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Article Number 113. This sub-section contains an article contributed by Peter Marren.
Memoirs of NCC Scotland. Click on a photo for a popup window showing larger photo.
Peter Marren's memories of life in the
NCC's North-east Scotland region between 1977 and 1984.
Please let me explain. When I turned sixty, and had
time on my hands, I wrote a memoir of my childhood - to some extent, it was also
about contemporary childhoods generally. It was published by Pisces
Publications as Where the Wild Thyme Blew, subtitled 'Growing up with
nature in the fifties and sixties'. It took my life from cradle to graduation,
that is, from 1950 to 1972.
Recently, and just for fun, I've taken on a part two,
which, so far, takes things through my young adulthood to 1984, and includes my
seven years in the NCC in Scotland. This covers the time when the NCC was
changed by the Wildlife & Countryside Act from a relatively small organisation
bumbling around on the margins of Scottish public life to the one we know
today. As fellow ex-NCC hands, I thought my experiences and memories might
interest some of you, and with that in mind I've appended the relevant chapters
(duly edited!) to the 49 Club website. I have no plans to publish it anywhere
else.
Since I didn't join the NCC full-time until January
1977, the first nine chapters are missing. The relevant stuff starts at Chapter
10, and goes on until Chapter 19, when I left Scotland for the south and
started a new, and (as it turned out) brief stint as ARO Oxfordshire.
If any of you would like a copy of Where the Wild
Thyme Blew, I have some copies left which I can dispatch for, say, a tenner
each. Just give me a bell at the following
And so let us begin. It is winter 1976, and snow lay
deep on the hills of Scotland... Notice had come of three vacant ARO posts north
of the border. Though I had no experience at all of conservation up there I
applied hopefully. Days later, a brown envelope slipped through the letter box
containing the following invitation.
Chapter 10
Conservancy
13 December 1976
Dear Mr Marren
ARO - N.E. SCOTLAND
Thank you for completing the application
form for the above post.
I am pleased to invite you to an interview
to be held at 12 Hope Terrace, Edinburgh, on Monday 20 December 1976 at 11.50 a.m...
Would you please telephone to confirm that
you can attend the interview. I should be grateful if you would also complete
the enclosed health form and claims form and return them at the interview.
The invitation came out of the blue. I was all set to
become a 'team leader' on a fixed-term contract based at the field centre at
Gibraltar Point on the freezing, windswept Lincolnshire coast. Then, suddenly,
and just in time, came the possibility of escape. I remember the interview
well. I had recently enjoyed a fairly vinous weekend in London, at the
Conservation Course Christmas party, after which I killed time with a pal
before blearily boarding the sleeper to Edinburgh. I hardly slept a wink, and
come the dawn we were unceremoniously turfed out by a rude guard, and I had to
run to the toilet on the station. And so it was a tired and hungover interviewee
that eventually turned up at Hope Terrace, the NCC's Scottish headquarters. I
faced a panel of four or five veterans. One in particular, a chap with sharp
eyes under shaggy brows, questioned me closely about my small doings in nature conservation:
the seabird survey on Lundy, the wildlife surveys of north-east England, the
recreation report, the wasted days of my failed doctorate, out on Widdybank Fell with a metal frame and a packet of cocktail
sticks. To my surprise, he seemed to be quite interested. As far as I remember,
I answered, untruthfully, that all these things had been 'fun'. Such fun. I
love nature, me. I'm a nature guy. I tottered out again, and thought, well,
there's another opportunity gone west.
But it wasn't. The interviews were for three posts,
all in Scotland, and the best of the three, by some distance, was the one in
the North-east, which included Deeside as well as Donside,
plus a long, wild, and rugged coastline, and half the Cairngorms. That was the post
I was offered a few days later. As shaggy-eyes informed me later, to my
surprise, "you came across well". The salary was nearly double what I had
received from the skinflint, Cobham, and there were expenses on top of that.
For the first six weeks, by some fluke in the wording of my appointment, I was
able to live off expenses and bank the rest.
I rode the night train to Inverness early in New Year
1977, gazing out of the carriage window at the moonlit drifts. It was the
furthest north I had ever been. Snow lay heavy on the hills that winter; there
were news stories of buried cars, some with their occupants still inside. Arriving, I was put up at a B&B, One,
Wimberley Way, whose landlady was a kindly Mrs MacKenzie,
though it ought to have been Mrs Womble. The office was in a tall Victorian
building in the middle of town called Caledonia House. It was shared by both the
NCC's North-west and North-east regions, despite Inverness being nowhere near
any part of the North-east. I was duly welcomed, with a whirlwind of
introductions, and given a lot of papers and documents to study. Oh, and like
all newbies, I had to sign the Official Secrets Act, just in case I came across
any official secrets (but which ones were the secrets?). I learned that I
would, after a bit of tutoring, be out-posted at Banchory, near Aberdeen, with
easier access to the many 'sites' for which I would be responsible.
[You will probably not wish to read the next two
paragraphs which is background stuff. Make a cup of tea or something]. At this
point, I should say something about the NCC: about what it was, and what it did
(I use the past tense because the NCC no longer exists; it was abolished in
1990, a victim of devolved government. Its functions in Scotland were taken over
by a body that now calls itself 'NatureScot'). First,
a bit of background history. Official nature conservation in Britain started in
1949, as a minor part of planning for the big outdoors after the conclusion of
World War Two. It was ushered in on the coat-tails of something seen as more
important: the creation of National Parks. For reasons lost in time, the Nature
Conservancy, as it was then called, didn't become part of a government
department, under the thumb of a minister, but a semi-autonomous 'wildlife
service' established under a Royal Charter. It was given a modest budget,
enough to establish a team of scientists, a network of offices, and an
administrative arm. One of the Conservancy's purposes was to set up and
maintain 'National' Nature Reserves, but it could also identify other places as
'Sites of Special Scientific Interest' (SSSI or 'Triple S.I.). It was entitled
to advise government on issues affecting wild life and geology, and to comment
on local plans. The Nature Conservancy would be governed by a board of
distinguished scientists with a full-time director, Max Nicholson, who had the
ear of his real boss, the Labour politician and Lord President of Council,
Herbert Morrison. But few conservationists seem to take much interest in history,
not even their own. Too busy worrying about tomorrow, I suppose.
The Nature Conservancy went through various
vicissitudes until 1973 when it was reformed, losing its science branch and
most of its scientists, and becoming purely administrative. This was known for
ever after as The Split', like an axe falling on an apple' as Morton Boyd put
it. The new body was to be governed by a formal Council, more firmly under the control
of the minister, with his recently retired Permanent Secretary, Sir David Serpell, in charge, as Chairman. Hence, it was renamed the
Nature Conservancy Council, a backward step in my view because it meant that
the Conservancy would henceforth be known by an acronym, the NCC. More
officious. In the new structure, there were three 'country directors', for
England, Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland had a separate set-up), with a
'director-general' at the top. My country was, of course, Scotland, directed by
an excitable chap called Morton Boyd, of whom more anon.
Within NCC Scotland there were four regions, divided as
quadrants between North-east, North-west, South-east and South-west, each with
its own regional office and Regional Officer to occupy it. My Regional Officer
was none other than my interviewer, the shaggy-eyed Mike Matthew. I'd feared
that he might be a bit of a fire-eater, but in fact, Mike was a quiet soul, resolutely
unflashy, but one who knew his job and the North-east inside-out. He had
originally been a 'warden-naturalist', but, with silent competence, he had
risen to his present position by, I would guess, his early forties.
Under Mike, came his deputy, who traditionally took on
all the jobs the Regional Officer didn't want to do, plus three 'assistants',
known as Assistant Regional Officers or AROs. I was now one of those, at the
civil service grade of 'Higher Scientific Officer' ('Higher' because I had
three previous years of experience to draw on). In addition, we had some
wardens who looked after the National Nature Reserves, and an estate agent:
around a dozen of us all told. Together we covered a vast area including not
only Grampian Region but Speyside, and Orkney and Shetland as well. The odd
thing was that, wardens aside, none of us were Scots. What does that say about
Scotland's educational system? Anyway, that's the NCC's North-east Scotland
Region as it was in 1977, and I hope it's enough to be getting on with.
A few days later, I boarded the first of many train
journeys to Aberdeen to meet my future boss, the deputy or DRO. His name was John
Forster. A plumpish, balding chap in his late
thirties, John was, unusually for the NCC, a public-school man - Sherborne and
Oxford - who had married a Scottish wife and settled in a farmhouse in Finzean, by the Water of Feugh, just
a few miles from Banchory. Equally unusually, he wasn't a biologist; I think
his degree was in English. John had the hardest job in the region, for
nominally under him were three independently-minded 'assistants'. With a
doctorate from the Antarctic Survey, Mike Richardson was our man in faraway
Shetland. Necessarily on his own, he was a natural organiser, and had built up
an influential web of contacts locally. Mike performed well above his
pay-grade. Dave Morris, who was based at Aviemore in Speyside, was a keen
mountaineer, skier, and climber, and so very much in his element. He wasn't an
obvious team player either, and might have been happier as a campaigner (many
years later, he became one). That left me. It seemed to me that a certain amount of
bolshiness was the North-eastern style. Fortunately, although relations were
sometimes strained to begin with, John and I ended up as friends quite as much
as colleagues. The trick, I discovered, is to make friends with your boss's
wife.
I was probably quite lucky. John was English for a
start. He was also hospitable, as well as thoughtful and conscientious, the
sort of chap who makes himself useful locally and ends up as chair of the
community council. He had travelled a bit in his youth, in Nepal and
Afghanistan, which gave John a wider perspective on life. Though he couldn't deliver
a speech to save his life, he was a useful background operative, organising meetings
and conferences, co-ordinating evidence at public enquiries, things like that. He
was more of an environmentalist really, interested in sustainability, free
trade, clean air, that kind of stuff.
We began with a tour of the North-eastern lowlands in
a noisy, rattletrap Land Rover, holding necessarily shouted conversations.
Various problems had piled up before my appointment. One of them was about a
place called the Moss of Rora; and I'll go into this
a bit because it was a good example of what we were up against. This place was
the largest surviving raised bog in the district of Buchan, a desolate, windswept
plain of nondescript farms with boggy bits in-between (but with a fine rocky
coast punctuated with pretty, out-of-work fishing villages). As the best bog, the
Moss of Rora had been 'notified' as a Site of Special
Scientific Interest. The problem was this: the postwar landscape of Buchan had
been transformed by the miracle of winter barley. The earlier scrappy mix of
run-down farms and shooting estates was turning into a prosperous arable
prairie in which the surviving fragments of wild, once of some small value for wild
game and peat, were now useless and ripe for reclamation. As it stood, Rora Moss represented a square mile of nothing. But the elderly owner, lately enfranchised
after the sale of the estate, had plans that would turn it into a nice little earner.
His plan was this. First, he would sell the peat rights
to a company to mine and sell on to plant nurseries. Next, he proposed to allow
the local authority to use the resulting hole for land-fill. And finally, once
that hole had been filled in and smoothed over, he proposed to lease the ground
to the Forestry Commission to plant trees, and not nice trees either, but
horrible non-native lodgepole pines. The great thing was that it would involve
him in very little work, just paperwork that his solicitor could do, and would probably
bring in more money than he had ever seen in his long, hard life. Unfortunately,
by the end of it, there wouldn't be much left of the SSSI.
I expect he explained all this to us, but I'm sorry to
say I couldn't understand a word of it. The rural dialect of Buchan is one of
the most extreme in Britain. It is barely even Scots. Known as the Buchan
Claik, it is essentially a different language, with its own spelling and rules
of grammar. So here was this Claik-speaking old boy dithering on about how he'd
'daunderfurthanfath' and 'gyaunaneth an fither' until 'my darg
were deen' - and the Moss of Rora
looked as though an atom bomb had hit it. But John, I noticed, seemed to understand
the chap's point of view. As a tenant farmer in Buchan, he'd drawn one of
life's shortest straws, and now, at last, he'd smelt a chance to pay back his
overdraft. And here were we, trying to stop him, but with very little to offer
in return. I think, in the end, we gave him some money from our very limited
coffers to preserve bits of the bog. But the point is that I realised there and
then that nature conservation in the North-east, especially for an Englishman
like me, looked like uphill work.
We also called in at the place where I would be
working in a few weeks' time. It was a single-storey, modern centre for upland
research situated just outside Banchory among birch trees. It was called the
Hill of Brathens, and had been one of the field
stations of the former Nature Conservancy, though it was now the separate Institute
of Terrestrial Ecology. Its mouthful of a name resulted in many a comically mistaken
address: The Institute of Terrible Ecology, Hole of Bothers, for instance. Because
'the Split' had happened relatively recently, relations between us were still
quite close. I had already met some of the people who worked there when we had dropped
in during the UCL Conservation Course tour.
The chap in charge was another old-stager, David
Jenkins. Tense, slightly simian, and with deep-set glittering eyes, he had been
an expert on wild pheasants and grouse until he was pushed aside by Adam Watson
and became station head instead. David was quite a character, definitely
marmite, but forceful, perceptive, and with a fierce kind of intelligence. I
rather liked him. I do warm to these slightly eccentric types with a bit of
style. Late in life, David self-published his scientific memoirs, in which he sadly
recognised that it had been his mission 'to encourage other scientists more
talented than himself'. But it was thanks entirely to him that the NCC retained
an office at the Hill of Brathens. David believed it
was important for the research and admin arms of the Nature Conservancy to
remain in close contact. Unfortunately, four years after the Split, that was no
longer a widely shared view. Stationed there, I would be a link-man as well as
an Assistant Regional Officer, and expected to take an interest in the scientific
work. But that was OK. Brathens was a stimulating
place, among ecologists studying the ways of grouse, red deer, puffins, foxes,
otters and Scots pine, as well as the vaguer-sounding 'range ecology'. And apart
from the scientists, there were some animals, including a tame dog otter called
Benjie and some unfriendly badgers.
Back at John's farmhouse, Dalsack,
while his wife Sandra cooked our supper, I was introduced to my immediate
predecessor, Robin Callander, who was wearing a kilt. Kilted Robin hadn't been
in my job for long. He wasn't a team player either. He preferred to live
a crofter's life in a remote corner of Feughside,
working on radical theories about land ownership in Scotland. He informed me that
I was inheriting an area of unjust occupation, still governed by a form of
feudalism. He claimed to have discussed this with the Duke of Edinburgh. I
didn't know it then, but Robin would be the publisher of my first book, even though
I expect he found it short on wealth redistribution and other ideas for a
better Scotland.
Another predecessor, Laughton Johnston, hadn't lasted
long either. A Shetlander, he soon returned to his native islands to become a teacher,
a writer and poet, in other words an all-round professional Shetlander. And the
one before that had been John Forster himself. Given its recent, erratic
history I began to wonder whether there was something wrong with my job.
Actually there was nothing wrong with the job. Here I
was, landed in the midst of a beautiful and interesting area, when newbies were
traditionally given places no one else wanted.It seemed I was fortunate in my colleagues too. In my second week, Mike
Matthew had sent me to Edinburgh headquarters to, as he put it, 'say hello'. There
I met another regional officer very different to Mike who gave me quite a talking-to,
ending with the ominous remark that "it'll take a year or two to drill the
university out of you". This guy, I was fairly sure, hadn't been to university.
I also had a talk with the deputy head, Jim McCarthy. Well,
he talked, I listened. Like a number of NCC Scottish staff at that time, his
background was in forestry, in colonial Africa (he spoke Swahili). He tended to
see the big-picture, estate-sized, and so talked about 'integration'. He
thought I needed a briefing in 'the professional approach' to problems, whose overall
aim, it seemed to me, was to avoid confrontation. When I queried whether it
might sometimes be necessary to make a stand on behalf of the birds and the
bees, he exclaimed, "goodness, you sound like General Custer!" But McCarthy had
been a regional officer; he understood the reality. All the same, I returned to
Inverness feeling relieved that these guys weren't my immediate superiors. I
realised that the slightly bumbling way in which the North-east Region seemed
to go about things was no bad thing. With my new colleagues, I reckoned, I
should be able to bumble along quite nicely for a good while. Phew, what a
piece of luck!
Chapter 11
Scientists
After nearly two months of internship at Inverness, I
moved to Banchory, a small town in Royal Deeside about twenty miles west of
Aberdeen. I stayed in my usual stand-by, a B&B, until I found a bachelor
flat at Ewan Place, overlooking the river. The Hill of Brathens,
my workplace, lay just a couple of miles away. I was given a small office next
to the library, and settled into a hybrid life as the token NCC man in the lead
ecological institute in Scotland. It was now April, and spring was returning,
slowly and reluctantly, the lime-green budding birch contrasting prettily with the
dark ribbon of the Dee and the still snow-capped hills beyond. On my first day,
a stoat caught a rabbit just beneath my office window. The latter's child-like
screams chimed with the ringing telephone. I was to spend quite a lot of time
on the phone. Or reading plans. Or attending meetings. Or writing memos. When I
was so occupied, the wildlife outside would just have to get on with it.
From this point on, my memories will need to become less
strictly chronological, more thematic. Until I joined the NCC, my
post-university life had been episodic, a job here, another job there. But now I
was in the same place, doing much the same thing (although with some shades of
difference) for seven long years. Perhaps the main interest of this memoir now
is to give a taste of what conservation in action was like, half a century ago,
before the invention of social media, home computers, smart phones, and websites.
Back then we stored our type-written letters in paper files, talked to
colleagues on rotary-dial telephones, and received news on Telex machines. And
we sent our stuff by post with a letter-rate stamp costing, if I remember
rightly, 5p - or, as some of us still insisted, a bob.
What were my new colleagues, the scientists, up to? The
central ecological problem in Scotland, especially in the Highlands, was the
interaction between the grazing of deer and the environment. Their name for
this was 'range ecology'. There were more Red Deer on the open hill, and in the
woods, than the environment could cope with. In prehistory, their numbers were
held in check by wolves and, probably, cave men. Now it was done by stalking
the stags and culling the hinds, but an unsustainable number of deer were
needed to maintain the sport. Heavy grazing reduced woodland regeneration and
diminished biodiversity. The purpose of the Hill of Brathens'
range ecology programme was to study the effects of overgrazing and the habits
of the deer. Ideally this work should have suggested a solution. Unfortunately,
the estates take little notice of scientists, and deer numbers are now getting
on for twice as high as they were in the 1970s. In practice the lairds pay far
more attention to the views of their head stalker than to a bunch of government
scientists writing incomprehensible papers that only their peers ever read.
The scientists were mostly of middling years, a
mixture of zoologists and botanists, plus some administrators, the chaps that
secure the cash. They were mostly chaps, often with beards. They were supposed
to work in teams, but many seemed to work more or less on their own, doing
their own thing. The team working on grouse were housed in another research
facility, called Blackhall, on the far side of the river. Its leader, Adam
Watson, looked like the Old Man of the Mountain with his snowy beard and
patrician air. He and his side-kick, Bob Moss, were the grouse team. They were
literally surrounded by grouse, caged up like chickens. Visiting Blackhall, you
were met with a grousey uproar which sounded to my ears
like "go-back, go-back'. I hold in my hands a large volume titled, simply, Grouse,
by (of course) Adam and Bob. If you want to know what Adam and Bob did, year on
year, it's all in there, all 530 pages of it. The jacket depicts two combative
grouse squaring up to one another, and that seems appropriate too. At Brathens seminars, where the assembled scientists competed
to pull down whichever poor sap was presenting his work, Adam and Bob were
always in the forefront of the hecklers. Adam Watson was quite well-known
locally through his broadcasting - he was the go-to guy for mountain news - but
I never warmed to him. He was a queer cuss, with a way of talking that looked
beyond you towards the hills, and then, as it were, he would suddenly notice
you, and look a bit surprised you were still there. That said, he was helpful
when it came to conservation issues, and was a key witness, maybe the
key witness, at the public inquiry into the extension of ski-ing in the Cairngorms. He had what you might call
hill-cred.
At Brathens, the star was
Hans Kruuk, a Dutch carnivore man. Hans had been a
disciple of Niko Tinbergen, the animal behaviourist, and had spent time in
Africa getting to know hyenas. Now back in Scotland he also published a lot of
stuff about otters, badgers and foxes, but I think it was his advice and
experience that mattered most, especially to those of his colleagues who were
also studying otters, foxes and badgers. Don't bother Hans, David Jenkins warned
me, he is too busy, too important, (Though actually he was very approachable, a
nice helpful guy, always smiling. A wide, distinctly carnivorous, smile).
It was natural that the scientists I saw most of were
the botanists. Gordon Miller was the very image of a keen-eyed, red-haired Scot,
with the regulation beard, though in his case a well-trimmed one. He knew about
mountain vegetation, and I remember we once had a pleasant day out at Caenlochan glen, clambering about among rare flora until we
were chased away by a thunderstorm. Then there was David Welch, who, unusually
for a professional scientist, enjoyed recording the wild plants of the
North-east. He was very meticulous, and eventually published the first and only
Flora of North Aberdeenshire, before moving on to the wild flowers of Kincardine.
David was reluctant to use the NCC's plant records unchecked, because, he said,
they were so inaccurate. The other notable thing about him was that he wore
wooden clogs. There must have been a reason, but there it is.
Then there was Neil Bayfield, a good friend, noted for
inventing a machine called the trample-ometer, a
Monty Python-ish artificial foot that stomped up and
down on a square of turf to model our effect on the environment. Neil's beard
was curly and black. In his spare time, he was studying some predatory fly (an
Empid), of the sort that presents some gruesome gift to its partner before jumping
on its back and having its way. More importantly, Neil played the fiddle, and
was at the centre of the institute's main and surprise social activity: Morris
dancing. I'll come to that. He also wrote humorous verse, in the style of
Edward Lear, and had once fiddled in a folk band called the Railway Pudding
Hill Runners.
The scientists would congregate for seminars in the
coffee room in which views would be exchanged. The views sometimes generated
more heat than light. It could certainly get a bit fraught at times. There was
a tradition that, before presenting a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, the scientist
would run it past the bearpit of his colleagues. That way, any weaknesses could
be highlighted - and, take it from me, there would be weaknesses, and they
would indeed be bloody well highlighted. It was a bit like those business-plan
interviews in The Apprentice. The Brathens guys were
well up on statistics and data analysis, and could sniff out any weaknesses in
a twinkling. I suppose these sessions aimed at stoking a feeling of scientific togetherness
and common purpose. But there was a strong competitive element too; a gladiatorial
contest, without the blood, but with dented egos at the end of it. Still, the
victim would get his own back in the next session.
David Jenkins, the head, was having a difficult year.
Shoved aside from other avenues of research, he had started to study otters. The
immediate problem was that he couldn't catch any otters. The next problem was
that he couldn't see them either, on account of troubled eyesight. After a
painful operation, he recovered his vision in one eye, but in the meantime, he
needed helpers. He was lent one from Aberdeen University. Her name was Maggie
Makepeace, who has since abandoned zoology and become quite a well-known
novelist. Alas, very soon, there was a major falling-out between the two. I
forget the details, but it may not be entirely irrelevant that the Makepeace
novels have titles like Travelling Hopefully and Out of Step, and
which focus on 'communication and the lack of it', as well as controlling
behaviour. Perhaps her time at Brathens was a
catharsis. As for DJ, he too decided to say a word or two about it in his
memoir, characteristically titled, Of Partridges and Peacocks...and of things
about which I knew nothing. He recalled, and I quote, that after the
falling-out, Maggie 'returned to the University Zoology Department where she
was more-or-less happy in a routine laboratory job which aimed to find out
whether faeces could be identified as from particular individual
Otters...Unfortunately the work was inconclusive'. Touché!
His next assistant was Graham Burrows, who was my age,
capable of fun, and who became my best mate in Banchory. He had recently
completed a thesis on wood-ants, but was now thrown into the near-impossible
task of trapping, tagging, and studying wild otters. He threw himself into life
at Brathens and became very good at Morris dancing.
Tall, bearded (of course), and an impersonator of the Incredible Hulk, Graham was
in most respects refreshingly normal, with a healthy everyday interest in girls
and beer. I was best man at his wedding, three years later. Always good to have
a bestie.
David Jenkins made it clear that he expected me to
join in too. This became a bit of a tug, for John Forster reminded me that this
was by no means compulsory. But, when in Rome...So, I ran the Rothamsted light
trap for moths. I did a few talks, on nature reserves and Sites of Special
Scientific Interest, and once, I think, on the pollination of orchids, at which
I was mercifully not heckled. I attended their open days and parties, and
listened to tedious tales of science in the pub over pints of freezing-cold
Scottish beer. So, I mucked in a bit.
What else did I do for science? With Neil Bayfield, I
edited a satirical rag called OecologiaGramporum, which took the piss out of solemn journals,
like the Journal of Ecology. It ran, I think, to four numbers. Some of the
others contributed limericks and funny drawings. It was fortunate that Neil was
there to warn me off topics that were unsafe. Caretaker Charlie's hat, for
instance. Like all caretakers, Brathens Charlie was
an irascible character. He wore a revolting beanie indoors and out, and I
thought it would be interesting to pen a speculative account of the wildlife inside
it, possibly declaring it a site of special interest. Neil probably saved me
from serious injury. He also considered it unwise to ask David Jenkins to pen a
serious and (we hoped) pompous foreword. Neil's stuff was in any case better
than mine. For example, he offered his colleagues free data: 'Cut out the
numbers of your choice!'; 'Save the bother of calculations. Choose one of these
already formulated standard errors!'. 'Join the dots for the graph you require!'.
My stuff was more whimsical. 'Matthew MacMarmalade's
Notebook', for instance, was based on the notes a certain warden-naturalist had
made, with observations like 'Mole was observed'. OecologiaGramporum was the forerunner for the satirical
pieces I used to write for the NCC's own news magazine, Natural Selection.
I can't help it. Anything to raise a smile among the enveloping seriousness. I
doubt there is anything so serious that it can't be mocked.
The other Bayfield-Marren project was a Mummer's Play
to go with the Morris dancing. I was not one of nature's dancers but I could be
a playwright. Mummer's plays have traditional plots and verses that date back
to the mists of time, but you can liven them up with topical references that
everyone will get. We made a magnificent dragon, played by Graham Burrows, out
of wire and papier mâché, with working jaws. I acted the presenter, wearing a
traditional tall hat decorated with ribbons, while Neil played the Peruvian
Knight ('Peruvian' because Peru had recently thrashed Scotland in the World Cup,
so a topical reference, you see).
The other Morris-men took various roles, and all went
well until we introduced a new character, Beelzebub, played by me in bin bags.
Beelzebub has traditional lines such as, 'My arse is made of beaten brass/ No
man can make me feel!' This displeased one of the Morris-men, a character with
a beard so enormous it practically concealed his entire face. He thought Beelzebub's
capering was spoiling the squeaky-clean image of the Banchory-Ternan Morris
troupe and warned me to stop ("but he's a devil from Hell, for heaven's sake!").
I was willing to tweak the offending line, changing it, for instance, to "My
chopper is made of beaten copper", but Mr Weird-beard wasn't having it, and got
me and my play chucked out. I didn't mind really. A little bit of Morris
dancing goes a long way. It's a bit girly if you ask me.
The Hill of Brathens was my office for just over a year until the dread
day, on 3rd April 1978, when my colleagues moved from Inverness to a
new regional HQ at Rubislaw Terrace in Aberdeen. My fellow outposted AROs
stayed where they were, but I was too close to Aberdeen to escape. I had to
move too. I think it was a mistake, for being the link man did matter, and
certainly David Jenkins thought so. But regional officers like to have their
staff clustered about them, like chicks with Mother Hen. It was also the Civil
Service way: to labour the metaphor, to pile all your eggs in one basket. And
so, on the eve of my departure from Brathens, a cake
was baked, and DJ made a speech, hardly mentioning me, but reminding all the
beards that it was a milestone all the same, the breaking of a historic link. Science
and conservation were drifting apart, and my going was a small symbol of that.
Since then, that fissure has become a gulf. Government nature conservation
today is hardly science-based at all. It is, rather, deeply administrative, and
also tends to cow-tow to the latest wokery (And as for basic literacy, what is
left when NCC Scotland's latest manifestation calls itself 'NatureScot'?).
As for the Hill of Brathens, the station was
eventually burned to the ground by animal-rights activists under the mistaken
impression that cruel experiments were going-on there. It was rebuilt along the
same lines but the lost long-term data and the excellent library, full of rare
journals, were irreplaceable. Sometime after that, the Institute of Terrestrial
Ecology itself was abolished. I helped to fight that, pulling in David
Attenborough, and a tame MP, but the deck was rigged in advance. Permanence is
an illusion. The passage of time informs us that what we take for stability are
mere episodes. Adrift on its fathomless wastes, we do what we do, and the world
moves on.
[You know this first bit. Skip it if you like]. There
are nature reserves and then there are National Nature Reserves. Anyone
can set up a nature reserve. But the National ones, referred to in my trade as
the NNRs, were the exclusive preserve of the Nature Conservancy and its
successors. To be a National Nature Reserve, you needed to be a top-quality
habitat with superb wildlife. Grade 1, as we used to say. In theory these elite
sites would enjoy a commensurate level of care, including a full-time warden living,
wherever possible, on-site. Note, I say 'in theory'.
What my NNRs weren't was state-owned. We hadn't the
funds to buy much land, and, besides, some ministers in the Tory government, at
least, regarded land acquisition with an unfriendly eye. It was particularly
difficult to acquire land in Scotland. In my patch, there were six NNRs and the
Conservancy didn't own an inch of them. Not so much as a blade of grass. We did
own a small estate in the Cairngorms, but that was on the other side, the Speyside
side, and so run from Aviemore. My NNRs were really just bits of private
estates for which we paid a fee in return for a few protective covenants. There
was no need to provide access for the public. The contribution of my NNRs to
tourism was minimal. Wildlife came first.
Two of my NNRs were on the coast. The Sands of Forvie
was a large wasteland of windblown sand, later extended to include part of the
neighbouring Ythan estuary. It was noted for nesting seabirds and seals. St
Cyrus, 40 miles further south, was a narrow stretch of dune grassland backed by
a cliff, and noted for species at or near their northern limit (or, if you
like, a bit of the south somehow grafted onto the north).
The other four reserves were all in Deeside. The biggest,
the Muir of Dinnet, was also the newest, opening in 1977, and I'll come to that
one. There was also Dinnet Oakwood, which shouldn't have been an NNR at all,
being small, dull, and probably planted. Above Braemar lay Morrone Birkwood
which was maybe Britain's best example of a dwarf, alpine wood with an
underlayer of juniper, or, if you still like, a bit of Norway grafted on to
Scotland, just above the pitch for the Braemar Gathering. Technically I was
also responsible for the southern half of the Cairngorms, including the native
pine forests of Glen Quoich and Glen Derry.
As I say, we didn't own them, and we didn't have much
of a say in how they were run either. Nature conservation was certainly the
aim, but, in the way of things, only one aim among others. The wardens recorded
wildlife, did a bit of maintenance and repair, and mucked in with the estate. At
St Cyrus, salmon fishermen continued to place their nets. At Dinnet the laird
did more-or-less as he liked, shooting, planting trees and grazing his cows.
And at Morrone Birkwood, the owner had plans to clear-fell the whole wood and
replace it with something more profitable. Only the Sands of Forvie was what
most of us would regard as a proper nature reserve, with a visitor centre,
waymarked trails, and protection for its hauled-up seals, and its nesting eider
ducks and terns.
Although National Nature Reserves did not appear
prominently in my job description, I became involved with them through a series
of chances. Usually, the management plans of reserves are drafted by the people
that carry out the management, namely the wardens. But on my patch, all three
wardens were elderly, and two of the three had been put out to grass,
semi-retirement sinecures for the final year of a long service. I was
interested in nature reserves, and especially in the disparity between what
they should be and what they actually were. So, just off the cuff, I decided to
study the management agreement in place between Mar Estate and the NCC over
Morrone Birkwood. I could barely believe what I was reading. The plan was
completely useless, barely allowing us to do anything meaningful, and certainly
not to get rid of the sheep that were destroying the place. The problem, it
seemed to me, was that nature reserve agreements were made over a glass of
sherry between the laird and our senior land agent, who also happened to be a
Scottish aristocrat. The result was that we were, in essence, paying to call a
place a National Nature Reserve when it wasn't much more than a label. I
thought this was a bit crap. With the brittle confidence of a newbie, unversed
in the ways of the service, I pontificated a bit, and Mike Matthew, in faraway
Inverness, seemed impressed by my argument. At any rate, the next year we did manage
to secure the estate's permission to fence three areas of the wood to encourage
regeneration. The locals hated our fences and renamed the place Stalag Luft 13,
but, hey, who says nature conservation has to look pretty?
The big event of 1977 was the opening of the new NNR
at the Muir of Dinnet, situated in the Howe of Cromar, on the edge of the
Highlands between Ballater and Aboyne. Since this was the year of the Queen's
Silver Jubilee, and government bodies expected to join in the rejoicing, Dinnet
became our own contribution. Apart from anything else, it guaranteed that a
royal would be present to cut the thread. Negotiations with the estate had been
on-going for a couple of years. The Muir of Dinnet is an accessible place of
great natural beauty, consisting of the twin lochs Davan and Kinord, together
with their surrounding birchwoods and, back then, large open stretches of now
unmanaged grouse moor. It ticked the boxes for several habitats - bearberry-dominated
moorland; freshwater and fen; birch and alder woodland - as well as being a
superb demonstration area for glacial geology. Archaeology too: Loch Kinord had
a crannog and a carved Celtic cross, and, half buried under the trees were well-preserved
hut circles and underground 'souterrains'. Just the place for an easy,
educational walk. And on top of that there was a natural wonder called the Vat,
a smooth-sided, circular gorge sculpted by torrents of meltwater at the end of
the Ice Age.
The Dinnet estate had been inherited by Marcus
Humphrey, a youngish, energetic laird, currently the chair of finance on
Grampian Regional Council, and later Deputy Lieutenant of the county. Since the
grouse moor was no longer viable, and the birch woodland worthless, he needed
to think about its future. The local council had weighed in with a plan to turn
the place into a kind of park, with car parks and various Mickey-Mouse features.
Not fancying that, Marcus approached the NCC instead. The resulting agreement
was, as usual, very much on the laird's terms. One area was reserved for
forestry (though why bit that had to be part of the nature reserve, God knows);
another was reserved for grazing; while the core area, for which the estate had
no particular plans, was called 'a strict reserve zone'. Which wasn't actually very
'strict' for it was open access and gamekeeping continued.
The formal 'declaration' of the Muir of Dinnet was an
unusually high-profile event. We had bagged the Duke of Edinburgh to unveil our
cairn. I was drafted in, faute de mieux, to write the text of a leaflet
and commission illustrations, I also organised a display in the local
tea-rooms, and, come the day, escorted guests to the Vat, dilating all the way
about what a terrific place it was. There was much talk about a suitable gift
for the Duke. I'm afraid my own suggestion, an address in verse beginning, 'Dinnet,
Dinnet, Muir of Dinnet/ Lovely place for a NNR, innit?' got short shrift.
On the day, we all turned out in our best fig, the
Scots wearing their kilts with little daggers tucked into their socks. The Duke,
in tweeds, deployed from his Landrover, and Marcus Humphrey made a speech about
how grateful we were that our royal guest had spared the time. Prince Philip
replied to the effect that nature reserves were all very well, but polite
persuasion and wise husbandry was much better in the long run. Then he pulled a
string to part the curtains and reveal our little map. Marcus's little daughter
ran up with our gift, a cromach I think it was, and then, overawed by the
occasion, burst into tears. The Duke shook hands with the line-up: Marcus, Maitland
Mackie, who was the Lord Lieutenant, our Chairman, Professor Holliday, and Charles
Gimingham, another Professor. Apart from Marcus, none of them had had anything
to do with it. The humbler sort, who had organised the event, and were actually
responsible for the reserve, hung about in the rear. Prince Philip had
evidently hoped to meet the temporary warden, lovely Rosaline from Belgium (we
all fancied Rosaline). But, no, she was too humble, and so was I. The class
system wakes up when the royals are involved, and we knew our place, which, as
I say, was at the back. Our royal guest was then whisked off to the tea-rooms
for a wee dram. I wasn't allowed to say anything about our little exhibition because,
I was told, very solemnly, that no one under the rank of a bishop is allowed to
witness the Queen's consort enjoying a drink. Back in our more fustian
surroundings, some barn or other, we ate humble pie, and I'm afraid some of us
got a bit pie-eyed. Well, I did.
It also fell to me to write a management plan for the
Muir of Dinnet. These were formal working documents, stating our aims for the
place, and how we would set about achieving them - works of fiction, quite
often, since the plans assume we are in control of events, and we aren't. For
example, confident plans for woodland reserves failed to take account of Dutch
elm disease, the explosion in numbers of deer and grey squirrels, and, more
recently, ash dieback. The more lasting part of a management plan was a
detailed description of the place and its wildlife, which formed Part One. For
Dinnet, I reckoned we could manage quite an extensive Part One. The result was
my first lengthy publication after the recreation review fiasco: an inhouse,
spiral-bound report of 120 pages titled Muir of Dinnet: Portrait of a
National Nature Reserve (I got the idea of a 'portrait' from books by Guy Mountfort,
'Portrait of a Wilderness' and 'Portrait of a Desert'). It looks a crude thing
now, with pages that were basically xeroxed A4 typed sheets. But it got
reviewed in local newspapers, and was on sale in local bookshops at GBP2 a copy.
In a nerdish spirit of thoroughness, I had included great
long lists of fungi, snails, water-fleas, water-beetles, moths; even
microscopic creatures like rotifers. I'm fairly sure it's the only nature
reserve portrait to have included a good whack of rotifers. There was also more
history and archaeology than there strictly needed to be, including a detailed
account of the Battle of Culblean, 1335 (we now think the battle was fought in
a different place in a different way, but never mind). The equally detailed
bird list caused trouble. It was compiled by the reserve's first full-time
warden, and brought down the wrath of David Jenkins, who claimed that much of
it was wrong, and blamed me for my gullibility. As for Morton Boyd, he
contributed a foreword in his unique style:
'To be at one with nature is to know it in your
own way...The seeing eye, the hearing ear, the fresh scents of the countryside,
the feel of the rocks, or the pure burn water build in the mind a child-like
sense of wonder even in the greatest of men'.
Greatest of men, eh? We used to laugh at Morton's
effusions, but they were heartfelt and they were human, and I'd far rather read
that kind of guff than the recitals of today, consisting of one weary cliché gummed
to the next. All told, my 'Portrait' was a funny little thing, containing
several unintentional jokes.
I made many visits to our reserve at St Cyrus, too, partly
for management-purposes, but also because the summer warden that year was my
old university friend Chris Johnson. He was living on-site in a caravan, with
his wife Ali. When I first dropped by, I was diverted by a curious squeaking
from the shower cubicle. What was that? It was a fledgling Barn Owl called
Barny. A pair of owls were nesting in a quarry nearby, and this one, being the
runt of the litter, would have starved to death if they had not rescued it.
Chris, an experienced falconer, caught mice to feed it, and later had to give
it flying lessons. Which was difficult because every time he stepped outside
with Barny on his arm the other birds would kick up a tremendous fuss known as
mobbing. It must be hell being an owl. In fact, the closer you get to the lives
of any wild creature, the more you realise that nature is bloody horrible. With
just the occasional treat, if, that is, you can count a mouse, or a feathery,
five-second shag, as a treat.
That year, the NCC's budget was increased slightly, and
suddenly there were resources for two more Assistant Regional Officers in our region.
This was good news, as one of them would get Banff and Buchan, which I couldn't
wait to get shot of. Chris applied for the job, and he jolly well should have
got it, being as he had been an excellent summer warden at St Cyrus, and had
also worked for us in the Cairngorms. But he apparently interviewed poorly, and
the NCC pinned everything on the interview, rating proven experience as secondary.
I was almost as upset as Chris, but there was damn all I could do about it. Still,
good chaps will find a niche sooner or later, and Chris ended up as director of
Wild Jordan, our man in the desert kingdom. I'd suggest that was a better
outcome than ARO Banff and Buchan.
Another outcome was a day-long seminar to 'celebrate'
the natural wonders of St Cyrus. It ended with a second 'portrait', published
inhouse, The Natural History of St Cyrus. It was in the same
spiral-bound format as Muir of Dinnet but this time with guest authors,
including, for reasons of tact, a piece by the manager of the salmon-netting
company. I contributed an introduction (remembering Morton's effort, I'd
decided to do it myself), all the editing, and a chapter on wild flowers: 150
pages, all devoted to a narrow sliver of land beneath a cliff.
To complete the picture, the native pine forest of
Glen Tanar, halfway up the Dee, was later 'declared' to be our seventh National
Nature Reserve. As usual the land was privately owned, and reserve status made
little difference in practice since the estate was already committed to its
preservation, more or less along the right lines. It was really a formalisation
of what was already there. And guess what? I organised a seminar! There was
Morton again, very happy at this latest 'acquisition', and various scientists going
on about pine trees, and there was I, co-ordinating the event, and persuading
them all to write up their talk afterwards. I contributed a long chapter on the
history of the glen, cribbed from a thesis. It was printed in the same knock-'em-out-cheap
format as the previous two. And then, somehow, the entire batch was lost. I
think a few copies did emerge eventually, but Glen Tanar never made the
same splash as the other two. It's a shame, because there was some good stuff
in it, among the dross. It was certainly the most closely studied native
pinewood at that time.
At introspective moments, we sometimes asked ourselves
what difference it would make if we weren't there. If the NCC didn't exist. Of
course we were an institution with a role, going through the motions,
commenting on this and that, reminding local councils what SSSIs were, and why
they were important. Yet we weren't a very outgoing, confident organisation, not
like the Forestry Commission or the various development agencies. Much of our
work was internalised, with meetings at every level, and streams of memos going
to and fro. In my case the latter were often about the Bedford Beagle van which
was constantly breaking down and costing us a fortune at the garage. It was
'the system', churning along. You might assert (you might very well think) that
our National Nature Reserves - those places Morton called 'The Jewels in our
Crown' (The longer version was: 'The Jewels in our Crown from Caerlaverock to
Muckle Flugga!') - were a façade, like the sets in Hollywood westerns, all
appearance with nowt behind it. But they were as good as we could manage at the
time, and they were better than nothing.
Look, I was never a mover or a shaker. Not much of a
team-player either, to be honest. And never a manager. But I think I can
claim to be a recorder. Recording is what naturalists do, what we are best at.
By the time I had finished with them, my National Nature Reserves were the best
documented in Scotland. My region had the forbearance to let me to take the idea
and run with it. It was a tolerant region, looking back. We were allowed a
little time to fly our kites.
What about the longer-term? Are these places in better
nick now than they were back then, nearly fifty years ago? Well, two of mine,
Morrone Birkwood and Dinnet Oakwood, have since been stripped of their NNR
status. The former has grown taller and shadier, and the march of the
Cairngorms on the northern horizon is no longer snow-capped in the spring, as
it used to be. The lovely alpine feeling it once had is disappearing. The Muir
of Dinnet has been transformed by natural processes from open moorland to woodland,
one big birchwood in fact. Which most people might regard as an improvement,
but it was a scarce and diverse form of moorland, while the birch woodland is
commonplace. And the wild geese that used to winter there in their thousands
have buggered off. So, I guess it's a no. Glen Tanar has received praise as an
enlightened estate (it doesn't persecute raptors) but suffers from fires caused
by idiots with disposable barbecues. That's the risk you run when you invite people
to disport among dry heather and resin-oozing pines. On the other hand, all these
places are still there, some with facilities which were absent then. Let's call
it a draw.
All told, my work on nature reserves is among the
happiest memories of my time up north. I loved them all (apart from Dinnet
Oakwood) and I still miss them, I really do. Boo hoo.
The North-east office moved from Inverness to Aberdeen
in April 1978, and I had to move with it. The new place was in the City's west
end, No.17 on a terrace of tall Victorian houses made out of great blocks of
glittering, grey Aberdeen granite, with crow-stepped gables, bow windows and iron
railings. A smart balustrade ran along the front, beyond which lay a strip of public
garden before reaching the main road. Formerly inhabited by well-to-do fish
merchants and the like, Rubislaw Terrace was now mainly offices, quite grand on
the outside, but penny-plain - strip lighting and whitewashed walls - inside.
Our property was soon named Wynne-Edwards House, after Vero Wynne-Edwards, the
noted animal behaviourist and former chair of NERC. It had been Morton Boyd's
idea to name our offices after prominent chaps. I settled into a small room at
the back, overlooking the walled yard, now the office car park. I recall that we
all went out to lunch at a nearby hotel, feeling generally very glum, apart
from Mike Matthew who was as pleased as punch to have his region all together at
last.
The glummest of all was Dick Balharry,
the Chief Warden. He was manifestly in the wrong habitat. As John Forster put
it, it was like uprooting an alpine bloom and transferring it to a suburban
garden. Not that Dick was anything like a flower. Powerfully built, with a big
red beard and a forceful personality to match, he had made his name as our man
in BeinnEighe, at Torridon in the far North-west, the earliest National
Nature Reserve and the one most resembling a Highland estate. Dick had gained
kudos by negotiating a Reed Deer management scheme with neighbouring landowners
- by sheer force of personality probably. He was a favourite of Morton Boyd,
and the two had cemented their relationship in the first ascent of Stac Lee in the
St Kilda archipelago. I think Dick probably pulled him up. I was always careful
with Dick. He was easy-going and full of life, but a bad man to cross. And he
had his blind spots. Science, for instance. More than once, I heard him exclaim,
indignantly, "That isn't science! It's a fact!". But when he was on form,
talking about his numerous unusual pets - eagles, pine martens, and a deer that
would come in through the kitchen and rest itself by the roaring fire - Dick
was a natural entertainer. Like Morton, he was a romantic, and, by the same
token, an eager nationalist. Unlike the rest of us, Dick had social credibility
- hill cred. Although he looked the epitome of a clan chief, he was actually
born in Dundee, and had been a humble kennel boy and then a deer stalker before
joining the Nature Conservancy. He ended up as chair of the National Trust for
Scotland.
Thanks, I think, to Dick's influence, I was well
kitted out for life at the edge of the Grampian Highlands. It bears repeating
that the NCC was a cash-strapped organisation, with a wretched budget of around
GBP6 million to cover official nature conservation across the whole of Britain.
It didn't go very far even then. My run-around was a battered green Bedford
Beagle van, one of a fleet we had purchased cheaply from the Royal Mail. The
engine was worn out, and various bits, a door handle maybe, or the exhaust, or
bits of the engine, fell off regularly. The long-suffering garage man
constantly urged me to get rid of it, but, no, we couldn't afford to replace the
thing, be it never so unreliable. Eventually I bought my own car. The same
bean-counting attitude extended to everything else, including the office toilet
paper, shiny, bum-scarring Izal: tracing paper impregnated
with carbolic acid. Yet, in certain odd ways, the Conservancy was quite
generous. I was allowed to buy the best cold-weather gear from Marshalls, the
top mountain-sports store in Aberdeen, and charge it to expenses, as well as
Hartmann binoculars, a Schmidt & Bender telescope, and even an ice axe. A
bit later I added a botanical press and a Nikkormat
camera to the loot.
As part of my training, they sent me on a winter
survival course at Glenmore Lodge in the Cairngorms. It wasn't that I ever
needed to survive out of doors in winter, but the wardens were doing it, and it
seemed natural for me to go too. Unfortunately the wardens were as fit as
fleas, and I wasn't. We spent a day or two learning how to find our way out of
a forest using a map and compass, which was fine, because I knew how to do
that, but once we hit the snow, I was in the most literal sense, the fall-guy. We
learned how to break a fall, and to use an ice-axe to build an igloo out of
blocks of snow and then sleep in it - or at least try to. After which I caught
the flu, and so, as it were, failed to survive. Some time after that I also
learned to ski, though I paid for the lessons myself. It was worth the effort
and humiliation, for Highland winters were snowy in the Seventies, and the cold
lasted a long time. Ski-ing gave you something to do.
I never became a very proficient skier, but I managed to stay upright on the
easier slopes without crashing into anybody. Wearing my other hat, of course, I
did my level best to oppose new ski developments in the North-east, which were
invariably on land designated as SSSI.
Yes, SSSI. Site of Special Scientific Interest or
'Triple S. I.' These things were the core of our work as Assistant Regional
Officers. There were no National Parks in Scotland at that time, not one, and
other official designations, like the Euro SAC or 'Special Area of
Conservation' also came later. It was just SSSIs, areas of high-quality natural
habitat or geological formations, big or small. The Cairngorms was very big, the
largest SSSI in Britain, and as large as some English counties. At the other
end of the scale, I had the Brig o' Balgownie in Aberdeen which was a rock
exposure the size of a tennis court. Most of these places had been identified
as a result of one survey or another, and the process was complete by the time
I joined. Each SSSI had a description of the points of interest, called a
'citation', and a map. Later on, there was also an accompanying list of
'operations requiring consent'. The details of each one were forwarded to the
planning authority, in this case Grampian Regional Council in Aberdeen, and to
the land registry. Interestingly we didn't need to inform the landowner (though
in practice we usually did), nor did we need their permission to 'notify' their
property. The amount of protection provided by SSSIs was, at that time, very
limited. We would be consulted on developments requiring planning permission,
and on drainage and other land-improvement schemes involving public money, but
that was about it. In extremis, where conflict could not be resolved in any
other way, the government might call a public inquiry, but these were rare,
and, besides, there was no guarantee that we would win. In the 1970s, nature
conservation didn't feature strongly in the minds of the average Scot. He was
thinking more about developing wildplaces to promote jobs
and income. In the eyes of private forestry companies, or the Highlands and
Islands Development Board, and other improvers, the NCC NE Region was simply
one of life's obstacles, a minor public nuisance. We didn't have many natural
allies. The Scottish Wildlife Trust was, at that time, a small organisation
without any clout. And the RSPB was one of our critics.
There were around 80 SSSIs on my beat, arranged in folders
or 'schedules', one for each district - Kincardine and Deeside (which held the
majority), Gordon, Banff and Buchan, and Aberdeen City (all these districts,
set up in 1973, were abolished in 1996). They had colourful names like the Coyles of Muick, the Craigs of Succoth, and the Den of
Finella. A few were famous - dark Lochnagar, of
course, and Ballochbuie pine forest, and Fowlsheugh, the seabird city on the Kincardine coast. Most
weren't. The sites that took up most of our time were those standing in the way
of development. There were several around Aberdeen, the expanding city of North
Sea oil, and none was more threatened than Scotstown
Moor, the last lowland heath near the City.
Quite early on, I wrote an internal report about this
sad place. As was my wont, it was informal but impassioned, and titled 'Scotstown Moor: A Tale of Woe in Three Angry Chapters'. The
twentieth century had not been kind to this damp, heathery place of butterfly orchids,
Sphagnum moss and pretty dragonflies. Land improvements had whittled away the
heath until there were only about six acres left. A former tenant, a Major Adam
of Perwinnes, had lately come into possession, and he
was understandably eager to sell the land to builders, or to a golf club, or
both. I was just as keen to prevent that from happening, and, for once, the
local authority concurred, seeing the place as a necessary 'green wedge' in the
City outskirts. Scotstown Moor got me into trouble,
first with the Major, who complained about my 'intransigent' attitude ('just doin' me job, Sir'), and the planning department which had seen
my Tale of Woe and didn't take kindly to its criticisms. We did manage to save
the site from housing development, but were unable to prevent a link road
crossing the site, nor the mysterious appearance of an overflowing skip and other
vandalism. The moor's biodiversity gradually bled away. Eventually what was
left was purchased by the City as a joke Local Nature Reserve. But, later, that
same Council earmarked the place as a long-term camp for 'travellers',
apparently without consulting anybody. I guess, if I were writing about it now,
there would be a couple more 'angry chapters'.
I remember one of many meetings, in November 1978,
when, frankly, Scotstown Moor did not appear to
advantage. For one thing, a rotting mattress lay half-in, half-out of the bog-pool,
and a litter of plastic sacks strewed the bank. A posse of District Councillors
debouched from their limousines, and I was asked to explain the interest of
this unprepossessing place. A cold wind was blowing and one sensed their
impatience to return. I also noticed how their eyes glazed over as I went on
about the species-rich heathland, and, look, look, do you see here the
winter-dried remains of the black bog-rush, a key species! Bog-rush, or was
that bog-brush? Nobody cared. So they went back to their nice warm offices. And
then earmarked it as a camp for the travelling community.
It was Scotstown Moor, as
much as anything, that became the germ, the catalyst as it were, for my first
book, The Natural History of Aberdeen. Urban ecology was coming into
vogue just then. The NCC had commissioned 'Bunny' Teagle to survey the
unexpected wildlife lurking in the 'endless village' of Birmingham, and his
report had been given generous airtime - thanks in part to a rare spider that had
made its unlikely home under the arches of Spaghetti Junction. George Barker
had lately become the NCC's first urban wildlife adviser. Aberdeen, it seemed
to me, was the perfect model for a study of wildlife within the city. For Aberdeen
was in many ways a city apart, not only in its far northern location and distance,
but also in its setting, at the mouth of two rivers, the Don and the Dee, a
metropolis of granite facing the grey North Sea.
The book came about in this way. As I mentioned three
chapters ago (were you paying attention?), my predecessor, Robin Callander, had
turned to publishing; he edited a magazine about his local community called The
History of Birse. We met up from time to time and talked about projects. One
was about Aberdeen, a portrait of the wildlife co-existing with the richest,
most rapidly developing, city in Scotland. It seemed attainable after due
research - and, I thought, since I was stuck in this place, I might as well try
and make the most of it. Mike Matthew was willing to allow me time off to write
it, but only so long as the NCC kept half the royalties. There was a way around
that; Robin split the royalties in two, into a public account, and a private donation.
The NCC took only the income from the former, but no one noticed, and no one
cared anyway; Mike was just doing things by the book.
I researched it at odd moments, meeting experts on the
wildlife, birds above all, and with the people who ran the parks and public
spaces, most notably David Welch, the man who helped the city win Britain in
Bloom year after year. His secret, he told me (while begging not to be quoted),
was the realisation that red roses make the perfect match for Aberdeen's
sparkling grey granite. His rose budget was virtually open-ended; he had recently
planted another 20,000 rose bushes on a custom-built mound in Duthie Park. The complaint
of the birders was that the City's famous parks were still managed the old-fashioned
way with short-clipped grass, formal beds, and nowhere for a bird to hide, or
nest. Aberdeen, I was learning, might be the super-city of the north, but it
tended to lag behind the times in other ways. For instance, Tullos Hill, the windy,
heather-covered hills at the City's southern boundary, had become a landfill
site, leaking toxic waste, amid a perpetual blizzard of bin-bags. It was this
Mordor-like scene that welcomed the visitor on the coast road as he neared the you
hoped for as you neared the offshore oil capital of Europe.
I had hoped for an enthusiastic foreword by
Wynne-Edwards, he who had lent his name to our Aberdeen office, and whose
photographic portrait glowered over our meetings. But, having dutifully read
the manuscript, he declined. I had been critical of the city authority, he
pointed out, and he thought that was a bit unfair. Isolated as it is, cold,
lonely, and smelling of fish, people get very fond of Aberdeen and resent any
criticism. If you feel that strongly about it, suggested W-E, you should stand
for the Council yourself. On a more positive note, the City's sense of esprit
de corps gave my first book a more rapturous reception than anything I have
written since. I was interviewed on television (both channels!) and radio, reviewed
in local papers (including profiles!) and Aberdeen's Leopard magazine. The
bookshops, including the biggest one, Watt & Grant on Union Street, made it
the basis of their window displays that week. I even appeared on Radio
Aberdeen's equivalent of Desert Island Discs.
A Natural History of Aberdeen
is not, in fact, a very good book. It was published by 'the People's Press',
and the production was amateurish; the font is faint and the lines cramped, the
map is rubbish, and the design laughable. It seems to me now to lack a sense of
the granite city, and there's a strange reluctance to use quotations or mention
names, apart from a few long-dead naturalists. And it hardly mentions the
impact of offshore oil development at all. Very rum. At the time, of course, I was
immoderately proud of it. A published author! Had my regional colleagues
written any books? No, they hadn't! I might be only a humble 'assistant', but when
it came to penmanship, young Peter was king!
My diary of that time might give the impression that I
did pretty much as I liked: a sort of freelance naturalist on a civil-service salary.
I think that's a false impression, unfortunately. I was certainly given generous
latitude to follow my interests, in a way impossible in busier regions. I was
able to do a lot of extra-curricular stuff, and to roam my domain, limping from
place to place in the battered Beagle. But everyday work is boring to record,
and I probably didn't bother to mention the long hours at my metal table in the
garret, transferring dross from in-tray to out-tray, day after day. Or indeed,
the other times, the banter with the typists, the discussions over coffee in
our little library, or the lunchtime pints in Aberdonian bars with my amiable new
colleague, Steve North - known as 'Stan', because he came from Yorkshire. By
the time my first book was published, in 1982, I was already thinking of myself
as not a civil-service assitant so much as a
naturalist in the north, the wildlife guy, with a growing public profile, and a
consequentially casual attitude to routine work. By allowing me to write that
book, did Mike Matthew realise he might be fostering a cuckoo in his nest?
Chapter 14
Explore
Before I joined the NCC, I had visited North-east
Scotland only once, and that briefly. I knew some of the hills further south,
especially Ben Lawers and its neighbours, but I had never stepped foot in the
Cairngorms, and had never even heard the names of its lumpen sisters to the
east - Mount Keen, Morven, Bennachie,
Little Cockcairn, Mudlee
Bracks. It was terra incognita, the Unknown Land, ripe for exploration. Luckily
for me - and what wonderful luck it seemed then - the job would allow me a
certain amount of exploration, especially on the bits designed as SSSIs, which,
by definition, were the most interesting. I was drawn to the hills. There was
the view, for a start, and the excitement of having reached a remote place.
There was also the sense of feeling small, dwarfed by the rugged landscape, and
often assailed by the weather. It made you respectful of your surroundings, and
gives you a sort of longing to be part of them. One incentive for me, of course,
was wildlife, especially the mountain flora; the flowers you need to plan a long
walk to see, and to scramble over rocks at the end of it. Several of the best sites
were in my favourite Mountain Flowers by Raven and Walters: Lochnagar, MeikleKilrannoch, Corrie Kander, Craig an
Dail Beg. Even the names are a bit good, aren't they?
The problem was that I arrived in the North-east in mid-winter.
In January the summits can be seriously cold. I took my innocent brother
Christopher to the top of Lochnagar one freezing day in
the New Year, so cold that the soup from my Thermos was tepid, going on cold,
by the time it hit the cup. After we had staggered back to Ballater, we were
not only chilled to the bone but seriously dehydrated. I drank about a gallon
of hot tea. Since that day, Chris has never been very keen on hill-walking. As
they'd say in Chicago, he never saw the percentage.
On the other hand, windless spring days when the snow
lies late are fun. One fine day in May, I walked the LairigGhru with my chums, Graham Burrows and Dave Catt,
through that great defile that splits the Cairngorms, past the wonderful Pools
of Dee, and then down through the pines of Rothiemurchus
to Coylumbridge. And, after a cheerful evening in the
bar, the next day we took the chair-lift to the top of Cairngorm, and returned
over the still snow-white plateau, tobogganing down the slopes, and with Graham
and Dave actually Morris-dancing over the high tops, until we reached Glen
Derry and civilisation. After just two days on the hill - the highest in the
land, bar the top of Ben Nevis - the workaday world seemed trivial. We felt
exalted by the heights and the elemental beauty of the scene, all sky, rock,
and ice. Of course it wears off. You come back to earth, as it were. What wore
off more slowly was my sore feet, which had mysteriously turned black, from
peat, I should say, not frostbite. All that remains of that glorious weekend
are photos. One of the best pictures I ever took was of the Pools of Dee
fringed with ice. Fortuitously, the framing formed a perfect saltire, deep blue
and white, Scotland's flag as laid out by nature. I'd offer it to the Scot Nats
now, but the shots we took back then were 35mm trannies, and therefore only
landfill now.
Eventually I walked all the high tops from Breariach in the west to Ben Avon in the east. Apart from
Cairn Toul, which is at least a rough cone with a scoop taken out of it, the
Cairngorms are really just one big, rolling plateau, whose tops are humps
rather than peaks. That's what I liked about the place: you could walk it,
rather than just reaching the summit and then going down again. When the
weather allows, which is a big proviso on those chilly heights, you can roam
over the roof of Scotland with stupendous views on every side. You want to
sing. You almost want to dance, like Graham and Dave. And there's the wonderful
sense that, however briefly, you have escaped from all the bollocks. If I had a
favourite hill, it would probably be Ben Avon (pronounced A'an).
It is remote, one of the remotest hills in Britain, and it's huge. Once you
have puffed your way up to that vast, breath-taking badland,
you are surprised to find yourself among the tors, in a kind of arctic
Dartmoor, and each one more weirdly shaped than the last. One tor is called CacCarnMor, which, I think, translates as 'a big pile of
crap'. The summit tor has a more dignified name: Leabaidh
an DaimhBhuidh, the
couch of the golden stag. When I scrambled up there, a couple - the only people
I saw all day - had taken 'the couch' rather literally and were making love on
the very summit. Excuse me, Madam, Sir, while I bag this Munro. Oh, no, don't
move, I will step over you. Lovely day. Nice view.
It was shortly after this unexpected encounter that I
nearly touched the void. There is a gully on Ben Avon, a nasty, stony, slippery
one, that falls between cliffs, and I was eager to check it out because a rare
saxifrage grows there. Its location had been a secret, not so much because of any
risk to the plant but to the foolhardy person looking for it. As I found out when
some rock gave way, and down that gully I slithered, at gathering speed. I eventually
slid to a halt just as a nasty drop opened up which would have bounced me a
thousand feet or so before dumping what was left in the defile of Strathavon, food for the nearest eagle or raven. I was
shaking so much that my picture of the wretched saxifrage came out all blurry.
But, it's funny, such things don't bother you for long, not when you are young
and think yourself immortal, and soon I was on my way again, marching along,
whistling a happy tune. One result of botanical scrambling is that you lose
your natural fear of heights, and start thinking you are Chris Bonington. Which
might end badly.
Generally speaking, you don't need to risk your life
for plants. Most of our alpines grow on nice sheltered ledges that accumulate
snow to protect them from the worst of the winter frosts and winds. In many
cases you can walk right up to them without climbing. Even the
Blue-Sow-thistle, noted for growing on 'vertiginous heights' that even the deer
and sheep can't reach, is fairly easy to reach if you don't look down. I have
clambered up to all of its locations, and later wrote a paper about the plant
for the prestige journal, Watsonia. The sad thing about the poor old
sow-thistle is that it isn't really a mountain plant at all. It simply got
stranded up there because its usual haunts down there in the glen had been
eaten out by deer. In its weedy way, the Blue Sow-thistle embodies the plight
of wildlife in the Highlands, with the number one problem being overgrazing.
The deer and sheep are eating the life out of the place. [There are a few
exceptions now. At the Mar Lodge estate, which was on my patch, and also at
Craig Meagaidh in the central Highlands, there have
been successful attempts to cull the deer to more sustainable numbers - but to
do so, we first needed to buy the land. The Red Deer Commission, set up in
1959, are useless].
My keenness to find plants was noted and, at Charles Gimingham's earnest request, I took over as official
recorder for South Aberdeenshire, 'vice-county' no. 92. Aberdeenshire has never
had an individual flora, a compilation of the region's plants. Botanically it
is one of the least well-explored parts of Britain, even compared with the far
north or the western isles. Much of it is remote, and also pretty dull. You
could, for instance, spend a whole day tramping to the top of Mount Keen and
see bugger all of interest apart from a few sedges and an infinity of heather.
Charles Gimingham (a world expert on heather, as it
happens) had been the token recorder for years, and he was only too pleased to
hand over the series of record cards housed in a green tin box. I'm afraid I
wasn't much of a recorder either; it becomes very boring, identifying and ticking
all the plants in each 10 by 10-kilometre square. Takes a certain kind of enthusiast,
which, when push comes to shove, I wasn't. And Aberdeenshire still doesn't have
a Flora.
In pursuit of plants, I attended a few courses at Kindrogan Field Centre in neighbouring Perthshire, which
the NCC obligingly paid for. There was one on lichens, run by a wheezing,
dyspeptic Frank Brightman, author of The Oxford Book on Flowerless Plants.
There was another on mosses and liverworts, by the centre's head, Brian
Brookes, and a third one on fungi, run by Roy Watling. On the last, Heather
Angel joined in, teaching us how to photograph the mushies in natural light
with the help of tin foil, a sheet, and a torch. These were all fun, although
most of my fellow coursees seemed reluctant to go to
the pub afterwards, wishing, presumably, to extract the very last pennyworth of
their investment. Despite this, I never did become very knowledgeable about mosses
or lichens, which all look the same to me, though I can see why people are
fascinated by them. Even otherwise normal people, sometimes. As for the
mushies, I knew them pretty well already. But it made a nice free holiday.
I also recorded (and, per confessionum,
killed and mounted) moths, which you mainly catch with a light trap. My great
friend in this line was Mark Young, a zoologist at Aberdeen University. Mark
was my tutor in the more arcane ways of catching and studying moths, such as 'sallowing' - an early spring activity where you clamber up
a tree, and then shake or jump on the branches to send the moths tumbling down
onto a sheet laid out for your inspection. There was also 'dusking' where you
kick about in the long grass with a net, catching the sleepy little things as
they are disturbed from their rightful rest. And, best of all, there was 'treacling' when you paint a sticky concoction of Fowler's
Black, beer and rancid bananas onto a tree trunk and return later with a red torch
(moths can't see red) - for moths, the equivalent of a night out at the pub. None
of these methods were needed for my favourite moth, the Kentish Glory, so named
because it is confined to the eastern Highlands of Scotland. It is indeed
glorious, a moth with a tartan pattern and a body as warm and furry as a
guardsman's bearskin. Better still, it has the grace to fly by day, with a fast,
tumbling flight across the heather. Unfortunately, the subtle beauty of moths seemed
to leave my NCC colleagues cold. Just bat food, innit? That was why I so appreciated
Mark, who was also chair of the local wildlife trust. Enthusiasms are sweetest
when shared.
My best mothy find was the Chocolate-tip, pale,
stripey grey, and with what looks like a square of Cadbury's on each wing. Old Chocky was unknown to Scotland before I discovered him.
Later we found its caterpillar, which makes a little tent out of a folded aspen
leaf and creeps out of it at night. So that was all good.
I also became interested in dragonflies, encouraged by
meeting the top Odonata guy, Cyril Hammond. He showed me the impressive artwork
for his new book, which for some years was the classic handbook on these lovely
insects. "Go on, show your knowledge", he implored, expecting me to identify
each untitled plate. I became a co-founder of the British Dragonfly Society and
the North-east's first dragonfly recorder. Actually, there weren't many species
to record so far north, but I did make one notable discovery. Mark Young had
found a larva in Loch Kinord which he suspected to be
that of the rare Northern Damselfly, Coenagrionhastulatum. Next summer, I spent some time wading
among the sedge lawns of that loch, and there, sure enough, was the rare
damselfly, and lots of them too. It turned out to be quite common in ponds in
the Dinnet area, perhaps more so than in any other
part of Britain. And so I was the first person to see and recognise that
beautiful insect in Deeside in over ten thousand years. Which was also good.
One of the ways we could specialise was to bag a
habitat. John Forster, for instance, was our lead on native pine woods. With my
interest in dragonflies, I chose freshwater. Apart from offshore islands, the
North-east is the region of Britain with the smallest biodiversity. We had the
fewest butterflies, the fewest grasshoppers, the fewest bats (just three
species), the fewest freshwater fish; but we made up for that in scarce
northern species and being the centre for Britain's sub-arctic flora and fauna.
The freshwater flora, though, was the
exception. The clearest of our cold lakes, those with a non-agricultural
catchment, such as Loch Kinord, were fantastically
rich in what botanists call the macrophytes; submerged water-weeds. It might
well have been the primordial flora, the one that had existed elsewhere before
we polluted everything. Encouraged by a visit from our freshwater specialists,
Chris Newbold and Margaret Palmer, I spent some of the best moments of my last
years in a borrowed boat, using a weed-drag, or even actually swimming. I had
become used to wild, cold-water ducking and diving. I'd swum with salmon in the
Dee, and skinny-dipped in the burns. I'd nosed my way along through the dark, peat-stained
waters of Highland lochs. But the best experience of all was skin-diving with
flippers and snorkel in cold, gin-clear water, enjoying the sensual flicker of
weed round your legs or the silvery flash of a fish, here and gone in a
shimmer. In a good loch, you swim through a jungle of weed, almost like a coastal
kelp forest but much more delicate and tramslucent. It's lovely down there, on
a warm summer day in the Highlands, and what you find is often a discovery. No
one else is doing it. You're alone in the icy element, among nature, and (like
sex, I suppose), the feeling's beyond words.
Chapter 15
Extra-curricular
In September 1980, I moved from Banchory
to Aboyne. My brother Christopher, now a pilot
working for a commercial airline, had lately bought a house in Aboyne, conveniently close to his glider club at Dinnet. He told me a super flat had become available, a
converted loft over a carriage house belonging to Gordon Lodge, the big house
by the river. I took one look and fell in love. This was Studio Flat, which had
been decorated to her eccentric tastes by Mary Levy, wife of the wealthy
solicitor at the Lodge. She had laid a huge Persian carpet in the large
upstairs room, with jungle wallpaper, and cushions all about. It looked like a
bordello, and had, indeed, been quite well-known for louche parties. Also, it
was said to be haunted by the ghost of an old woman sitting in a chair. But she
didn't sound like much trouble, and the rent was reasonable, and so into Aboyne's Studio Flat I moved. The main disadvantage was
that I was still based at Aberdeen, and now had twice as far to commute. Also I
could be evicted at a month's notice.But Mary told me that this was only a formality - legal
boilerplate.
Socially, Aboyne was a step
up from Banchory. Situated by the river, between hills, with a big green and a
pretty square where the station used to be, it was an attractive place, much
visited by hikers, cyclists, and (just down the road) glider pilots.At Banchory, the main entertainment on offer had
been hotels and pubs. Plus the odd cottage party with yobs. But, as well as
being more civilised than Banchory, Aboyne was more anglicised. It was full of English
scientists, doctors, lawyers, and business executives. English, you might say,
was the village's second language. It also housed the Deeside Community Centre with
its theatre, pool, and sporting amenities. There was a golf club, which didn't
interest me at all, and a music club, which, perhaps surprisingly, did. They
were putting on The Gondoliers, and since I was going through an eager
Gilbert & Sullivan phase - the D-Oyly Carte had lately
had a season in Aberdeen, with Iolanthe, Pirates of Penzance and The
Sorcerer - I joined and became a jobbing Gondolier. Later on, I was a
Seabee in South Pacific, and then a stage manager in Guys and Dolls.
I couldn't act, I couldn't dance, and I wasn't much good at singing either, but
the standard wasn't high; my voice simply merged into the dull roar of the mob
at the back. We also did Christmas shows, for which memory is mercifully faint.
The flat was deliciously quiet, once the man from the
hydro board had fixed a noisy radiator. The year and a half I spent in Mary's bordello
was, I think, the best of my time in Scotland; certainly the most productive.
Apart from my job, I went seriously extra-curricular. Within twelve months I
had written two books, several dozen radio scripts, and various short pieces
for the local newspapers and New Scientist. It was there, at the gable window
on a borrowed desk, that I wrote A Natural History of Aberdeen, in
longhand, and when I'd finished that, I wrote the first draft of Grampian
Battlefields, my second book. Each chapter of Battles was serialised in
Aberdeen's own magazine, The Leopard.
Battlefields. Does that surprise you, unknown but
cherished reader? Unlike the Aberdeen book, which too close to my ordinary work
to be wholly independent, this one had nothing to do with the NCC. Ever since
boyhood I had been keen on history, and I found that of the North-east not only
fascinating but fresh and new. There it was, the once-remote earldoms of Mar,
Gordon and Buchan, surrounded by hills, cut off from the rest of Scotland
except by long and perilous trails across 'the Mounth'
as the southern hills were called. Here, in isolation, the local families could
enjoy their feuds and fights without much reference to anywhere else. Battles
are the cherries in the seed-cake of history, the bit where it gets exciting. Hardly
anyone had heard of my battles: Corrichie, Culblean, Harlaw, Glenlivet, Craibstane, even
though they sometimes brought in some resounding names: Macbeth, Bruce, Mary
Queen of Scots, Montrose. There they were. The great families, and always at it,
hammer and tongs, Forbes versus Gordon, Comyn versus Bruce, Farquharson versus
Macleod. And through it all, the poor burghers of Aberdeen were trying to make
a living, catching fish, mining granite, buying cheap and selling dear, and
drawing their purse-strings tight.
I researched the book in the library of Marischal College, that wondrous building of
Aberdeen-Gothic, and in the process became an ex-officio member of the
university and regular user of the senior common room. I looked up primary
sources, wherever possible, which meant I needed to learn and decipher Old
Scots. For a year, I was steeped in the historical literature of the Scottish
North-east. I think Grampian Battlefields was a pretty decent piece of historical
investigation, but it was a devil to get published. David Stevenson, a
historian at the university specialising in the Civil Wars, did his best to
help. My first would-be publisher went bankrupt, and it was only through David's
good offices that the book was eventually re-edited and brought out, very
handsomely, by Aberdeen University Press, then owned by the dreaded Robert
Maxwell. As 'an exercise in historical reasoning and historical imagination',
my battles book was runner-up for the Saltire Prize, Scotland's national book
award. Its promoters were nonplussed to discover that its author was an
Englishman, and, by then, no longer resident in Scotland. Various pundits said
nice things about it. In terms of its lifetime in print, twenty years or more, Grampian
Battlefields could be said to be one of my more successful books. When
Maxwell's empire collapsed, the title was bought by Mercat
Press in Edinburgh, with a new jacket depicting showing some Scots sweating and
heaving at a reenactment of the Battle of Bannockburn - a battle I didn't
cover.
My involvement with local radio came about early on after
Chris Lowell, who worked for the BBC, interviewed me at the opening of the Muir
of Dinnet reserve. One thing led to another, and very
soon I was writing my own scripts for ten-minute readings on Radio Aberdeen.
The studio, at Beechgrove Terrace, was just round the
corner from us, and many was the day when I would toddle round. Some of the
readings were merely factual, about local wildlife, but others veered towards
satire, or as much satire as the listeners of Aberdeen might reasonably be
expected to cope with. I once involved the regional officer, Mike Matthew, in a
piece about notifying nature reserves in outer space. He played up well, with some
of his own ideas about how to notify comets. But the problem with doing satire
in Aberdeen was that the pieces were presented po-faced, as if I meant every
word. There were anxious letters about another such piece in which I advocated
replacing all the trees in the parks with plastic ones. By no means everyone
thought that was a great idea. Chris Lowell sent some of the better pieces to
BBC's magazine, The Listener, in which they were published together with
a cartoon by Larry. There were spin-offs too: various brains-trusts, in which I
appeared with other pundits, including Dick Balharry
and Adam Watson. When I was the guest on the local version of Desert Island
Discs, I chose sentimental ballads about Scotland's wonderful wild lands, and a
bagpipe tune, the Floors o'th' Forest, not because I
liked them, but because it seemed appropriate.
My pieces for local newspapers began after the
publication of A Natural History of Aberdeen. The first was a short
series, in the city's Evening Express, on habitats within the city,
including the City's lost loch. Next up was another short set on wild flowers,
each ending with what was intended to be an unexpected twist, and then a more
'gothic' series on mushrooms with headings (not mine) like 'Horror of the
creeping slime' and 'A witch in fairy mantle'. After that I think I moved from
ecology to memorial stones, a spin-off from my battlefield research, which included
a 'Grave of a corpulent king' and 'End of the line for Macbeth'. One of the
last sets was simply titled 'Nature', but not nice nature. It was about the
horrible things that live in your carpet and under your bed, and in the
bathroom, the sort of things you probably wouldn't want to conserve. Actually the
paper would probably have accepted any old crap, but I did my best to be
entertaining, and they sometimes sent out a professional photographer, or hired
a cartoonist for the more far-out stuff. Journalism and the BBC scripts represented
a nice little income supplement. I was rather proud of the fact that I earned
as much as my boss, though I never managed to save very much.
Then there were talks. After a couple of sticky ones
about My Job (yawn), I realised what many of us appear not to have done, and
that was that it is about entertainment at least as much as education. The naked
truth doesn't always sing well on its own. You need to use your personality to
give truth a bit of a spin: make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em think. A
good speaker should have the audience in the palm of their hand. Dick Balharry could hold a room by dint of his large presence
and animal stories. I tried to use wit, or what passed for it, anything to make
them like me. When it works, speaking can be a tonic. The easy laughter of an
audience is a lovely thing. You can surf that sound. Of course, there is the
concomitant danger that you might just as easily make an arse of yourself - or,
even more dangerously, anger your paymasters. But when it goes well, the uplift
is giddying. You understand then why people take to the stage. I am rather modest
and shy by nature, except after a few pints, and so this suppressed inner showman
took me by surprise. I suppose it made me a bit cocky. I began to think of
myself as a local celeb.
The downside of any success is that you are in demand.
After the publication of Aberdeen, every local society, big or small,
wanted me as a speaker, and, as an NCC official, I felt I couldn't charge, or at
least not much. I should have. Some of the venues were a waste of time. Perhaps
the worst was an invitation to speak to the Aberdeen Soroptimists, a sisterhood
of businesswomen. It sounded impressive, but what I didn't know was that there
were only about five of them, and that their ancient projector would cook my
trannies. The best were the AGMs where I was guest speaker. The gust of applause
at the end of one show I did for the Scottish Wildlife Trust - a journey down
the River Dee, I think it was - damn near knocked me off the rostrum. They loved
me! Yes, up there in the North-east, among the growing number of people who
liked nature, I felt like the star of the show. Not a jobsworth, not a
blank-faced functionary, but the nature guy. But, of course, all this
was extra-curricular, and subsidiary. I was still an ARO in the NCC, and, yes, as
you may be thinking, you could be riding for a fall, If so, you're not wrong.
Chapter 16
The Act
A word about NCC politics (sorry). [This may be
another bit you can skip] We had come into being in 1949, and lost our
science-base in 1973. Before the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, the
NCC's formal powers were minimal, and our ability to cause any kind of public fuss
severely constrained. We tended to leave that to the 'vol. bods', preferring to
work quietly behind the headlines, as civil servants do. The Government, at
least under the Conservatives, saw wildlife as safe in the hands of landowners
anyway, which back then included a lot of Cabinet ministers. Evidence to the
contrary could safely be disputed or ignored. That is, until the NCC published
a document, a full-colour glossy one, that contained irrefutable evidence that our
wildlife habitats were suffering. The rate of attrition, monitored on SSSIs, showed
that the law, in its present form, wasn't working. SSSIs weren't working. The
existing system wasn't adequate.
This assertive attitude was new because government had
ways of shutting us up. The most obvious way was Council - government
appointees all - and above all its chairman. Our first chair had been Sir David
Serpell KCB, a former 'Sir Humphrey', the first
permanent secretary at the Department of the Environment [the DoE]. He brooked
no nonsense from what one Tory MP called 'the minions and zealots'. The new chair,
in 1980, was Sir Ralph Verney KBE, another safe pair of hands, so the Minister
must have thought. He was from an old aristocratic family (his Dad was a
Liberal MP, serving under Asquith), a Buckinghamshire landowner, and President
of the Country Landowner's Association, with all the knobs on. Sir Ralph
brought to the table the view that the NCC's task wasn't to champion nature but
to see it 'properly integrated into a balanced rural land-use'. For him, 'a
prosperous agriculture and a thriving forestry industry were the best
guarantors of conservation'. Yeah, right. But here's the funny thing. In time he
changed his mind. He went rogue; he went native! Sir Ralph Verney's finest hour
was to be hanged in effigy by a howling pack of Somerset landowners. And,
shortly afterwards he was sacked.
Another straw in the wind was our new minister, Secretary
of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine. Though rich, his wealth was of
the nouveau kind. He didn't own half a county and, as one of his
colleagues reminded us, this fellow had bought his own furniture!
Besides, Heseltine was energetic, ambitious and a great lover of headlines. He intended
to make his mark. He later described his four years at the DoE as 'the happiest
time of my life'. Of course, no one cares whether he was happy or not; the
point is that, to everyone's surprise, he did seem to care about the
environment.
Without support from government, the NCC was likely to
remain a little-known body that would go on achieving very little. Our latest 'Director-General',
Richard 'Dick' Steele (replacing the more substantial Bob Boote), was unlikely
to rock the boat, but at least he was 'one of us', from a conservation-science
background. Our best-regarded member of staff, Norman Moore, had been
marginalised. Although he had been an excellent Regional Officer, and had then
made his name as head of pesticides research at Monkswood,
the NCC didn't know what to do with him. He was given a sinecure, on agricultural
policy, but, with his diplomatic gifts to the fore, even there Norman made
something of it by helping to found the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group in
1979. He was also the prime mover behind the forementioned publication on
trashed habitats.
Our other hero was Derek Ratcliffe. He was nominally the
Chief Scientist, but, unsuited to an administration (and wasted there), he left
most of that to an underling, and did his own thing. Derek was our moral
backbone. It was largely thanks to him that the NCC published several influential
and relatively outspoken documents during the 1980s, including one that noted
that nature wasn't the prerogative of scientists but mattered to everyone.
Radical stuff! Another publication, written largely by him, asked whether it
was right that modern forestry should trample all over the natural environment;
and, no, it obviously wasn't right. On general release, Nature Conservation
in Britain (1984) and Afforestation and Nature Conservation (1985), became
public debates, raising our public profile considerably, and, arguably, increasing
the NCC's influence. But, as Yes Minister fans will know, courage is a
dangerous thing in politics. Eventually it got us all sacked, after the NCC was
disbanded by the unfriendliest minister of them all, Nick Ridley.
But all that lay in the future. By 1980, what we
called the voluntary sector (the 'vol. bods'), the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts,
and (with more caveats) the National Trusts, were pressing for reform. Between
them they held memberships in the hundreds of thousands, later the millions.
They had developed political clout, and, just as importantly, political nous. All
told, the seedbed was being laid for the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. It
changed nature conservation. And, with it, it changed our professional lives.
The Act was a great sprawling thing that repealed and re-enacted earlier
legislation, such as the Protection of Birds Acts, but also, and crucially, it strengthened
the protection of Sites of Special Scientific Interest. In its lengthy passage
through Parliament, there were a record number of amendments, suggesting
unusual interest. Fortunately, there were enlightened MPs in both houses, such
as Tam Dalyell, Peter Hardy, and Peter Melchett, who between them helped to strengthen
the legislation from the feeble thing originally proposed to something more
substantial.
I played no part in this process. For one thing, Morton
Boyd liked to keep his Scottish 'team' more or less sealed off from events down
south. There was no comparable pressure for change in Scotland, where the
voluntary sector was weak to invisible. Hence, when the Act became law, and
each of us was given a copy, the realisation of what it would mean suddenly hit
us. It was a shock. We had to make this thing work! My copy was inscribed by
John Forster: 'read, mark, learn'. Yes, we learned, protection for SSSIs
had indeed been improved, to the extent that we had to be consulted over 'potentially
damaging operations'. Legally-binding agreements could be made over their
future - though whether there would be a budget to pay for them was another
matter. But the difficulty was that, before an SSSI received the benefit of the
new law, each and every one of them had to be renotified. And that was
our job, my job. In some counties it took ten years.
'Renotification' became the core of our work, and
bloody tedious it was. Identifying a place of sufficient interest, drawing a
line round it, and describing the interest was the easy bit. More
time-consuming were the meetings with owners, tenants and estate factors, who
naturally wanted to know exactly how all this would affect them, and weren't
necessarily pleased when told. Many were perturbed by our lists of 'potentially
damaging operations' (PDOs - we even had anagrams for those), some of which
were normal practice on farms and estates. Development lobbies viewed it as
land sterilisation. Some interpreted it as backdoor nationalisation, or, at the
very least, an attack on the hallowed rights of farmers and landowners to work
the land as they thought fit. Our reply was that they farmed with the help of
public money, and so it was right that the public had some say in what they did
with it. The Government seemed to imagine that the process would be nice n'
smooth, with an amiable give-and-take on both sides. Were they really that
naïve? It wasn't like that. Of course it wasn't.
The effect of the Act was to immerse us in a quagmire of
red-tape for years on end. Renotification absorbed our energies, and became
close to being an end in itself. To ensure that the process was legally
watertight, we were obliged to make heavy weather of it. Each renotification went
through about thirteen different stages, before being finally approved (or not)
at director level. It also involved the sideways step of negotiating formal
agreements if the owners insisted, as was their right. Government might have envisaged
SSSIs as odd corners that could be set aside, but some of mine were
estate-sized. The worst cases of all were commons, where the commoners, as well
as landowners, had rights, including how many animals they could graze (which
was generally far too many for the good of the habitat). I, for one, soon began
to feel less like the nature guy and more like a bureaucrat. Or some poor sod
on a production line with every day threatening to look like the day before.
We weren't given any special training. Earlier, I had
been on a few official exercises. One was the standard 'management' course, at
Cardington, in which we had to go through all kinds of cringe-making group
routines. Another was a course at an agricultural college where the farming
industry was explained, and we were told how excellent it was. Nature conservation,
they insisted, must fit into the excellent existing system. Derek Ratcliffe
believed the purpose of such things was to emphasise our place in the rural
peck-order - right down there at the bottom.
The one thing the NCC did do was to commission a
leaflet designed to explain the Act to landowners. The notification process was
outlined with the help of cartoons. These showed a smirking, curly-haired,
bespectacled creep presenting documents to a stereotyped Farmer Giles. Young Creepy
offers the baffled hayseed long lists of stuff, before nailing a notice to a
tree. And of course, this smug twat was meant to be a typical ARO, that is, you
and me. God, we felt so ashamed.
Bill Adams described renotifying SSSIs as 'walking to
the moon'. There were around 1,200 of them in Scotland, split between just 22
of us. I decided to start with some new sites worthy of SSSI status. The
candidates had built up over the years. There was Eslie Moss, whose irate owner
threatened to take me to court for trespassing. There was Quithel
Wood, by the Dee, where this time the anger erupted from a local councillor who
had decided to make a name for himself as a scourge of bureaucracy. And then
there was the old railway line at St Cyrus. Since Beecham had closed the line,
it had developed into a veritable rock garden of wild flowers, including
rarities like Yellow Vetch, Maiden Pink and Nottingham Catchfly. Unfortunately
the owner, who had bought the line for a penny and a handshake, first stripped
it bare, with the help of her sheep, and then used it as landfill. When I
called by with my papers, she entertained me to tea and scones, which seemed
like a jolly good start. But her view was that "you can't stop me, can you?"
Oh, come, come, dear lady. Swallowing my second scone (very good these; the
Scots know about scones), I looked up and then read out the penalty clauses for
knowingly damaging an SSSI. The riot act! Shortly afterwards, I was shown the
door. We gradually learned to be more diplomatic. The trick was to do the easy
cases first and leave the hard ones till last. Hopefully they would fall to
someone else. Unfortunately, time wasn't always on our side, and quite a few
SSSIs were destroyed before they could be notified.
There were a few that I didn't intend to deal with at
all. One involved the stately home of Marcus Humphrey of Dinnet. The NCC geologist expected me to notify the house,
for Christ's sake, or at least the grounds on which it stood. It was, apparently,
situated on a fine example of an 'outwash apron', a natural terrace formed by
glacial meltwater. No way, hosay, we needed Marcus's
co-operation on more important things. Another was a stretch of heather
moorland near Ballater called Cairn Leuchan. There were heather moors stretching from end to end
of my patch, and, what, I asked our uplands specialist, was so special about
this one? Ah, he said, it was a very good example. It was a natural heather
moor, while most of the other heather moors were managed grouse moors and so were,
in his view, less natural. But THIS IS A GROUSE MOOR TOO! His hackles rose. He
was, after all, senior to me. JFDI: "Just
do it". It seemed to me then, and since, that NCC's scientists had a much
easier ride (and better promotion prospects) than Assistant Regional Officers. Did
I do it? Course not.
One of the oddest cases was Ballochbuie,
the pine forest on Balmoral estate, owned by the Queen in person, not as an
estate of the Crown. Our meeting with the estate factor, Martin Leslie, was
chilly. He harboured grave doubts about whether the Act applied to the estate,
and invoked Crown immunity. And then he told us he was busy and invited us to
leave. He was right. After my time, Ballochbuie had
to be 'denotified', and is no longer an SSSI (although
even Leslie could not prevent its declaration under the European Habitats
Directive as a Special Area). I was once given access to Ballochbuie,
a privilege granted to few. The forest has some pretty bridges, and figures
carved out of granite, but also hideous bulldozed tracks and bonkers schemes to
encourage regeneration. Also plenty of deer fences for the unfortunate capercaillie
and black grouse to crash into. Oh, and a sauna! I hadn't realised that the
monarch was still above the law. I thought all that had been sorted out at the
time of Magna Carta.
If renotifying my sites was bad enough, it was worse
for some of my colleagues. Peter Reynolds, who was new to the NCC when he was
outposted as our man in Orkney, faced what was a virtual a revolt by local
farmers, hoping to reclaim the moors for agriculture, and was burned in effigy
for his pains. That job should never have been given to someone inexperienced,
but we were thinly stretched, and no one else was available. Peter became so
disillusioned that he left the organisation after a few years. As for my Yorkshire
friend Steve 'Stan' North, our man in Buchan and Banff, we shared an acute
sense of embarrassment when visiting farmers with our sheaves of papers, taken
from a briefcase. As Stan might have put it, "it were sae bloody nanglin', I felt an arse". Especially when the man got "right
radgewi' me". 'Radge' is
northern for 'angry', and there were cases where the local ARO had to be
accompanied by a police officer after being threatened with violent eviction. There
was at least one site where I was told the man would be waiting for me with a
shotgun. It worked: I didn't renotify that one either. In other ways it was a
bit easier for me because we did hire a young chap to deal with the paperwork.
"Ee, you're a right jammy bugger", said Stan.
In his posthumous memoirs, our 'Director Scotland',
Morton Boyd, claimed that the Act lost us 'hearts and minds' north of the
border. I wouldn't put it quite like that. Before 1981 hardly anybody had ever
heard of us. No hearts, no minds. Afterwards, it was different, and we managed
to get up a lot of corporate noses. The NCC was ill-prepared for a more public
role. And under-funded too. The Act made us enemies in Scotland. Improved protection
of SSSIs brought us into conflict with existing dedication schemes for forestry,
and with moorland reclamation and other farming improvements, especially in
'less favoured areas'. In the Cairngorms, our resistance to further roads, and
the expansion of ski-ing into unspoiled corries, irritated
the Highlands and Islands Development Board and the tourism lobby. The Scottish
establishment is smaller and tighter than the English. We weren't popular in
the Scottish Office, nor in the departments either. It all blew up later in the
1980s after the NCC's attempts to safeguard 'the flow country' of the far north
from mass forestry. Even our supposed allies, notably the RSPB, were critical
because they thought we were proceeding too slowly and too cautiously. Yes, it
was getting lonely in NCC Scotland. We might think of ourselves as
environmental saints, avant la letter, but
all the same, as we were coming to realise, no one loved us.
Chapter 17
Portents
Morton Boyd, our Director Scotland, was a romantic, a
man of passion. As an Elder in the Church of Scotland, he brought to his trade
an evangelical zeal, with special reference to the small islands of the west
(he had a cottage on Tiree). Unusually for a scientist he had literary
pretensions, with a D. Litt from Glasgow University and, besides that, was an
FRES, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He painted in watercolour and
travelled a great deal. I'm less persuaded that he was a visionary, as some
have claimed. In his memoirs, Morton told us he was responding to 'the voice in
the mountains'. Did he think of himself as a sort of Moses of nature
conservation? Those memoirs were titled 'The Song of the Sandpiper', that bird
of 'vibrant, ecstatic flight'. Yet, in his reprise of a hectic life, did Morton
mention a single one of his regional staff by name, apart from Dick Balharry? He did not. He was too busy being Morton.
His heart was obviously in the right place, and a
streak of charisma was no bad thing. Morton made a thing about knowing his
staff personally, and he often reminded us how lucky we were to be serving the
people of Scotland as well as its wildlife (and, on that subject, while his
doctorate was in earthworms, Morton preferred big, hefty animals: seals, red
deer, eagles). I daresay he worked conscientiously whenever he was in the
office; the trouble was that he usually wasn't. Morton managed to get himself involved
with all kinds of external activities far from Scotland: Jordan, Uganda,
Aldabra, Christmas Island. 'I know your job isn't like mine', he would tell us,
in his chatty letters to the troops, written from some remote island paradise. Well,
no, perhaps not. Morton's great hero and mentor was Frank Fraser-Darling, the
Highland zoologist and sage. It was like calling to like. They were both
individualistic to the point of being self-obsessed; although, interestingly,
when he came to write Darling's biography, Morton told me he had become
disillusioned. Apparently, Darling wasn't such a great chap after all.
Morton seemed to like me, or at least he took an
occasional fatherly interest in my progress. I can only suppose he spotted
something of himself in my own approach to nature. It was through his influence
that I was invited to the promotion board after three years in service. But if
I had impressed him, I certainly didn't impress them. I hadn't prepared
for it, as perhaps I should. I also gave them the unfortunate impression that I
didn't get on with my boss, which wasn't really true. They worm these things
out of you. The board concluded, probably rightly, that I wasn't yet ready to
take on more responsibility. After a pretty sticky half hour, I slunk away sorrowfully,
with my tail between my legs. "You seem to be a different person at interview",
remarked Morton. You felt you'd let him down. He promised I'd get another
chance next time, if I behaved myself.
The NCC placed great faith in interviews. Your record,
your performance reviews, your reputation even, might be up there in lights,
but if you fluffed the half-hour board, conducted by four nobodies in suits, they
count for nothing. From my perspective, I felt that they had asked me the wrong
questions: dreary questions. They weren't interested in how much I knew about
the North-east. About how I could talk to lairds about heraldry and Scottish
families and so ease my way into notifying their estate as an SSSI. No, they
wanted to know how I felt about office nitty-gritty, about stuff so boring I
could barely force myself to listen. When they asked me about 'the highlights
of your career', they very much didn't mean my book, my slot in New Scientist, my
regular work for Radio Aberdeen, and membership of the university's senior
common room. I came away feeling like the square peg facing a big round hole. Around
that time, we were hearing more and more about this dread thing, 'management'.
In the institutions I respected, the old Nature Conservancy, or the field
stations at Monkswood and Brathens,
or even the UCL Conservation Course, you didn't hear much about management. As
Kenneth Mellanby, a much cleverer man than the stooges who called the shots in
the NCC, had noted that if you were any good, you didn't need managing. And if
you were useless, it probably wouldn't do you much good. So Mellanby went off
to study moles, which was probably quite a useful thing to do, much as David
Jenkins studied otters. If you ask me, management is a lowest common
denominator thing. Mediocrity rules.
My second board, at GB headquarters in Belgrave
Square, two years later (so, it wasn't next year, Morton), was even worse. The
first one had at least been fair. At the second, I felt that they were out to
get me. They dissed my whole career. My involvement in National Nature Reserves
was held against me. My extra-curricular stuff didn't impress them a jot ("you
shouldn't have the time!"). My anecdotes were held to reveal a lack of
seriousness. It became clear that I was being tested for suitability in a
career of team-building and immersion in small-print. Pressed into a corner, I
admitted that I wasn't turned on by that prospect, at which I fancy I heard an
exhalation of breath. Gotcha! I watched them scribbling notes, probably
something pretty unpleasant. Mene, menetekelupharsin.
'You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting'. Hey, promo-boy, if
you want to get on, try losing your personality! No, we don't want your kind
here.
I emerged feeling an urgent need for a long, cleansing
shower. But within the hour I had a date in London with Yvie, and so f**k them.
When I returned to the North-east (safe again!) I decided to f**k them some
more by writing a sarcastic appeal against my expected failure. And, a little
later, I f**ked them again by penning a satirical account of my interview for
our staff magazine, Natural Selection. I thought, if I'm going to burn my
bridges, I'll do it publicly. Of course, it wasn't wise. But I'd been
humiliated, and the best way to cauterise that feeling of rejection was to make
fun of them. And the result? A letter from Establishments to my Regional
Officer containing the words, 'ought not to be an ARO' but 'placed in some
other role suited to his talents'. So much for my performance reviews, and so
much for Mike Matthew's authority. "Watch out", warned Mike.
There was more head-shaking from Morton. "You
antagonise them". Well, Morton, I felt they'd antagonised me. "What
happens to you at interviews?" Well, there was a certain amount of irony here,
because Morton was about to f**k up too. It turned out that passing the
promotion board was something of a poisoned chalice. Even if you did, you weren't
promoted right away. You were merely given a 'ticket' for whenever a suitable
post became vacant. And, the chances were that it would mean you'd have to move,
probably to somewhere like Bolton or Grantham. As Morton was about to
demonstrate, that move could be compulsory, even if you preferred to remain
where you were, at your present grade. This compulsion was new, and it hit our
region like a thunderclap. Dave Morris was told that he had to move from his comfortable
nest in Speyside to Kinlochewe,
wherever the hell that is. Mike Richardson had to move from Shetland, where he
had been so effective, for a stint at headquarters 'for the good of your
career'. And, a little later, my friend and boss, John Forster, was informed he
had to move too, simply because he had a ticket. The union took up their cases,
and I'm told that Morton broke down, blubbing, realising his staff didn't love
him anymore. Surprise, surprise, there's not a word about any of this in 'The
Song of the Sandpiper'.
The result? Evidently not what Morton, or the 'Estabs' team behind him, had expected. In the end, most of
us left the organisation. Dave Morris became head of the Ramblers in Scotland,
free to campaign at last. Mike Richardson went on to head the Antarctic Survey.
John Forster's wife, born and bred in the North-east, refused to budge, and so
John was forced to leave too. He became careers adviser at Aberdeen University.
The same thing happened to my next boss, Dick Hornby, and for the same reason.
In his case promotion entailed a move to some ghastly job in the NCC's new
headquarters in Peterborough. He wasn't keen, and his wife was even less keen. Dick
ended up as a consultant ecologist in Abu Dhabi. John told me he felt rather
proud that nearly all his staff had found new, and arguably better, careers.
But many of us would have stayed, had we only retained the freedom to make our
own decisions. It dawned on me that this was a new kind of NCC; no longer so amiable
and bumbling, but more hard-nosed, and, in my view, a great deal more stupid. As
it grew bigger and more bureaucratic, the NCC no longer seemed so much like a union
of like-minds. We felt more like pawns in a game played by people we didn't
respect. The Golden Age, it was pretty clear, was over.
One sign of change was the new intake of Assistant
Regional Officers. I remember the names of most of those who were in post when
I joined. Some, like Peter Wormell and Sandy MacLennan, became good friends.
Though personal style and circumstance differed, we shared a basic similarity
of outlook. We met once or twice a year in Edinburgh, and in the evenings in
the pub there was plenty to talk about: common experience, stories and
anecdotes, personalities, laughter (especially about the personalities): the interest
and amusement of life. It was a relaxed gathering of peers. But the new lot
that joined us after the 1981 Act, were different. The pub talk - those that
still came to the pub - became more exclusively work-orientated. They seemed to
take themselves and their duties very seriously. More professional, you might
say. Yes, come the 1980s, it was full steam ahead on HMS Culture-change. Management
was the name of the game now. Instead of product we were stuck with process. The
old mavericks were being upstaged by the new jobsworths. John Forster explained
my lack of progress like this: "You're different, you see. They want
people who are the same".
Perhaps I exaggerate a little. Those at the front line
were still committed, and often very knowledgeable, naturalists. We retained
old stars like Colin Tubbs and Martin George and George Peterken. Let's just put
it this way. In the 1970s, to join the NCC was to win the wildlife lottery; it
was the best job in nature conservation. And, by 1990, it wasn't. There were
more and better alternatives in the voluntary sector. Moreover, observers were
noticing that the NCC and its successor bodies had become more regimented, more
internalised, and that they talked baffling gobbledegook. Barrie Goldsmith, my
old tutor at UCL, had taken his students to NCC's Northminster House in
Peterborough, to learn about the work. They came away, in Barrie's word,
'uninspired'. "That's not a place I'd ever want to work in", they agreed.
And that was another thing: the workplace. When I joined, many of us were based
in nice places in the country, like Blackhall in the Lake District or Attingham Park near Shrewsbury. Our GB HQ was at the very grand
Belgrave Square, SW.1., among the embassies. By the Nineties, all these nice
places were gone, and instead we worked in modern offices in the middle of cities.
And different kinds of people were in charge. The characters and people of
real, and personal, achievement, the Morton Boyds and
Norman Moores of this world, were gone and often replaced
by characters from business backgrounds who spent their time devising 'vision
statements'. I think I preferred Morton's 'voice in the mountains'.
So, by 1983, there were certainly portents. From
Aberdeen, where news was often slow to arrive, and felt like a long way away, we
were caught up in our own world within a world. We were still a small region
where everybody knew one another well. Apart from poor Peter Reynolds, nobody
wanted to move. But even in Aberdeen, you could sense change coming, that
inhouse future of memos, management and meetings. There was a question I was
asking myself with increasing insistency. Yes, the North-east was comfortable,
but there was a world outside. As The Clash sang around this time on their
album Combat Rock- Should I
stay or should I go?
Chapter 18
Leaving
All winters in the North-east are cold, long, and
dark, but the winter of 83/84 was the hardest in living memory. Parked cars
disappeared under the snow - I could find mine only by the hump it made on an
otherwise even blanket in the yard. Milk froze in the bottle before you could
retrieve it, sprouting tallow-coloured candles with the cap still clinging to
the top. Bread turned to ice in the bin. I often worked from home - there were
days when we all did - sitting there in thermal clothing, watching the snow flurrying
past the windows on either side of the study, feeling like the little man inside
a snow globe paperweight.
I had been in Scotland as 'ARO Deeside' for seven
years. I was feeling restless. Much as I loved the North-east, I hadn't gone
native, like John or Mike. I hadn't put down roots. I missed the gentler
landscape of England, the chalk streams and slow, winding rivers, the woods of
oak and beech, the freckled meads of buttercup and cowslip. And a winter that
lasts three months instead of five. I knew very well that if I did move south
of the border, preferably to southern England, there would be less freedom to
go extra-curricular, or even just to do things my way. And instead of the great
forests and empty expanses of the Cairngorms and The Mounth,
I would be notifying little corners and banks that the combine harvesters had left.
But, even so, I felt the tug. And then an opportunity came up.
Home to me, in the sense that it was where my parents
lived, and where I usually stayed at least once a year, was Hungerford in West
Berkshire. I knew the area fairly well, and I also knew the NCC's local man, Peter
Tinning. Now Peter was moving to Sussex and his post was about to be trawled
internally. Since I was in Hungerford that Christmas, I dropped in on NCC's
South Region based at an old house on the edge of Greenham Common. The Regional
Officer, Peter Schofield, and his deputy, Richard 'Dick' Hornby, were welcoming
and friendly, and they as good as told me that if I wanted the Tinning job I
could have it. They would supply me with an office of my own, in the house, and
not in the overspill hut at the back. The Region sounded like a group of
like-minds, a gathering of committed naturalists. My Durham pal, Bob Gibbons,
was now in Hampshire, working alongside the redoubtable Colin Tubbs. And a
Scottish girlfriend, 'Moggsy' Still, was coming down
to work on a habitat survey of the Basingstoke canal. In some ways the place
reminded me of my early days in the North-east: a new start beckoned. The
downside was of course the work. The office kept a day-book of correspondence,
and the size of it made me blanch. It looked like a telephone directory. There
were all kinds of tough-sounding cases, section this and section that,
referrals, points of law. These guys seemed to write more formal letters in a fortnight
than I did in the whole year. I winged it back to Scotland for Hogmanay, deep
in thought.
Yes, I was bored with moors and pine forests and the
big outdoors where, whatever we might like to think, we were little more than a
source of irritating red-tape. SSSIs in the south of England might be several
magnitudes smaller, but they were closer to the concept of protected sites,
places where we really could make a difference. And the vol. bods, especially
BBONT, the Bucks, Berks 'n' Oxon Wildlife Trust, were natural allies. Public
opinion was on our side. On the other hand, I would be sacrificing my modest
celebrity as a writer and broadcaster. And, apart from boredom, there were no
pressing reasons to leave. John Forster had long since abandoned any hope of
managing me. He had even taken a leaf out of my book by going extra-curricular
himself. He was plastering the walls of his office with slogans such as 'Dissent
is Strength' and 'Paper policies protect paper tigers'. I think he was working
on a management plan for a national park in Nepal. As for Mike Matthew, I knew
I would never find another Regional Officer so modest, tolerant and decent
(though Peter Schofield seemed to be in the same mould).
There was another reason. The perks for moving from a
cheaper area to a more expensive one were considerable. Enough for me to afford
a modest deposit on a mortgage for a little cottage, if I could find one. House
prices were rising and everyone was saying how important it was to get a foot
on the property ladder now, buying cheap and selling dear, slowly advancing
towards somewhere nicer and more spacious. Perhaps, suggested the parents, as
well as becoming a householder you will settle down, perhaps get married, start
a family. Just down the road from us, maybe.
Three things happened, one after the other, that
helped to make up my mind. The first came after I had accompanied my brother in
a small aircraft, flying across the snowy Cairngorms to our office in Aviemore.
Since we were having a regional meeting the next day, I invited an attractive
intern who I fancied to accompany us back, a free flight. I would put her up in
my flat overnight and we could then drive to Aberdeen together. Cunning plan, what?
Anyway, to cut a long story short, she set fire to my flat. It wasn't
intentional. She just wanted a nice warm fire, and the chimney of the wood
stove, unused to such heat, began to glow red hot. And then, in its haste, the
fire engine knocked down the gate. Once they had finished hosing it down, my
flat was in the hell of a mess. Girls, eh? One of my colleagues wrote up the
episode for the staff magazine, Natural Selection (with a walk-on part
for Dave Morris as 'Mr Angry'), helping to set the seal on my reputation as an
eccentric.
The second thing also involved a girl, none other than
Scarlet Annie, the very same young lady that my brother stole from me at my
house-warming party the previous year. Annie liked to drop round sometimes for
drinks and music, and on this occasion, she told me she would like to try some
magic mushrooms. Well, I found some - "ooh, they're like popcorn!" -but disappointingly, they didn't seem to have
much of an effect. She needed to nip next door to the pub to buy some fags or
something, and she was gone a long time. Eventually, and in a foul mood, I
traced her to the bar, and there she was, stoned out of her mind, surrounded by
many young chaps. Pushing my way through, I'm afraid I had words with one of
those chaps, with the result that he hit me in the eye. What a sad end to our
evening! I began to think that, at 32, I was getting a bit old for this kind of
thing.
Episode three followed a week or two later. There was
a new magazine called Ecos, founded by a group
of eco-zealots to discuss environmental topics of the day. One of the founders
was an old acquaintance, Charlie Pye-Smith. He'd asked me for a light-hearted piece,
for Ecos seemed to be short of those, and I decided
to pen a satirical account about what a bloody chore it was, notifying SSSIs to
uncomprehending farm tenants in the Highlands. Unfortunately, I'd noted that, among
the many difficulties, was the sad fact that you couldn't understand a single word
they said. This was true, but not tactful, and especially not coming from an
Englishman in Scotland. I thought it pretty unlikely that any tenant or crofter
would read Ecos. Unfortunately for me, someone
else did, a journalist called Jim Hunter. I knew him slightly; he had written a
nice review of A Natural History of Aberdeen, and since then I had fed
him a few stories. But he evidently decided that my little miscalculation was
the best story of the lot, for it ended up in The Scotsman newspaper,
with adverse comments. And if that wasn't bad enough, I was verbally assailed
at a joint NCC-ITE seminar by the grouse man, Adam Watson, who had also taken
offence at my light-hearted piece. That took me by surprise. There was no
warning, and in situations like this you need to think quickly; a spirited
reply in public might make a bad situation even worse. So, instead I had a word
with him afterwards. I made it clear what I thought of him, not that he cared.
There was a party afterwards at John Forster's
farmhouse. Watson wasn't there, not being a social man. There was much sympathy
for me, and some disparagement of Watson. The station head, David Jenkins,
proposed to have a word with his errant colleague the next day, but I told him
not to bother.
What hurt most about the Hunter/Watson attack was that
it looked as though my imminent move to Berkshire - England's equivalent of
Devil's Island, Watson had suggested - was punishment for writing the Ecos piece. It wasn't. And it wasn't going to be
Berkshire either. Peter Schofield told me that a new situation had arisen. Oxfordshire
was now available. Its ARO, Joanna Martin, was moving to Lincoln on a promotion
ticket. Peter told me that Oxfordshire was a much better county than Berkshire,
and one more suited to my experience. There were of course snags. One was that
I would be based at the regional office, a good twenty miles away from the
nearest Oxfordshire road-sign. The job would clearly involve a lot of travel to
and fro. And the county had well over 100 SSSIs to renotify. A very tedious
future was staring me in the face, as it did to many AROs across the land.
Mike Matthew thought I must be mad. "No accounting for
taste", he wrote on my leaving card. They all thought the same. Perhaps it was
mad, but restlessness, a black eye, and now Adam Watson had made up my mind. It
seemed to me that if I didn't move now, I might be stuck in the North-east for
another seven years - and doing what? More of the same, with, at most, maybe
another book, probably on the natural history of the Dee. A fresh scene seemed
preferable, and besides, that scene was rural England, and I was English. And surely
nowhere (thought I) is more English than Oxfordshire, home of the dreaming
spires, the willow-margined Thames, the verdant meads, the hanging woods, the Lewis
Carroll landscapes. It was the very essence of what I had missed all those
years. Seven years' absence does make the heart fonder you know.
There was also the transfer windfall, though I nearly
cocked it up. The exact financial terms of a move depended on whether or not you
are a 'householder'. That assessment, it seemed, rested on whether I owned the kitchen
cooker, and, like an ass, I said I didn't, no. In that one word I nearly signed
away about five thousand quid. Fortunately my landlord, David Levie, was a
lawyer. He knew what to do, and produced an affidavit to say the cooker was in
fact mine, and so was everything else in the flat. So, I got the deal. Phew! I
handed over the job to my replacement, one Phil Rothwell. He was one of the new
kinds of ARO: young, sober, serious, and bearded. Though perhaps tact wasn't
his strongest suit. I was told that the first thing he said to Dick Balharry was, "Peter tells me you can be a complete pain in
the arse!" [Rothwell, predicably, climbed some way up the greasy pole. In the
1990s, one saw him occasionally on the television news, informing us that the
Environment Agency, for which he now worked, was amazing, helping to avoid
floods, and making sure the water was always nice and pure].
The last week went past in a blur. I had many
farewells to make when, usually, out came the whisky bottle. The office had had
a whip-around, and a generous one too. Unfortunately they blew most of it on a
stripper. I was in the hotel bar with my colleagues all around, and in she came,
pointing at me. Yes, lucky man, it's you! Who me? (oh shit, not me!) Well, what
a lovely surprise, oof, don't wiggle, love, I've just had a skinful of beer.
Later on, there was a presentation in the meeting room, with the face of
Wynne-Edwards still glowering from the wall, flanked by my mounted pictures of
the Dee, the Cairngorms, the ancient pines. It went on a bit. Afterwards John
and I had a few more pints, and someone gave me a lift home to Aboyne, slumped in the back like a sack of apples.
It was now the end of April, the sudden spring of
Deeside, all the sweeter for being late. The riverbank smelt deliciously lemony,
from the resin bursting from birch buds. Pine cones crackled and popped in the
sudden heat. Salmon were leaping. Lizards rustled through the grass. Won't be
seeing much of you guys where I'm going, I thought. The sky was streaked with
mare's tails, presaging a storm I wouldn't be there to see. Why am I doing
this? Why am I leaving this beautiful place? Fate, it seemed to me, creeps up
on you, like Old Father Time. All of a sudden it has you in its grip. You obey
its injunctions, passively. You float into the future, just like that fag
packet I now saw on the river, drifting along to its destiny. Could I pretend to
myself that being based in Berkshire, responsible
for Oxfordshire, meant coming home at last? Or was it all just a dream?