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| Conor Jameson - entertaining and informative |
IN the second half of the Victorian age, many men (and some women) of wealth and enterprise ventured far beyond Britain's shores to explore little-known jungles and icecaps in faraway places.
But for one man, the bold step into the unknown took a different form.
Nature enthusiast W.H. Hudson had been brought up by his late parents in rural Argentina, so, for him, it was coming to England, the land of his forebears, that was the Big Adventure.
Aged 32 on the day he left The Pampas, he had never attended a day of school, but he was far from being an uneducated man.
Among his parents’ collection of books had been one that particularly fascinated him - Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne.
On arrival at Southampton aboard a steam packet from Buenos Aires, Hudson's top priority, therefore, was to see and hear as many as possible of the birds so vividly described by White.
Over the next 45-plus years, Hudson's own colourful descriptions of his wanderings throughout southern England, especially in Hampshire and Wiltshire, were to provide the bedrock of his career both as a writer-naturalist and as an effective campaigner for bird protection.
It is 103 years since this enigmatic figure died, aged 81, of heart failure but at the 2025 annual meeting of Lincolnshire Bird Club, he was brought to life in an absorbing illustrated talk by Norfolk-based Glaswegian Conor Jameson, formerly an RSPB staffer for 27 years but now a full-time speaker, writer and author of Finding W.H. Hudson - The Man Who Came to Britain To Save The Birds.
Conor's presentation was excellent - conversational, amusing and sometimes mischievous in his choice of illustrations, with a photograph of Clint Eastwood (as he appeared in the western, Pale Rider), making a couple of guest appearances!
Evidently, like the character played by Eastwood in the Hollywood movie, Hudson was a man with a mission.
He was determined to do whatever he could to halt the widespread practice pursued by 'collector naturalists', many of them eminent ornithologists, of shooting brightly-plumaged birds for the purpose of having them stuffed and displayed behind glass as drawing room 'trophies'.
During his talk, the speaker also touched on Hudson's somewhat unorthodox relationship with women. He was married to Emily Wingrave, an opera singer 15 years his senior, but seemed to spend much of his time with other women - in particular, the group who went on to found the organisation that was to become the RSPB.
He was not an activist and is never known to have addressed a public meeting. But his effectiveness derived from his stinging letters to The Times and other publications which tweaked the conscience of many of those who might otherwise have disregarded the callousness not just of taxidermy but also of the killing of birds so that their feathers could be used as adornments to the hats of 'fashionable' women.
Inevitably, Hudson trod on the toes of many establishment figures (among them, the artist and writer John Gould) because he exposed the cruelty, snobbery and arrogance that characterised their activities which were all-too-often disguised as scientific research.
For much of his life, he and Emily lived in poverty, but, as his many books became increasingly popular, his circumstances became comfortable - particularly with the success of one of his novels, Green Mansions, which proved to be a runaway success in the US and was later made into a film, starring Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins (of Psycho fame).
Following his engaging talk, Conor was thanked by LBC chairman Phil Espin and warmly applauded by his audience which numbered about 50.
* Finding W.H. Hudson is published in paperback at £17.99 by Pelagic Publishing: pelagicpublishing.com/
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| Page-turner - Conor James' absorbing biography of a remarkable individual |
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