#52 Wild Life of Britain by F. Fraser Darling
F. (Frank) Fraser Darling (1903 to 1979), the author of Wild Life of Britain was, according to Wikipedia, an ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist, and author. And if that wasn’t enough to make him internally riven, Wikipedia ungraciously informs us that he was the illegitimate son of Captain Frank Moss (whom he never met, and who was killed in action in 1917); and that his mother resisted the demands of her family that the baby be fostered. Oh, he also ran away from school at age 15. How any good can have come from such origins is a mystery that must have confounded the bluenoses of the times; and still today. And how Darling, with his wretched background, came to receive a knighthood (in 1970) is surely a mystery beyond explaining!
And, before we abandon the sardonic tone, know that among Darling’s many achievements – a clutch of honours and awards, and over 25 publications – surely the most testing for the credulous is the Fraser Darling Effect, to which he gave his name. Listen carefully. While studying herring gulls in1938 Darling noticed that gulls nesting at a distance from one another rarely raised their young past the fledgling stage – because, typically, there was huge loss to predators. But where the gulls nested close together in colonies the predator loss was relatively much less. Strength in numbers you might think. Well, not exactly. The “effect” of nesting in colonies, Darling observed, was for the breeding cycle to be synchronised throughout the colony (and moreover, accelerated), with resultant simultaneous hatching, in turn leading to fewer casualties to predation. Darling attributed the “effect” to the sexual stimulation of the hens living in close proximity.
The illustrations in this book are particularly worthwhile. In each volume of the Britain in Pictures series the illustrations are numerous – as the series title would predicate – and of themselves they are informative and estimable, but sometimes we have a few that aren’t particularly apposite to the topic, and have been sourced so as best to fill the space allocated. Not so here. They comprise an impressive collection of bird, fish, animal, insect and reptile drawings.
Darling starts his story with four paradoxes. First, that although Britain is highly industrialised, and densely populated, it still contains “stretches of deep rural country, commons, fens and wastes untouched for a thousand years, and mountains and moors which are wild, remote and little trodden by man”. The second paradox: that although as a people the British are kind to animals “they hunt some of them with a fervour and ritual that is almost religious”. The third: that while the British are among the world’s most solicitous of domestic and domesticated animals they are mostly indifferent to the mistreatment of wild creatures. And fourth: that despite its rural traditions Britain is an urban country – and increasingly so. And yet another paradox: that while the rural dweller is, by and large, little bothered by the wild life around him, it is the urban dweller “who has tried to awaken the national consciousness to the beauty of our countryside with its heritage of wild life”. These paradoxes overlay the startling diversity of Britain’s natural history compared with any other part of Europe: due, it seems to the tempering influence of the Gulf Stream – the result being a place of northern latitude with an Oceanic climate. Thus Darling asserts: “A Martian gazing on the face of Britain might well choose this country for a living museum.”
Darling undertakes a comprehensive whip-around of the entire country, describing the environment and habitat region by region, then the endemic fauna of each. He spends a chapter on “the creatures”, a chapter brimming with statistics. “It surprises many people to learn that we have seventy-five species and sub-species of native mammals, a number almost as great as a thousand years ago” - having exterminated in that thousand years only the wolf, the beaver, the wild boar, the brown bear, and the reindeer. Followers of the journalist and writer, George Monbiot will be aware of his mission to re-introduce the wolf back into the wild parts of Britain, and with that re-introduction to restore part of the former balance of nature – the process known as “rewilding”. Monbiot’s writing is some of the sanest I know. He’s not hard to find in a Google search – the following link should do it too:
https://www.monbiot.com/about/
Darling then gives an historic conspectus, and suggests that the proper approach should be an appraisal of the interaction between man and the rest, broadly the interaction of all creatures “inhabiting the same ground”. Historically, this is the journey from man the hunter for the pot, through man the hunter for fun, to man the hunter for knowledge, and finally and hopefully – to man the conservator. Man the hunter was intensely aware of the wild life around him – an awareness that was practical and, accordingly, hunter man did not destroy the wild life of his locale. But once agriculture arrived man’s attitude turned from defensive to offensive – the deer that raids the crops is an enemy. Interestingly, this inevitable change in attitude did not lead to an overall extermination mindset but rather to the parallel ritual of hunting. The exclusive preserve of the large land-owners no doubt, but game hunting of necessity must have the flip-side of game preservation. Hence red deer, hares, pheasants, grouse, salmon and trout, while reserved for the hunting pleasure of royalty and their nearer minions, were preserved for that same pleasure.
Darling has a long chapter on British naturalists, extending through the era of the observant amateur to the science-based present. He pauses to honour Charles Darwin as the greatest of the self-taught amateurs: one “almost uneducable” in his studies, one so interested in collecting stones and insects that his despairing father urged the Church as a career – a career that would provide him with the leisure time to pursue his love of natural history! Darwin had a desultory time at Cambridge, then got the job and the break as naturalist on the five-year voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. On the voyage Darwin had the time to range across diverse areas of study, was able to make thousands of observations, and was freed from the influences of others. The result? Darwin “gave up the orthodox notion of species separately created, and crystallised the hitherto nebulous theory of evolution by stating the hypothesis of natural selection, the survival of the fittest, and modification in descent.”
Not surprisingly, Darling’s concluding chapter is a plea for the future – not starry eyed, but accepting of the practicalities. There was, in 1943, plenty to be hopeful about. Natural history had become a scientific study, and yet the gifted amateur still played a valuable role. The Albert Schweitzer philosophy of ‘respect and reverence for life’ had become pretty well entrenched. But Darling highlights the continuing need for the establishment of conservation sanctuaries (nothing new there: William the Conqueror had done it nearly nine hundred years earlier); and the continuing need for education and for vigilance, and the need for mindfulness of the opportunities for conservation.
#87 Sporting Pictures of England by Guy Paget
What is it with “sporting pictures”? Why do they need this book to shine the light on them?
Well, that’s the point. They are rarely in the light, rarely on the walls of the public galleries and institutions, because typically they have been special commissions from individuals or organisations who have walls of their own, thank you; and who are private.
This point is forcefully, if unwittingly, made by the listing at the rear of Sporting Pictures of England of some 62 “notable” artists who have practised in the sporting pictures genre. Sixty-two artists who have left behind pictures of horses, deer, salmon, dogs (alone or in hunting packs), and partridges (dead and alive) and who would mostly remain un-famous to this day without the application of the Guy Paget touch. Guy Paget is our author.
Major Guy Paget (1886 to 1952) was an “enthusiast and an expert”, and frequent contributor to The Field, and to Country Life etc. on these neglected artists. He was the author of a number of books on Hunting (capital H, so do we presume fox-hunting?), and was the historian of the 7th Northamptonshire Regiment. He also wrote three biographies of important mediaeval women; and was a Conservative Member of Parliament for a short while in the 1920s. As an example of the apple falling rather further from the tree than legend dictates, his son became a Labor M.P. and later a life peer. How like the British – and unlike the Australians – to produce a lifelong Labor man named Reginald Thomas Guy Des Voeux Paget .Q.C., Baron Paget of Northampton.
As to the sporting pictures: well, I didn’t find much to detain me. Guy Paget’s access to the works he describes was phenomenal, doubly so when considering that most of them are in private hands. As a consequence of his diligence the overview is extensive and esoteric. But for this general reader the interest was minimal. Is it strange that a picture of a dog with a partridge in its mouth does not fire the blood? Or that a picture of the hounds breaking cover, presumably pursuing a fox that has similarly done so, does not stir the heart?
And yet, Paget does have some telling observations about the influences of “country life” on the nation:
# During the eighteenth century the breeding of horses, dogs, cattle, sheep and pigs had taken the place of war and had become the ruling passion of the country gentleman.
# With this went a love for country life, shooting, hunting, racing, gardening.
# Without this passion, wealth and fashion might have been concentrated in London.
# However, even the government of the country had to give way to it - and the sittings of Parliament were regulated by the shooting and hunting seasons.
# Accordingly, in England the real home of the ruling class is in the country, not in the capital.
Was it true in 1945; is it true today?
#78 Battlefields in Britain by C.V. Wedgewood
Dame (Cecily) Veronica Wedgewood (1910 to 1997) was a distinguished historian who specialised in English history of the 1600s, and – is this a Wikipedian put-down? – whose “biographies and narrative histories are said to have provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works”. Ouch! Nevertheless, her peers regarded her as an outstanding historian and biographer; and her own life story is a catalogue of achievements and honours, including the Order of Merit. Sadly, the well-used brain did not save her from Alzheimer’s disease, the affliction of her final years.
Mackenzie (1883 to 1972) was a remarkable figure: born in England but a committed Scot, novelist, and writer of some 50 works of history and essays and criticism and biography, and books for children. He was founder of the magazine, The Gramophone, and an authority and contributor on serious music. He was prolific beyond words.
He was a British secret agent during the First World War, and spent much of the War in Greece. He returned to Crete and Greece in 1958 as the author and presenter of a multi-part television series, The Glory That Was Greece. One of the segments, and here we arrive at my point, was filmed at the scene of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE: Marathon the place from whence – as every schoolboy of my vintage used to know – the young Pheidippides ran the 26 miles to Athens to tell the inhabitants that the Athenian army had defeated the numerically superior Persians; and then dropped dead. While exciting to schoolboys, the story is likely apocryphal. Nonetheless, Pheidippides is immortally saluted in the 26-mile length of the marathon.
The Battle of Marathon is not a British battle, I know, but the memory of Compton Mackenzie standing in a bare piece of ground, pointing with his stick to conjure up a scene of more than two millennia ago, resonates with the whole of Wedgewood’s book – where none of the battles described by her occurred fewer than two hundred years since. It takes some imagination; and this is what is generously provided by Wedgewood.
Having steered so far off course I started to wonder whether the title of this volume might be a misnomer. Why battlefields, and not battles? Surely the author has to describe the battle, and surely the field of battle is merely part of the overall story. Surely the battlefield can be the dominant feature of the story only if the physiography itself proved to be a determinant in the outcome. So in approaching the story of each significant battle described by Wedgewood I have held foremost in my mind the panorama, the mise-en-scene. How much did the outlook contribute to the outcome?
Happily for my thesis, in Wedgewood’s opening chapter, on the pre-Norman Conquest era, she makes this very point: ‘…..who knows what really takes place in a battle. Certainly not the combatants: how then the historian? Something more and less than knowledge is needed………the sense of the past, the imaginative mind which can think the scene again…….see the bend of the stream round the willow clump, this gentle dip, that bare hillock as the anxious soldier saw it, feel the sun or the mist of three centuries ago”. Mindful of the landscapes of the past, Wedgewood notes that it is in the descriptions of battles that we find the best descriptions of these landscapes. Having said that, she laments the paucity of extant information about the battles involving the Romans, the early Saxons, and so on – indeed some of the sites of early battles are no longer known.
As to the rest: there’s too much for me to cover all of Wedgewood’s survey, and little point in précis that are so short as to be uninformative, so I’m going to skip the battles of the Wars of the Roses, that is the wars between the white rose Yorkists and the red rose Lancastrians – where, finally, at Bosworth on 22nd August 1485, Richard Third lost his horse and his life, and Lancastrian Henry Seventh took the crown. And I’m also going to skip the Civil War battles, where off and on over four years the Parliamentary forces of Cromwell overcame the forces of Charles First and triggered the downfall of the monarchy.
But it’s hard to pass over the Battle of Hastings, a battle recognised as a foundation stone of the English people. The story goes back a little way. The Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, reigned from 1042 to 1066. He was childless, and in 1051 while his cousin William Duke of Normandy was on a visit to England, King Edward pledged to leave William the kingdom. But, on Edward’s deathbed some fifteen years later, the King instead nominated as his successor his nephew, Harold Godwinson. The affronted William wasted no time. Edward died on 5th January, 1066, and William’s forces landed in England on 13th October, eleven miles from Hastings. By the next day they had marched to a spot near Hastings, engaged King Harold’s forces, and won the victory. Although the two armies were more or less of equal number, Harold was said to have been underprepared and his forces less experienced. [There was also the factor that Harold and his army had just now arrived after a forced march from the north of England where he had engaged and defeated the King of Norway, an ally of Duke William, who acting in concert with the Duke thought he’d have a piece of England too.] When, at one point, the Normans had been driven back Harold’s less-disciplined men broke formation and gave pursuit – to their cost. But the battle lasted all day, and nobody can evaluate the ebbs and flows. Of no little significance, however, is the fact that Harold perished on the battlefield courtesy of an arrow through the eye. As to the terrain: contrary to Westwood’s opening proposition, the terrain seems to have played little part in the outcome of the battle. Instead, Westwood concludes: “The truth about Hastings is in all respects odder and sadder than the romantic fictions which from the earliest times have crowded round it………it was an extraordinary fluke of history that one of these feeble little shafts [the Norman arrows were short and light – the Saxons had no bowmen at all] whistled home to its deadly target just as King Harold flung back his head. One second more, one second less, and it had glanced off his helmet, scarcely felt.”
One extraordinary legacy of the Battle of Hastings is the Bayeux Tapestry. This group of 50 centimetre-tall embroideries (not, in fact, tapestries) portray the Battle of Hastings, and the relevant events of the two years prior. They were apparently embroidered within a couple of years of the Battle, destined to hang in the soon-to-be-completed Bayeux cathedral. Some of the later sections are missing, but it is miraculous that so much has survived. The panels, stitched together, are altogether some 70 metres (230 feet) long. The tapestry is today housed in a circular purpose-built museum in Bayeux. Incidentally, there is a 44-page blockbuster article in the August 1969 edition of National Geographic commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings; and commemorating the fact that the Geographic’s photographers had been the first to capture the whole tapestry on colour film. The article, a blend of history and Bayeux travelogue, features the tapestry as narrow panels across the top of each page. There is a short running commentary under each panel as the drama unfolds.
Wedgwood next deals with a group of skirmishes a couple of hundred years after Hastings. During the intervening years the Norman invaders had integrated, and their occupancy of England had been “normalised” – although the Court language remained French. But the primitive Welsh and Scots were causing grief. There were Welsh wars from 1277 through 1295, then Falkirk in 1298 and Bannockburn in 1314. Falkirk was the stage for the Scots rebel William Wallace (remember Mel Gibson bare kneed in tartan), and Bannockburn the stage for Robert the Bruce (remember the spider). Wedgewood highlights the dilemma, not resolved in the years since Hastings: “by what means can foot soldiers armed with spears overcome cavalry and bowmen? Only by evading and drawing the enemy into unknown and difficult country.” Wedgewood also highlights the mechanical aspects of the warfare of the time. After Hastings the cavalry, both knights and horses, had become completely sheathed in armour – good for frontal attack, but not so mobile. Although with formidable impact, the charge could be delivered only at a trot. And while there had been a universal adoption of the mechanical crossbow, including adoption by the Scots, England still retained the longbow. However, the crossbow was prone to mechanical defects; the longbow, properly handled, was just as deadly, possibly more so – iron tipped arrows could pierce armour.
Edward the First led his army in the defeat of the Wallace insurgency. The English bowmen were triumphant, although the heavy-laden cavalry almost succumbed to the bog that Wallace’s men stood behind. Edward the Second (the fourth son of Edward the First) had accompanied his father on the Falkirk campaign; and sixteen years later, against Robert the Bruce, he became one of history’s big-time losers. Robert the Bruce had spent years in leading the Scottish cause, taking fortress after fortress, and recruiting supporters - and he just had to be stopped! So it was that the new King Edward amassed a 20000-strong army (including 3000 cavalry) on the field of Bannockburn – and lost decisively to Bruce’s 7000 foot soldiers. The battle is described as “the only one in recorded mediaeval history in which infantry totally and overwhelmingly defeated cavalry”. Wedgewood concludes that it is reassuring for today’s united Britain to know that “the most lamentable defeat which an English army ever suffered” was at the hands of the Scots. I don’t think so! Wherein does that reassurance lie?
I’ll conclude with Culloden, another – later, some 430 years later – adventure of the pesky Scots. In 1987 my wife, Annie, and I were touring through Britain, and with no particular agenda came to the site of the Battle of Culloden. I knew a little of the story, about the merciless suppression by George the Second’s redcoats of the rebel forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie - the crushing of the so-called Jacobite Rebellion. And the little I knew I had learned from the 1964 Peter Watkins film Culloden. That film, a pioneer in the field of docudrama, had achieved some fame, and accolades galore, and had about it (as I remembered then, and think I remember today) a feeling of doom. The Battle at Culloden, on 16 April 1746, was the last battle fought on British soil, and cost 1000 rebel lives on the day (for loss of 50 King’s men only), plus 1000 more in the subsequent bloodthirsty round-up.
So in 1987 I’d set the scene in my own mind; and, given the trail of numbered “highlights”, the total absence of other visitors, and the foggy soundless day, the field of Culloden was an eerie place indeed.
I wrote these words before actually reading Battlefields in Britain. When I turned to the final page of the book, to the final paragraph, I saw that the author, too, was mindful of the drama: “Culloden Moor, the scene of this last and final defeat of the Celtic north by the Anglo-Saxon, is a site as beautiful as it is tragic, with the desolate moor under a wild sky and the long graves of the clans buried in the places where they fell.”
Gary Andrews
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