12
Ten Years On
Well, here we are again! The New Naturalist library is now sixty years old, and lies within a short distance of its ‘golden goal’ of 100 titles – twice as many as the founders of the famous series had once envisaged. To celebrate its 60th birthday, the publishers are reprinting The New Naturalists, and have commissioned a new chapter to bring the book up to date. Much has happened since 1995, most importantly no fewer than 14 published titles, and many more in the pipeline. In a different sense, nothing has changed. Though the founders of the series are no longer with us, the spirit in which they launched the series in spring 1945 is very much alive – to communicate ‘the results of modern scientific research’ in British natural history to the reader in ‘the inquiring spirit of the old naturalists’. The synthesis of new science and old curiosity was to prove a winner to the nature-starved audience of 1945. It is still a good idea today, for some good ideas are ageless. The books themselves are obviously no longer at the forefront of modern design technology – indeed, I suspect their old-fashioned look is deliberate. The New Naturalists may soon be given a face-lift, with full-colour printing. But the old face we have grown to love should still be recognisable.
I have taken the opportunity here to review all the new titles, and to add their esteemed authors to the gallery in Appendix 1. I have more to say on how the books are commissioned, written and published (from the standpoint of a bit more experience of the subject than I had in 1995!). In that context, I have also written a short account of a particular book, British Birds of Prey by Leslie Brown, which, though not a recent title, probably has the best-documented ‘biblio-history’ in the series. The 60th anniversary has also been a welcome opportunity to evaluate Robert Gillmor’s crucial contribution to the series in the form of those luscious, if light-sensitive, jackets for the hardbacks.
I begin with a prospectus of the current scene with the help of Myles Archibald, editor of the series since 1989.
The New Naturalists in 2005
Perhaps the first thing to mention is that ‘Collins’ is back! The old name first appeared on the title page of Seashore and now lodges beneath the oval on the dust-jacket of Northumberland and subsequent books for the first time since 1990. Collins, we learn, is now ‘a registered trademark’ within the publishing giant whose name I think we need not repeat, nor mention again. Vivat Collinsiana!
Fourteen new books have appeared since the first edition of this book was written. What are they about, and where do they take us in the series? As ever, the only order among the titles is the order in which they were written. The subjects are an interesting mix. Eight of the fourteen are new books on old titles, in some cases even sharing the same name: A Natural History of Pollination, Amphibians and Reptiles, The Broads, Moths, Nature Conservation, Lakeland, Fungi and Seashore. Of the rest, three deal with a particular region or country (Ireland, Loch Lomondside and Northumberland): two with ‘plants’ (Plant Disease, Lichens), and only one (British Bats) with animals. Putting them all together, five titles deal broadly with places, four with ‘plants’, three with animals, one with habitats and one with the human domain, if nature conservation can be so categorised. There is a remarkable serendipity in having three books on mycology (the study of fungi and lichens) all at once. There is also the coincidence of two books on ‘lakelands’, Lakeland and The Broads (and Ireland, too, is a country full of lakes). Does this amount to a change – a different emphasis, perhaps, or an altered course? Well, the comparable figures for the 14 titles preceding The New Naturalists (1995) are two on plants, six on animals, three on places and three on habitats. Zoology, then, has slipped a bit, and it may be significant that there are no recent titles specifically about birds (though the growing number of ‘place books’ are well-stocked with our feathered friends). The balance is better now, despite three books on fungi. There is little, if any, calculation behind the apparent change of emphasis. What creates a New Naturalist waiting list is only partly the desirability of a given subject; it is more a matter of being able to match subjects with authors willing and able to write for the series.
The pace of publication has quickened slightly. The ‘first fourteen’, from Mammals to Ladybirds, spanned 14 years. The second, from Pollination to Fungi, took only nine, and in three of those years there were no books at all. The average over the past six years of two books per year is therefore most encouraging. The series has not seen a sustained period of growth like this since the 1970s.
One significant difference between the early days of the series and now is that virtually all the recent authors are from a professional background in science or nature conservation (the exceptions, Eric Simms and Philip Chapman are from the natural-history media). There have been no more books by vicars (Armstrong), bankers (Lousley), schoolmasters (Blunt, Hepburn), classics dons (Raven), retired physicians (Smith) or even museum men (Ramsbottom, Summerhayes). The amateur naturalist seems to have dropped out. The new men are mainly from the universities, from National Park or nature-conservation bodies (Mitchell, Ratcliffe, Lunn), or from Botanic Gardens (Spooner, Roberts). Admittedly the line between the natural-history amateur and science professional was never very sharp; if one thing unites the authors of the series, it might be ‘professionalism in the spirit of the amateur’. But I suspect that most would agree there has been a rise in rigour. Most of the new titles are not easy reading. They are admirable for looking things up in, and are manageable enough in small doses, but how often are they read through for pleasure? Are they still significant as literature, as opposed to technical proficiency? And the poor reader is scarcely given a break by the printing, which in recent titles has been 52 lines per page – it used to be 39, and printed by black letterpress rather than grey filmset. There is, of course, a pressing reason for using a smaller font: authors are writing longer books.
Still, the series is in better shape today than for a long time. Thirty-five years ago, it seemed to have spluttered to a halt. Twenty-five years ago it came close to being wound up. Fifteen years ago, many believed it had run out of steam. Yet it has survived, and even recovered lost ground. Not only has production quickened but the hardback print run has doubled from 1,500 in 1995 to 3,000 today – and they still sell out within a couple of years. If any single individual can take the credit for this modest increase, it is Myles Archibald, editor of the series since 1989. He works on the first-floor wing of the Collins office on Fulham Palace Road, which opened in 1992. His office is lined with natural history and reference books published by the company, including the famous field guides and pocket ‘Gem’ guides. Prominent among them is a long shelf of New Naturalists in their gleaming Gillmor jackets. They face his desk, and he is obviously proud of them. Myles believes the future is reasonably bright. His aim, over the past fourteen years, has been to ‘rebuild the reputation of the series’. “We’re now, I think, producing the right books on the right subjects. The series is being managed properly, with a better understanding between us and the Editorial Board. And we’ve developed a very broad range of contacts, which helps us find the right authors.” However, it seems harder than ever to find sufficiently knowledgeable people who also write well. As science becomes ever technical and intellectually demanding, the need for first-rate communicators and popularises is greater than ever. There are such people, of course, but they are not necessarily excited by the prospect of a microscopic advance for a New Naturalist. To write for this series today, you really have got to want to.
The ways in which books are sold is changing rapidly. Time was when the New Naturalist reader or collector bought his books in a shop, after a leisurely browse and a natter. Unfortunately the economic facts of life do not currently favour the stocking of serious books on natural history, apart from field guides and TV spinoffs. The profit margins of the High Street chains are too wide to stock low-selling titles, and ordering is done with an eye on quick sales. Our traditional standby, the independent bookshop, is usually short of space, and there, too, the bookseller is forced to pick and choose carefully. You are more likely to find New Naturalists in a secondhand bookshop, or, for those unluckily remaindered paperbacks, a seconds shop. Only in university and specialist bookshops are they still displayed prominently. Fortunately, says Myles, “the target audience of the New Naturalists is fantastically good at finding them outside retailers”. Many books, particularly the hardbacks, are sold by direct mailing, using the order form on the flier that normally arrives when publication is imminent. The Collins New Naturalist mailing list has over 2,000 names. Inserts in magazines like BBC Wildlife generate more custom. Unfortunately, the company sometimes forgets to issue a flier, the packaging is, in my experience, by no means knock-proof, and the reader has to pay the full price. An increasing number of collectors are turning to online services like Amazon, who somehow manage to knock off up to a third of the recommended retail price. In fact, selling the New Naturalist hardbacks to its core audience is relatively easy. It is reaching a wider readership that has proven much more difficult. Sales of the paperbacks have been consistently disappointing. It was hoped that they would find a lively market on university field courses, as the Fontana paperbacks did so successfully in the 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps they are too expensive; perhaps their failure is due to the decline in field-taught natural science and the rise of molecular biology and applied science. Perhaps such books need energetic promotion in today’s market. As it is, the fate of all too many New Naturalist paperbacks has been remaindering after two years or so.
What about the recent price-hike to £40? Myles denies that its purpose is to subsidise the paperback price. It was necessary to raise the price to cover production costs: the quality buckram-cloth bindings, the large number of illustrations, the dishy jackets. He thinks it is still good value. He points out that the price has gone up roughly in line with inflation: twenty years ago, when postage stamps cost about 12p, and a pint of beer was just over a pound, the books cost just under £20. The price went up to £30 in 1988, and £35 in 1996. In 1945, the books cost 16 shillings (which was considered expensive), when postage stamps cost a pennyhalfpenny, and beer a shilling. He has a point. Whether he is right in assuming New Naturalist readers are entirely happy about paying £40 for the books I do not know. But the knowledge that the book will soon be worth twice whatever you are paying for it must be some compensation.
The good news, as they say, is that the series is on the brink of the greatest advance since 1945. The New Naturalists are to be printed in full colour! This has been a dream, for many of us, for a long time. Some of the recent titles, such as Pollination and Lichens would have looked lovely in sharp, accurate colour. The increasingly old-fashioned segregation of colour to a few central plates has long been a weak point, especially when the designers insist on arranging pictures on broad acres of white, like a stamp album (an arrangement in which the authors have little or no say, and can only gnash their teeth). Moreover, most half-tones today are made from colour transparencies, and the results are all too often disappointing (did I, on observing what the printers had done to Nature Conservation, did I in my helpless anguish rend my garment? Did I cast my cloak over my face? I can’t remember, but I’m sure it was one or the other). Full colour printing would require printing the books overseas, probably in the Far East. At the Editorial Board meeting in April 2003, Myles suggested ‘it would be quite a statement’ to produce the 100th volume in full colour and set the style for the future. It is possible, however, that all-colour printing may be even closer; in spring 2004 it was being considered for the very next volume, Northumberland.
What has sustained the series all this while? I had always assumed that prestige, the glory it had brought to the House of Collins, was the fuel that fed the engine. I was therefore a little taken aback by Myles’ reply. Certainly, while Billy Collins was alive, this might have been so. The company was a family business, and he could do as he liked. After his death in 1977, Collins Ltd. entered a period of financial crisis. “We had to make ‘economic decisions’,” said Myles. The New Naturalists were no longer selling well. Crispin Fisher, with all the loyalty to his father’s legacy that his appointment as natural history editor implied, did his best to rescue the series. Though most of his ideas for promoting it were unsuccessful, he helped it to turn an awkward corner. Very slowly, the series picked up again, helped by cheaper printing costs and the swallowing up of Collins within the vast Murdoch publishing empire. Within that empire, a series like the New Naturalists is a valued but very minor entity. It keeps going because Myles, as associate publisher, wants to keep it going. And it’s as simple as that. So long as the series isn’t losing company money, there is no pressure to stop. He has even been able to resist ‘internationalising’ the series (an old chestnut) in pursuit of foreign sales: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s about British natural history, and always will be” (British in a natural-history context, means of course the British Isles, and includes Ireland).
Even after 60 years and nearly 100 books (plus 22 monographs), the New Naturalist survey of Britain’s natural history is not yet truly comprehensive. Some topics, like mosses and liverworts, bogs and fens, slugs and snails, rivers and natural woodlands, seem forever tantalisingly out of reach, (though Mosses, at least, is now written and, moreover, looks very promising). Myles talks dreamily about a New Naturalist on British crows; my own dream is one on the small life of ponds, puddles and birdbaths. Forthcoming books include the natural history of gardens, British game birds, British wildfowl, plant galls, the Isles of Scilly, seaweeds, and a new weather book including the effects of climate change. New titles for old include fungi (due for publication in spring 2005), dragonflies and Dartmoor. Predicting which of them will finally complete the long, slow race, let alone in which order, is as impossible as ever. But the current queue of books in various stages of completion makes the publishers aim of two new titles a year seem quite achievable. And that, as they say, is good.
William Stearn (1911-2001), botanist, bibliophile and historian, co-author of the new edition of The Art of Botanical Illustration (Antiques Collectors Club, 1994).
As for any rumours of stopping when we reach No. 100, Myles tells me they are, on the contrary, thinking of stopping when they reach 1,000.
Writing a New Naturalist
On 24th April 1995, the House of Collins held a party in the lobby of its vast office to celebrate the half-centenary of the New Naturalist series – effectively fifty years of natural-history publishing. There were speeches, and flowers, and an exhibition of printing and artwork, which included some of the original jacket designs by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. Champagne flowed and conversation buzzed. You realise how small the natural history world still is when you notice that nearly everyone recognises everyone else. I counted at least a dozen New Naturalist authors among the assembled litterati: beaming, red-faced Willie Stearn with his shock of white hair; Richard Fitter, whose book, London’s Natural History, was rolling off the presses on that very day, fifty years ago, when Hitler was in his bunker and the 14th Army was entering Mandalay; and dear Bill Condry, who roared with laughter when I creepily told him I was looking forward to his next book. David Attenborough made a gracious speech. He even asked me to sign his copy of The New Naturalists, though any hopes of getting him to film my life and times faded when he was led away by some minder. Being the centre of attention for a change was very pleasant, and the evening passed all too quickly.
Most people at the party had either written books, or had commissioned and published them. They all looked happy enough, but in some ways times are hard for natural history writers (and publishers). There are not enough serious reading-naturalists for the writing-naturalist to make much money, unless you happen to be an established television star (in which case it doesn’t matter what you write about, or how badly you write it), or are writing a field guide with potential international sales, or are writing about birds for a mass market. People who write New Naturalist books are certainly not doing it for the money. Yet the books take a long time to write and need a lot of thought and preparation. How is it, then, that there has nearly always been a sufficiently large pool of authors to sustain the series for sixty years?
The recent authors of the series are older than the earlier generation. By my reckoning, since 1993 the average age of the author on the publication of his book was 551/2, compared with about 45 for the series as a whole. The youngest recent writer was Michael Majerus (then 40), followed by David Lack (then 43) and me (44). The oldest was Noel Robertson, who tragically died a few days after receiving the page proofs of his book, aged 76. All the authors since 1973 have been men. There are remarkably few female authors in the series (precisely 4 in the mainstream series, and all co-authors; and 5 women wrote or co-wrote monographs). The books are therefore written from the perspective of mid to late career, or even retirement. They embody considerable personal experience, as well as a review of the literature on a subject. They seem to be by people who enjoy teaching, in whatever form, and yearn to popularise a subject that means so much to them. Some titles, I suspect, are written, consciously or not, with an immediate audience in mind – one’s students, or people on field courses or wildlife outings, or conservation volunteers. They are writing the kind of book they would have wanted when they were students. Enthusiasm is a strong characteristic of nearly all the books – as is much of the correspondence behind them. Dedication is also a necessary attribute, since only the truly dedicated will ever complete a New Naturalist in today’s market (the incentives, fifty years ago, were considerably higher). I doubt whether ambition plays much part, unless it is literary ambition; in terms of career development, the time spent writing a New Naturalist could doubtless be put to better use. Besides, most of the authors have already climbed the greasy pole. Pride, however, must be a serious motive. Most people still regard it as an honour to be invited to write for such a long-running and prestigious series. There may also be an element of paying one’s dues. Oliver Gilbert and Derek Ratcliffe, I know, were glad to be able to pay public homage to their mentors in natural history, and I suppose the book you are reading could be regarded as one long obeisance to the living and departed great. On the whole, it is perhaps a mixture of enthusiasm, duty and flattery that keeps the engine moving. It works almost as well today as it did in 1945.
The Editorial Board play a key part in author-hunting – in finding suitable authors and then persuading them to write a book. The five of them, together with the associate publisher, Myles Archibald, and the managing editor, meet roughly twice a year, usually in Cambridge, where (not by coincidence) three of them happen to live. In return for a small royalty, the editor traditionally acts as a fairy godmother to the book, encouraging the author, commenting kindly and positively (but, if necessary, firmly) on his manuscript, and being as helpful as they can. Sarah Corbett normally supervises the entomological titles, Derek Ratcliffe the ones about uplands or nature conservation; Max Walters takes on some of the botanical ones, and Richard West and David Streeter share the animal books and the more broadly ecological ones. But it can vary. For instance, as a bryologist, Derek Ratcliffe assumed responsibility for the forthcoming volume on mosses and liverworts.
The bulk of each meeting is spent reviewing the progress of each forthcoming title – and that can be a lot of titles: 34 of them at a recent Board meeting. For every book that is ready for publication there is normally a string of titles in every state of preparation from a bare synopsis to a nearly-complete manuscript. The editors also take the opportunity to propose new titles and discuss them around the table. The minutes record the action decided on: ‘to chase’ one title, to approach a preferred author, ‘to remind’ another of an overdue manuscript. Directions must be given to avoid too much overlap between titles. For example, Peter Hayward’s book on the Seashore is deliberately light on seaweeds, because a book on that subject is in preparation. Similarly the Fungi volume had to steer around plant diseases and lichens. What the Board cannot very well do is orchestrate the rate of production. The rate of growth of the series is governed by a wish to publish two new titles per year, which depends in turn on whether authors finish on schedule (which is not unknown). While some titles will drop off the list, a large proportion of the titles commissioned do, eventually, pass the finishing post. It is a long, slow race, with all sorts of obstacles and pit-stops, but the lead contenders come home in the end. Twenty-first century writers tend to finish their books. Eventually.
The three recent botanical volumes, The Natural History of Pollination, Plant Disease and Lichens, offer insights into how and why such books are written for the series. All are semi-specialised, and leaning towards the university or field course end of the spectrum. All three needed, and I think, received, good illustrations to make them more palatable to a mainstream natural-history audience. But each has its individual traits. Pollination was originally intended to be a revised edition of the classic Proctor & Yeo Pollination of Flowers, published in 1973 as No. 54 in the series. But, as the authors quickly realised, the growth in the subject since then really requires a new book, or at least a new text grafted onto a well-pruned stem. One potential problem for a specifically British natural history is that the scientific literature on pollination is worldwide, and more of it was done in America or even Australia than at home. However much of this work offers new insights into how British flowers and insects exploit one another. Pollination is in fact the key to the myriad shapes, colours and scents of flowers, as well as why some insects have decided to get social and live in a hive. Hence, the examples need not all be British, so long as they illuminate general principles. To help bring the book up to date and provide broader perspectives, the original co-authors, Michael Proctor and Peter Yeo, drafted in a third member, Andrew Lack, who had studied the pollination of knapweeds for his PhD thesis under Yeo.
Given the nature of the subject – the book’s micro printed references run to 36 pages – as well as the nature of co-authorship, this was not going to be one of those books one dashes out during an unusually wet summer. In a letter to me, Andrew Lack remembered how “Peter and Michael first asked me to suggest changes and what to cut out, which I did, and moved things round a lot”. Then, he went on, “I had to add ‘my’ chapters, and they to rewrite theirs, although by then we were consulting each other about everything anyway. It took a long time, but towards the end, when Michael in particular was in full steam, he took to ringing me up at 10.30 in the evening, and discussing a few arcane points for an hour…I think at least once I picked up the phone and said ‘Hello, Michael’ before he said anything! The book seems to have gone down well, with quite a bit of the credit down to Michael’s photographs, and people have generally been very nice about it – rather flatteringly, I heard it described as the ‘Bible of pollination’”.
There is, alas, no picture of the three ‘pollination people’ together. “We tended to get together only for book discussions, and often it was just the two of us.”
Written as a review, in scientific, if reasonably clear and well-explained, language, Pollination was never likely to be read straight-through – and especially not in Collins’ dense, eye-straining print. It is primarily a book for clever A-level or university students, or naturalists with a scientific bent. I can attest that it is, however, a wonderful book for looking things up. When I wanted to find out why flowers smell as they do for a television programme (in which I was masquerading as ‘the expert’) I didn’t need to look any further. It is one of those books that brings new pleasures to the shortest ramble in the countryside, or even the garden.
Plant Disease is another work of co-authorship that gets you looking more closely at plants than you did before. It came about through an idea of Max Walters. The ‘grand old man’ of the series had written Wild and Garden Plants as an attempt to bridge ‘the artificial apartheid’ dividing ‘wildlife’ from whatever grows (or lives) in a garden. One of the things that wild and garden plants share is their diseases. Max persuaded a distinguished Cambridge plant pathologist, David Ingram, to contribute a book on the perpetual warfare between green plants and the ‘treacherous, mutable’ army of cankers, blights, wilts and rotters attacking them. Ingram brought in his old friend and mentor, Noel Robertson as co-author. Like Proctor, Yeo and Lack in Pollination, they wrote their own chapters ‘because we both wished to show the other what we could do’, and then worked on each other’s ‘to lead to a more homogeneous style’. The joins do not seem intrusive, nor even obvious. The problem with plant pathology, even more than in pollination biology, is the technical vocabulary used for structures and processes that go unnoticed except by specialists. But the book’s chapter heads are certainly inviting: ‘curls, scabs, spots and rusts’ – ‘the dark and secretive smuts and bunts’ – ‘bringing down the trees’. The series needs such books, and if this is inevitably one of the more challenging titles, it is arguably as readable as it can be without becoming oversimplified. In the past, amateur naturalists have certainly engaged with the micro-fungi of plants, and indeed have discovered most of those that live on wild flowers. Ted Ellis, author of The Broads, was a great field micro-mycologist; and his late son, Martin, together with his wife, Pamela, wrote the standard work of identification, Microfungi on Land Plants.
Oliver Gilbert, pioneer of ‘Adventure Lichenology’, author of Lichens (2000).
By comparison, Lichens is fun to read, even though the species are unfamiliar to most of us, and known only by Latin names. One reason may be that there is a single author, but the main reason is that the author is Oliver Gilbert. A gifted writer, and a populariser par excellence of his arcane subject, Oliver invented the new science – or is it a sport? – of ‘Adventure Lichenology’. He and a small, fraternal band of fellow-enthusiasts delight in exploring the remotest parts of Britain – mountain-tops, small islands, woods hanging on cliffs – as well as some less conventional habitats, such as the drip-zone under motorway crash-barriers, the remains of a crashed aeroplane on St Kilda, or even the ‘dog-zone’ of certain trees! Oliver Gilbert has brought to this book a refreshing approach based on habitats and scenery rather than taxonomy. He has even managed to convey what one reviewer described as ‘a white-knuckle ride’ of exploration. The achievement of this band of ardent lichenologists in terms of mapping, recording and discovering new species is one of the brighter corners of contemporary natural history. The layout of Lichens is also impressive: Oliver told me he deliberately arranged the pictures so that you were never confronted with consecutive pages of dense text (how good it would have looked in full colour!). The book would have been better still if the editors and publishers had been persuaded to include the short ‘interludes’ he wrote after each chapter. These gave a flavour of what lichen-hunting is like: the companionship and fun of working in remote places; struggling to scribble notes with frozen fingers; accidentally knocking the best specimen into the breakfast pan; being dropped by helicopter onto the summit of Ben Nevis, appearing as a sun-scorched rock above an ocean of cloud. I have a jolly good mind to include one of Oliver’s ‘interludes’ here, so you can see what you missed (And I have – see Note No. 9).
Perhaps the interludes would have been retained had there been a face-to-face meeting. When writing The New Naturalists, I was necessarily in more or less frequent communication with the Collins office in London, especially my editor Isobel Smales, and this contact not only helped to ensure that the book was going in the right direction but conveyed an assurance that the editors were almost as caught up with the book as I was. This was strangely comforting. By the time I was writing Nature Conservation, this cosiness had ceased; there were no more bistro lunches in Fulham, and my occasional queries were answered with, it seemed to me, hesitation and reluctance. Of course, the real umbilical cord is supposed to be between author and scientific editor, but valuable and positive though that is, it brightens the experience when there is a sense of shared participation in the project by the publisher: an organic growth, like a human baby, rather than some production process, with the books rolling off the line like tins of paint.
I think Oliver Gilbert felt this too. He was disappointed, he told me, to have had no direct contact with the publishers nor the Board: “Everything was done by post or phone. I was even asked to deliver the finished manuscript by post”. Here, however, Oliver dug in his heels. “Determined to meet my editor – who had changed twice during the two years – I said I was bringing the MS down myself, thinking we might have an agreeable lunch together…In fact the two of us had a working lunch of sandwiches and bottled water.”
We have come a long way, alas, from those early meetings when Julian Huxley or James Fisher would wine and dine their authors at The Traveller’s Club, or when Fraser Darling, hearing a knock at his remote croft house in Strontian, opened the door to William Collins himself.
The ‘place-books’ (plus some animals)
The most recent New Naturalist titles include no fewer than five books about places, whether a whole country (Ireland), a county (Lakeland i.e. modern Cumbria and Northumberland), or a National Park (The Broads, Loch Lomondside). The inclusion of four National Parks, for large parts of Cumbria and Northumberland are so-designated, suggests a continuation of the policy made very early in the series to include special volumes about each one. In practice, it seems to be coincidence – the regional titles of the series are simply about places which seem to have reasonably broad readership appeal. Undoubtedly, the recent declaration of Loch Lomond and The Trossachs as Scotland’s first National Park strengthened the case for a volume on Loch Lomondside. But titles waiting in the wings include Galloway and the Scottish Borders, the Isles of Scilly, and, more distantly, Breckland, the Wye Valley, and the Gower, none of which are National Parks. The proportion of ‘place-books’ in the series has slightly increased from a quarter (3 out of 12) in 1985-95 to a third (5 out of 15) in 1995-2005. But over the lifetime of the series, place-books have shown a significant increase from about a fifth to a third, though there are long sequences – volumes 14 to 25, 28 to 43, 54 to 63 – with none at all.
Ireland (1999), David Cabot’s tour-de-force, is one of the most remarkable, certainly one of the longest, titles of recent years. It is the first comprehensive review of Ireland’s natural history for more than fifty years, and probably only David Cabot could have written it. He manages to confine so large an area within a single book by emphasising Ireland’s peculiarities and differences – its waterscapes, its limestone pavements, its callows, slobs and turloughs, and miscellany of special plants and animals, such as St Daboec’s heath and the Killarney slug. In the spirit of the grand surveys of the nineteenth century, he begins in the clouds of Ireland’s mountainous rim and moves gradually towards the sea through lakelands, bogs, valleys and farms. Though densely ‘fact-packed’, and scientifically precise, the book is always readable. David Cabot is an ornithologist, with twenty years experience as head of conservation science in Ireland’s state planning department, and his obvious love of the outdoor life, as well as his partiality for antique natural-history books and manuscripts, is right for the series. The origins of the book go back to the moment when Cabot stepped foot in Ireland from the Rosslare Ferry over forty years ago, and, spotting a hooded crow ‘frisking some rubbish’, began to wonder why British crows are mostly black and Irish crows are grey; Robert Gillmor was right to put the ‘hoodie’ on the jacket. Ireland was one of those titles that required a long, slow marination. Cabot had been pencilled in as a possible author as early as the 1960s on the strength of a testimonial from Professor David Webb of Trinity College, Dublin. But a busy career intervened, and the ink did not really start to flow until the mid-1990s. A vast amount of reading must have gone into the book, despite Cabot’s extensive first-hand experience: the book includes a bibliography of nearly 30 pages (and an index of 28). It arrived at a crucial time for the series, helping to lift it out of the doldrums with sales brisk enough to justify an early reprint. David Cabot is now working on British Wildfowl, another title with a long history of failed commissions and a succession of over-busy authors.
The Broads (2001) is another interesting and original book. One of the problems for the author was that there were already two large books on the subject; one of them in the series itself. Ted Ellis’s well-known book, published in 1965, described the landscape history and wildlife of the Broads, but had little to say about the downturn in water quality and the growing tension between recreation and conservation. Its planned successor by Martin George described that conflict much more closely, as well as the broader social history of Broadland. But the resulting book was too long for a New Naturalist, and it was published elsewhere in 1992. Brian Moss, author of the new book, therefore needed to steer an original course through water that was already fairly turbid. As he puts it, the early place-books of the series ‘could write of man the curious rural inhabitant. I must attend to man the powerful, competitive species in the environment of man the creative and destructive modifier…I have tried to present what a reader might realistically see’. In other words, this natural history is by no means an escape from real life into the other-worlds of birds, plants and insect life, as its predecessor was. This Broads presents human life at the centre, fair and square, and how wildlife adapts to it or goes under. The result is a refreshingly honest book, a kind of social-cum-ecological history of how The Broads came to be as they are, not without plenty of wrong-turnings and the kind of commercial shortsightedness Moss characterises as ‘struthious’, that is, ostrichlike. While at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Moss came up with the bright idea of ‘bio-manipulation’ or ecological engineering to clear up the plankton blooms that were suffocating the Broads. Algal grazing could be stepped up by thinning out the top predators, the fish, or by encouraging water fleas and other zooplankton with fish-free bunds or ‘shelter-woods’ of branches. Such measures, together with suction-dredging the phosphate-rich mud, worked quite well on a small scale, especially where the water could be isolated, but most of the lakes were still murky and weedless when Moss left East Anglia in 1989. The Broads are now promoted rather glibly as ‘a place for the cure of souls’, to which Moss drily comments, “perhaps”.
Brian Moss, freshwater ecologist, author of The Broads (2001).
Curiously enough, The Broads does not come across as a ‘downbeat’ book. In Moss’s account, the modern custodians of the area, ‘the officer, visitor, minister, sage’ of his part 4, are the successors of a thousand years of human water-life, from ‘hunter, pirate, marshman, monk’ in part 1 to the more recreational ‘gunner, yachtsman, wherryman, naturalist’ of part 3 (the tacit implication that the ‘naturalists’ are now the ‘officers’ wasn’t lost on this reader). That the future need not be all that bad is suggested by the last two startling, almost surreal, colour plates showing the future of Broadland – the epoch of belief and ‘the spring of hope’, complete with timber-barges, water buffalos and wide open spaces. They refer to the imaginative ‘postscript’ of the book, which Moss had to fight hard to retain, in which the author pretends to be writing fifty years from now, and reflecting on the experiences of the past century. In this scenario, the historic continuity of the Broads as ‘a working landscape’ has been resumed after ‘the doldrums years between 1960 and 2025’, when successive tribes of officials struggled against the ‘inevitable and inexorable’. You do not have to accept all the prognosis, but this is a well-considered and digested personal journey, written in an agreeably clear and lively style.
That The Broads and Lakeland should be published within eighteen months of one another is another of the little serendipities that befall the series from time to time. The Broads and the Lake District are two of England’s three natural lakelands (the third, less well-known, is the West Midlands meres, with Cheshire at their heart – a landscape described, as it happens, in A Country Parish). Like Brian Moss, Derek Ratcliffe had to tiptoe round another New Naturalist book, this time The Lake District (1973) by W.H. Pearsall and Winifred Pennington. Lakeland takes a different perspective in two ways. It broadens the subject-matter to include the whole of Cumbria, and so embracing the coast and its estuaries, lowland farms and the bordering moors and fells of the North Pennines, as well as its mountainous heartland. And, like The Broads, the book is a personal interpretation by one who has tramped over practically every inch of it, and spent many a long day inspecting the nests of peregrines and ravens, or photographing flowers and ferns. Some subjects, fully covered by the earlier book, such as climate and geology, could be dispensed with. Like Ireland, Lakeland is habitat-based, and, also like Ireland, is topped-and-tailed by a full chapter on Lakeland naturalists and another on ‘conservation problems and approaches’. Ratcliffe grew up near Carlisle – ‘Lakeland was my youthful stamping ground’ – and he was able to return there frequently after retirement in 1989. Hence, there is a strong ‘then-and-now’ element, which is always interesting, if, inevitably, sometimes rather depressing. There is also the sense of a long and agreeable ramble over hill and dale, in the company of a quiet-spoken but exceedingly knowledgeable and observant master (with, one might add, a photographic memory). By keeping an eye on its production, Derek Ratcliffe ensured relatively high standards for this book, with sharp half-tones and a larger font size.
John Mitchel, author of Loch Lomondside, at the sign of The Chequered Skipper.
As I write (in April 2004), Northumberland by Angus Lunn lies in the future. It and Cumbria are the back-to-back counties of northern England; soon, if all goes well, they will be joined by Derek Ratcliffe’s current book on Galloway and the Borders. Apart from the Isles, Scotland has been rather neglected by the New Naturalist series. The grand survey of The Highlands and Islands by Darling and Boyd has served as the series’ Scottish book for almost as long as the series itself. At last, in 2001, it was joined by Loch Lomondside by John Mitchell, who for many years served as the resident nature warden (nature’s ambassador is a better title) in that enchanting area. Mitchell and his editor, Derek Ratcliffe, had to fight hard for this book. The other editors thought it too specialised, despite Loch Lomond’s proximity to Glasgow and its two million inhabitants. John Mitchell is a clear and interesting writer, with eclectic interests and a fascination for delving into what might be called ‘unconsidered trifles’ (as the historian Simon Schama has noted, it’s the little details that can illuminate whole landscapes). When I lived in Scotland, I sought out some of Mitchell’s papers on such things as Victorian fern-collecting in the Moffats, or the unlikely escaped animals that had established themselves on the Bonny Banks, which included, if I remember correctly, the kangaroo. An all-round naturalist, he knows his Scottish docks as intimately as his shelducks and herons, and also enjoys researching the area’s human past: its cornstone workings and charcoal woods, and the ancient communities of the lake isles. Equally important, he gets on well with its present occupants – farmers, keepers, foresters, fishermen and ‘officers’ of every kind. By happy chance, Loch Lomondside coincided with the opening of Scotland’s first National Park. The ‘long struggle’ that got there in the end is described in the final part of the book on ‘Conservation: past, present and future’.
So much for the place-books. We are left with the four new books on animals and invertebrates, all with nice short titles: Bats, Seashore, Moths and Amphibians and Reptiles (short, that is, on the wrapper and binding. On the title page, Seashore becomes A Natural History of the Seashore. Which one is the official title is unclear). The only wholly new subject is bats. When Leo Harrison Matthews wrote British Mammals, very little indeed was known about the natural history of living bats – and a third of our native mammals happen to be bats. The series needed a bat book. The editors had pencilled it in as a possible topic as early as 1959, but few zoologists then specialised in bats. Ten years on, Eric Hosking had found Robert Stebbings, who, he urged, would be able to write them a splendid book, illustrated with the matchless photographs of S.C. Bisserot. However, when enquiries in the trade indicate there was insufficient demand for a bat book, the idea was shelved. By the mid-eighties bats had grown enormously in popularity, thanks mainly to legal protection and enhanced status as ‘honorary birds’. Local bat groups were springing up to record their numbers and distribution, and advise householders how to look after their bats, or get rid of them without harming them. Two or three potential authors were contacted; a contract was produced for one of them; but nothing happened. Finally, an author was found in John Altringham, an authority on ‘biomechanics’, that is, the means by which animals get around, and especially on the flight of bats. He was also familiar with bat natural history and conservation work, from loft inspections to roost-box design. Appropriately, given Eric Hosking’s notion of matching writer and photographer, Altringham was able to draw on Frank Greenaway’s splendid photographs of bats in flight and at rest (as well as some very nice text-drawings by Tom McOwat). The book, one of the shorter ones of recent years, takes us through the collective biology of bats, as well as one by one, ‘in a functional and evolutionary context’. Like other new New Naturalists, the reader needs to concentrate, but if the going proves a bit austere, one can dip instead of swim, and there is a good balance of text and pictures.
Reptiles and Amphibians, or, in their latest incarnation, Amphibians and Reptiles, have been treated generously by the New Naturalist library. There are now three books and nearly 800 pages, or roughly 75 pages per native species. The first one, by Malcolm Smith, commissioned in 1948, was to have been a monograph, but was promoted to the mainstream series at the last minute. At that time, what was known about ‘herptiles’ was based on bones, dissection, or, if the animal was lucky, an aquarium. Field study eventually picked up, and now our tiny but much – loved herpetofauna has acquired its own conservation trust and a dedicated band of followers. ‘Herptiles 2’ or, more properly, Reptiles and Amphibians in Britain by Deryk Frazer, published in 1983, was more of a review than Smith’s book (Smith had very little to review), and included many new studies of ecology and behaviour, as well as the puzzling species-complex of ‘pool frogs’, and recently established species. It was an ill-fated book, held up for a year for technical reasons, soon out-of-print and not reprinted. A few years earlier, a Collins editor, Robert McDonald, had noted that ‘As a general point, I am not sure that it is wise for us to be thinking of replacing older volumes almost as a matter of course. With the New Naturalists suffering from rising costs and falling sales, we need to be rather careful about what we take on.…Perhaps this is just a gloomy thought occasioned by Monday morning’.
McDonald’s advice was obviously not heeded, and, in different commercial climate of today even he might have had second thoughts. Replacing some of the old, classic titles with modern, up-to-the-minute books could be seen as a mark of confidence in the series. Which titles are in fact replaced relies largely on chance and opportunity. For example, Moths came about because there was a Michael Majerus able and willing to write a new book in the same spirit as E.B. Ford, but ‘concerned more with the place of moths in the biological world…dealing with their behaviour, ecology and evolution’. Similarly, Peter Hayward has given us an entirely new Seashore, not a replacement of C.M. Yonge’s book, published in 1949, but one ‘which offers another view from another time’. With characteristic modesty, Hayward hoped his book would complement, rather than supplant Yonge’s. It occurred to me that it also supplements Hayward’s own Collins Field Guide to the Seashore rather nicely – as a biological background to a fine set of pictures.
But back to ‘Herptiles 3’. Perhaps feeling that Herptiles 2 never got a fair crack of the whip, David Streeter asked his Sussex University colleague, Trevor Beebee, whether he would like to write a new book. Beebee’s is one of the best-known names in modern herpetology; he has written a string of popular books on ponds and amphibia, as well as the standard monograph on the natterjack toad. He is also a New Naturalist in the fullest James-Fisherian sense of blending the latest, often highly technical, advances in scientific research, with a solid grounding in field study and conservation – which for these animals entails a lot of digging and scrub-bashing, especially in winter. Beebee invited Richard Griffiths and a third colleague, who later dropped out, to share the load – which was substantial. As they explain, or perhaps warn, British ‘herps’ are not only studied for themselves, but as ‘model organisms’ for ‘research into behaviour, especially sexual selection, thermoregulation and community ecology’. Our tiny herpetofauna, one of the smallest in the world, is also the most intensively studied in the world. The new book reviews the recent scientific literature admirably, without rehashing too much of its predecessors. One wonders, though, whether some of these titles are not becoming a bit too exclusively scientific. The ‘herps’ in particular have a large and enthusiastic popular following, whose activities vary from maintaining garden frog-ponds to rescuing or ‘reintroducing’ crested newts and sand lizards. They have, in short, entered the public domain, the broader human consciousness. Is this broadly ‘cultural’ aspect of a subject a legitimate subject for the series? Is it time to broaden the approach of a new natural history from the purely scientific preoccupations that were so fashionable in 1945? But, if it is, where do we find the authors? We live in a world full of specialists gazing narrowly, but there are evidently fewer talented communicators who possess breadth as well as depth of knowledge, and the capacity to convey it in interesting, readable English. And, where they exist, how do you persuade them to write a book which is neither mass-market nor a cornerstone academic textbook, but something inbetween? The wonder, perhaps, is that the additions to the New Naturalist library are as good as they are.
An author explains…
The book you are reading was easy to write: I wanted to write it even before I was given the opportunity. I wanted to write it so much that I devoted six months of my life to it, at a time when I really should have been earning a proper living. It felt like the working-out of fate, as though I had no choice in the matter. It would be untrue to claim that I spent these months on a rolling surf of unalloyed pleasure, because any big book is an awful slog, and writing them makes for a very boring life. But researching the book, mainly by interview or forensically sifting huge, dusty piles of papers, was undeniably fascinating. It was a privilege to meet or correspond with some of the people who made the New Naturalists what they are. And it was creatively satisfying to investigate the background and make history from it.
It was also as good a time as any to take stock. After five decades, the series seemed becalmed, and I wondered whether I was writing its funeral sermon. Yet, by its very existence, The New Naturalists encouraged fresh interest in the books, and I’m told, helped to create a new dynamic. The success of Ireland, a few years later, enabled our editors to increase the print-run and get to grips with the series more effectively.
As for writing the book, I have few memories other than the sunshine outside, which looked especially inviting in that warm summer of 1994. Each day, I started as early as I could (which wasn’t all that early), and stopped around 4, at which time I often played a game of badminton and afterwards enjoyed a large gin-and-tonic. Are such things of interest? I had two deadlines: one, the official one, was the end of September, to enable the publishers to flourish the book at the celebrations. This was tight, but the other deadline was tighter still because the money from the advance would, I calculated, run out in June or July. By taking on some small commissions for ready money, I eked out my income to the due date, and, on the whole, it was a happy journey.
I hesitated longer before accepting the publishers’ invitation to tackle Nature Conservation, the intended successor to Dudley Stamp’s venerable and posthumous book published in 1969. Clearly I was being engaged on the strength of The New Naturalists, for, although I had worked for nature conservation bodies over many years in different capacities, I was neither an originator nor a policy maker as Dudley Stamp was. Indeed, my career as a scientific civil servant in the Nature Conservancy Council had met with a crashing lack of success. On the other hand, I seemed to know a lot about it, and had no particular axe to grind: unusually, among the conservation crowd, I was unaligned. I wanted to justify some of those dreary days I had spent notifying SSSIs and writing annual reports. In the end, I accepted because I felt the opportunity would not come again, and that, with my skates on, I might be able to repeat The New Naturalists challenge and polish it off in six months. Not that I had any choice about that. When you write for a living, the last thing you want to do with your spare time is more writing. So, once again, it looked like another journey against the clock, taking on enough extra work to see it through without starving. Heroic stuff, I thought.
It was, of course, a much harder book to write than The New Naturalists. While the latter was a nice narrow-but-deep subject, like a well, that enabled me to wallow happily in the detail, nature conservation has grown impossibly broad and fluffy – where does it end? The gardener who uses compost, or a more ‘environmental’ weed killer, thinks he is helping to conserve nature. The Government used to claim that building more roads was good for the environment. Recently, English Nature surprised us all when it told us that even house-building could, in certain circumstances, benefit wildlife. So many people – so much conservation! (it sounds better in Latin). I decided it would avoid a lot of fruitless grasping for definitions if I focussed on the interesting question of whether all this conservation had been good for wildlife. You might think it obvious that it has been, but it is surprising how little hard information there is on how this or that policy has worked out in the field. Even nature reserves are not necessarily success stories; not at any rate if half the wildlife has fled since you set up the fence.
An extra note of acerbity may, I admit, have crept in. Some of the papers I waded through when researching The New Naturalists would have been very dull except to an ardent bibliophile, but that was nothing compared with the numbing effect of what passes as the literature of the conservation movement. Saving the natural world seems to rely on producing joyless micro-managing ‘strategies’, from ‘action plans’ for the most obscure moss or snail to confident utopian tomes promising to redesign whole landscapes with the aid of ‘joined-up thinking’. Yet the sense they give is not the countryside we all know and love but a kind of drawing board around which faceless figures are busy pulling levers and making adjustments. Is this where Dudley Stamp, Max Nicholson and all the other pioneers of scientific nature conservation in Britain thought we would end up?
I didn’t think a simple review format would work for Nature Conservation. Instead of trying to cover everything, I selected themes, and freely offered my own opinion on what it all amounted to. I tried, as far as I could, to say not only that such a thing had happened, but why it happened. And I also tried to give readers plenty of space to make up their own minds. The book is about the same length as The New Naturalists (about 125,000 words) and took about the same time to write – but twice as much effort. If I was to do it again, I would include more from the voluntary perspective. But in terms of conserving species and habitats, we live in a top-down country.
I dedicated the book to Derek Ratcliffe, one of the towering figures of postwar nature conservation, but I don’t think he liked the book much. He and some others found it too downbeat: “too many of your apples have maggots in them”. I was conscious while writing it that I wasn’t going to please everyone, especially those who had dedicated their professional lives to trying to save what is left of the natural world. All the same, I think the book has its merits: it bounces along at a brisk, lively pace (perhaps a bit too fast; there are places where I should have paused), that its analysis and judgements look reasonably sound to me, and that it reaches places other books don’t. It was well received, where it was reviewed at all, and is not, I think, a bad book by any means. If you find its conclusions a bit pessimistic, I can only say that, as I see it, nature conservation isn’t a success story. In the eternal contest between making money and saving something for the future, supply and money will usually win, witness the dried-up rivers and spreading housing-estates of rural England. To be honest, I think a lot of conservation activity is a waste of time. The movement has become a job-creation industry as much as anything. Which is not, of course, to deny that nature conservation has achieved a great deal, and that the world would be the poorer without it.
The tale of a book
Few books in the series are better-documented than Leslie Brown’s British Birds of Prey. Not only was the author a prolific (and entertaining) letter-writer, he left us a detailed account of how he came to write the book in The Birdwatcher’s Handbook for 1974. I was unable to trace a copy (not even in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) when writing The New Naturalists, which, for that reason, scarcely did justice to Leslie Brown nor his fine and important book. A few years afterwards, my friend Bob Burrow found a copy of the elusive book in which Brown’s article appeared and kindly sent me it as a gift. The following piece is by way of making amends, and also to reveal a little more about the process in which this particular New Naturalist was written.
British Birds of Prey first published in 1976, was the best-selling New Naturalist title since the 1950s. Some 20,000 copies were printed between 1976 and 1982, including 5,500 for the Reader’s Union book club. The first edition of 9,000 sold out within a few months, and was reprinted the same year. The book was even given the rare honour of a prepublication serialisation in Animals magazine, the leading natural history periodical of the day. Perhaps its success was not surprising. Birds of prey are eternally popular celebrities among the avian kind, both for their fierceness and beauty and as potent symbols of wildness and freedom. Yet few have attempted to review our birds of prey as a whole, as opposed to writing in depth about individual species; since Leslie Brown’s book, first published in 1976, only one book has done so (Birds of Prey in a Changing Environment, 2003) and that one required the services of five editors and over forty authors; Leslie Brown’s book, by contrast, was very much a personal interpretation. That is, in part, what makes it so readable. Birds of prey are indeed a knotty subject in several ways. The scientific literature was enormous, even in the 1970s. Every species had its own expert, and by no means everything about them had been published. For example, there were long-term studies on the red kite and hen harrier, based on years of work, which had not been written up. In the case of the honey buzzard, very little indeed had been committed to paper; the experts on this rare bird had committed themselves to a kind of masonic pledge of secrecy (perhaps it all went back to the famous episode of the robbing of the honey buzzard’s nest in BB’s Brendon Chase). Birds of prey were, besides, an unusually sensitive subject. Few birds compete so openly and fearlessly with mankind. Though all are protected by law, birds of prey are, notoriously, still persecuted. Keepers blame hen harriers for a dearth of grouse on the moor; pigeon-fanciers are not always well-disposed towards peregrines; some have even called for a cull of sparrowhawks on the grounds that they are eating too many garden songbirds. Anyone writing about birds of prey in Britain has to do so against a background of scientific controversy and inflamed passions, to which even ornithologists are not immune.
Leslie Brown (1917-1980), eagle-watcher extraordinary, author of the best-selling British Birds of Prey (1976).
The New Naturalist editors had had no settled policy on how to tackle the birds of prey. In keeping with the ecological ethos of the series, they originally planned to produce a series of habitat-based bird books: the published Sea-birds and Birds and Men (which was effectively about farmland and towns) were to be followed by volumes on the birds of woodland (Bruce Campbell, later W.P. Yapp), sea-shore (Eric Ennion), moorland (James Fisher) and marsh and freshwater (R.C. Homes). Individual species were to be covered by the New Naturalist Monographs, which, by 1953, included commissioned volumes on The Peregrine (J. Walpole-Bond and James Ferguson-Lees) and The Golden Eagle (Seton Gordon). In practice, birds of prey slipped through the net completely. The problem was that the sort of people who tramped the hills in search of eagles and peregrines, and their nests, were not always the kind of naturalist-scientists capable of fusing field observation with scientific insight. ‘Jock’ Walpole-Bond had asked sceptically of James Fisher: ‘is he a cragsman?’. And Fisher retorted by bluntly informing Bond that his literary style would make them all a laughing stock.
By 1969, the commercially unsuccessful New Naturalist monograph series was coming to a close; the death of its main protagonist, James Fisher, the following year lost the series its main advocate. In its place, the natural history editor at Collins, Michael Walter, planned to publish a series of bird books in the mainstream series based on groups of related birds: finches, tits, thrushes, waders and so on. He had already contracted one author, Ian Newton, to write about finches. But the new policy would benefit from a really good book on the most popular birds of all – the birds of prey – all the more so since the series had so far barely touched on the subject. Michael Walter already had an author in mind. Leslie Brown had a reputation as an authority on birds of prey throughout the world through his many papers in learned journals and his authorship of the much-praised standard work, Eagles, hawks and falcons of the world (1968). He was also an authority on British golden eagles, and had, with Adam Watson, written a definitive paper on the distribution of eagles in relation to their food supply. He had also, as it happened, recently written a book on African birds of prey for Collins. The only problem was that Brown lived in Kenya, where he had been a senior agriculturalist in the colonial government until the independence of that country in 1963. Thereafter he had been an independent advisor on land-use and conservation matters in East Africa, but spent an increasing amount of his time studying and writing about birds. Brown’s knowledge of British birds, even golden eagles, was not recent. On the other hand, he was a first-rate communicator, fast, fluent and opinionated as a writer, vivid and unstoppable as a raconteur, and known to be hardy and indefatigable – and short-fused. He had the rare ability to blend science and accurate observation with undiminished enthusiasm. Many of his studies of flamingoes, pelicans and African eagles had been done under arduous conditions in remote country. Though published in learned journals like Ibis, they were always readable. In 1967, the BBC made a film about him entitled ‘Birdwatcher extraordinary’, showing him on the trail of migrant pelicans in Ethiopia, clambering up a waterfall to a red-winged starling’s nest and, after an all-day trek in the Scottish hills looking for eagles, leaping naked into a Highland burn.
With the agreement of the Board, Michael Walter wrote to Brown asking him whether he would like to write a New Naturalist. The idea appealed to Brown, who replied promptly that he would be very pleased to do it, though pointing out that there were others, living in Britain, who would feel they could do it also. Brown certainly felt flattered to be asked to contribute to such a prestigious series, but it also appealed to the poacher in him. He was a keen amateur pheasant poacher, and liked the idea of stealing the subject from under the noses of the birds-of-prey establishment. As he put it in his preface to British Birds of Prey,
I have gathered that several British ornithologists might have liked to sink their teeth into this particular cock pheasant [but] have not felt able to spare the time and effort from other more essential tasks to bag it legitimately. So it has fallen to me to climb over the fence with my concealed weapon and snatch the bird from under the noses of British experts. Those who know me well will merely observe that I am a creature of habit, and would not be able to resist it. However, when they have seen me making off with the bird they have all encouraged me in my nefarious task and, if I faltered, have plied me with meat and drink, bed and board, that I might poach the better (Brown 1976).
Following his acceptance, Brown was sent a contract stipulating a completion date by the end of 1971 and was given an advance large enough to cover his travel expenses for a short stay in Britain. The timetable was hopelessly optimistic. It did not take long for Brown to discover that the task was larger than he had anticipated. His visit to Britain in the fall of 1970 allowed him time to consult back-runs of Bird Study, British Birds and other journals in the library of the Edward Grey Institute in Oxford, and inevitably they showed up the apparently gaping lack of knowledge of some species. There was also, he knew, a great deal of work that had not been published, which would require a second visit to pick up, and delay the book for at least a year.
Brown wrote about his second visit, in spring 1972, in great detail in an essay for The Bird-Watcher’s Book (1974) called ‘A bird of prey odyssey’. An odyssey is, of course, a tale of wandering, a journey with many turns and adventures. Brown planned to tour the country interviewing experts, inspecting monitoring reports and other unpublished data, and also to see as many birds of prey as possible, from buzzards in Devon to hen harriers in Orkney, from Welsh kites to East Anglian marsh harriers. Unfortunately it turned out to be one of the wettest springs in memory. Brown’s dormobile odyssey was, he wrote, a ‘grinding slog’. He liked to write up what he learned while it was fresh in his memory, and, if possible, show it to the relevant expert before moving on. Hence a full, and probably wet, day in the field might be followed by several hours in the cramped dormobile or in a friend’s spare room, banging out a report on his portable typewriter (by all accounts a fairly unreliable machine). The odyssey began in Exeter, where Brown spent a couple of days poring over Peter Dare’s highly regarded PhD thesis on the buzzards of Dartmoor. Turning east, Brown inspected the BTO library at Tring to extract data on migration and nest records, and also the RSPB library at Sandy, before taking off to Minsmere to watch, with some help from the warden, Bert Axell, a real bird of prey: a bigamous marsh harrier cock tending his two sitting wives. On a day of rare May sunshine Brown dropped in on his old friend John Buxton, of Redstart fame, to talk about harriers and spend a day on a trout stream with a dry fly. He caught the permitted maximum of three trout, including a big one-and-a-half pounder, ‘one of my rarest and keenest pleasures’. Thence he headed north to meet Ian Newton (Finches), who was studying sparrowhawks in Dumfries, talk to Douglas Weir in Speyside about buzzards, eagles, peregrines and merlins, and inspect, with derision, the RSPB’s somewhat chaotic osprey records at Loch Garten. While in Speyside, Brown took the opportunity to revisit an eagle eyrie he saw in 1945 and found it occupied by an eaglet tucking into its dinner: a grouse, a hare and a mallard drake with its bright orange webbed feet. He was gloomy, however, about the future of the golden eagle: ‘Gamekeepers and their employers are about as hopeless a proposition in 1972 as they were in 1872’, he decided. After a day or two adding, ‘a little titbit of knowledge’ observing an eagle’s attempt to extend its nesting territory in a remote Sutherland glen, Brown caught the boat to Orkney and spent three days roaming the hills with a taciturn Eddie Balfour looking for hen harriers. He also looked for, but failed to find, the phone box inside which he and two fellow birders had spent an excruciatingly cold night in 1937, longing to be arrested for the comparative comfort of a cell.
Brown returned south, with a detour to Wales to find out about kites (‘I saw seven, probably about 10 per cent of the whole population’), and another to the New Forest to discuss buzzards and hobbys with Colin Tubbs (The New Forest). That day, the first hot day of summer, and in the company of Richard Fitter (London’s Natural History), he was lucky enough to witness a pair of honey buzzards performing their unique aerial display, repeatedly raising their wings vertically over the back, somehow without losing height. Finally Brown came to port at Chris Mead’s hospitable home in Tring, where he wrote much of the book, hammering the keys ‘round the clock from seven to seven’. ‘I was dead beat at the end of each day [but] felt I must complete all the chapters on individual species before leaving for Kenya, where I could do the rest…All but a few of the experts to whom I sent revised chapters for review came up with useful criticisms.’ ‘Those that did not,’ he added, characteristically, ‘have, of course, blasted me already for misquoting them.’
Brown was critical about bird watching in Britain. Instead of watching birds closely to learn more about their behaviour, most bird watchers wasted their energy dashing from one place to the next to tick off another rare bird, contributing ‘little that is useful, but antagonising farmers and others by leaving gates open and trampling crops’. Brown completed the book at home in Kenya and sent the manuscript to Collins towards the end of 1972. Michael Walter found it not only ‘a most filthy manuscript’ but ‘a dangerously long book’ full of tables and references. Brown, meanwhile, reflecting on the whole experience, had vowed never again to try to write ‘anything like a new naturalist book’ on British birds except in the somewhat unlikely circumstance of being based at a British institution and enjoying a good regular salary. ‘The result of my Odyssey won’t be as good as I, or others, might like it to be, though I think it is fair and most of my expert referees have said so. For good or ill, it’s done…’
Unfortunately the book was not done. Three years passed before the ‘filthy’ manuscript of 1972 was transformed into a book, a frustrating delay which goaded Brown into a fury, especially as he was already, he calculated, £2,500 out of pocket over it. There were, of course, communication problems with an expatriate author who was often away on his travels as an agricultural advisor in east Africa – and who also, at one stage, lost all his valuable notebooks to thieves. But the main reason for the delay seems to have been Michael Walters’ insistence that the book was too long, contained too much data, and needed drastic cutting before it could be published as a New Naturalist volume. The last straw for Brown was when, the contracted indexer having turned it down, he was asked summarily to produce the index himself, just as he was setting off for Ethiopia for several weeks. Brown insisted that his preface should reveal the date he had actually written it – 1972. As he pointed out, one British bird of prey, Montagu’s harrier, had ceased to breed since then! His editor, Kenneth Mellanby, begged him to reconsider, pointing out that the text had been much revised, and that the discrepancy between Brown’s date of 1972 and the published one of April 1976 would imply that the book was out of date and prejudice its inception. Eventually Brown conceded, but the experience had evidently entered his soul. He resolved to give up writing books – ‘I simply can’t stand the strain of dealing with publishers from this range’. Whether it was Collins or another errant publisher that formed the subject of the ‘numbing’ four-hour tirade remembered by his friend Jeffery Boswall (Boswall 1982), Brown had certainly added book publishers to his list of bêtes noires along with ‘pompous landowners, constipated functionaries, and fools generally’.
The odyssey was not quite over even then. British Birds of Prey had been eagerly awaited by a large ornithological public and was well received. It combined an indepth study of the subject in a readable style and with many personal touches, especially when Brown was describing a bird he knew well, like the golden eagle. His carefully considered judgements came over well, and in places it is hard not to see a little of the bird-of-prey in the beady-eyed, narrowly gazing, high-wired author himself! What drew more criticism was the presentation. To confine such a long book (for Brown had eventually had his way as far as cutting went) within 400 pages, the text had been micro-printed, 50 lines to the page. There were no colour plates, and the paucity of text illustrations gave it the hallmarks of an academic book. The book was also published at a time of rampant inflation, so that the not inexpensive initial price of £6 had, by 1982, escalated to a decidedly steep £11.50. Even the much-praised dust wrapper design by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis was reprinted in Spain as an economy measure, on inferior paper and paler colours. The book, of course, did well – so well indeed that large book club editions were also ordered for the forthcoming specialist volumes on British Thrushes and British Tits. The modest first edition of just over 5,000 sold out very quickly. With reprints, book club editions and a small US edition published by Taplinger, total sales came to 20,000. A quarter-century later, although the book is clearly out-of-date in many ways, it is still the standard popular work on British birds of prey.
When British Birds of Prey was published, Leslie Brown was on his back in hospital, having suffered a ‘bad but not massive’ coronary. Expecting ‘bad and ungenerous, if not actually libellous’ reviews from rival ornithologists, he was pleased that, on the whole, they agreed with him that it was ‘a darned good book’. For the second reprint, he added two pages of notes (including a stubborn reference to his having completed the manuscript in 1972). There was also what amounted to an apology to Desmond Nethersole-Thompson who had found himself fortuitously libelled as an egg collector. A lively correspondence between Brown and his publishers continued, sometimes good-humoured, often apoplectic. Brown partly blamed the decline of his health in the late seventies on books and publishers, though that did not prevent him from working on another enormous literary project, a multi-volume Birds of Africa. A few months before his death from a heart attack in August 1980, aged 63, he had returned to his beloved Speyside and watched golden eagles again. One reason for the visit was an intended revision of British Birds of Prey. As he had remarked in his last letter to Michael Walter, ‘I should prefer to revise it myself than see anyone else do so, though I may of course be incapable of so doing for reasons beyond my control. If so, it won’t matter so much’.
The New Naturalist series has had a record of good judgement – and perhaps good luck – in matching the right author with the right subject. Leslie Brown and British Birds of Prey is a good example. Although there were more obvious candidates for the job in terms of experience and scientific qualifications, few could have rivalled the amateur Brown’s lucidity and sense of quest. As Brown himself described his personal odyssey in his Encounters with Nature:
The more one learns the more there is to learn, and one bit of new knowledge just leads on to another…anyone can make discoveries; it needs no PhD or even a degree, just a pair of observant eyes and ears, and a questing mind. Some of the very best naturalists of recent times have been, scientifically speaking, rank amateurs. Although much natural history literature is dated almost as soon as it appears, it should still be published, for it is the springboard from which someone else may dive deeper into a new and unknown sea.
New Naturalist jackets 1995-2005
Nowadays Robert Gillmor’s name is spoken by New Naturalist fans with the same reverence that his illustrious predecessors, Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, enjoy. Among words that describe his designs, I’ve heard ‘luscious’, ‘tactile’, even ‘sensual’. By the end of 2004 there were a full two dozen of them, spanning nearly twenty years, from British Warblers to Northumberland. Separately they are admirable enough, but together they are likely to be the most attention-grabbing books on anyone’s shelf. Using only three colours, plus black, Gillmor creates designs that are detailed enough to satisfy the naturalist, yet also find graphic forms to express the colours and shapes of nature with sufficient clarity and boldness. Good examples include the swaying reeds on The Broads, rendered in rhythmic form, or the bold plumage of the bittern on the same jacket, both created using linocuts. Or the artful stippling to create the texture of old stone on Lichens, or the ivy-leaves of Plant Disease, an ideal subject for lithography with their bold outlines and flat planes. We all must have our favourites. Lakeland and The Hebrides are hugely likeable with their birds and cool tones, but for me the palm still goes to the half-abstract design of Ferns with its satisfying textures and forms. Oh, and of course I like the two jackets he did for me, too!
Robert Gillmor in his studio at Cley-next-the-Sea.
Robert (for I can’t call him Gillmor), a versatile and successful bird artist and book illustrator, was asked to take over the design of the New Naturalist jackets after the death of Clifford Ellis, who, with his wife Rosemary, had produced consistently imaginative and colourful lithographic designs for the books for over forty years. The then editor, Crispin Fisher, gave him the greatest possible amplitude for interpreting each book. His only suggestion was that he should keep the title band and the oval containing the NN logo. Fortunately, Robert saw no pressing need to change the basic design at all. Less fortunately, his jackets were, with the exception of Warblers, restricted to the hardback ‘collector’s editions’. The paperbacks were given uninspiring designs based on colour photographs, which, it was supposed, would appeal to a wider book-buying public. The differences between Gillmor and Ellis jackets are mainly due to technique. The Ellises based their characteristically smudgy designs on pure colour, and rarely used line. Gillmor uses line more often, and overlaps solid blocks of colour to achieve extra colours and tones. For example, at its simplest, a yellow printed over blue produces green. Though no more ‘photographic’ than the Ellises, his technique does allow more detailed designs which often feature a range of birds, animals, insects and flowers in more or less realistic colours and settings. As always, they are produced and printed by craft methods. The New Naturalist jackets are a rare example of a computer-free zone in the modern book-publishing world.
Since 1985, Robert has supplied the printer with his artwork in the form of a series of blocks or ‘colour separations’, in which each printed colour is rendered as black on white. Only when the jacket is printed do the colours emerge and combine to form the picture. For this reason, the artist normally does a detailed colour sketch from which the blocks are made, and it is this sketch, rather than the printed jacket, that has been used on the fliers and advertisements of some forthcoming titles (my own Nature Conservation was an example). The first time the artist actually sees the design in printed form is when he is shown a kind of proof, known as a chromalin, produced by inkjet laser. This enables him to decide on any last-minute adjustments to the colours before printing. Technology helps that task, too – a gadget placed over the colour registers a number which enables the printer to adjust the tone to the exact level required. The jackets themselves are printed by the technique known as offset lithography, in which the printing inks are added as the paper passes between whirling rollers. Such printing machines are nowadays becoming museum pieces, and are used mainly for reproducing artwork as prints. Between 1985 and 1996, the jackets were printed by Radavian Press in Reading, and since then by the Norwich-based Saxon Photolitho Ltd. By good fortune, both were close enough to Robert Gillmor’s homes for him to supervise each printing to ensure that the right combination of colour tones are selected. The naturalistic colours of the jackets depend on very precise tones chosen from a wide range in the Pantone matching system. In recent times the process has become even more critical, since Robert has taken to using tints, artful layers of dots visible only under a strong lens, to squeeze a wider range of colours and tones out of his four basic colours.
The six pieces of artwork used to make up the four plates for printing the jacket of Moths. The 30 per cent black tint was printed over the yellow to make the dull green background. The mixture of the 80 per cent red and yellow created orange. The dark grey centres to the black wing patches are an 80 per cent black tint. The solid black and two black tints are combined in one plate, as is the red with its 80 per cent tint. See plate 12 for the finished jacket.
The Gillmor jackets offer an intriguing mixture of design ideas, from naturalistic scenes, like The New Forest and Lakeland, to more graphic designs, like Ferns and Plant Disease. The jacket of The Natural History of Pollination could be a homage to Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, who used a similar bee-and-foxglove motif for Bumblebees. With The Broads, where the brilliant colours of the spine bleed into a monochrome waterway, the jacket even contrives to tell a story. How do such ideas surface? Work on the jackets normally begins after the text is nearly ready, at least in draft form, but several months in advance of the publication date. The artist is normally sent a synopsis of the book by the publishers, together with the introduction and a sample chapter. This gives him a general idea of the book from which a suitable design may emerge by doodling numerous sketches. There is generally some discussion between artist and author. A chat with the author often results in agreed motifs which the artist can work on, and it also helps to ensure the author is happy with the chosen design. For example, for Lakeland, Derek Ratcliffe sent Robert a list of suitable subjects, including various species of birds, insects and plants, along with a colour transparency of a view from Falcon Crag, above Derwentwater. The prominence of a peregrine falcon in the finished jacket is a reference to Falcon Crag, but may also be a compliment to Ratcliffe as the author of a well-known book about that remarkable bird. For my own book, Nature Conservation, the original design had a plainer background with a superimposed outline of the British Isles. I wasn’t keen on this, and, to my delight, Robert substituted a beautiful landscape setting for the finished book, which, from various clues in the architecture, wildlife and distant hills, we agreed must be somewhere in west Somerset! In several cases, the jacket is, in fact, based on a real place. The church at Wiveton, Robert’s next door village on the North Norfolk coast, forms the background to British Bats, while it is the ancient stones and tombs of Binham Priory that adorn Lichens. By the by, at the request of the author, Robert added a little lichen-mimicking moth to one of the stones on the latter design. Did you spot it? (I didn’t.) The Loch Lomondside jacket shows the early evening light of midsummer playing on Ben Lomond. Pollination incorporates a bee that is recognisably Bombus hortorum, the garden bumblebee. For Plant Disease, the authors’ reference to target-spot disease of ivy inspired Robert to examine some ivy on a wall a few yards from his front door, and almost immediately found it, in all its spotty glory. Other designs took longer to work out. Robert abandoned his first versions of Amphibians and Reptiles, and Freshwater Fish, featuring several amphibians and game-fish respectively. Moths, on the other hand, needed no modification. The bold colours of the garden tiger-moth are so perfect for lithography that it virtually chose itself.
Northumberland was one of the more protracted commissions, partly because new methods of production had been imposed on the artist (see below), but also because there was less in the book about birds than had been expected. Robert had originally produced a design in which birds were prominent, including a fine ring ousel on the spine and an eider duck (as the iconic bird of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne). To bring the jacket closer to Angus Lunn’s text, some of the birds were shooed off the design. Robert added an outline of the county in white, which one of the editors hilariously mistook for bolts of lightning – it would have been an extremely dramatic thunderstorm, but may be the weather can be like that, up there in Northumberland.
For The Seashore, Robert Gillmor was asked to produce a design that said ‘seashore’ to the reader, clearly and unambiguously, but without seeming clichéd. He began by making pencil sketches of starfish, crabs, limpets and other shore life, combining the different elements into a coherent design. Barnacles, in particular, proved a good subject for a linocut, with their bold, sculptured shells and flickering gills. But perhaps the most telling feature was the addition of concentric white lines to create ripples, as when the observer, peering down into the miniature world of the rock-pool, disturbs the surface with his finger. The jacket forms the greatest possible contrast with the original Sea Shore of 1949, for which the Ellises produced an austere design of a sun-bleached crab’s claw lying half-buried in the sand.
Northumberland: the hardback jacket was reproduced from a linocut and screen-printed in a single process.
Seashore: the hardback jacket was based on a linocut and printed by offset lithography.
Over the years, the artist’s technique has become more complex and demanding, no doubt to bring an element of challenge to the commission, but also reflecting the development of Robert’s wider work. One innovation has been the use of tints, first employed on Ireland, to create subtle variations in tone as well as extra colours. For Moths, a hand lens reveals that the apparently even olive-green background is in fact a tint obtained by overprinting yellow with fine black dots. Tints require a degree of exactness that borders on the virtuosic. For the recent jackets, he has produced up to nine separate pieces of artwork, from which the printer makes the four printing plates.
Another change has been the use of linocuts to produce bold, expressive line artwork, full of character. Linocuts are made by cutting into a sheet of linoleum with an awl-like tool to leave a raised design, from which a print is obtained. They first appeared on The Broads where the luscious colour on the left contrasting with the monotony on the right owes much of its effect to the technique. The black ink plates for Nature Conservation and The Seashore were both linocuts.
In future, linocuts may become the basis for the whole design, as in Northumberland. In 2004, the publishers asked Robert Gillmor to produce ready made full-colour artwork for the printer to screen and print as a single process, rather than making the plates from a number of separate drawings. This may become necessary if, as is currently planned, the books are colour-printed. Colour-printing would almost certainly have to be done overseas, and there are commercial advantages in printing the jackets and the books together. Robert, an experienced printmaker, intends to make more use of linocuts which can also be made as camera-ready artwork. He hopes to transfer the same rich effect of the original hand-printed work to the printed jacket. It does, however, require immense technical skill (and time) to produce a piece of lino intricately carved in relief, resembling, to the unskilled observer, a detailed diagram of Hampton Court maze. The slightest mistake is hard to rectify. Another problem, though hopefully not one for the foreseeable future, is that craft skills are being replaced by computer techniques, and fewer artists are skilled in traditional techniques, such as linocutting. In my view, the jackets, on which so much of the New Naturalists’ attractiveness to collectors is invested, are not a wise place to make economies, nor radical changes.
The Original linocut for The Broads jacket.
Despite the great care that goes into their production, some jacket designs have tiny technical defects. Robert pointed out to me one of his own mistakes on the Nature Conservation jacket. Under the body of the large copper butterfly, the hedgerows should be green, not blue; he had missed out a small section of the yellow block. Since the book happens to be written by me, I must have looked at that jacket a thousand times without spotting the mistake (did you?). Some improvements would be possible, in retrospect. Robert is unhappy about the colour tone of the cliffs on Lakeland, and thinks a darker colour on the main rock face would have created a better contrast with the foreground crag. The aberrant coloured book-number on Lichens could have been avoided by substituting a grey sky tone in the open ‘windows’ above the title band.
Far more annoying to collectors is that the design occasionally stops slightly short of the spine, so that there is an ugly white margin to the left, especially if the jacket has slipped on the book. Though Robert takes pains to prevent this from happening, the exact size of the book is hard to gauge before it is printed. The Ellises got around the problem by smearing colour onto the back, but this is impossible with Robert Gillmor’s more detailed and intricate work. Much more serious is the tendency of the inks to fade or change colour over time, and more quickly if placed in direct sunlight. By some perverse trick of fortune, the most colour-sensitive titles tend to be the most valuable ones, and a faded spine can reduce the book’s value by scores, if not hundreds, of pounds! I spoke to the current printers about this, and was told that the reason for using non-colourfast inks is the printing method, which requires very exact colour tones. It means that the printers select from a very wide range of ink colours, most of which are not made to be colourfast. The big advantage of using the half-tone screen process is that it requires only the four basic printing colours, black, magenta, ‘cyan’ and yellow, so that the jackets can be printed with colourfast inks, as the early Ellis jackets evidently were. But the collector is left with the conundrum of what to do with numbers 73 to 94. The more valuable they become, the more reason to conceal them. Has anyone designed a transparent wrapper that filters out ultraviolet light? Should one make several laser copies right away, and consign the original to a bank vault? Or is the investment value of a book immaterial, and, like a car, you accept that condition depreciates over time. The answer probably depends on why you bought the book in the first place.