Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds

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This is a remarkable, greatly impressive, well researched, comprehensive and valuable piece of work about a young man who came from the Pampas of Argentina in 1874 to save our British birds.Conor Mark Jameson vividly describes Hudson's character allowing us to almost ‘know’ him. He was shy and unpretentious and shunned society. Dinners and public speaking were avoided unless such events would help towards the creation of a Society for the Protection of Birds. ( the RSPB as we now know it ).His friends and admirers were many and varied from the poorest country folk across the board to, for example, Sir Edward Grey who made sure that Hudson had a pension and could work without financial worries at Grey’s Hampshire cottage. ‘Hampshire Days’ was a book he wrote whilst there. Jameson describes many of these friends and manages to dovetail them in comfortably to add further interest to the story.His health was always fragile but he might have lived longer had he not suffered so much anger and stress over the treatment of birds by those who sought only to profit from the sale of their feathers, eggs, nests and skins. He died in 1923, working tirelessly to the end.I would certainly recommend this book to anyone, whether they have heard of Hudson or not, and especially if they care about birds. Conor Mark Jameson has produced a definitive work which deserves high praise.Pat Brockway

A remarkably well-researched and well-written book, which shows how important WH Hudson was in the development of the RSPB and as a campaigner against the abuse of our wild birds. Hudson was both the Attenborough and Packham of his day, but has been curiously forgotten. He changed our relationship with birds, from one based on exploitation and abuse, to one based on love, wonder and knowledge. Anyone with a keen interest in British birds needs to read this book, it tells an amazing, must-know story. The book does, though, leave you wanting more: for example, it does not contain any appraisal of Hudson's ground-breaking nature writing, which is still hugely relevant today, and does not analyse Hudson's deeply Gaian relationship with Nature. Read, learn and enjoy!

Top marks for Conor Jamison’s biography of this unjustly under-appreciated hero of nature.

A fascinating, meticulously studied and attractively written book on W. H. Hudson, pioneer in bird conservation.

In the 40 years spanning each side of the end of the 19th century, London was home to William Henry Hudson, writer and naturalist. The latter calling he held with great fervour, but he claimed little affection for the profession at which he excelled but through which he forged a national campaign for nature conservation, the impacts of which are felt to this day.Hudson wrote vividly of his early years as a boy intoxicated by the birdlife of his Argentine homeland. Previous biographies examine his life principally as an author, but Mark Conor Jameson's mission in his book is to bring colour and form to the years of Hudson's greatest influence as a pioneer conservationist, when his innate passion for nature fired a literary output that touched great minds in politics and society, and swayed public policy on protection of the countryside and wild creatures.Jameson achieves this in a very touching and absorbing text. He is meticulous in exploring contemporaneous articles, diaries and letters which show the fabric of Hudson's daily life and the zeal he applied over decades in supporting the Victorian women founders of 'The Bird Society' (the fore-runner of the RSPB). He lays out intently and beautifully the context, influence and compromises of the life Hudson made in England, having sailed from Argentina in 1874, in his thirties. Hudson came here with the simple impulse to be in the land where renowned ornithologists worked and where he might find respect for his own dedication to wild birds. But chance, the publishing industry and connections anchored him to London, and he railed at the habitual smogs, and the loss of wooded space and open land to unbarred urban sprawl. Movingly, Jameson tells how much-needed solace came from Hudson's escapes among the landscapes of southern English counties - Berkshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Wiltshire, Cornwall - staying at the homes of devoted friends or in obscure country lodgings.A key revelation for me from Jameson's book, is that Hudson's life embodies the axiom that writing - books, articles, pamphlets, personal and public letters -was THE genre of communication and campaigning in his age. And it is obvious that Hudson was at core a writer, with instinctive literary skill. He must have been conscious of this skill and knew he could enlist it to the cause of his heart, but it was perhaps an incidental occupation in his eyes, compared to treading the natural world and confirming his kinship with it. Jameson's work makes clear, however, that writing always immersed Hudson, as evident from his output of 28 books in almost 40 years, plus substantial pamphlets opposing the plumage trade, several essays and seminal letters to The Times, and extensive personal letters to friends. His best known books (Birds of La Plata, Birds and Man, Birds in London, A Shepherd's Life, the novel Green Mansions) and his lobbying works for The Bird Society reflect his fierce intent to forever speak of, and for, nature.Jameson's book is an accurate and sympathetic tribute to Hudson's almost animistic spirit, which drove his will to protect what he loved through the honest expression of his words. And the subtitle to 'Finding W H Hudson' reflects this perfectly: 'The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the birds'. Despite his final regrets at leaving the Pampas behind, one hopes Hudson realised that he was right to migrate and to live his later life in the place where his talent and passionate eye could have most purchase. It is certain that had he decided to stay in Argentina we'd not have the RSPB as we know it: his presence in England at that key time underpins much past and current action to save bird populations worldwide. And one hopes also that his writings are read anew as a result of this biography, and so continue to energise others in the cause of conservation.