Little has been written about these women. But you may view the \u2018bird hat\u2019 in fashion archives all over the world, for this was an insatiable global craze that spanned half a century. When I visited London\u2019s V&A Clothworkers\u2019 Centre to inspect a dozen hats from the late 19th and early 20th century, I was shocked by what I saw. Here were birds \u2013 whole, halved, spliced and dyed \u2013 decorating millinery from the 1870s to the 1920s. This was fashion with blood on its hands: a voluptuous, savage, disturbing aesthetic that early photography does nothing to convey.<\/p>
Here were birds \u2013 whole, halved, spliced and dyed \u2013 decorating millinery.<\/p><\/blockquote>
Coming under the hammer at monthly \u2018fancy feather\u2019 sales in London\u2019s Commercial Sale Rooms were bales of bird skins measured by the thousand. A typical lot was \u201c8,000 parrots<\/a>\u201d, as was \u201c12,000 hummingbirds<\/a>\u201d or \u201c5,000 tanagers\u201d. All were destined for the millinery trade: for the female \u2018feather<\/a> hands\u2019 who created the avian adornments out of raw material.<\/p>
But what of those women who fought against the fashion? What evidence remains from the radical campaign against \u201cmurderous millinery\u201d? The RSPB maintains that, due to a bomb falling on its London offices during the Blitz, there is a hole in the early archives. This is one of the reasons given by Britain\u2019s biggest conservation charity as to why its early story has never properly been told. I thought it worth travelling to its current headquarters in Sandy, Bedfordshire, to find out what was left.<\/p>
Etta Lemon’s 1913 portrait. \u00a9 Courtesy of Ian Dawson<\/figcaption><\/figure> The Lodge is a rambling, mock-Tudor mansion set in gentle woodland, where chaffinches and tits dart and chirrup on a reserve of some 220ha. Here you will also spot keen birdwatchers \u2013 hungry-looking men in Gore-Tex, binoculars in hand, hoping for a sighting of hobby<\/a> or hawfinch<\/a>.<\/p>
In Britain, it seems to me, birds still belong to the boys. And when I pushed open the door of the entrance hall, this impression was reinforced. Large oil portraits of RSPB men loom down from the wood-panelled hall, with Edwardian nature writer WH Hudson in pride of place.<\/p>
How Victorian women started what was to become the RSPB<\/h2>
For two days I sifted through the archives, through papers stored in slim cardboard boxes, before coming across a handwritten version of the RSPB\u2019s birth. This rough, much-corrected document on blue notepaper was written by one Mrs Lemon in 1943, looking back over half a century, when it might have seemed to her that the Society\u2019s origins might fade from memory.<\/p>
In Britain, it seems to me, birds still belong to the boys.<\/p><\/blockquote>
\u201cThe movement began in a small way,\u201d she writes, \u201cand for the first few months of its existence was confined to efforts to enlist the sympathy of women in support of protests against the wanton slaughter of birds for the sake of their plumage.\u201d Mr Hudson, she continues, was an early \u201cinspiration\u201d; talking freely, showing the ladies \u201cwhat was in his heart and in his mind\u201d. But \u2013 \u201cit was we women who had to work out the practical details\u201d.<\/p>
Who were these women?<\/h3>
The RSPB website cites Emily Williamson of Didsbury as their founder. This middle-class solicitor\u2019s wife invited ladies to tea in 1889, and urged them to sign a pledge to wear no feathers. But I could not find her face in the archives, and she spoke only once at a subsequent meeting. \u201cWomen are mostly timid in inaugurating anything,\u201d said Emily, \u201cbut they are very ready to give their help to a good cause when they are shown the way.\u201d<\/p>
Ostrich plume sorting \u00a9 Chronicle\/Alamy<\/figcaption><\/figure> There was also a Mrs Eliza Phillips, elderly founder of the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk of Croydon. The all-female Folk merged with Emily\u2019s campaign in 1891 to create the SPB, keeping the name of the Didsbury group, while drawing on the Croydon women\u2019s energy. As head of publications, Eliza\u2019s trenchant voice rings out from every pamphlet. \u201cThis is above all a women\u2019s question,\u201d Eliza writes in 1891. \u201cIt is women\u2019s vanity that stimulates the greed of commerce, and women\u2019s money that tempts bird-slaughterers to continue their cruel work at home and abroad.\u201d Eliza died in 1917; she, too, is faceless.<\/p>
Winifred, Duchess of Portland \u2013 RSPB president from 1891 until her death in 1954 \u2013 was painted many times. But what was her role? Her patrician voice rings out from scrawled letters to those women in the office. \u201cLiterature on the subject might do her some good! Will you send her some \u2013 by my express desire!\u201d<\/p>
With four collaborators\u2019 names already in my notebook, I began to understand why none had achieved posterity. Writers of history like to put a face to a movement \u2013 an Emmeline Pankhurst; a Florence Nightingale. It helps to have a charismatic hero when telling a battle\u2019s story. Who, then, deserves credit for the SPB\u2019s early triumph in the face of male bemusement and scorn? Who was the dynamo? Who should we celebrate?<\/p>
The diffuse nature of the charity\u2019s start seems to have confused and irritated historians over the decades. Credit \u201ccannot be given to any single individual,\u201d wrote the birder and author Stephen Moss in 2013. Rather, the campaign\u2019s \u201cmost prominent figurehead was the popular nature writer WH Hudson.\u201d Hence the oil painting in the entrance hall.<\/p>
A catalogue of hats from 1908-9, including feathered ones. \u00a9 The Millinery Record (private collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure> Yet to anyone combing through the archives at Sandy, like me, the answer seems obvious. All the anecdotes have stuck to Mrs Etta Lemon. She was gruffly modest about her role \u2013 \u201cI was roped in and induced many hundreds to join.\u201d But it was clear that here was the prime mover; a woman known both as \u201cMother of the Birds\u201d and the \u201cDragon\u201d.<\/p>
As I untangled the individual stories of the four, Etta\u2019s was the voice that leapt most off the page \u2013 hectoring, withering, crisply no-nonsense: \u201cWhile these foreign birds are to be had at such ridiculous prices, that class of the community which rejoices in gaudy headgear is not likely to forego its passion.\u201d<\/p>
There was something else in her tone, too. Though she did not share their politics, Etta had more in common with the militant tactics of Mrs Pankhurst and her suffragettes than she was aware. They shared the language of action. \u201cThere is an urgent need for all who love birds to bestir themselves,\u201d wrote Etta in an early report. \u201cCombine for the protection of bird-life against the vanity and greed of a selfish minority!\u201d<\/p>
As I untangled the individual stories of the four, Etta\u2019s was the voice that leapt most off the page \u2013 hectoring, withering, crisply no-nonsense<\/p><\/blockquote>
In her youth, Etta would note down wearers of every bird hat in church, sending each a stern letter by post. It is said that a director of the Natural History Museum once hid down a stairwell rather than be harangued by Mrs Lemon for some bird protection failure. She was \u201cnever much of an scientific ornithologist,\u201d wrote James Fisher in the 1960s, \u201cbut a woman of tremendous drive and a humorous ruthlessness and courage.\u201d<\/p>
By then, Mrs Lemon had passed into folklore, a Victorian fanatic considered fair play for pot shots. She was unattractive, with \u201ca mouth like a rat trap\u201d, thought one old RSPB staffer of her portrait. In the official history of the RSPB published for its 1989 centenary, For Love of Birds<\/em> (known in-house as FLOB), author Tony Samstag dubbed her the \u201cFulminator in Chief\u201d \u2013 \u201cone of those whose Christian name was\u2026 forever \u2018Mrs\u2019.\u201d<\/p>
An RSPB sandwich board campaign to save snowy egrets in 1911 (above), mimics the approach of the suffragettes (below). \u00a9 rspb-images.com<\/figcaption><\/figure> I wondered when exactly the men of science had turned against the women, in a reflex that seemed to then become ingrained. This moment came about, as far as I could tell, between the wars. In 1926, the rigorously scientific young birdwatcher Max Nicholson attacked the RSPB\u2019s core as \u201can elderly and passive group of amateurs\u201d who \u201csay too much and do too little,\u201d in his book Birds in England<\/em>. The female founders of the RSPB, with their early policy of women-only membership, had unfortunately had the effect (so he thought) of sharply dividing the growing bird protection movement from its \u201cnatural scientific base\u201d.<\/p>
Leading ornithologist Julian Huxley was next to criticise the Society in the early 1930s for its \u201cblindness to the intellectual, as opposed to the emotional side of the bird-lovers\u2019 activities\u201d. Etta Lemon was well known for her suspicion of modern birding practices: the ringing of nestlings, census taking, the intrusion of long camera lenses into nests. She felt that these practices had human, rather than the birds\u2019, interest at heart. <\/p>
See caption above. \u00a9 GL Archive\/Alamy<\/figcaption><\/figure> The extraction of the widowed Mrs Lemon from her own charity was painful to witness. I found highly personal letters in the archives telling the story \u2013 how first she was \u201crelegated to a very inferior position in the Society\u2019s office\u201d, then \u201cbaited\u201d at a committee meeting \u2013 \u201cthere\u2019s no other word for it\u201d. In May 1939, just after the RSPB\u2019s 50th anniversary celebrations, she was informed, by post, that her services would no longer be required. She was 80 years old.<\/p>
How callous \u2013 but also, perhaps, how necessary. Mrs Lemon was the Margaret Thatcher of the bird world \u2013 visionary, forthright, divisive and, in the end, out of touch. For her society to grow and evolve, Mrs Lemon had to let go.<\/p>
But because of the unpleasant nature of her extraction, in the face of her stubborn possessiveness, Mrs Lemon has lingered in the collective memory like a bad smell, rather than getting the heroic Hudson treatment.<\/p>
Mrs Lemon was the Margaret Thatcher of the bird world \u2013 visionary, forthright, divisive and, in the end, out of touch.<\/p><\/blockquote>
Mike Clarke, current chief executive of the RSPB, uses the phrase \u201cfounder syndrome\u201d to describe Etta\u2019s predicament. \u201cWhen a society starts small, the individuals have a huge influence on the early culture,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut the culture has to change with the times.\u201d By 1939, the spat over feathered hats was long over. The Plumage Importation (Prohibition) Act had been passed in 1921, and there were more pressing nature conservation battles, including oil spills, egging and the persecution of birds of prey \u2013 none of them straightforward, some divisive. If tactics and personnel had not changed, the charity would have alienated its members.<\/p>
I asked Clarke why he thought his charity\u2019s early history has never been celebrated. As an \u201carmchair historian\u201d, he said that he\u2019d always imagined devoting his retirement to investigating the stories of Emily, Eliza and Etta. \u201cI haven\u2019t really got the time now. But it pains me that we haven\u2019t devoted more charity resources to celebrating our history. The time to write it should have been the 1989 centenary; this was when we could have invested a lot of effort pulling it together.\u201d<\/p>
But with so many pulls on the RSPB\u2019s time and money, the organisation didn\u2019t, and the moment passed. The \u2018FLOB\u2019 book has a chapter on \u2018Those Formidable Women\u2019 \u2013 who \u201cin different times would have given suck to giants\u201d \u2013 written in a breezily chauvinistic tone which no longer has traction.<\/p>
When a plaque was erected on Emily Williamson\u2019s house in Didsbury in 1989, it failed even to mention her by name. Clarke points out that \u201chistory is always written through the cultural lens that we have at the time.\u201d Happily that lens is now coming to bear on the women; pulling them into focus. Since my book\u2019s publication, the people of Didsbury have funded a handsome new plaque for Emily Williamson. Her image is now public property, too. I was sent an old family photograph by Emily\u2019s ancestor, the ethologist Melissa Bateson. Manchester\u2019s early animal rights heroine now has a face.<\/p>
And at the RSPB\u2019s Sandy HQ, an old oil painting of Etta Lemon has been unearthed and is currently being restored. It is destined to hang opposite the portrait of WH Hudson: the man who gave the ladies the courage to go forward with their fight. Eighty years after she was purged from her own society, Mrs Lemon is coming home to roost. <\/p>
Tessa Boase <\/strong>is author of The Woman Who Saved the Birds <\/em><\/p><\/div><\/div>
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