Birds Britannia. Stephen Moss

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СКАЧАТЬ key aspect of this behaviour was feeding wild birds, and this was included in the pledge taken by new members of the Dicky Bird Society: ‘I hereby promise to be kind to all living things, to protect them to the utmost of my power, to feed the birds in the winter-time, and never to take or destroy a nest.’

      Today we take feeding birds for granted, but in Victorian times it was quite unusual, even in towns and cities. By encouraging children to feed wild birds, the Dicky Bird Society, and others like it, promoted a pastime that would go on to forge a lasting bond between the British people and what would eventually become our ‘garden birds’.

      The Dicky Bird Society was a highly successful organisation, which continued to run until 1940, attracting hundreds of thousands of children throughout the country, and gaining public support from such Victorian luminaries as John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Florence Nightingale. Together with other children’s humane organisations they could boast millions of members, some of whom came from surprising places, according to social historian Frederick Milton, who has made a special study of the society: ‘There is a letter written to the Dicky Bird Society from children in Dover workhouse, which tells Uncle Toby that they were collecting crumbs from their table to feed to the birds the next day.’

      As Frederick Milton notes, this eagerness to engage with feeding birds was not confined to children living in poverty: ‘As the nineteenth century progressed, the number of people actually feeding the birds visibly increased. There was a brand-new generation of individuals who were far more interested in garden birds and their welfare.’

      But not everyone in Victorian society thought it necessary, or indeed desirable, to feed birds, as Rob Lambert explains:

      The Victorians were caught up in a massive ethical dilemma about feeding garden birds. On the one hand, Victorian values and society were dominated by the concept of ‘Self-Help’ [the title of a book and movement led by Samuel Smiles] – you had to look after yourself, and couldn’t depend on the state for welfare and support in hard times. And they extended this moral code onto the birdlife, so therefore the Victorians believed that by feeding the garden birds, you somehow made them indolent, lazy, and dependent on welfare.

      These attitudes would be changed by a series of very hard winters, which pushed birds to the edge of starvation. In particular the winter of 1890–1 saw long spells of ice and snow, and national newspapers began to urge their readers to feed the birds. In the centre of London, the nature writer W. H. Hudson witnessed working men giving scraps from their meagre supplies of food. As Rob Lambert points out, this coincided with a shift in attitudes in the country as a whole:

      Victorian Britain was also dominated by these emerging new sensibilities; by this wave of humanitarianism that developed decade by decade, which was extremely powerful. And the Victorians couldn’t bear to see suffering, so when hard winters kicked in, and birds began to die in Victorian gardens, there was then a battle for control over the Victorian mind – and in the end it was the humanitarianism that won, and the Victorians fed their garden birds in times of great peril.

      A major winner from this change in attitudes towards feeding birds was the Robin. This had already become firmly established as the nation’s favourite bird, according to cultural historian Christopher Frayling:

      There’s a very rich folklore for the Robin that goes way back – for example where did the Robin gets its red breast? It got its red breast because it plucked a thorn from the crown of thorns – as Jesus was on his way to Gethsemane, a drop of Jesus’s blood falls onto the bird, and thereafter the Robin has a red breast. So it’s associated in a very deep way with the New Testament. So Robins, by Shakespeare’s time, and possibly long before that, are associated with charity and piety.

      Historian Keith Thomas notes that the Robin was accorded almost supernatural powers, as in this seventeenth-century poem penned by Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle:

      Man superstitiously dares not hurt me,

      For if I’m killed or hurt, ill luck shall be.

      Robins were also associated with death: if one tapped on a window or came into a house, it was thought that one of the occupants would soon die. Given that Robins would frequently appear on the doorstep in search of food, especially during harsh winter weather, this belief may seem rather odd – but perhaps it marks the unseen boundary between regarding this endearing little bird as a ‘wild pet’, and not allowing it to cross over the boundary into our domestic lives.

      Whatever the ambiguities of our relationship with the Robin, by the Victorian era its position in our popular culture had become even more deeply entrenched. Jeremy Mynott tells the complex story behind our present-day association of Robins with Christmas, which arose in the middle of the nineteenth century:

      Robins appear on Christmas cards through a rather strange process of causation. Robins gave their name to the first postmen, who wore red tunics, and were therefore called ‘robins’. And on some of the early Christmas cards delivered by these postmen, the Robin was often pictured with a postcard in its mouth, delivering the letter like a postman. So the Robin gave its name to the postman, and the postman gave his role to the Robin.

      Another obvious reason for the connection of Robins with the festive season is that they often come into gardens in search of food, especially during spells of ice and snow. But whatever the reason, every year since, highly sentimental images of Robins have appeared on our Christmas cards, an annual renewal of our commitment to them.

      * * *

      By the start of the twentieth century the foundations of today’s special relationship with the birds living alongside us had already been laid. Although we didn’t yet call them ‘garden birds’, a growing number of people regarded these wild creatures with a sentimentality that would have been inconceivable to their rural ancestors. But this developing picture of harmony was about to be severely tested, with the coming of the First World War.

      In August 1914, within days of the outbreak of the conflict, the Defence of the Realm Act was passed. This draconian piece of legislation outlawed many activities, and amendments to the Act later included the wastage of food. Almost overnight, feeding garden birds became illegal, and people were even prosecuted for doing so, including an elderly woman living in Surrey, Sophia Stuart.

      According to a report in the Daily Mail, she appeared at Woking Crown Court, charged with the offence of giving bread to wild birds. In her defence, the poor woman stated that she had lost her only son, who had been killed fighting in Mesopotamia; that all she used were the dirty bottom crusts she could not eat. Moreover, she maintained that she had fed the birds for seventy years – and would continue to do so, whatever the court decided.

      For this small act of defiance, she was fined two guineas – the equivalent of several hundred pounds today. For Britain’s garden birds, as well as its people, the world had certainly changed for the worse.

      The war also cut off supplies of nestboxes, which had been imported from Germany by the RSPB and had proved very popular with householders. The inventor of the nestbox, Baron Hans von Berlepsch, had even been granted the position of ‘Honorary Fellow’ by the RSPB, in recognition of what he had done to help conserve Britain’s birds. The coming of war between Britain and Germany put paid to this fine example of Anglo-German co-operation, and as a result our birds had to revert to finding natural nest sites.

      One familiar species wasn’t simply deprived of food and nesting sites, but became one of the first casualties of war on the Home Front. House Sparrows had long been persecuted in the countryside because they ate grain, thereby depriving farmers of part of their harvest. But now people in cities, towns and suburbs also became concerned about the threat they posed to the nation’s food СКАЧАТЬ