FEATURES
The women who saved the birds Most of us are familiar with the RSPB and its work, but what do we know of the founders of the organisation, and the cruel trade that inspired their movement? Tessa Boase tells the story. unique contribution to Britain’s conservation movement is now to be commemorated with a statue. Getting to this point has been a long journey. It began in 2014 with my attempts to persuade a publisher that the RSPB’s birth was a great, untold story that needed to be heard. I couldn’t understand why this heroic tale of early eco-feminism had been completely neglected by history. It had a brilliant cast, a gripping plotline and vivid extremes of scenery, from the swamps of the Florida Everglades to the glittering Royal Box at the Covent Garden opera. But the idea of women and birds was, apparently, troubling to a publisher. Men, I was told, read books on birds. Women read books on women. I argued that this was a story about women’s fight to save the birds. It combined fashion, commerce, animal rights and women’s rights, and it spanned an era of hurtling social change, from the High Victorian period to the Roaring Twenties. What’s more, I argued, women do birds differently. They’re not so interested in terminology and life lists. Female birders often seek more of an emotional connection. I wanted to discover when this connection was first fired up. How did we get to care about the birds? When did it become shocking to wear paradise, or snowy egret, or albatross feathers on your head? My hunt for the women who saved the birds eventually homed in on two central characters – young, beautiful, spirited and driven. In their personalities, methods and voices, they couldn’t have been more different. You won’t have heard of either but, together, they were formidable. Above: A satirical cartoon from RSPB, mocking the bird hat trend. Left: What the best dressed woman was encouraged to wear on her head around the turn of the century.
Picture credits: Etta Lemon, Aurum
8
NWR Magazine Summer 2021
Picture credit: Etta Lemon, Aurum
One hundred years ago this July, a highly lucrative trade was banned: a trade that once earned Britain £20m a year at its Edwardian peak – that’s £200m in today’s money. The Plumage Act made it a crime to import feathers to Britain. If you think that sounds a bit lightweight and fluffy, consider that between 1870 and 1920 64,000 tons of bird skins were imported into the Port of London for the plumage trade. Ships from every corner of the distant British Empire, crammed with exotic, feathered species, steamed towards Britain to supply the fashion industry. Lyrebirds, scarlet-rumped trogons, Indian green parrots, South American macaws, Raggiana birds-of-paradise… The millinery trade had an insatiable appetite for ‘fancy feathers’, and its female customers clamoured for novelties. But from 1 July 1921 the wheels of this industry, kept spinning for half a century, faltered and stopped for good. Ships bearing feathered cargoes could no longer enter the Port of London. The weekly Mincing Lane plumage auctions ground to a halt. Feather manufacturers laid off their poorly paid female ‘feather hands’, who switched to working in the artificial flower industry. Milliners began creating ‘vegetarian’ hats, for which no bird died to decorate. Ladies browsing the latest fashions began to favour a less fussy, cleaner look. Wearing a hat with half a greater bird-of-paradise sprouting from the rim, complete with beak and eyes, suddenly seemed a little tawdry, a little passé. The ban was the result of a bitter and bloody 30-year campaign driven by women. Their legacy is the RSPB – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Few today know that Britain’s biggest conservation charity was born in 1889, over teacups, as an all-female, anti-fashion movement. When the men’s British Ornithologists Union refused to take a stand against the ‘bird hat’, the women hit back with their own Society for the Protection of Birds. Its founder was Emily Williamson of Didsbury, a solicitor’s wife aged 34, and her
