W. D. Hamilton’s essay appeared in the TLS of August 12, 1994
When I was a boy, Britain was way ahead of the rest of the world in the
publishing of books on natural history – indeed until quite recently
colleagues from America, Eastern Europe and Japan would gasp at the wealth
of our productions and wish they had something similar: the pages and pages
of coloured plates of set butterflies and moths, of beetles, bugs, painted
toadstools, and the colour-illustrated floras that soon covered not only
Britain but also Northern Europe.
The challenge to our supremacy started in America with the Peterson’s Guides.
That was a shock – we had nothing like it: the compact species-descriptions,
the many birds crowded onto each plate, making them easy to compare. By the
time the fashion for using colour photographs arrived, it was all over.
Nowadays in a book shop in Hay-on-Wye you will more easily find a colourful
photographic guide, four inches square, to the fishes of the Chokweneejee
National Forest Reserve, Montana (a lake-strewn area once visited by at
least one tourist who bought the copy) than any guide to the fishes of the
North Sea or any part of the British Isles. That photographic wave was a
product of technological development – Japanese cameras and flash lights
making it all so easy, no doubt (and British field biologists were too poor
to buy the equipment). Now the Japanese are way ahead. Who in Britain, for
example, keeps on his bookshelf a colour photographic guide- to identify the
weeds in his garden, like the one I bought in a very ordinary bookstore in
Nagoya? But – and here I reach the point of all this – we in Britain
actually invented this new publishing format, too. That is, we were the
first to use numerous colour illustrations of living animals and plants in
books and certainly we were the very first to integrate such photographs
into a publishing venture destined to detail every aspect of the natural
history of our islands. There is, in fact, a book of fine colour photographs
of British weeds and with them a text that ought to teach all of us to pull
such plants, when we have to, with more respect than we usually do. It is
written by Sir Edward Salisbury, a former director of the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew. Who published it? Collins, of course, in the New Naturalist
series.
These books, still continuing to appear and now numbering around eighty
volumes, have never attempted to be photographic guides, but they were the
first series in any country to use numerous colour plates based on
photography to sell natural history to the general public. Numerous topics
were evidently planned for the series right from the start, and the best
naturalists in the land were persuaded to write them. I have always wondered
how Collins knew where to look for their writers. Perhaps it is not strange,
given our native eccentricity, that the director of The Royal Botanic
Gardens was approached for a book on, say, British botanical collections or
British gardens, and said he would rather write one on weeds. But how did
Collins find out that a high administrator in Imperial Chemical Industries
was Britain’s leading authority on spiders? (W. S. Bristowe, The World of
Spiders, 1962). One imagines invitations cadged to meetings at 49 Queen’s
Gate, where greying shock-haired enthusiasts could be button-holed, exhibits
in their hands, at tea-time in the Royal Entomological Society library; one
thinks of publisher’s clerks, ordered to find writers on flowers,
infiltrating themselves into the Botanical Society of the British Isles.
However it came about, beautiful, fascinating monographs began to line up on
the bookshop shelves.
The very first volume of this series, E. B. Ford on Butterflies (1945) – of
which group I was at the time an ardent collector – was given to me as a
birthday present by my parents. For a long time I bought none of the series
new because, while reviewers rhapsodized on their low prices, these were
still beyond my childish resources. I think the first of the series that I
bought new was J. E. Lousley’s book on limestone plants (1950); I am sure I
later bought E. B. Ford’s second in the series on Moths (No 30,1955). My own
passion for butterfly and moth collecting had almost burned out by then but
I was still interested. New Naturalist books are generally reticent about
localities for rarities, but who could fail to note here, for example,
Cothill marsh, where the rare bimacula variant of the Scarlet tiger flies?
If one hadn’t time to bicycle to see it, there at least was the photograph
giving the hot, wet reedy feel.
How I envied the people I knew later who had been able to collect all of the
series! Yet how different were those often proudly displayed collections
from my own meagre line of books. Whenever I saw a perfect array of the
bright and smudgy hieroglyphs of the dust-jackets I would curl my lip just a
little: those books had clearly not all been read, or not like mine had. For
me the best in the series meant the dirtiest: most of mine had long ago lost
not only the dust-jackets but also the gold-impressed titles on the spine.
Gradations of dullness and shine of the green cloth born of usage (plus the
varying thickness of the different monographs) have for long had to be my
main way to pick out the volume I am looking for: Harrison Matthews on
mammals (1951/1982) is bulky; C. G. Butler, The World of the Honeybee (1945)
and S. W. Wooldridge and F. Goldring on The Weald (1953) are thin; A. D.
Imms on Insect Natural History, 1947 (the second one I read and second most
important in my life) is unfortunately of rather average thickness – yet it
is still detectably thinner than Ford. There are rumoured to be people who
unwrap and lay to one side the dust-jacket when they read a book, especially
if it is part of a collection, as the New Naturalist books easily become. So
perhaps I should not be too caustic about my friends’ neat rows – but of
course I still am. A loving archivist to my own library in my own way, I
pride myself on an independent convergence to the ways of Darwin who, as I
learned with pleasure, scribbled notes in all his books, and even once
threatened Lyell that if the expanded new edition of his Principles of
Geology was not printed in two volumes, his first act on receiving it would
be to cut it in two down the spine.
Of course I was sorry to see my dust- jackets go and I kept them as long as I
could. As to their art, the work of Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, I was very
ambivalent about it at first but became a convert as I came to recognize
that, for an impression of all the diverse aspects of British nature which
they came to include, the designs for them were very good. Now my problem is
rather to accept the arrival in the recent series of Robert Gilmour as the
dust-jacket artist. He does not use smudges. However, I think that as a boy
I probably would have liked him better.But how did Clifford and Rosemary
work? It is like finding an obvious Van Gogh painting signed: “Vincent and
Estelle” and thinking about who and how. Does Clifford sketch drawings and
Rosemary daub paint or vice versa? Similar problems have occurred to me
about the various photographic geniuses of the early series, principally
John Markham, Robert Atkinson, Brian Perkins and Eric Hosking, all of whom
have photographs in many volumes. It used to seem to me that for people
clearly passionate about scenery and natural history they must have had one
of the most wonderful jobs imaginable – provided, that is, you could stand
cold British wind and rain. The photographic editor of the series no doubt
had to economize on the travelling he was commissioning so I imagine him
packing his team off to Wales in a small estate car (the kind of those days
that had real wooden framing) and giving them a set of directives from the
dozen or so busy authors about what photographs were needed. Arrived on a
small road up a valley leading to the pass, they would park and get out to
survey the terrain. In a few clumsy and laconic words these artists would
divide up their tasks. Markham and Atkinson, the hill walkers, would go up
opposite sides of the valley to the heights and hope that the drizzle would
clear. Atkinson would then photograph the Welsh coal-mining settlement down
the valley and at the same time, drizzle or no, go for close ups of Sorbus
cambroendemicus, the asexual whitebeam growing only, in the whole world, on
the screes of this valley. Markham is to do the podsol soil profiles at the
top of the landslip on his side, to get the Ebbw black-rumped sheep if he
can find them in their characteristic haunt under the bracken, and then go
over the top and start for the summits of the Beacons where the Lower Old
Red Sandstone shales are well exposed. Meanwhile Perkins will go to
photograph the Turquoise Heleborine orchids supposed to be in flower in the
wood above the church, its only and new-found station west of the Urals, for
V. S. Summerhayes’s Wild Orchids of Britain, 1951, and also record wild
Welsh leeks being demolished by sawfly. Hosking is to set up his hide in the
churchyard and do the Pied flycatchers at the nest box which the vicar has
reported. He needs time because he must get his shot with the Flycatcher
lousefly crawling on a bird’s back for Miriam Rothschild (Fleas, Flukes and
Cuckoos, 1952), but that of course shouldn’t prevent him doing the
arrow-slits of the Welsh church for H. J. Fleure and M. Davies (Natural
History of Man in Britain, 1951) while he is waiting, nor the clustered caps
of Coprinus necrosanctus, the toadstool thai grows only on buried miners –
an illustration for one of Dr Ramsbottom’s more gothic mycological themes
(Mushrooms and Toadstools, 1953). So, one likes to think, those wonderful
wanderlust pictures all came rolling in.
There is almost no end to what was first introduced to me as an intending
biologist through the New Naturalist books. They were and remain a treasure
of British publishing. How did I first understand why our whole land browns
as we travel towards the north and west? That was in W. H. Persall
(Mountains and Moorlands, 1950); it is not just that there are more
mountains but that the rainfall exceeds evaporation and all that follows –
the leaching, the acidity, the bog and moorland plants. How did I first
learn about the life-cycles of aphids and plant-gall formers? From A. D.
Imms (Insect Natural History, 1947), who taught me also about Ips, the
harem-forming bark beetles. Sexlessness, inbreeding, dull flowers on high
mountains: these are topics on which M. Walters and J. Raven commented in
Mountain Flowers, 1956, and which, like the parthenogenesis of aphids and
gall-wasps and the harems of bark-beetles have become important in my
theoretical biological research – how but for the last book would I have
known where to look to find certain brilliant beauties in my life, Britain’s
sea-level alpine flowers, Primula scotica and Oxytropis halleri, on broken
rocky dunes of the north coast of Scotland? How but for Sir Alister Hardy
and his The Open Sea (1956,1959) would I know that lone, lost Eskimos from
Greenland had kayaked, fishing as they came, to those same remote coasts
where, while kindly treated, they died of the porridge diet or a common
English cold? The titles in the series go on seemingly for ever; they
currently run at about two new books a year. Max Walters as author or
part-author now spans three volumes and a period of thirty-seven years. It
is not now my pocket money or the supply of books to buy, but my time to
read that is sadly fading away.
Yet I am still managing to collect tidbits. When a dog happily paddling back
to shore with its master’s stick suddenly disappears in the murky water of
some south-east midland lake, I will be among the unsurprised cognoscenti.
This is because I have read P. Maitland and R. N. Campbell (Freshwater
Fishes, No 75) and will know that the cause is the Giant Danube catfish
brought to these waters late in the last century. The dog will have been
swallowed to celebrate the fish’s 300th kilogram; soon this fish will reach
its 300th centimetre, and then it will celebrate with its first fisherman:
already in the Danube they “are reported to have taken dogs – and even
children”. Probably no one will believe me, but naturalists are used to
being disbelieved. Nature is so fantastic that it is true that we could, if
we wanted to, get away with almost anything, and most people suppose that we
do. Meanwhile, as the New Naturalist series grows, Collins deserves to be
congratulated on this irresistibly increasing brood and to mark this year,
the half-century after the first volume was commissioned, with some equally
mighty if less drastic celebration.
