Eric Ashby, Silent Watcher of the New Forest

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1:00One more from the top? I've come to Bristol, spiritual home of this series, also famously home of the BBC's Natural History Unit. I'm wandering around some of the images on display. Polar bears feature heavily behind the producer's desk. There are big cats and chimps and pictures of famous naturalists from the past over there. Today's Great Life, never filmed in the exotic locations where these animals lived. In fact, he rarely left the New Forest. That's where he devoted his life to the secret life of that Hampshire wood. He was as elusive as the animals he filmed. Sir Peter Scott called him the silent watcher and his pioneering work helped bring foxes, badgers and deer into millions of homes for the very first time.

1:53Take a listen. Another part of the forest and there's another old buck with a fine spread of antlers.

2:04He's collected several does. A young buck approaches, attracted at first by the noise and then, almost too late, he realises that this is more than he can cope with. Now, Eric Ashby, who lives in the forest here and who studies the wildlife all the year round, he keeps a diary. And most of the detail of this diary is kept on film. But he has to have a small book, too, in order to write down the dates. Now, Eric, take, for example, that last shot that we saw of the fallow deer. When did you actually take that? October 26th. On October 26th last year. Well, I have come back here because I enjoyed enormously my last visit to the New Forest, and so incidentally did you, I gather.

2:56I've come back here to see what the silent watcher has been doing during the last year. And I know that a great many people envy him, his beautiful cottage, in this wonderful wild setting in the middle of the forest. Sir Peter Scott with the elusive Eric Ashby. In 1963, Eric is our subject on Great Lives today. And choosing the silent watcher is another extremely accomplished cameraman, the author of The Man Who Climbed Trees, James Aldred. Welcome to the nerve centre of the Natural History Unit and tell us why you've picked Eric Ashby today. Well, thank you. It's very good to be here. Eric, I mean, I grew up in the New Forest and when I was a kid I was very lucky to meet Eric a couple of times.

3:44For me, he embodied, sort of epitomised the notion of wildlife filming and he basically created a genre which has continued. There's a continuous thread from Eric all the way through to today's natural history filmmaking, everything from Spring Watch to Big Blue Chip series. Do you think he influenced your choice of career? Tell us about some of the work you've done. Do you climb trees? Yeah, he had a huge influence on me. My auntie ran a sort of rest home on the western edge of the forest And one of the ladies that was in there in the 1980s was very good friends with Eric and his wife, Hylene.

4:24And we went round to meet Eric. Anything in particular strike you? Oh, everything struck me. It knocked me sideways, you know, to walk into a little cottage in such a beautiful, ancient part of the English countryside. And then to walk through the back door into the back garden where there were pens and rehabilitated or rehabilitating foxes. and then you know for him to then let me into the pens with one of the foxes and to give me a chocolate button he said put this between your lips and sit down in the bracken there which I did and sure enough the first fox came running over and took the chocolate button straight out so that was it I was just bowled over because I'd spent countless hours trying to get a photograph of a fox.

5:09Eric Ashby was born in Cumberland but his family moved to Hampshire when he went to school. According to one obituary, Ashby died in 2003, he saw a man called Cherry Keerton show his films from Africa at the South Parade Pier in South Sea and Eric brought his own 16mm camera when he was just 16. What about you James? When did you first start using a camera and can you remember what you filmed? Well I was quite infamous in my family. I mean I had a very long-suffering very patient father who would pay for endless roles of poorly exposed films to be developed and you know there's a kind of running joke in the family where's James always out taking more pictures of squirrels bottoms you know because I could never get up level with him it's these endless wide-angle shots of you know a little gray block on a branch 40 feet above me you know did you have anything to teach you um well mates of mine um growing up in the forest they went into things like tree surgery and forestry on YTS youth training schemes when we 16 17 so they they left school I went on to do a levels and things but I'd go back and meet them at the weekend and they'd borrow kit from the local tree surgeon and we'd go out climbing recreationally I just thought there's a whole world up there and no one was filming it no one was doing it there was one producer in the two producers in the BBC that had dabbled with it it was a niche that I was very passionate about and I thought well maybe that's my way in if I can provide safety at height for people at height I mean one of my first jobs was taking David Attenborough up into the canopy for things like life of mammals and I thought well if I can provide this as a useful tool maybe I could then be trusted to handle a camera I mean that process took a long time but eventually got my hands on the camera your career became in a way a ladder almost literally a ladder to another world absolutely and it's another world that I still hugely enjoy going back to it.

7:02I'm in the process of filming Wild Goshawks at the Nest, for example, at the moment. It never gets dull. Eric wrote two books, the second of which is called My Life with Foxes, published in the year 2000. The foreword was written by a young Chris Packham and included the line, truly accomplished naturalists are an endangered species. He clearly loved Eric and so the producer dropped him a line to see if he wanted to add a few words. Didn't need to sell me great lives, he wrote back. And yes, I'd love, indeed must contribute to this if I can. So here he is, Chris Packham from afar. A visit to Eric's was always enhanced if you could talk your way into his underground set.

7:44And this was something that he had built so that he could observe badgers underground. And for all of his sort of old school approach, he was actually very innovative. You know, he didn't think twice about adapting a camera or a hide. So I think he had a reputation for being a sort of a man in the tweed suit out in the gorse with a wooden tripod and some ghastly filming contraption strapped to the top of it that was almost impossible to use. But in fact, behind the scenes, he was always building things and fantasizing about other things that he could film. And so, yeah, we would sit in this tiny shed and there was the chamber in front of us, which was quite clean.

8:23and the glass was always duly polished the badgers would come into the and be there in the straw invariably not doing very much just being asleep but you know at that age being able to put my nose you know a few millimeters away from a sleeping badger on the other side of the glass was such a tremendous thrill I mean I can't tell you I was cloud nine. So he had a big effect on you? A significant effect on me actually because I met him when I was 14 13 sorry and I met him close to his home at a remote cottage which I always fantasized about living in inhabited by a forest keeper Mr Holland and I was there one afternoon talking to him about a kestrel which he was rehabilitating and Eric turned up and I recognized him instantly because he was a bit of a local celebrity he was always appearing in the southern evening echo and there he was leaning against the gate and I was with my father and I think my father had to sort of put his hand on my shoulder to restrain my excitement.

9:24And of course, he was such a humble, quiet, small man that the combination of an undiagnosed autistic boy plus Eric meant that the conversation didn't exactly rollercoaster along, but there was a connection. Tell us about his garden, his sanctuary. Yes, he had some sort of field enclosures. Well, first he'd fenced the whole thing to keep the hunt out. Then he had a number of enclosures where he would keep rehabilitated foxes, those that had been delivered to him, because everyone knew him as the local fox man. So if cubs were picked up, they would gravitate towards Eric and Eileen's. You could go and meet them and they would jump all over you.

10:01I've got numerous photographs of me lying on the ground with one of Eric's foxes standing on top of me licking my nose or something, you know. So again, as a young naturalist, you know, that was just a tremendous thrill. I mean, I loved watching foxes. And in fact, I'd reared a couple and released a couple myself that I'd been given by the RSPCA but to go and see Eric in his garden his sanctuary as you say was always a treat from that point of view. Well that was just great that's a lot of common ground there. What did he mean when he said that accomplished naturalists are becoming an endangered species?

10:37Well I run the risk of straying into sort of choppy water I suppose but I think what I take from that, there's a lot of emphasis on technology these days, which is great when it's balanced with field craft and natural history knowledge. But when it takes over, when the camera and the tech is more important than the actual subject matter, and the depth of insight into the natural history, the natural behaviour of wildlife, wildlife, clues in the word, that is getting rarer now and Eric just that's what he was all about. I want our listeners to be able to picture the man and I've got here a picture he's sitting quietly in Wellington boots and it appears that a fox is filming him actually if you look at the camera you see it's the other way around but the fox looks in charge he looks like a like a silent watcher describe the the man that we're looking at there well eric there i mean he must be uh well into his 70s by then i would have thought maybe yes yeah uh white hair side parting very neat terrible teeth i noticed very yeah but yeah but that's whenever you look back at old photos and things you know and but he's sitting there in wellington boots he's got his trousers a sort of tweed jacket by the looks of it so quite shabby chic country you know you sort of call it these days and the fox is up on his rear legs that's the other thing that strikes me the fox looks so relaxed that the fox is in control completely in command of the situation one of his first photos included a vixen suckling her cubs wonderful would you like to read this from richard maybe's introduction to eric's secret life of the new forest richard is a noted nature writer and first saw one of Eric's films in 1961.

12:31For much of the 1950s, wildlife documentary had been dominated by globe-trotting naturalists like Armand and Michaela Dennis. Their films were fast-moving, exotic, superbly photographed, but presented a picture of nature as something impossibly remote and romantic, and the animals themselves, on occasions, as little more than free-range circus performers. Alongside these films, he says, Eric Ashby's quiet, respectful cameos of foxes and badgers were a revelation. Elaborate a little on what you've just read about Michaela and Amor. Denise, I remember those where our whole family used to watch them and they were lovely.

13:13How were they different? You can't really go wrong sitting in a Land Rover driving up to a six-ton elephant in bright sunshine you know with a 25 or 64 or 50 asa film and a f11 the widest that your lens can can open up to so i mean of its time it was a logical place for wildlife filming to begin but of course eric was doing something utterly different he was in a place where it was dark even in the brightest of days in the shadow of trees most of his animals were crepuscular if not absolutely nocturnal. And he, if anything, had much smaller budgets and certainly didn't have access to cutting edge equipment.

13:53Nor a team of people, and he was just on his own. And of course, you know, the way I understand it is that's exactly how he wanted it. He would be envious, I imagine, of Sir David Attenborough and his work, or would he? What would he think of the modern iteration of what he was trying to do? Well, I think there's a lot of common ground there. I once heard someone ask Sir David in an interview, you know, what do you think about the exploration for life elsewhere in the solar system? And to which point David replied, well, don't we have enough beauty here to be focusing on, you know? And I think Eric in turn would have scaled that down even more to the forest.

14:29You know, if someone said you want to go off and film orangutans, well, yeah, sure. But I think he'd be perfectly happy filming badgers. Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line. When the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Cullen. BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com.

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15:42From time to time, Eric is joined on location by a fellow naturalist, or a filmmaking colleague. Earlier in his career, Desmond Hawkins was closely associated with Eric's wildlife filming for the Natural History Unit, and a shared concern for the animals of the New Forest still brings them together. I see that. That hides the camera and this is all the hide that you need? This is all that you need. Yes, for foxes or mammals, all you need is a little bit of cover, just as a screen. If you have too much cover, then it's obvious to the animals. I then sit down behind the camera and make myself as small as possible, so that any animal that comes along can't see me.

16:23Oh, I see. And having settled down, Eric, I suppose now you've got to just keep still and be patient. Yes, hours on end, day after day, perhaps. And of course, the wind has to be towards me, from the animal to you, and not the other way around. Otherwise, it'd be off in no time. But if they outflank you, what then? Well, if they should get your scent, say they came up behind you, well, probably perhaps your whole season spot. The whole season? It's not just... Yes, it can be the whole season, because if the fox is suspicious, then she'll move the cubs, or else she'll be suspicious of that spot and she'll come up behind you again.

17:06I think that's the longest we've seen and heard of him in one continuous shoot, so to speak, isn't it? I mean, he is so elusive. Yeah, absolutely. His first film for the BBC was called The Unknown Forest. It was 45 minutes long and broadcast in 1961, but he published his first article called Bird Photography, an Ideal Hobby for Boys, when he was just 16. We think he worked as a farmer in Devon during the war and moved to the New Forest in the 1950s. Do you know much, James, about what sort of a technical kit he was using at this time? I really don't. All I do know is that, like I say, the lenses would have been quite limiting in their light gathering capacity, as were the film stock, insensitive, really, to light.

17:55Yeah. So beyond that, I really don't know. I made a film with him once called Through Two Cameras, and it was contrasting him using his antiquated ancient camera and me using what was then a state-of-the-art camera and looking at our different approaches to how we did things. And we made this for Southern TV, as it was at the time, the local ITV station. And I remember, you know, it was painful trying to get him to do anything in front of the camera. And our interviews with me talking to him, you know, we'd run through it without the camera on and he'd be speaking to me as he would as a friend.

18:35And then we turned the camera on and he would retreat into his humble, quiet shell. Yeah, it was quite a challenge that. I like that about him. I think that's all for the good. Yes, I like that about him too. The main difficulty, I think, in that case, was to hope they'd come out and arrive at the right spot for filming. You'd think it could be quite a wide area, but it must be within width of about three feet and length of about, say, nine feet, as to get in reasonable views. I'm just going to show you something. Yeah. Oh, look. Oh, wow. Fantastic. That is just fantastic. It's a box. It is. Painted green, about eight inches by six inches, with a screen or a window at the front.

19:23I think that's a blimp. I think that's what he built around his camera, which would have sounded like a sewing machine with that film going through it. The camera would go inside that and it would muffle the sound, which meant that he could hide in plain sight. and as long as the wind's direction was in his favour and the badgers couldn't smell him, then that would enable him to get very intimate shots. Would he have camouflaged the box any more than the green paint, do you think? Possibly not, because everything you introduce, I mean, maybe some bracken from the natural environment, for sure.

19:57I'm going to move it away, because it's actually quite precious. Is it? That's so lovely. It's even got a little strap hand to carry it with. Yeah, a nice bit of leather on the top. It's an old belt, isn't it? Isn't that great? Do you think, James, that he was in a way a shy creature like the shy creatures that he was observing and that actually his whole demeanour, his whole personality was ideally suited to tucking yourself away quietly in the woods somewhere and watching? I think there's definitely something in what you say there. But that's not to say that he didn't have some very firmly held beliefs and he was quite steely underneath.

20:39My impression is that there was a line with Eric. And of course, in retrospect, what he was actually documenting was a period of extreme transition in the new forest. A lot of the badgers, which he could only film during daylight hours, would come out to forage in daylight hours because there was no human disturbance and the impact of much more people coming and all the rest of it. You know, that's the world we live in now. Britain's a busy place. Badgers and foxes are thought to be creatures you could only ever see at night. A world in which they're coming out during the day has passed. It has passed.

21:16I think I just caught, if I may, can I just show you a photograph, actually? I think I caught the very tail end of it. And this actually, I took these when I was about 14 years old. Oh, wow. Well. And this is broad daylight. Broad daylight. Yeah. Three badgers, or is that four? They're just playing around, aren't they? They are playing around. They look quite relaxed. I remember that was half past five in the evening in mid-June. Yeah, yeah. You're listening to the great life of Eric Ashby, the silent watcher, as Peter Scott called him. And here from 1963 is Peter Scott again. When March comes every year, Eric starts to make plans for filming badgers because the cubs will then be starting to appear above ground.

22:02I don't think that there's any doubt that badgers are Eric's favourite animals. And so we walked on to the set where he's been watching the most. Already he's made some superb film of these creatures, but he's never satisfied. And this year he was determined to fill in some gaps and to improve on what he'd already got. You see, what he really wanted to do was to get some pictures showing how close the Badgers would come to him if the conditions were right. He'd done it once before, but he wanted to get better ones this year, and so on June the 18th, he came here and he set up his camera, more or less where you are now, and then he went forward himself with a remote control release in his hand, and he waited.

22:54there was no problem about them or very little problem about them seeing me as long as I stood still and as long as they didn't go right up to me if they came right up they'd seen censorship but if they're about six or nine feet away they don't seem to censure as long as wind's right of course Well that was some lovely footage shot in daylight with Sir Peter Scott introducing Eric in situ filming a family group of four or five badgers and judging from his shots, they came right up to his feet pretty much and these are wild animals. I got the impression that we were watching Peter Scott watching Eric Ashby watching Badgers.

23:35Yes, I know, where will it ever end? I know, I know, absolutely. In the tightly budgeted world of television, said The Guardian, his principles made his method uneconomic but money was never his motivation and his filming was always encouraged, even if he did need four years of his own time to shoot enough sequences for his first 45-minute film. He wasn't expensive, but his method was. What was the distinctive appeal of this laboriously produced work? Authenticity. Yeah. And that's something that we're all coming full circle. Well, surprise, surprise. Everyone on social media and everything, it's all about authenticity.

24:16Who'd have thought it? Here from Bernard Rufton, who was an assistant film editor at the Natural History Unit, is a little more detail about Eric that he emailed to the producer. Perhaps you'd like to read it, James. Of course, yeah. I met him working on a film we made at BBC Bristol in the summer of 1974. It involved foxes and badgers. I think it was a half-hour jobby. Eric came up to see a rough cut and also came into the cutting room. I had some affinity with him as I'd been to school in Limington on the edge of the New Forest and knew it well. My recollection is that he was driven up by his wife, a very pleasant lady called Eileen.

24:57Eric was rather reserved, but dignified and friendly, just needed a bit of drawing out. My life, he wrote, has been divided more or less equally between two careers, farming and photography. There's probably no subject which sets these two professions more or less at odds with that of the fox. What do you know in a nutshell about this story? Well, I've heard it from both sides, you know, pro-hunt, anti-hunt. I try and remain reasonably in the middle. But what I know in terms of Eric was that he did have a long-term struggle. with you know back then it wasn't just fox hunting it was also beagling and buck hunting and i think i read somewhere that there were 165 hunt meets a year so if you think what that does in terms of upsetting the day-to-day life of these animals that's a huge amount of stress eric was right in the heartland of that activity and if he's trying to protect a sanctuary it is inevitable there's going to be a clash yes and I think it just got to the point where he felt he had to stand his ground for not only the fox's sake but also his actually quite frankly he clearly didn't have a farmer's attitude to the fox here's Chris Packham again I mean let's let's be very clear um Eric was fervently anti-fox hunting and the hunt did do some pretty rotten things to him to aggravate him by allowing their hounds onto his property and so forth.

26:35So he had to put up all of these fences and barriers to try and keep them out. And to be quite honest with you, I think he was resentful of that. I remember an old line, you know, a psychotic builds a castle and a neurotic lives in it. And Eric was neither psychotic nor neurotic. But he loved those animals very, very much. And he loved them as individuals. So yes, he liked foxes and wildlife. But those animals that he cared for, he and Eileen, they loved them like children. Obviously, they didn't have children. So, you know, but I got to know him through my work for then what was then the Nature Conservancy Council studying badgers in the New Forest.

27:12And Colin Tubbs, another hero, had employed me to look at the effect of set stopping by the New Forest hunt on the behaviour and ecology of the badgers. And this meant that I had a terrible position to stand in, in that I had to work very cooperatively with the New Forest hunt. and I equally had to work with Eric who'd been studying the badgers in that area. I mean there was a sort of an aggravated loathing between those two parties and I was stuck in the middle so I was being pulled from pillar to post. I actually became quite friendly with the head of the New Forest Hunt, Sir Newton Rycroft at the time.

27:49He was a remarkable naturalist and his views on fox hunting were not as straightforward as people might have imagined and I think in some ways he he empathized and sympathized with with eric and and certainly he he had no loathing for eric ashby whatsoever um i think he saw him sometimes as a nuisance when it came to stirring up anti-hunt feeling but you know they were both great naturalists and i think they sort of grudgingly probably had to accept that um so being in both of their companies was it was interesting Interesting response from Chris there Of course Eric didn't live long enough to see the ban No, I mean that was very well put by Chris there And no he didn't I think he always felt that it was inevitable That it was coming You know he was part of the gathering momentum And the public opinion that swung the tide in the end And I think he would probably like to think that he was Chris Packham was among the mourners at his funeral in 2003.

28:52My thanks, James, for bringing this fascinating man to our series. And to end, we're going back to Sir Peter Scott, ending one of his famous Look episodes in 1963. It was episode 111, and it's called A Forest Diary with Eric Ashby. Goodbye. Well, I hope you've enjoyed as much as I have of seeing these extracts from Eric Ashby's film diary of the new forest. Now, I'm just going indoors to see the first shots of a new film project, which Eric is just starting now. Goodbye.

29:45Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts.