Meet W H Hudson who came to Yorkshire to protect our birds

THE seabird cliffs of Yorkshire remain arguably England’s most memorable places for the nature lover to visit.

It isn’t surprising that they occupy a pivotal place in the history of bird conservation in Britain. After becoming chairman of the newly created Society for the Protection of Birds (SPB) in 1893 it didn’t take long for the immigrant naturalist W H Hudson to head north from London to experience the seabird spectacle for himself.

The 1869 Sea Birds Protection Act aimed at putting a stop to the unrestrained slaughter of breeding birds such as kittiwakes and gannets on our sea-cliffs. Despite the law, 130,000 guillemot eggs were recorded as taken from the cliffs at Bempton in Yorkshire in 1884.

To check on progress, in late June 1894 Hudson embarked on ‘birding expeditions’ with his fellow SPB founders, among whom he was the only man.

They went first to the Norfolk Broads, then to Bridlington by boat, then Flamborough Head, then on to the Farne Islands. Not surprisingly, he enjoyed a "good week" doing all this, and saw "tens of thousands of guillemots, puffins, razorbills, cormorants, gulls, terns". He was astonished by the numbers of birds he found here, packed so close together it was almost impossible to move among them.

Hudson was prone to mood swings. In summer 1903, during a decline in his physical and mental health, he returned to Yorkshire – this time on doctor’s orders. Hudson wrote soon afterwards from Roker’s Hotel in the fashionable spa town of Harrogate. He soon detected some health benefits from the trip: "I suppose that four hours’ shaking in the train from King’s Cross did my system some good," he wrote, despite a change in weather to "rough and cold".

Hudson had hoped to find "some miraculous quality in these waters". He also seemed content with his surroundings. "The people are very obliging, and there’s a nice quiet room to sit and smoke in." But his spirits dipped as he tried to summon the enthusiasm to work on a book, a revised edition of one of his earlier titles.

W H Hudson

Demand for his writing was growing apace. It stirred bitter memories of austere days of poverty. "What revolts me is the thought that when I had not a penny and almost went down on my knees to editors, publishers and literary agents I couldn’t even get a civil word," he wrote to a friend. "And now that I don’t want the beastly money and care nothing for fame and am sick and tired of the whole thing they actually come to beg a book or article from me."

His low mood tarnished his view of the spa town: "I should say, judging from its fine appearance and the numbers of fine people frequenting it, that Harrogate must be highly esteemed by town-loving folk," he reflected later. "I there found myself in a numerous company of the sick … Pilgrims from all parts of the land to that pool in which they fondly hoped they would be cured of their ills. Perhaps they did not all hope for a complete cure… I took it that these well-to-do well-fed gentlemen were victims of gout and rheumatism."

Finding W H Hudson by Conor Mark Jameson

Typically, it was a connection with wild nature that lifted Hudson’s spirits, as a small bird arrived and saved the day.

"In this crowd of sufferers mixed with fashionables I was alone, out of my element, depressed, and should have been miserable but for a small bird, or rather of a small bird voice. Every day when I went to the well in the gardens to drink a tumbler of magnesia water and sit there for an hour or so I heard the same little bird, a willow-wren, which had taken up its summer-end residence at that spot. I do not mean a song; a little bird when moulting concealed in a thick shrubbery, has not heart to sing: it was only his familiar faint little sorrowful call-note.

"The people sitting and moving about me had no real existence; I alone existed there, with a willow-wren for a companion … and was sitting not on an iron chair painted green but on the root of an old oak or beech tree, or on a bed of pine needles, with the smell of pine and bracken in my nostrils, with only that wandering aerial tender voice, that gossamer thread of sound, floating on the silence."

Hudson’s range was limited by his meagre income and increasingly by uncertain health, and despite his dislike of the confines of London he remained based there. He would hanker for the hills of the north, from time to time. "Somehow I should not be able to settle down at Wadhurst [East Sussex] and live with a contented mind," he wrote to a friend in 1906, when contemplating a move to the countryside. "I like open worlds – downs or great moors like the Cornish or Yorkshire ones".

The main aim of the now Royal SPB was to end the global trade in bird skins and plumage. It was not unknown for stuffed kittiwakes to adorn fashionable bonnets. A report in the York Press in 1914 gives a flavour of debates in Parliament, as details of proposed law were hammered out. For example, ostrich feathers would be exempt from any ban, as they were a by-product of ostrich farming. Plumage licences would be granted to museums or for scientific research. Some argued that this would leave the door open for collectors, who were more of a threat to wild birds than the plumage trade.

In response, it was cited that 5,000 birds of paradise had been exhibited for sale by three traders in June 1913. It was promised that if this law passed an advisory committee would decide who might be permitted a licence. Time and again the legislation ran aground. And the protection of wildlife was slipping down the political agenda. War was looming in Europe.

The happy ending is that the Plumage Act was finally passed not long after the end of the First World War. By this time Hudson had become a big hit in America too, and the money he made from publishers and movie studios there he would leave to the cause of bird protection.

Author and biographer Conor Mark Jameson

Hudson hadn’t set foot in Britain until he was 33 years old. He experienced these Isles with fresh, explorer’s senses, and wasn’t shy of a generalisation. He thought he detected a greater appreciation of aesthetics in the higher latitudes. "These rough fellows from the north, especially from Yorkshire and Lancashire, are always surprising us with their enthusiasm, their aesthetic feeling! [they] have yet more poetry and romance, more joy in all that is beautiful, than one could find in any native of this soft lovely green south country!" The SPB delegation in 1894 had also visited Ireland soon after their visit to the north of England. He was struck by its relative poverty. "What a contrast between the cottages and the bare-legged ragged people in them here", he wrote, "and those of Northumberland and Yorkshire".

My research on Hudson and his colleagues has been based mainly on surviving letters preserved in American archives. A letter of 1921, written just a year before he passed away, reveals that he also visited York in 1893, principally to see the Minster, and Monks House. He adored cathedrals, but nature was always his first love. "When I spent a little time in York I was mostly interested in the swifts, they were in such numbers," he told his friend. His impressions of Yorkshire had stayed long in his memory.

Conor Mark Jameson is a nature writer and the biographer of W H Hudson. His book, Finding W. H. Hudson is available from Pelagic Publishing