by Ronald Startup. A reviewer for The Naturalist found little to complain about, praising its easy style, even though ‘sometimes he simplifies his writing too much, and writes as though his readers were still in the second form’. All seemed set fair until, shortly after publication, the editors received a letter from Dr M.V Brian at Glasgow University criticising the book for numerous errors of fact. The minutes of the editorial board record that Morley drafted ‘a good restrained reply’ which was read and approved by Huxley and Fisher, who were of the view ‘that personal issues beyond science had been involved in Brian’s review’. But worse was to follow, with a very adverse review in the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine. It began mildly:

‘The New Naturalist volumes have set such a high standard of excellence that we accept almost complacently Mr Wragge Morley’s opening remark that his contribution to the series is the first comprehensive work to be published on British ants for over twenty-five years. The chapter headings are indeed full of promise and it seems that the author is prepared to cover his subject widely…

‘Why then, with so much offered, does Mr Wragge Morley so soon begin to disappoint us? In an introductory chapter we learn about the ants he found as a boy in his parents’ garden. Here is much general information on foraging habits, mating flights, colony founding and other aspects of ant behaviour. But the material is assembled in a haphazard sort of way and thrust without order at the reader. And all the time we get the impression, almost too sharply, that the author is relying on a very personal interpretation of what he has observed. Before long, however, we feel a twinge of uneasiness, a first flicker of real doubt. For on page ten he describes how one fine day in March, 1934, he witnessed a marriage flight of the Black Lawn ant with hundreds of males and females rising into the air at dusk. Now this particular species – Lasius niger (L.) – mates normally in the afternoon of sultry days towards the end of summer. But Mr Wragge Morley saw the event in spring and not only in his garden, but round about as well. And yet he does not trouble to tell us that this was something unusual and quite exceptional.’

The review goes on to list more factual mistakes, before concluding damningly:

‘If Mr Wragge Morley’s book fails, it is not because he lacks enthusiasm. But enthusiasm without discipline is not enough to carry a work of this kind to success. Right from the start he underrates our intelligence. The pills we are offered are so often too big to swallow and we resent all along the author’s irresponsibility, his carelessness, and the absence of anything like a critical approach to his subject.’

Review in Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, November 1953, p. xliii

A copy of this review seems to have been sent to Collins. Morley had not endeared himself to the editors by writing another book about ants, The World of Ants for Penguin, without informing them. The Board minutes state only that James Fisher told Morley that the book would not be reprinted, but that the editors would not commission anyone else to write on ants ‘without telling him and giving him the opportunity to write another book’. The record leaves it open to doubt whether Ants was in fact withdrawn from sale as is widely believed. Out of some 3,900 copies printed, some 3,651 were sold, leaving only 244 to be accounted for, all of which could have been swallowed up in samples, review copies, bookseller’s returns and so on. An alternative reading of the evidence would be that Ants simply sold out, and was not reprinted. Although it was in the shops for less than a year, Ants is not a rare book, as it would be if a large proportion had been returned and pulped. It was, and still is, quite a popular book among myrmecophiles. My guess is that Collins simply decided not to advertise it.

The bad reviews in the entomological press must have been a bitter disappointment to Wragge Morley personally, and he does seem to have ceased to publish scientific papers on ants from about this time. However, his decision to switch from insect research to science journalism had been made several years earlier. From 1952 to 1962, Wragge Morley was the science editor of the Financial Times and later worked as a science and technical consultant to Hambros Bank and on the board of a firm of compressor manufacturers. He died in January 1969, leaving a wife and four children. Ironically his book sold more copies than did the main series Ants by M.V. Brian, published a quarter century later.

The special volumes

The monograph series includes three ‘special volumes’ which are not really monographs at all but books which were regarded as too limited in appeal to form part of the main series. One of these books, Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos (1952) is a science classic. The other two, Mumps, Measles and Mosaics (1954) and Birds of the London Area (1957) are half-forgotten, and are usually among the very last titles to come to the attention of the New Naturalist collector. The idea behind the first two seems to have been Julian Huxley’s and they were commissioned soon after the war. Miriam Rothschild began to write Fleas, Flukes (its working title was The Parasites of Birds) in 1947, and a contract was sent to Kenneth Smith for the book about viruses which became Mumps, Measles and Mosaics in the following year.

The circumstances in which the first chapters of Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos were written – a desolate hotel in the middle of the rubble of Calais, while a storm brewed up in the Channel – must be enjoyed and read in Miriam Rothschild’s own words at the end of this chapter. Although this book is credited to co-authors, the whole of the draft was in fact written by Miriam in her distinctive style, while her colleague, Theresa Clay, contributed advice and information, especially on her special subject, bird-lice, as well as blue-pencilling the manuscript. The title was Huxley’s. The ‘This, That and the Other’ style of title was briefly in vogue in the early 1950s, and publishers saw it as a useful way of jazzing up less appealing subject matter. The authors had completed the book by September 1949, but it was not published until May 1952. Billy Collins had in the meantime decided that the title was unlikely to make much money and no longer wanted to publish it. Unfortunately, the authors had proceeded without a formal contract and therefore had no legal redress. The editors were incensed at Collins’ unilateral decision, especially Julian Huxley who had read the manuscript and regarded it as a very good book. He threatened to resign and take the rest of the board with him. Collins then agreed to look into ways of publishing the book without losing money over it, but that he still refused to commit himself is suggested by a note by Raleigh Trevelyan at the end of 1950 saying ‘that is just possible that we may not even do the book, the subject matter being somewhat specialised and the cost of production rather high in relation to likely sales’.

Collins agreed to publish the book only on the toughest of terms that would indemnify his firm against the expected loss. He insisted that the authors and publishers should in effect change places, so that the former would take on the financial risks, while Collins would take a percentage of the sales – in effect a royalty. The authors were to pay for all the illustrations themselves. And the first edition was limited to a mere 2,000 copies. The meanest aspect of these negotiations concerned the jacket design. By some crossing of purposes, two illustrated jackets were designed for it, one commissioned and paid for by Miriam Rothschild, and the other (featuring a cuckoo) designed by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. But Collins decided that, as a ‘special volume’, the book should be issued in plain wrappers, like a university textbook. Having resisted publication at all points, he was not minded to give it a pretty cover.

Billy Collins completely misjudged Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, which is a triumph of style over content. Miriam Rothschild presented the bizarre world of bird parasites unsqueamishly but in a wonderfully clear and accessible way. Some of the regular book reviewers in the daily papers were enthralled by it. Guy Ramsay picked on its marvellous quotability. Peter Quennell in the Daily Mail found ‘scarcely a dull page. There is a surprise – sometimes a nightmarish surprise – in nearly every paragraph.’ His colleague on the Sunday Times, Raymond Mortimer, agreed: ‘I have gone through this book with my eyes popping out of my head, so amusing, amazing, appalling are the habits here uncovered.’ The Spectator went so far as to declare that Fleas, Flukes would set a new direction in natural history writing. It was a rare example (very rare at that time) of a book that managed to be a contribution to literature as well as science.

With so many good reviews behind it, the first edition sold out within weeks. Wrong-footed, Collins was slow to reprint it, and by the time the book was back on sale, the feast had grown cold, the rave reviews forgotten. Even so, the reprint had also sold out by 1956, helped by the demand from university biology courses, and a second reprint was ordered at Huxley’s insistence. There was also a Reader’s Union edition and two paperback versions, one in the Pelican series, the other published by Arrow and on sale in Ireland. Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos did in fact sell better than the majority of the monographs, even though the Irish paperback was a travesty of a book, full of misprints that the authors were not given an opportunity to correct. Given more considerate treatment by the publishers, it would have done better still.

Mumps, Measles and Mosaics was planned as a semi-popular book about viruses. The editors had argued about the title for some time, toying with names like ‘Beyond Bacteria’ and variations on ‘The Invisible World of…’ before coming up with the one adopted. Mumps, measles and mosaics are all, of course, diseases caused by viruses. Raleigh Trevelyan sent a copy to Miriam Rothschild with a note: ‘As we have rather pinched your title, I thought you would like to have a special complimentary copy. You will be very pleased to know, I am sure, that there is a howling misprint, but I leave you to find out where it is.’ If Fleas, Flukes was an experimental title, the much shorter Mumps, Measles charted completely new waters as a semi-popular work. The authors (for the elderly Kenneth Smith had invited his younger colleague Roy Markham to write the book with him) were both leading experts on viruses and Fellows of the Royal Society. Smith had in fact written the standard textbooks on both plant and insect viruses and was a world authority on the subject. Even so, the editors decided the book might need a push since it dealt with organisms (if, indeed, viruses were organisms) that were not only invisible but strangers to British naturalists. As the responsible editor, John Gilmour compiled a publicity hand-out, full of ‘amazing facts’: ‘In the USA every person catches, on average, 21/2 colds per year. In the 1918-19 ‘flu epidemic half the entire population of the world was attacked. Clothes moths have been successfully controlled experimentally by infecting them with a virus. Viruses are far and away the smallest living things – about a ten millionth of an inch across’ and so on over a couple of pages. James Fisher wrote to all the main agricultural colleges, hoping to get the book adopted by them as a textbook: ‘as a general introduction to the viruses we believe it to be unique, and its agricultural slant is self-evident’.

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Kenneth Smith (left) (1892-1981) and Roy Markham (right) (1916-1979), authors of Mumps, Measles and Mosaics (1954). (Photos: John Innes Institute)

Mumps, Measles and Mosaics was published on 1 February 1954. It was widely reviewed but in marketing terms it fell between two stools. The agricultural world had its own textbooks (written, as it happened, by Kenneth Smith), and since this book dealt mainly with cultivated crop plants, there was little in it to interest the field naturalist. Nor, for that matter, the medical man: there was plenty about mosaics, but only a few paragraphs about measles and mumps. The authors had done their best to write popular science, but some reviewers, like Cyril Connolly, in the Sunday Times, still found it far too technical. ‘It is a pity we could not have had somebody who knew more about the subject,’ complained Raleigh Trevelyan about Connolly’s review. ‘He had obviously not read the book properly,’ agreed an annoyed Kenneth Smith.

The drab grey jacket and print-run of 3,000 (including 250 which went to Praeger of New York) scarcely argued confidence in the book. The title sold out within 18 months but, since the hoped-for orders from America did not materialise, there was no question of reprinting it. More than half of the copies sold did so on subscription. Raleigh Trevelyan considered that the sales ‘compare very favourably with other NN special volumes’, by which he presumably meant Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos. Kenneth Smith’s reply was: ‘I am glad you consider these favourable.’

On the face of it, Birds of the London Area since 1900 seems an odd title for the New Naturalist library, based as it is on a sectional interest in a limited area (and the library already contained a London volume). London had in some ways a claim to being a special case, however, since, with a large and well-organised natural history society and the longest continuous history of ornithological observation in Britain, it was a pace-setter for the rest of the country. The book is based on a survey by the London Natural History Society, edited into book form by a committee chaired by its President, Richard Homes. James Fisher was keen for the book to be published in the series, providing it was based on bird habitats, and was not a mere systematic list. The problem was that it was both. It was also too long, with 55,000 words on ecology and 125,000 on individual birds. Collins agreed to publish the book so long as the Society guaranteed to purchase 400 copies from an edition of 2,000, and cut the manuscript to a more manageable 150,000 words. These negotiations were stringent enough, but when Trevelyan proposed to reduce the size still further, while raising the price and cutting the royalty, they grew acrimonious as well. Birds of the London Area was published belatedly in March 1957. It was out of print in little more than a year, representing a favourable subscription list followed by slow sales; in other words, most of those who bought the book did so at once. One was either very interested in London birds, it seemed, or not at all.

The book was significant as one of the first thoroughly documented ecological surveys of any part of Britain. It was reprinted in 1963, but not by Collins. The blocks were sold to Rupert Hart-Davis, who re-set the type and brought the book up to date. Collins made a profit of £85.

An eye for a bird

James Fisher once wrote that it was the ambition of the New Naturalist to ‘capture British natural history, and to transform it into lines of type, and blocks, and coloured inks’. To avoid any impression of pomposity, he added that while this might be a worthwhile aim, it was, of course, impossible to achieve. Success is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps the books which came nearest to doing so were the dozen or so bird monographs, and their fellow travellers: badger, squirrels and oyster. In the 1940s and 1950s, bird study usually involved nothing more elaborate than a notebook and a pair of binoculars, with nest boxes and hides sometimes used for more intimate observation. The rest was a matter of reason, deduction and speculation, the same attributes as those used by James Fisher’s hero, Gilbert White. There was not the detachment that seems to have built up since between the naturalist and his object of study. The authors of these books made it clear that they enjoyed their work, and loved their birds (or badgers or squirrels) without ever descending into the sentimental language of the previous generation.

Every one of the bird monographs was based on years of personal work. They all reviewed the sometimes scant available literature, but personal experience is usually to the fore and it is what lends these books their lively quality. Some of the authors were genuine pioneers. No one anywhere in the world had got to know greenshanks or herring gulls or even house sparrows so well. Their work had in some cases (notably the heron, the greenshank and the fulmar) started in the 1930s, long before the New Naturalist series existed. The Yellow Wagtail was based on eight years of more or less continuous observation, The Fulmar on something nearer fifteen. It was the apparent simplicity and straightforwardness of these studies that encouraged others to follow in their footsteps. Today, of course, there are many people who could (and often do) write such books. One would not now go to the New Naturalist monographs for new information. What we do still find in these now classic books is the excitement that goes with original discovery, and to bask in the glow of that golden postwar decade.

Rather than review each book in detail, I will sketch in a little of the background to the books, and the circumstances in which each was written: for it was circumstance more often than not that governed the choice of species. James Fisher had loved the cold grey seas and green islands of the North Atlantic since taking part as junior ornithologist in the Oxford expedition to Spitzbergen in 1933. The fulmar epitomised this world, and Fisher usually managed to find the means to visit its remote haunts each summer. Other naturalists found themselves marooned by wartime petrol rationing and chose birds that lived close to home. Desmond Nethersole-Thompson was exceptional in that he moved his own home to live among his beloved greenshanks. Denis Summers-Smith chose the house sparrow not so much for convenience as out of his admiration for a bird that had proved itself uniquely adaptable to man. We may be certain that there was something in each chosen bird which appealed at a more human level than mere scientific objectivity. It is not hard to imagine why Stuart Smith, for example, was so entranced by the yellow wagtail ‘so lovely to look upon, and so full of a dainty and buoyant airiness of stance and flight’, marvelling at the brilliant colours of the returning cocks ‘before they were dulled by the soot and dirt of Manchester’. Smith was a fibre research chemist for the association of cotton industries in Manchester, living in the dormitory suburb of Gatley, close to the black waters of the River Mersey. At only a field’s distance from his house was a ten-acre plot of land wedged between a railway line and the river, where the wagtails would return each spring to nest among the strips of ‘potatoes, cabbages, sprouts and other vegetables’ grown for the Manchester market place. Smith longed for their appearance each spring, and from 1941 began the study which resulted in The Yellow Wagtail nine years later.

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Stuart Smith (1906-1963), author of The Yellow Wagtail, noting the reaction of a nesting willow warbler to a stuffed cuckoo. (Photo: Eric Hosking)

In the same corner of England another Lancashire ornithologist, Frank A. Lowe, was studying the heron. By another coincidence, Lowe was, like Smith, a manufacturing chemist, which in his case was a family business. Well-known locally as the wildlife correspondent of the Bolton Evening News, Lowe’s love affair with the grey heron dated back to the late 1920s and the national heron enquiry, among the first national censuses of a British bird. For many years he had watched a particular heronry at Dam Wood, a private mixed wood on the Scarisbrick Estate. Herons had nested there for at least a century, and seen great changes to the surrounding land – entirely, from their point of view, for the worse. In 1937, Lowe had constructed a hide on a platform at the top of a beech tree seventy-feet high, a task not eased by the local sparrows who made a habit of stealing the tie-strings for nesting material. During that spring and summer, he spent 100 hours there between February and July, at all hours of day and night. In 1948, he rebuilt the hide, this time spending 300 hours there. When he came to write The Heron (and the 1948 vigil seems to have been done for that purpose), Lowe was to include fascinating material from history and folklore, as well as a detailed survey of the heron in Britain and Ireland, but it was the herons of Dam Wood that were at the core of the book. Among its most memorable passages is the all-too-brief account of the rarely witnessed tree-top world, of the tree sparrows tucking their jute-fibre nests into the masonry of the heronry itself, of the loud snapping of the beech buds as they burst open in the May sunshine and the adventures of the young herons, now ‘engaged in vigorous exercises or preening’, now ‘uttering low growling notes, quite unlike any sound produced by their parents’ and the occasional crash as some over-venturesome fledgling fell off its branch and through the canopy.

The Reverend Edward A. Armstrong’s book on The Wren was based on a site at the opposite end of the country, a tiny wood in the western suburbs of Cambridge. Armstrong had moved there in late 1943 from the smoky streets of Leeds ‘where there had been few opportunities to watch birds’. He was to be based at Cambridge for the rest of his life. In the opening lines of The Wren, Armstrong described how:

‘Darkness was falling on a November evening in 1943 and the bombers were roaring off into the gloom when, happening to look out of my study window, I saw a small bird alight on the trellis outside and then fly up into the ivy on the wall. A couple of evenings later the wren was there again. Evidently he came regularly to these sleeping quarters. My interest was again captured by a bird which had fascinated me as a boy. Here was a species about which I should like to know more.’

The Wren. Ch. 1 Studying the Wren

An ideal study area, a private 4-acre wood with a shallow, reedy pond, excavated in the previous century by skating enthusiasts, lay less than a mile from his home. The wood was maintained as a nature sanctuary and it was in these ‘ordinary’ but undisturbed surroundings that Armstrong decided ‘to concentrate on studying the “life and conversation”, as Gilbert White would have put it, of a single species’.

While the wren study was partly the product of wartime restrictions, that of the redstart was the war itself. The 28-year-old John Buxton had joined the Commandos soon after the outbreak of war and having taken part in the ill-fated Norwegian campaign in 1940, had had the ill-luck to be captured. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Germany. And so it came about that,

‘In the summer of 1940, lying in the sun near a Bavarian river, I saw a family of redstarts, unconcerned in the affairs of our skeletal multitude, going about their ways in cherry and chestnut trees. I made no notes then (for I had no paper), but when the next spring came, and with it, on a day of snow, the first returning redstarts, I determined that these birds should be my study for most of the hours I might spend out of doors.’

The Redstart. Ch. 1 Introduction

In some ways, prisoner-of-war camps offer rather good opportunities for birdwatching. It is hard to imagine any other circumstances in which so many intelligent, active people would have so much spare time on their hands, nor so much incentive to find a distracting pastime. Buxton’s best prison camp was at Eichstätt in Bavaria, at ‘an old German barracks in the [well-wooded] valley of the River Altmühl’, not far from the limestone quarry where the remains of the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, had been discovered. It was in the springtime of 1943 that Buxton, with the help of fellow prisoners, ‘was able to gather together a mass of notes on one pair of redstarts, covering eight hundred and fifty hours’. That represented the equivalent of a 65-hour working week continued for three months, an incredible feat. Possibly nothing like it had ever been done before; and certainly the Eichstätt redstarts were the best-studied pair of redstarts that had ever lived. This particular camp became a kind of university of field natural history. Besides John Buxton, there was Peter Conder, who studied crested larks and goldfinches, George Waterston (wrynecks), Richard Purchon (swallows) and John Barrett (chaffinches). So popular did birdwatching (and butterfly watching) become that Buxton used to produce a weekly report for the canteen notice board. He even managed to get in touch with a famous German ornithologist, Erwin Stresemann, who sent him materials allowing the Eichstätt birders to catch and ring birds in the camp. John Buxton had studied redstarts in England and Norway before the war, and was to do so after his release in 1945, but it was the mass of notes obtained on that single pair in spring 1943 that formed the factual basis for The Redstart, published in 1950.

In terms of single-mindedness, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson, the author of The Greenshank (1951) must surely be in a class of his own. Thompson devoted his entire life to bird study; everything else (apart from politics) was subordinated to it. His early career in teaching (history and the classics) served only one purpose: to fund his weekend egg-collecting forays in the spring and early summer. These raids, which took him to many of the wilder corners of England and made him unpopular in preservationist circles, did at least make Thompson a master of the art of finding nests, a respectable and necessary skill for any field ornithologist. Though he eventually gave up egg-collecting, he maintained to the end of his days that to study breeding birds you needed to have ‘a predatory hunger for the nest’. Thompson was a purist; he cut no corners and he probably spent more hours watching birds than any ornithologist alive. He threw himself into writing, as into egg-collecting, fieldcraft and local politics, with great energy – no naturalist rivals him for staccato excitement, reflected in his unique style which must set some sort of record for exclamation marks: ‘What a glorious challenge the Spey Valley offers! Look up! Stand and watch. Did you ever see more lovely birds? Don’t go away. Listen! Watch the crossbills courting. You will love every moment!’

The Greenshank, the first of Thompson’s keenly collected monographs on Highland birds, is relatively quiet in tone but it still reads with a freshness and vitality that the cloak of scholarship cannot conceal for long. The book was begun, in Thompson’s mind at least, as early as 1932 with his first visit to the Scottish Highlands at the age of 24. By his own account, he had gone there to watch some of the hill birds, presumably steal their eggs, and then write up his adventures for the Oologists Record. It was that most beautiful of all the waders, the greenshank, that made him decide to go native. That epiphany is best read in Thompson’s own words:

‘In 1932 I had saved enough from my miserly salary as a schoolmaster to go north. It was a grand investment! In the Spey Valley I found my first crested tit’s nest and stayed with an ancient gamekeeper who had been guide to Harvie-Brown, F.C. Selous and John Millais. After my first night in his cottage I killed thirty-nine fleas! Then I trained it to Sutherland where James McNicol, an outstanding naturalist-keeper, showed me my first greenshank’s nest. After hunting greenshanks on the flows of Strath Helmsdale I knew that I had lost the first round..... I have never learnt so much as in those crowded weeks. In 1933 I was back north. I watched greenshanks in Rothiemurchus and dotterels in the Cairngorms. I was now completely hooked! The Highlands were the only place for me. In 1934 I was back for good. Perhaps I was the original Counterdrifter.’

Highland Birds. (1971)

The turning point had been the late spring of 1933 when Thompson met his first wife and fellow enthusiast, Carrie:

‘It was a summer of great heat. The air in the valley was close and stifling, yet wind and mist sometimes made work on the high ground impossible. There were days, therefore, which we spent in hunting greenshanks in the vast forest clearings that lay in the shadow of the hills: greenshanks exchanging duties at the nest, greenshanks flighting nestwards after feeding, greenshanks singing passionately under a hot June sky. This was a good introduction to the unwritten story that I now contemplated’.

The Greenshank. Ch. 1 Early Beginnings

Desmond and Carrie moved into a bothy in Rothiemurchus, which was soon ‘full of rusty filing cabinets’. In 1940, he had obtained a Leverhulme research fellowship with the backing of Julian Huxley, and with it was able to devote long hours to watching nesting greenshanks. That the story took so long to put down on paper was probably due to Thompson’s other obsession, socialist local politics. This is of no interest to us, but it embroiled him in the immediate post-war years and reduced even his ornithology to the level of a mere hobby. Thompson had put off the task for several years while he fought landowners and Tories on the Inverness County Council. Fortunately, his memory of the days in wet heather watching Old Glory, Castle, Myrtle and the other Speyside greenshanks was still fresh. The Greenshank was his first book. Derek Ratcliffe, a close friend of ‘Tommy’, believes he never wrote a better. It is one of the best reads of the series, and by the end of it his greenshanks seem as individual as neighbours.

Greenshanks are among the most difficult of British birds to study. Their haunts are remote, and the well-camouflaged nest is one of the blue ribands of nest-finding. That was doubtless part of the attraction. Few resident birds offer more of a challenge, but the hawfinch is probably one of them. Nesting greenshanks can become tolerant of human intruders, but to watch hawfinches you need to melt into the woodland background and spend a lot of time in hides. To Guy Mountfort, who had recently co-authored one of the best-selling bird books in the English language, the Collins Field Guide to Birds of Britain & Europe, it was the extraordinary elusiveness of this bulky, colourful, and in terms of numbers, not uncommon finch that was the attraction: a bird that would stretch its watcher’s fieldcraft to the limit. As Mountfort noted in his foreword to The Hawfinch, ‘When one of Britain’s leading ornithologists cheerfully confessed to me that he had “never laid eyes on a live Hawfinch” I gained the first measurement of my presumption in deciding to write a book devoted exclusively to this species.’ In doing so he rarely found Nethersole-Thompson’s opportunities to spend long hours observing particular individuals. Mountfort had had an exceptionally busy and peripatetic war as a member of the British army staff in Washington. His birdwatching time was almost equally constrained in post-war years by his directorship of a large firm of advertising agents. The hawfinch hopped in and out of his life, as in ‘my first sight of the Atlas Hawfinch in Algeria and of Hawfinches feeding nonchalantly in the shell-wracked Reichswald’. It was to find out more about the hawfinch’s most remarkable feature, its massive beak, that Mountfort turned to R.W. Sims at the Natural History Museum. By constructing a model of a hawfinch skull, they measured the force it could exert on cherry stones and on fresh olives flown in specially from Palestine. The experiment suggested that to crack open an olive stone, a hawfinch applies a pressure of a thousand times its own weight: at the scale of an average male human being that would represent a force of some 60 tons!

The Hawfinch is well and elegantly written. And although it draws on all the available literature, it contains, like the other monographs, some beautifully described first-hand experiences. I cannot resist quoting at least one of them, which is Mountfort at his best:

‘The Hawfinch is devoted to sunbathing and will bask for long periods whenever the opportunity permits, either in the tree-tops or on the ground. It sits motionless, fluffed out like a ball, with its head sunk low between the shoulders and the flank feathers all but obscuring the wings. Sometimes the long neck is extended, feathers on end, looking like a bottle-brush. The tail, at such moments, is tightly compressed and looks ridiculously short and narrow. One bird I watched chose a sunny nook at the base of an old gnarled Beech tree and stretched out on the dry moss, lying on its side, with neck and one leg extended and eyes half closed, in positively voluptuous abandon to the sun’s rays. When a distant Greenfinch sounded a mild alarm note, the Hawfinch shot up on its feet, with its neck raised to maximum extent, listened intently for a moment and then slowly sank down again and rolled over, blinking blissfully, as a cat will blink as it settles for a nap in front of a hot fire. It did not stir a muscle again for fully ten minutes. Such incidents become treasured memories.’

The Hawfinch. Ch. 3 The Winter Flock

The last bird book written in the same spirit is The House Sparrow (1963) by Denis Summers-Smith. He wrote the book in 1959-60, a decade later than most of the preceding books, and in some ways it shows. Although the author could incorporate more than a decade of personal fieldwork, there was by now also a substantial world literature to draw on. The House Sparrow is therefore a more rounded monograph than some of the others, a thorough-going review of the sparrow over nineteen chapters and 270 pages. Summers-Smith was drawn to the sparrow because of its astounding success in following human settlement over most of the globe, and adapting itself to twentieth-century human-lifestyles while still remaining true to itself as a wild bird. He began to study the bird seriously in the late 1940s, while living in Highclere. In 1953, he moved to Stockton-on-Tees to become a development engineer for ICI, whereupon his study area on the house sparrow changed from the fields and gardens of rural Hampshire to the streets of an industrial town. After a decade of intensive work censusing and ringing sparrows, inspecting nest boxes and observing captive birds in an aviary, all in his spare time, he gave up intensive sparrow watching at the close of the 1958 season and began to write the book: ‘I am convinced that the attitude of the birds towards me has changed since then – now I am accepted as a normal piece of the landscape and no longer the detested pryer into their private lives, to be viewed with the utmost suspicion.’

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Guy Mountfort, author of The Hawfinch. (Photo: Eric Hosking)

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Denis Summers-Smith, author of The House Sparrow. Cartoon by Euan Dunn published in British Birds, 1994.

James Fisher, who had first approached Summers-Smith about a sparrow book four years earlier, was most impressed with the manuscript, finding it both readable and scholarly. The main problem was its ‘rather awkward’ length: even without the full bibliography – like many of its predecessors, that had to be sacrificed to the interests of commerce – it was an uncomfortably large volume. There was a delay of more than two years before publication, during which Collins approached a succession of American publishers to consider publishing the book under a New World title, The English Sparrow. ‘Although I cannot believe that Collins have lost interest in my monograph,’ wrote Summers-Smith despairingly, in December 1962, ‘the silence from your end almost makes me give up hope.’ The editors reply is not filed, but only a month later The House Sparrow was at last in the shops. While no more successful than its peers, it sold well enough to justify a modest reprinting in 1967 and 1976. The latter represented the last printing of any New Naturalist monograph; possibly it was a response to a letter from Tony Soper telling the publishers that second-hand House Sparrows were changing hands at £20: ‘Too much for honest labourers like me. How about a reprint?’

The House Sparrow was the first book ever devoted to this most familiar of birds, and its conclusion, that house sparrows are not only more adaptable but more intelligent than other birds, was as startling as it was convincing. That there was still a great deal of mileage in sparrow study was proved by Summers-Smith in two later books, which broadened the field to encompass sparrows worldwide. In the best tradition of British natural history, a study that began in his garden in Highclere has taken him all over the world in search of sparrows and became his life’s work: Denis Summers-Smith is undoubtedly the world authority on the genus Passer, an astounding achievement for someone who had only weekends and holidays for fieldwork, and the evening for writing. The House Sparrow was a worthy successor to a series of bird monographs that succeeded in setting new standards of natural history publishing.

The scientists take over

Most of the earlier monographs were written by amateur naturalists, if there can be any meaning in the phrase at a time when nearly all naturalists had to earn their living in some other way. From The Herring Gull’s World onwards, the ‘professional scientists’ started to take over, that is those people for whom bird or animal study was a more or less full-time occupation. This reflected the growing number of trained scientists in the 1950s, employed by the newly formed Nature Conservancy, by the Agriculture Ministry departments and by the Universities (especially Oxford). Inevitably, these monographs were written in a different way to their forerunners, more ‘scientific’ in tone, with more data and tables, more rigorous analysis of the results, and sometimes a greater distance between author and subject. Another difference is that they dealt in the main with common and economically significant species: gulls, wood pigeons, rabbits and trout, not green-shanks, hawfinches and yellow wagtails. As James Fisher put it in his foreword to The Wood Pigeon, ‘Until the present generation of highly trained and dedicated ecologists entered the field it has been almost unfashionable to investigate the very familiar…we suggest that there is, or until recently was, a rule that the rare and the middle-rare, the inaccessible and with-difficulty accessible, have been the great naturalist’s targets. Not the common, though.’

As often happens in this series, the exceptions threaten to outnumber the rule. Lords and Ladies (1960), the only monograph about a plant (or, rather, two plants, for the author covered both native species of arum lily), was written by an ‘amateur’. Prime was the senior biology master (later senior science master) at Whitgift School, Croydon, and, like Neal, had written a dissertation on his chosen subject for an external PhD degree. For Lords and Ladies, Prime did not need to resort to purple prose, for the facts were bizarre enough, and sometimes bawdy, too. A plant that was credited with all manner of magical properties, was the source of starch for stiffening Elizabethan ruffs and, though poisonous, was eaten ‘to provoke Venerie’, provides a merry tale in skilful hands, especially when it also has upwards of sixty folk names, most of them highly allusive. The arum lily was a good choice for a plant monograph and the book has rightly become a botanical classic. But classics do not necessarily sell well, or at least not right away. Lords and Ladies was published in July 1960, as the author lay ill. ‘I think you have done a very nice job,’ he wrote to the publishers from his hospital bed. ‘I hope somebody buys it.’ A few people did. Years later, Prime received a letter from a retired American professor telling him that ‘this is by far the most interesting, well written book I have ever read’. But it had taken him five months to track down a copy. The sales offered no inducement for Collins to publish further monographs on wild flowers. This was a great pity. Prime himself wanted to write another one on thistles, and a book about British primulas had also been considered by the editors, but there seemed no way in which such books could be published economically. Part of the trouble might have been indifferent marketing. Lords and Ladies was reprinted by Botanical Society of the British Isles Publications in 1981 as a memorial to Cecil Prime, and it seems to have sold readily enough by advertising in the botanical society literature.

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Niko Tinbergen (1907-1988), author of The Herring Gull’s World, at Ravenglass, Cumbria. (Photo: Dr Larry Shaffer)

The Herring Gull’s World (1953) is another book that has always stood out from the crowd. It is probably the best known of the monographs despite not really being a monograph at all. Niko Tinbergen will need no introduction for readers of this book. The great Dutch ethologist, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology in 1973 (jointly with his friend Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the discoverer of bee ‘Ianguage’), had begun to study herring gulls in the 1930s. Since there was a breeding colony on the dunes within cycling distance, Tinbergen, then an instructor at Leiden University, included gull watching within his practical course on animal behaviour. The war brought an end to all that, but with his removal to Oxford in 1949, Tinbergen continued to study gull ‘language’ and social behaviour, both in the wild and in captivity. He wrote The Herring Gull’s World at the invitation of Julian Huxley soon after his arrival in Oxford, and in perfect but ever-so-slightly stilted English which forced him to express himself simply. Having read the manuscript, Huxley and Fisher realised that this was no ordinary bird book and were keen to include it in the New Naturalist series. The trouble, from the publishers’ point of view, was that The Herring Gull’s World did not fit in well with the other books and seemed a better candidate for the university press. It did not pretend to be a complete biology of the herring gull, and in those days animal behaviour was regarded as a specialised and rather arcane field. On the other hand, it was not a book that would date quickly, as Tinbergen himself pointed out in 1969, when invited to revise the text: ‘The actual facts are not what sells the book; it is the type of approach to an animal that it illustrates, and as such it will not soon be out of date…The real market is only just opening up; the book was a little ahead of its time when you decided to publish it in 1953.’ The ‘sales people’ at Collins wanted to publish Herring Gull outside the series in a plain wrapper but Huxley eventually had his way. Publication was delayed by several months in order not to clash with another behavioural book by Tinbergen, which also contained a great deal about herring gulls.

The Herring Gull’s World appeared to the kind of reviews that are reserved for books that are new and exciting, and touch the imagination. Writing in the Manchester Guardian, Arnold Boyd thought that ‘for many it will present an entirely new view of bird life’. It was, perhaps, the most intimate portrait of a bird’s life (as opposed to its biology) ever presented, of a social system that seemed ‘efficient but unadaptable’, and even provided an insight into the herring gull’s ‘mind’. A lengthy review in Ibis found that it ‘recreates the atmosphere of the gullery with extraordinary vividness and charm, but without sentimentality’. Though Tinbergen was careful to avoid drawing comparisons with human behaviour, such a portrait inevitably holds up a mirror to ourselves. Richard Fitter recommended the book to ‘politicians and their voters’.

The Herring Gull’s World was not an immediate best seller. Its day came later on in the 1960s and 1970s when it became a popular standard work on animal behaviour, was published in America and translated into German, Swedish and Japanese. It is surprising that Collins did not include the book in the Fontana paperback series, since it was on the university reading lists for psychology, as well as zoology, courses. The sales, while never spectacular, exceeded all the other monographs except The Badger, and the book remained in print for nearly 30 years.

Lords and Ladies and The Herring Gull’s World were books of rather specialist appeal. So too were most of the remaining monograph titles. Collins hoped that The Salmon and The Trout would find a large market among fly fishermen, while The Rabbit, The Wood Pigeon, The Mole and Squirrels were of potential interest to agricultural colleges and the more educated type of farmer. As for Oysters, the publishers must have hoped that others would agree with the Rev Charles Williams that ‘an oyster, only regarded as a thing to be eaten, and having but a low place in the ascending series of animals, not only demands, but will richly reward, an enlightened examination’.

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Jacket of The Trout (1967).

The fish books did do relatively well. Some 9,150 hardback copies of The Salmon and 8,300 copies of The Trout were sold. In addition there was as an American edition of The Salmon and a paperback one of The Trout. Both were in planning many years before they were published. In about 1952, Eric Hosking had seen a remarkable film produced by J.W. Jones, a lecturer in zoology at Liverpool University, of salmon spawning in a tank. Jones was invited by the board to write a book on the strength of it, a task he accepted ‘with considerable trepidation’ since the world literature on the ‘King of Fish’ was already vast. Watching Jones’ film of finger-length salmon parr dashing beneath the hen salmon to fertilise her eggs as they were extruded from the vast silvery hull, James Fisher thought of Gulliver in the land of the giants, as if the tiny hero ‘had managed to consummate a union with a Brobdingnagian lady in bed with her giant lord’. Unfortunately that is probably the liveliest passage in the whole of The Salmon, whose text bears the signs of over-editing. Perhaps it was unfortunate that the author was not himself an angler, and, indeed, seemed to dislike angling. The last chapter on the problems caused by over-fishing and pollution is the best, but I found it a dull book.

The Trout (1967), the work of two authors, is better, if a good deal longer. It holds the record in terms of slowness of production, having taken 21 years from conception to publication. The senior author, Winifred Frost, studied trout and their food in Ireland in the 1930s under the great Rowland Southern, who taught her fly-fishing, and later in the Lake District as a senior biologist with the Freshwater Biological Association. Peggy Brown became involved with trout later, as a contribution to the war effort, and was therefore more concerned at first with their production for food than with the wild fish. After the war, she was introduced by Frost to the delights of wild trout in their natural world of shimmering lights, ‘a room with a ceiling made of mirrors except for a round sky light in the middle, through which the outside world is visible’. There is a lot about weights and measures in The Trout, and some tricky stuff about growth and ageing, but the book has the authentic whiff of clean river water and the fishy world within. Most of it was written at intervals in the late 1950s, and its delayed publication was not entirely the authors’ fault. James Fisher had sat on the draft for a year, and Frost and Brown insisted on restoring material that Fisher had altered or removed in an attempt to improve its readability.

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Winifred Frost (1902-1979), co-author of The Trout, in her office at Ambleside. (Photo: Freshwater Biological Association)

The third ‘fishy’ title, Oysters (1960), was, like Yonge’s The Sea Shore, a model of good science writing and enjoyable even by those, like myself, who have suffered from eating oysters. Early in his career, Maurice Yonge had worked on the feeding mechanisms and digestion of oysters during his years at the Plymouth Laboratory, and he had a wide knowledge of oyster culture. Billy Collins made a brave attempt to launch the book in style by holding an oysters and Chablis party at his Hatchard’s bookshop in Piccadilly, and decorating the window display with oyster shells. Reviewers praised Yonge’s clear, graceful writing, and scientists appreciated it as the only book about oysters in any language. Even so, it was an unlikely subject for commercial success and sold only slowly. Collins reprinted it ‘not so much to meet demand but because it is such a good book we would not like to see it go out of print’.

The remaining four monographs are written, to varying degrees, from the perspective of economic damage and pest control. This is least true of Squirrels, for whom it is clear that the author’s heart was engaged as well as her head. Monica Shorten was a young Oxford graduate when, in 1943, Charles Elton asked her to do ‘a little bit of checking on the distribution of the grey squirrel’. The little bit of checking turned into a research study lasting ten years, years in which the grey squirrel expanded its range at the expense of the much-loved red squirrel. Monica Shorten also studied the biology and breeding activity of wild and captive squirrels, and managed to nail the widespread but unwarranted belief that the greys were winning the war with the reds by killing them off or by interbreeding with them. Squirrels is a pert and sometimes drily humorous book: Monica was the only monograph author to include recipes on how to cook and eat her subject! Her work on squirrels for the Oxford Bureau of Animal Populations and later the ‘Min of Ag & Fish’ included making a film and appearances on television and on the lecture circuit, both at home and in the United States (where she co-authored another grey squirrel book in 1973). Were it not for family commitments and the weakening effects of a diabetic illness, we would have heard more of Monica Shorten. ‘I’m going to study stoats and weasels now, on the quiet,’ she wrote to Raleigh Trevelyan, shortly after the publication of Squirrels. Trevelyan pencilled a note on the letter: ‘J.F. [James Fisher]. Special Vol. on Stoats & Weasels?’

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Monica Shorten (1923-1993), author of Squirrels, with a flying squirrel ‘Mischa’, 1956. (Photo: A.F. Vizoso)

The Rabbit is harder to like, partly because the authors Harry Thompson and Alastair Worden did not seem to like the rabbit much. Thompson was in charge of mammal and bird pest research at the Ministry of Agriculture. His most recent scientific papers had titles like An Experiment to compare the efficiency of Gin Trapping, Ferreting and Cyanide Gassing (1952), Rabbit Repellents for Fruit Trees (1953) and Power Gassing of Rabbits (1954). Worden was a veterinary consultant, specialising in animal health and nutrition. As the editors put it, they were ‘entirely qualified to give a complete, calm scientific assessment’, and that is what they did. Most of the research on the rabbit, carried out first by the Animal Population Bureau and later by the Ministry, had been directed at controlling rabbit numbers. The book is therefore primarily a study of the rabbit as a major crop pest, not as cuddly bunnies, an emphasis perfectly expressed by the Ellis’ haunting dust jacket (see Plate 3). The original title was to have been ‘Rabbits and the Rabbit Problem’. But, though it was being written while myxomatosis was in the news, publication was laggardly and so The Rabbit missed the bus. By this stage in the series, no one could have been very surprised when it proved to be yet another slow seller. Readers of the series might have responded more warmly to a book like Ronald Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit which was to inspire Watership Down and bring rabbit biology to the attention of millions.

Although the wood pigeon is almost as injurious as the rabbit, Ron Murton’s book, published in 1965, treated its subject more sympathetically. More than most New Naturalist monographs, The Wood Pigeon is a review of the literature, but Murton had himself worked on wood pigeon biology for a decade and he was one of the most gifted animal ecologists of his generation. His work for the Agriculture Ministry had been of considerable practical value, since Murton was able to prove against internal resistance that the Ministry’s war against the wood pigeon, including a vast subsidy for shotgun cartridges, had largely been a waste of money. In place of the expensive shooting campaign, Ron Murton’s team recommended better crop protection and the development of stupefying baits. The Wood Pigeon became a standard work on pigeon biology. Despite being written quickly it reads quite well, though, being a ‘serious’ book, it lacks some of the liveliness that I, for one, can remember from Murton’s lectures. Murton was a gifted performer as well as speaker, and in these lectures he would in effect become a pigeon, bobbing and plucking at clover heads, and peering about, and explaining what it all meant as he bobbed along the stage. His early death in 1978 was a great loss to scientific ornithology, and to the BBC.

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Jacket of The Wood Pigeon (1965).

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R.K. Murton (1932-1978), author of The Wood Pigeon and Man and Birds. (Photo: Nigel Westwood)

At last at Number 22, we reach The Mole, published in 1971, during the modest revival in the series generated by the Open University. To some extent, The Mole represents a return to the natural history approach of the earlier monographs. Kenneth Mellanby studied moles as a hobby during any time he could spare from directing research at the Monks Wood field station. But his hobby was informed by an ecological and agricultural background. His original purpose, to see whether moles were a good indicator of soil fertility, soon broadened into studying moles for their own sake. The mole was not exactly an unknown animal, but nearly all research had been done on farmland. Mellanby was the first to study moles in a near-natural habitat – the nearby nature reserve of Monks Wood. He soon found out that (in his characteristic words) ‘every statement that is commonly made about moles is wrong’. They ate less and tunnelled less than was thought, and they were more at home inside woods than in open fields. The Mole is no more sentimental a portrait than The Rabbit, but Mellanby’s style is much pithier and full of infectious idiosyncrasy. He told a journalist that he normally kept a couple of moles about the place at his home, Hill Farm, which colleagues referred to as ‘Mole Hill Farm’. That it was one of the more successful monographs was perhaps due to Kenneth Mellanby’s scientific fame. It went on sale in America and there was a large book club edition at home. In 1976, Mellanby brought out a children’s story Talpa the Mole, which was considerably more accurate biologically than The Wind in the Willows, but which, like it, seemed to appeal to children of all ages.

Yet The Mole was destined to be the last of the monographs. There is nothing in the Board minutes that can be construed as a decision to end the series at that point. There were several more titles in the pipeline, and more than a few others had not completed the journey, either through the death or indisposition of the author, or because the author found himself too busy to write it, or because the book had been taken up by another publisher. Among the might-have-been monographs that surface in the record from time to time are The Partridge by Douglas Middleton, The Swift by David Lack, The Crested Grebe by Kenneth Simmons, and either the Greylag Goose or The Jackdaw by Konrad Lorenz. After completing The Fulmar and Sea-birds, James Fisher had planned to write The Rook and The Gannet (he wasn’t sure which one to start first), and might eventually have got round to them had he lived. The unluckiest title of all was The Fox. In the 1940s, Frances Pitt was commissioned to write the book; when she dropped out, James Fisher invited Ernest Neal to do so, evidently not quite understanding the logistics of mammal research: ‘He hadn’t a clue that it would mean another decade of field work before I could do it.’ Three authors later, Thompson and Worden, The Rabbit authors, proposed themselves. ‘Make the book as lively as possible,’ advised Fisher, thinking of their previous book, but in the event they too found themselves too busy to get on with it. In 1968, The Fox was offered to H.G. Lloyd, and for a while it seemed to be progressing well enough for the Ellises to design ‘an excellent jacket’. But it was not to be. The first draft was far too long, and when Lloyd withdrew, the editors agreed that The Fox had finally outstripped the hounds and gone to earth.

So had the monograph series. In truth it had been ailing long before 1971, and during the previous decade the flood of titles had diminished to a trickle, as had the publisher’s enthusiasm. By the early 1970s, both publishers and editors had concluded that single-species titles had had their day. They decided instead to include books about related groups of species within the main series. At least one new title, British Seals, had been intended for the monograph series, and about a third of the titles published after 1971 were in effect super-monographs. The first was Finches (1973), followed by British Seals, Ants and British Birds of Prey, and in the 1980s by titles on tits, thrushes, waders and warblers. This led to charges of overspecialisation, which, when one compares the 1970s and 1980s with the early years of the series, would seem justified. But that is another story. The true, small format monographs were (mainly) critical successes but (mostly) commercial failures. The series lost its greatest advocate when James Fisher ed in a car accident in 1970. Had he lived, there might have been a few more titles to come, but the commercial facts of life were against their long-term survival. On the whole, and despite a couple of duds, they brought the series nothing but credit. They spanned the period when old-style natural history became the modern science of ecology, and one can trace this progression in the series. The best titles have not dated all that much, or at least not in ways that matter. That must be why we go on reading them and why they inspire us still.

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Leslie Brown (1917-1980), author of British Birds of Prey.

Postscript

The account of Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, reprinted below in full by kind permission of the Hon Miriam Rothschild FRS and the publishers of The Author, was first published in spring 1994.

MY FIRST BOOK by Miriam Rothschild

The Scientific Advisory Committee of Collins’ New Naturalistic Series invited me to write a volume for them about parasites. At the time I was expecting my second child, and I decided it was the right moment to settle down and attempt to produce a popular book on this superficially unalluring subject. Would a worm living under the eyelid of a hippopotamus and feeding upon its tears have a popular appeal? Or the fluke which passed from freedom in pond water to the liver of snails, to the body cavity of a shrimp, to the gut of dragonfly larva, finally to end its peregrinations and live happily ever after under the tongue of a frog? Or fleas with the most complicated penis in the animal kingdom? Billy Collins appeared enthusiastic and advertised my book, and I was so ‘green’ I never bothered to ask for a contract.

This was in 1947, the year of the Fontainebleau conference at which we founded the International Union for the Protection of Nature. After the proceedings closed, I decided to return home by boat from Calais.

Calais had been flattened by aerial bombings in the war; first by the German Luftwaffe and subsequently by the British Airforce. Rebuilding had not yet commenced. As we puffed across France a gigantic storm blew up and swept the channel and the coast. On arrival at the port I found that all crossings had been cancelled.

It is impossible to imagine a more desolate and chilling scene than that of the ruined town of Calais. The ships, crowded at anchor near the quay, hid the sea and bay from view – like the backcloth of some stage scenery. Piles of shattered concrete and bricks stretched away to the horizon. The gale was blowing slates about like so much waste paper, and strands of barbed wire were sent crawling across the cracked tarmac like nervous snakes. I suddenly realised that the surrealists had had second sight – for here was a Salvador Dali landscape complete with a pair of ragged trousers flung against a sagging wall, with a dead lobster decaying in the foreground.

One pock-marked public house stood alone and forlorn in the middle of the rubble. I was offered a room. Needless to say both hot water and electricity were lacking. I was told cooking was also impossible, but under the circumstances I could be served with a meal of boiled potatoes in my room. Curiously enough a battered telephone – so the surly publican explained – was ‘in order’. It took the rest of the day to get a call through to my home. My husband’s voice, like a crackling whisper from outer space, implored me not to attempt a crossing the day the boats resumed service, since thrown about by high seas, I would inevitably lose our unborn child. This sounded like good sense to me so I settled down to write the Introduction to Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos. The following day the storm showed no sign of abating; the windows rattled ominously and sand and powdered concrete stuttered against the panes. Fortunately, I needed to consult no reference books for the chapter on fleas, nor flukes, which I began on day three. Except for the casserole of boiled potatoes, pushed through the door by the gloomy publican, I had no contact with the outside world. On day four, I felt that the book wasn’t going too badly and I might even take a stroll. On stepping outside I realised instantly that this was a mistake, since there was still too much debris flying around, but I noticed smoke coming out of the funnel of one of the anchored tugs. Was the storm on the way out? I settled down hopefully to write the chapter on Symbiosis.

About four o’clock there was a clatter on the stairs, a loud banging on my door and the publican entered with a uniformed policeman. The policeman announced I must be vaccinated. Up to that moment I had accepted the situation philosophically, without a trace of anxiety and barely a tinge of irritation. Pregnancy gives one an irrational feeling of security and confidence. But now I suddenly became alarmed. I was filled with a sense of unreality, like a bad dream. I stared at the policeman. ‘Are you crazy?’ I asked. ‘I am an English woman delayed by the storm. I have nothing to do with the French medical service.’

‘It’s a special situation,’ explained the policeman politely, and with an air of great importance. ‘In Calais everyone, without exception, is being vaccinated. We have smallpox in the town.’

In 1947 it had not yet been realised that vaccination against smallpox administered in the early months of pregnancy is exceedingly dangerous for the foetus but, fortunately, I had a strong premonition that this was so. I was also afraid of dirty needles…and determined at all costs to resist vaccination. I explained that I had not left my room since my arrival and I would not leave it until the boats were sailing for England. ‘Look,’ I said the policeman, ‘you are world famous for your logic in France – not like we poor English. If the entire population in Calais is vaccinated, you will agree that I am completely safe in this room – especially if my host doesn’t stay here too long.....’ The policeman clattered away down the stairs. Altogether, I remained incarcerated for a week. The storm raged and I ate my boiled potatoes. But when I left I felt somehow – bemused by seventy hours of writing – that Fleas and Flukes wasn’t at all a bad book.

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Miriam Rothschild, co-author of Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, in 1929. (Hugh Cecil/Natural History Museum)

To my great consternation, while I was tidying up the index and writing captions for the illustrations, Billy Collins decided that the ‘bottom had fallen out of the book market’ and he would therefore be unable to publish Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, which anyhow he now considered an unpopular subject. All I had by way of a contract was his early advertisement of the volume. But the late Julian Huxley was so incensed by this decision and by the aspersion cast upon his assessment of ‘a good book’ that he threatened to resign (with the whole committee) from the New Naturalists Advisory Board. This helped. After outraged, protracted and acrimonious negotiations the book was eventually published in 1952! I was refused a picture on the jacket, common to the rest of the series; it was considered too costly. However, Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, without the pretty jacket I hankered after, ran into five editions and became compulsory reading for school biology students…It proved my only successful book.

One day Billy Collins rang me up: ‘I hear you are writing a new book. I would like to publish it.’

‘But Billy,’ I expostulated, ‘this is very flattering, but you don’t know the subject let alone the title.’

‘Well give me the title,’ said Billy.

‘Crooks, Cranks and Collins – it’s quite a lively book.’

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Table 8. The New Naturalist Special Volumes and Monographs