Alumni Profiles
John Aitchison (Geography, 1984) By Mark A. Walsh (English, 1997) ‘Oh, I love that book,’ the assistant at the bookshop told me when I ordered John Aitchison’s The Shark and the Albatross. ‘I’m a bit of an Arctic nerd, so this was my kind of thing.’ If you’re about to do an interview, believe me, this is excellent news. The Shark and the Albatross is a fascinating insight into wildlife film-making—and, in many ways, the perfect book for trying times. Poetic evocations of far-flung, exotic nooks of the planet: check. An ode to patience and perseverance: check. A timely reminder of the beauty, fragility and mercilessness of nature: check. A seasoned wildlife film-maker, John Aitchison is, reassuringly, exactly how you would expect. He’s softly spoken, of course—this is a man who can sit for hours, alone and silent, in a canvas hide—and he has a ready smile. He listens. I suspect that if you were to build an idea in your mind of a wildlife film-maker, you might conjure up someone like John. He was raised in Portsmouth where his parents would take him on walks around the coast when he was little. Treks on the nearby Farlington Marshes made a particular impression, John says, with flocks of migrating Brent geese, waders and other feeding birds providing spectacular windows on nature ‘away from human stuff out in this wild place in the harbour.’ Even as a youngster, the natural world drew him in. He enjoyed trying to identify the different species with his mother and soon struck a deal with his parents to buy binoculars—if he could raise half the money himself, they would finance the rest. ‘I washed cars and raised pennies that way. And then there was this moment of revelation
16 Girton Newsletter
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Spring 2020
when it was possible to see the birds much better.... it was a self-discovery type thing.’ John was soon borrowing a camera from his father, himself a keen amateur photographer. As a teenager, he had something of an epiphany. Watching the BBC’s Life on Earth, he said, ‘It dawned on me that there was a job that combined those interests. I happened to have stumbled onto something that combined all the aspects of everything I liked.’ Academically talented, John was encouraged to apply to Cambridge and with his clarity of purpose, John thrived. His Director of Studies in Geography, Dr Jean Grove, encouraged a wanderlust and fostered a get-your-
hands-dirty way of learning—music to the ears of a practically-minded student who had grown up with a love of the outdoors. ‘Jean thought we should all travel. She was really quite insistent about it. That stood me in good stead because it meant that by the time I was going to any work-related stuff subsequently, I had done quite a bit of travel—I’d spent a whole summer in Peru when I was 20, on an expedition, because Jean thought it was a good idea. I’d got a taste for it.’ By the time it came to graduating, a fortuitous conversation at a College dinner led to his applying for a job as an assistant film librarian with the RSPB. He didn’t get it, but he made an impression. ‘They kind of invented a job for me, they gave me a kind of
