Emily Williamson, co-founder of the RSPB

0:00Today's guest once had a small bird called a bronze-winged mannequin finch set up home in her hair. The little fledgling rolled her tresses into a neat nest on or near her collarbone. I've seen this film, so you just have to believe me, listeners, it really is true. The bird stayed on her for 84 days. It's adventures written up in a book called Fledgling. So, welcome, Hannah Bourne-Taylor. Tell me more about this bird and your relationship. Did the bird have a name? Well, no, because I knew he was a wild bird, and it was very difficult to remember that when he was nesting in my hair. So that was the line I didn't cross.

0:39But I had rescued him and my promise to him was to put his life back on course. And eventually, after stalking his family for three months, I did just that. But it wasn't the only bird in my life because I'd also rescued a swift. And there's a bit of a running theme here with me and birds. But this bird, did it think you were its mother? Yes. So he imprinted on me after his nest had been abandoned and blown down in a storm. and it allowed me to walk through the rural grasslands every single day to learn how to be a wild finch and actually it rubbed off on me as well. You know how to be a wild finch.

1:11Yeah, more than a human, I think. Rural grasslands where? In Ghana, in West Africa. What were you doing there? Oh, goodness, that's another story. I was a trailing spouse for my husband's work. Now you've written another book about swifts and your fight to protect them. But what I want to know first is whom have you picked today as your great life? Well, I'm delighted to announce that my nomination is Emily Williamson, one of the co-founding women of the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds. And she has become a feathered ghost on my shoulder as I've entered into the world of bird campaigning.

1:44When did you first hear about her? Tessa. So Tessa on this programme with us now. She read Fledgling and she said afterwards, Hannah, you are the epitome of the legacy of Emily Williamson. And I said, who's Emily? and once she had said who Emily was, I realised that that was the best compliment I had ever received but at the same time I realised that actually it wasn't quite accurate because of course I had only saved the lives of two individual birds and Emily went on to save millions of birds. I know that she was born in Lancashire in 1855 and chiefly known for her role in the Plumage Act and co-founding the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the RSPB.

2:25Before introducing our guest experts, tell us something about the Plumage Act. It's not something I know much about, not until recently. It's absolutely fascinating. So, yes, in 1889, Emily Williamson founded the Society for the Protection of Birds. This had one aim at the time, which was to topple one of the most lucrative trades of the day, which was that horrible fashion of women wearing dead birds on their heads in hats. And she didn't like that very much, so she took it on. And it was such a huge industry, so lucrative that the feathers were at the peak more valuable than gold. And these auction houses were selling lots of 20 ,000 kingfishers, 120 ,000 birds of paradise at a time.

3:10As a result, it was known as murderous millinery. And Emily took it upon herself rather audaciously to stop this. That in itself is an amazing feat because, of course, in Victorian England, she was a second class citizen. She wasn't allowed to vote. She wasn't allowed to own property. She wasn't allowed to divorce. And here she was deciding to stop these mindless deaths for the sake of fashion. Why did she want to do it? Was it for reasons of taste or compassion? Or were birds actually being threatened with extinction? Millions of birds were dying as a result of this trade. And I think she found it unbearable, unnecessary, and something that she really wanted to stop in her lifetime.

3:50You have a campaign of your own to protect birds in particular circumstances. Let me ask you to explain it rather than my trying to do so. Yes, so thanks to Tess's compliment about me being the legacy of Emily, I made a promise to our very closest birds, the birds who share our walls, the cavity nesting birds, so swifts and other birds reliant on our buildings to breed, because their homes are being inadvertently destroyed. And luckily, the solution is very, very simple. It's just a brick with a hole in it that provides its nesting habitat. Without these swift bricks, these birds are going to have nowhere to be able to nest in this country.

4:26So it's a fundamental, obvious need to save birds from national extinction. So there's a huge pressure on my shoulders as I enter into this horrible game of political lobbying. And of course, Emily has done that before in the same setting because the Houses of Parliament are the same. And so the similarities of what I'm going through now, I think Emily would be nodding her head, gritting her teeth and saying, go girl, you carry on doing it. And also listening here so far, we have Tessa Bowes, who's done a huge amount of original research on this subject, written several brilliant books, and we have, too, Becky Spate, head of the RSPB.

5:04Important questions to both of you. Because we're radio, this really could be a film, but what did Emily look like? Do we have any photographs? Well, when I began my research, we had pretty much nothing. I knew where she had been born, I knew where her house was in Didsbury. I got in touch with the RSPB librarian, they don't have an archivist, and she said, we have gone down that route, you won't find anything, no photo exists. Emily was one of five, she had four brothers. Now she didn't have children, but I was able to hop onto Ancestry.com and find a pretty eminent living relative. This was a family of scientists.

5:50And I sent him an email. Dear Professor Bateson, I believe your great-aunt Emily founded the RSPB. Great-aunt Emily? He didn't know. He said, well, that would be wonderful if it were true. He didn't know. His daughter, Melissa Bateson, who's a bird scientist, didn't know. But by the end of that day, a really exciting email popped into my inbox, a photograph. And it's a very beautiful photograph. I see you have it. Yes, describe it to me. She is probably 18 or 21. Her hair is very elaborately dressed. But what is interesting, she's got this very calm, sincere, I would say compassionate face. She's pointing at a brooch.

6:33Serene, isn't it? It's serene. I sent the photo off to the V &A because I was hoping for any clues, the fashion and textiles department. I said, what can you tell me? And they analysed it and they said she's pointing at a brooch at her throat and that brooch is a bird with outstretched wings. And so I feel she's saying, yes, I'm all gussied up for this photograph, but this is who I am and this is what I am all about. Becky Spate, head of the RSPB, What did the RSPB know about Emily back then? Well, I came into my job about six years ago, and I would say I knew very little about it. And what was interesting was that Tessa grabbed me very early on and said, hello, I'm Tessa, and here's all the research I've done, and you should definitely...

7:20And somebody had given me a book that Tessa had written, and that told this story. And I think for a long time, the RSPB just wasn't very interested in kind of its history and where it had come from, And there were various documents that were located in the library. But actually, there sort of wasn't a huge interest. And I think that's partly because the RSPB is very keen on its work today. So saving birds today is what really matters to the RSPB. So it's less interested in its past. And I think also the RSPB had gone through a phase when men had been very dominant in its history. And that was the recent history.

7:56It was people coming out of the Second World War, passionate about birdwatching as a result of their experiences. So it was fascinating to hear this story about the three original founders being women. And just hearing everything that Tessa had to tell me about it just completely gripped me. Did Emily campaign alone? No, she was entirely collaborative. And I think that's one of the reasons that she hasn't been remembered. It was like a hive instinct almost. The same year, 1889, two separate groups of women were gathering, getting upset about murderous millinery. So there was Emily with her friends in Didsbury.

8:33She was getting them to sign a pledge to wear no feathers. They had to campaign in their communities. And then down south in Croydon, a group called the Fur, Finn and Feather Folk, which is very hard to say. They were gathering around the table of Eliza Phillips, who then was a 67-year-old rector's widow. Also around her table was a young woman called Etta Smith, as she was then. When she married, she became Etta Lemon, a magnificent name. They were campaigning to the same ends. They decided to become a single-issue campaign, much greater chance of success. and so a couple of years later in 1891 the two joined forces and the structure of the early Society for the Protection of Birds it sort of spread like a taproot.

9:27It was all female for the first two years until they realised they needed men's money. This is really significant that for the first two years the nascent Royal Society for the Protection of Birds was all women. Yeah, there was a good reason for that. Emily had tried to join the British Ornithologist Union, the all-male BOU, because she was so upset about what was happening to the crested grebe, this bird. There were hardly any left in Britain by then because of the plumage trade. And she was rebuffed by them. Of course, she was a woman. They were men of science. And I think the great spur to her starting her society, and it is a useful emotion to draw on, as I'm sure Hannah will agree, was anger.

10:14She was so angry that they were doing nothing. You know, the British Ornithologist Union. Were they for birds or were they against them? Stuff you, I'm going to have my own all-female group. But this led to quite a lot of derision in the press, of course. Any headline about them usually was birds and bonnets. And the fact that they called themselves the Society for the Protection of Birds, Well, the Times thought that was really overreaching themselves. I mean, how could they claim to be such a thing, these women? But they were brilliant at campaigning. She was a campaigner and you are a campaigner.

10:51Tell us about your Speaker's Corner escapade. In 2022, I decided to launch a petition and I knew I needed the help of one very important organisation, Emily's organisation, the RSPB. SPV. So I phoned Becky up and Becky as the CEO agreed to help with this aim of mandating Swift Bricks. But for a nobody, somebody that's not famous in this country, to get 100 ,000 signatures in six months is an almost impossible task, even with the endorsement of one of our biggest NGO nature organisations. So I decided to court the media by stripping off and walking through central London after a speech. Sorry, stripping off.

11:37Yes. Yes, Matthew. You took your clothes off. Yes, I did. And it was actually quite a cold day in November. So I was almost naked. And it wasn't supposed to be sexual. It was just supposed to raise the voice for birds. So I inked myself up in feathers. And I marched through London to launch the petition. And luckily, it did work. I did get over 100 ,000 signatures. In fact, it was the fastest growing government petition of 2023. Your speech at Speaker's Corner was called the Feather Speech, and I have an extract here. Swifts are awe-inspiring and every bird counts. Small enough to fit in the palm of our hands, swifts spend more time airborne than any other birds on Earth.

12:19They eat, bathe, court and sleep on the wing, flying millions of miles in their lifetimes, living in the sky. They are adventurous until they come home to us. Is it true that they come back to the same spots every year? Yes, they come home to the exact nesting sites as breeding adults, which is actually part of the problem because they're not expecting those nesting sites to be blocked. They don't have time to figure out how to breed. And we're sure that's the reason for the decline, are we? There are lots of factors in any species' decline. So, of course, insect-eating birds really need insects, so that's a really big thing.

12:53But when it comes to breeding, any species fundamentally needs nesting habitat, otherwise they can't breed and they can't exist here. I can remember when people would use the pole end of a broom to knock down house martens' nests in the eaves. Yeah, and we still... Because they're untidy. We still have issues with people kind of knocking down nests or preventing birds like house martens nesting on buildings. But I think swifts really excite people, actually, because they're absolutely, they're the sound of summer. I mean, that's screaming. People will be waiting for that sound. and because they're so sight loyal if you're lucky enough to have swifts nesting in your house I think people get genuinely feel huge ownership and want them to succeed and there are lots and lots of swift groups doing their bit to try and make sure that swifts have somewhere to come back to now as Hannah said there are other issues going on you know they fly a huge journey so they're affected by climate change we've got reductions in insects so food is a problem but that habitat, that being able to come back and nest where they need to, is really important.

13:59Did it seem a strange campaign, do you think, any of you, to stop people wearing feathers? Or was Emily actually pushing at an open door? Was there rising concern about this? I think it seemed a very strange campaign. I mean, they were called frothy fanatics. Two more Fs. Feather faddists. Yeah, people just didn't give it a second thought because nature was bountiful. It was, you know, you took something and another thing popped up. That was the Victorians' approach to the natural world. Do you think that's right, Becky? Yes, I think that's right. And I think one of the things that Emily and the other co-founders absolutely brought was that emotional relationship with birds.

14:38And they were able to talk about that and express that. And I think up until then, it had been a very male science approach to birds. And that was the big shift. And one of the things I was interested in, just reading your book, Tessa, that was talking about the impact of that very cold, snowy weather that came along just after the society got going. And people suddenly realising that birds were at risk, that the birds that they completely took for granted were suffering in this very cold weather. So what had started as this small kernel of quite a kind of odd campaign was suddenly gaining momentum, you know, and that's very exciting.

15:16Hannah? What is very important, I think, in the success of the RSPP and that original campaign with the plumage bill was that deep connection and love and admiration and respect for the birds, I think that's fundamental because as a campaigner just for three years versus her 30, you have to absolutely love the bird. Otherwise, you will not be able to survive the awfulness that is political lobbying for nature. You're listening to The Great Life of Emily Williamson, proposed here in the studio by Hannah Bourne-Taylor. Becky, I think you've brought a scan from the archives of a speech Emily Williamson gave in 1905 outlining how the society was established, how it worked in those early days and what its aims were.

15:59Can you give us a brief taste of what she was saying? Yes. So Emily is speaking up at the AGM in favour of the Duchess of Portland as president of the RSPB. And that was a great example of finding somebody in the aristocracy who was a vegetarian and kind of passionate about the same things and they could use as a sort of a head person for the RSPB. And she was there for a long time, for over 50 years. And Emily is using this speech to kind of second the motion. But she talks about the founding of the RSPB and she talks about these three key things that she thinks are so important. One is about attracting active supporters who are known the breadth of the land for their love of beauty and their love of nature.

16:42So, you know, having spokespeople who can absolutely make a difference. And then she talks about wisdom and moderation. So not falling foul of the pitfalls of fadism and fanaticism. So, you know, making sure that you can present this balanced argument. And then she talks about zeal and energy and having this kind of tenacity that Hannah has talked about. And she thinks these three things are fundamental. And she talks about the work of the RSPB mattering from the peacocks of India to the tiny wrens of St Kilda. You know, she sees this vast work set out before her, really. And so I can see so much in that speech that absolutely carries through to today.

17:23We've mentioned that her campaign merged with the fin fur and feather folk. When exactly did that happen and how did it happen? Tessa? That happened in 1891. I think it was the RSPCA, that much older animal protection body, that sort of noted these two groups of women agitating, one in the north, one in the south, against feathers, and it brokered a meeting between the leaders of the two different groups. Was there a power struggle? I'm not sure that there was. I think they all played their best suit. So Eliza Phillips, she was the older woman. She was a brilliant writer, very trenchant. She wrote these really hard-hitting pamphlets.

18:08Emily Williamson, you might think of her as the moderator. For example, anyone who said, but what about game birds? Why should we shoot game birds? They did not want to tangle with that argument. Etta, I see as the driver, Etta Lemon, as she became on Marriage. She was the great dynamo that drove the society onwards. And then you've got the Duchess of Portland as president. Today we might call her the influencer because that really was her job and she did it very well. She got royalty on side and that was absolutely critical. I'm still struggling with the gradual disappearance of Emily Williamson as initially a leading force.

18:51Do you think she got squeezed out a bit? To my knowledge, that didn't happen. But she certainly, there's only this one written transcript of her speaking. And then we know she became a vice president. So she stood to one side in terms of the active leadership of the organisation. It took decades for the Plumage Act to actually come into being, but she could see it was rolling. And I suspect she just chose to use her energies elsewhere. But Tessa, you might have a view. No, I think you're right, Becky. I mean, she was a local secretary to her death. and that is no small undertaking. First in Didsbury, then they moved in 1911 down to Surrey, local secretary there, and then finally Kensington.

19:32I mean, literally to her death, aged 81. But while living in Didsbury, she set up the Gentlewoman's Employment Association, the Princess Christian Training College for Nurses and the Loan Training Fund, trying to subsidise the costs of further education for women. So she clearly was a feminist. She was all about enabling women in education. Emily had no children herself, but she was a loving, maternal, gentle character. That was how she was remembered. As we talk about her, the Plumage Act just keeps recurring. It's not the only or even in the end the most important thing about her work, but it is the sort of founding indignation.

20:15And I'm just trying to get a bit of a sense of what these feathers were like. One of you has brought, sitting in front of me, an enormous feather. What is it? Yes, it is enormous. This is about two foot tall. It's sort of wiry. It's black. Lots and lots of fronds. It would stay upright and kind of quiver if you attached it to your hat. It's what was called a millinery adornment. These are the nuptial plumes of the great egret, the little egret, the snowy egret. these birds that were almost shot to extinction for the plumage trade. Known among milliners, this tuft of wiry feathers as the osprey, nothing to do with a fish eagle.

20:59Every woman of any class wanted to wear this. And I think by 1903, an ounce of these feathers, and you had to kill four adult birds to get one ounce, an ounce was worth twice its weight in gold. Plumage hunters were making fortunes around the world. What was the Plumage Act in the end and did it work? It did work in the end, but it was first raised 19 years after Emily had founded the RSPB. 19 years? 19 years after, in 1908, Lord Aysebury proposed it in the House of Lords. It had strong support. The premise was simply to prohibit the sale of feathers that had been hunted in other countries, but the whole point was they were trying to topple the actual industry itself.

21:46It had cross-party support. It was due to be raised the next day in the House of Commons. And agonisingly, it wasn't revisited until 1913, simply because they ran out of time in 1908. And actually, that's uncannily similar to what happened to me with the Swift Brick Amendment in 2023. And then what happened next is by that point, their main political ally had died because of the longevity of this. and it was revisited in 1913. There was a Paris International Congress the next year in defence of the feather trade because they really didn't want the plumage trade to be toppled by this bunch of tenacious women.

22:24And it sort of just got kicked around a little bit and it wasn't until another amazing tenacious woman, the very first woman to take up her MP seat, Nancy Astor, came along in 1919 and revisited it once again And this time, her tenacity, which was really the personification of Emily, Etta and Eliza, finally got it over the line in 1921. And actually, ironically, it was then amended again, even up until 1936, because it wasn't quite doing its job. There was a lot of smuggling going on. But the main point was stop killing all the birds, especially in the spring season when all their chicks die too, because they're going to go extinct if you wear them on your heads.

23:06Nancy Astor sounds absolutely central in the end to getting it over the line. Yes, I think she was. And in researching this story, I love the fact that it was a woman who did it in the end. Yes, yes. Because the men had somehow all muscled in by this stage and it pretty much taken over the society. The women were still doing the legwork. And I can just imagine Nancy looking at this bill. We know that she told the men off. She said, this has tremendous public support. because by now the British public had fallen in love with birds and that was all the work. Pamphlet by pamphlet, selling nesting boxes, talking to schools, Emily, Etta and Eliza.

23:46It was their work that had made us into the nation we would recognise today, a nation of bird lovers. And so Nancy said, we will get this through and formed a quorum. And without further ado, it was a bit of a lukewarm bill, It has to be said compared to the American Bird Migratory Treaty Act of 1918, which was so fierce that women getting off transatlantic liners in New York had their feathered hats ripped off their heads by customs officials. Jolly good. And whole feather foundries, as they were called in America, were torched. They were burnt. It was more of a lukewarm fudge in Britain, but it was a start.

24:29And I imagine Hannah would be very grateful to see any crumb of comfort at the moment, any sign that the government wants to engage. Hannah, it wasn't just feathers. It was whole birds that women were wearing on their heads. I've got a lovely letter from George Bernard Shaw to the Times complaining that he was sitting behind a woman with a dead seagull on her head and yet he was not allowed to wear a suit and tie but had to wear evening clothes. I prefer to wear living birds on my head. Yes, yes, you have, I suppose. It's quite true. Did Emily remain committed and part of the movement to get this bill through, or does she now sort of fade modestly into the background?

25:13I don't think she was at the core with the legal campaigning. And really, her essential modesty hasn't served her historically, because we still know so little about her. I feel that she's the presiding spirit behind the RSPB, as opposed to the dragon, and that was Etta Lemon. I feel like the absence of context of her, actually, for me at least, makes her so much stronger as a voice, because she's almost one-dimensional through only her actions and her legacy. And so now I walk around with her in my head, but I'm also looking in the eyes of Becky and Tessa, thinking, wow, that legacy is epic. It's absolutely epic.

25:56And we must remember and give her credit, she might not have been guns blazing at the front of it by 30 years later. I've only been at it for three years. I'd say I'm emotionally, physically crippled by my campaign. So I can only have the deepest respect for a woman in that position. And, of course, we might not know her name. Well, hopefully we do now. But we do know her name, Matthew, because her name is the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds. So, Becky, how many members do the RSPB have now? So, today, the RSPB has 1.2 million members. And they are all people, I think, who have a combination of that emotional connection to birds as well as the underpinning science and understanding.

26:40And I think that's absolutely what Emily and her co-founders brought. And two things. One is in a big meeting room at the Lodge, which is the RSPB headquarters. We have, thanks to Tessa, three big portraits of those three founders now. But the second thing is that, of course, egrets now are coming into the UK. One sees these beautiful little white herons. And every time I see an egret, I do think of Emily. This programme covers great lives whose reputation is already high and many others who deserve but have not received the world's admiration. So my thanks to you, Becky and Tessa, and to you, Hannah, for bringing us an outstanding example of that second, quiet, not-quite-forgotten group, the story of Emily Williamson and her campaign to protect birds.

27:31Goodbye.