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.

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 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.

Photo credit: Etta Lemon, Aurum Emily Williamson was horrified by the plight of the crested grebe, a milliner’s favourite – but instead of wringing her hands she turned her outrage to activism. Inviting her friends to tea, she asked them to sign a simple pledge: Wear No Feathers. And so, the Society for the Protection of Birds was born, in 1889. All of its members were women. I found Emily’s name on the RSPB’s website, but there was no story and no photograph. Their archivist told me that a bomb destroyed all early records during the Blitz, and I would find no images. But Emily’s house is still standing, today in a public park – so I travelled to Fletcher Moss Gardens in Didsbury, Manchester, in search of her footprints.

A park warden making tea had never heard of Emily Williamson, nor knew if there was any kind of plaque. Finally, I found a small, metal board hidden on a shady wall next to the café entrance: ‘Action For Birds – 100 years.’ Yet the name on this centenary board was not Emily’s. ‘The unveiling was performed by the Society’s President MAGNUS MAGNUSSON on 17th February 1989 at The Croft where the Society was founded one hundred years ago.’

The Manchester Evening Press had covered the unveiling of this underwhelming plaque, referring to Emily as a ‘stout Victorian woman’. In 1889 she would have been 34. Were there really no images of Emily? She had no children, but she did have four brothers. I turned to the internet to see if I could discover more. Online census returns led me to Emily’s greatnephew, the eminent Cambridge zoology professor Sir Patrick Bateson. I sent a tentative email.

‘Good heavens,’ he replied. ‘Did Great Aunt Emily really start the RSPB? It would be so good if that were true!’

It was true. Astonishingly, neither he nor any family members had any idea about this aspect of her life. How modest she must have been. I asked Patrick Bateson if there was, by chance, a photograph. Later that day, an email dropped into my inbox. Opening that file was a tremendously exciting moment. I couldn’t have guessed at the power this image would come to hold when it eventually went out into the world.

When you have a face, you have a personality – and then you have a story. I am still piecing together Emily’s wider story, combing through the Bateson family archives. Her cousin Edith was a committed suffragist. Was Emily? I don’t yet know.

‘Women are mostly timid in inaugurating anything,’ she once wrote to a newspaper, ‘but they are very ready to give their help to a good cause when they are shown the way.’ It was a typically modest statement about her part in founding the RSPB.

Now that she has a face, Manchester’s eco-heroine is being propelled into the spotlight. To the talented and trenchant women driving today’s conservation movement, Emily has become a bit of a poster girl. The planned statue will be a catalyst for change, inspiring a new generation to take action for nature. The lesson we can all draw from Emily Williamson is this: one voice can make a difference. Four bronze maquettes of Emily Williamson will be unveiled on 1 July in Fletcher Moss Park, Didsbury, Manchester, before going on tour throughout RSPB reserves. Get involved: vote for your favourite; donate to the fundraising campaign. www.emilywilliamsonstatue.com Etta Lemon, the dragon

Etta Lemon was a magnificent woman with a magnificent name – a name that once inspired terror and admiration not only in her hometown of Redhill, Surrey, but nationwide. If Emily Williamson was the RSPB’s modest founder, Etta Lemon was the energetic prime mover.

The charity was lucky to have such a formidable character at its helm, from the original campaign against feathered hats, to gaining the Royal Assent in 1904, to the creation of Britain’s first nature reserves, and beyond. For half a century, Etta Lemon fought fiercely and passionately on behalf of the birds.

Etta’s single-mindedness, obsessive personality and thick skin put me in mind of today’s young climate change campaigner, Greta Thunberg. There is even an uncanny likeness: the unflinching stare, the determined mouth. Was Etta Lemon also neuro-diverse, like Greta? Certain anecdotes make me wonder if this might have been the case. As a girl, Etta would note down the names of any ‘feather bedecked women’ in her family church in Blackheath, London, and then write to each offender, calling out the cruelty entailed. For a young woman in the 1870s this was extreme, even militant, behaviour.

In her campaigning prime, Etta Lemon was so trenchant in her views, so passionate on behalf of the birds, that a director of the Natural History Museum once hid down a stairwell rather than face her in lobbying mode. She was known, in her time, as ‘Mother of the Birds’. She was also known as ‘the dragon’, and lived on in RSPB folklore long after she had been forcibly removed from her perch, aged 80, in 1939.

Every conservation movement needs an Etta Lemon – but as a woman she was ahead of her time, and many couldn’t stomach her dictatorial, ‘mannish’ personality. Once ejected by the men, she was consigned to the scrapheap of history as the RSPB moved forward into a new, more scientific era. Birds became synonymous with boys. For 80 years, her portrait languished in the attic at the charity’s HQ in Sandy, Bedfordshire. I’m delighted to report that, on publication of my book, Etta’s likeness has been dusted off and re-hung. She is back on her perch at the RSPB. The world needs eco warriors like Etta Lemon. Etta Lemon – The Woman Who Saved the Birds, Aurum, £9.99 Book Tessa as a speaker www.tessaboase.com