PARAGON REVIEW

Issue 5

Ornithological observations

The Brynmor Jones Library contains a remarkable array of collections relating to ornithology, nearly all of which is of 19th century origin. These include papers of the Rev. FO Morris, John Cordeaux, and the Association for the Protection of Sea-Birds. In this article the University Archivist, Brian Dyson, describes the holdings and the people behind them.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw a remarkable explosion of interest in natural history in Britain. At that time, an interest in birds could take several forms. One was the thirst for knowledge, and particularly the identification of previously unknown species. Another was the love of beautiful things. A third form, unfortunately, was frequently the desire to blast them out of the sky in large numbers in the name of 'sport'. The rise of associations or societies to defend our feathered friends eventually led to the establishment of the Society (later the Royal Society) for the Protection of Birds in 1889. However, the first significant bird protection society, the Association for the Protection of Sea-Birds, was established in 1868 in Bridlington. Papers of its founder, the Rev. Henry Frederick Barnes (later Barnes-Lawrence) and two other prominent members, John Cordeaux and the Rev. FO Morris (left), are to be found in the Brynmor Jones Library. All are now relatively unknown, but each, in their own way, made significant contributions to the world of ornithology.

The Rev. FO Morris

Francis Orpen Morris was born on 25 March 1810, the eldest son of Admiral Henry Gage Morris, near Cork, whilst his father was on active service on the Royal Navy's Irish station. His mother, Rebecca, was the youngest daughter of the Rev. Francis Orpen, vicar of Kilgarvan, county Kerry. The family moved to England in 1824, living initially in Worcester, and, from 1826, in Charmouth, Dorset. His interest in natural history began whilst a pupil at Bromsgrove School, when he began to collect birds and insects. He left school in 1828 and, following a year with a private tutor, went up to Worcester College Oxford the following year. He read Classics, obtaining his BA in 1833. However, much of his time as a student was spent in the study of natural history, and one of his part-time tasks included arranging the collection of insects in the Ashmolean Museum.

Having decided to enter the Church, he became curate at Hanging Heaton, near Dewsbury, and was ordained Deacon by the Archbishop of York in August 1834. In January 1835 he married Anne, second daughter of Charles Sanders, of Bromsgrove. They were to have 3 sons and 6 daughters. Eventually, in November 1844, he was presented to the living of Nafferton near Driffield in East Yorkshire, where he remained vicar for nine years. This relatively small parish of 1400 persons provided him with an annual income of £40. He instigated much repair work on his church before, in 1854, moving to the Rectory of Nunburnholme, near Market Weighton in East Yorkshire, which had a much smaller population (of just 240), but a larger income. He again restored the parish church (under the direction of G. Gilbert Scott), but evidently now had even more time to study, and to look after his large collection of butterflies, moths, birds' eggs, and so on.

It was at Nafferton that his reputation as a popular writer on natural history in general and birds in particular began to grow. His first book had appeared as early as 1834, A guide to an arrangement of British birds. However, his association with Benjamin Fawcett, a local printer, was to have remarkable results, particularly for the study of ornithology. Benjamin Fawcett was one of the finest of the nineteenth century woodblock colour printers. Born in Bridlington in December 1808, he was the son of a ship's master. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed for seven years to William Forth, a Bridlington bookseller and printer. In 1831 he set up in business as a bookseller, bookbinder, music seller, printer and stationer, in Middle Street, Driffield. In 1830 he married Mary Ann Woodmansey, and they had two sons before her death in 1834. In 1848 he married Martha Porter, and they eventually had four daughters and six sons.

Many of his early printing projects were childrens' books published by Webb & Millington of Leeds. His first association with FO Morris was in 1844 or 1845, and was to last nearly 50 years. Morris produced the text for books which Fawcett financed and printed, which were usually illustrated by AF (Frank) Lydon (1836-1917), who had started as one of Fawcett's apprentices. Unlike the earlier work of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), printing was in colour. This was initially achieved by hand colouring wood-engraved illustrations, and later by printing in colours from multiple wood blocks. Most of the works were published by Groombridge, of London. Their first collaboration was probably Bible natural history, issued in sixpenny monthly parts in 1849, and completed in 1850. But their first great success was A History of British birds, work on which probably began in 1848. Publication, which took over seven years to complete from June 1850, was undertaken in monthly parts costing one shilling. Each part contained 24 pages of letterpress and 4 hand-coloured plates. The final six volume work contained 358 coloured plates. One thousand copies of the first part were initially produced, but such was the demand that Fawcett quickly had to move into larger premises (East Lodge, Driffield). Birds was quickly followed by A natural history of the nests and eggs of British birds and A history of British butterflies, followed later by A history of British moths. The last collaboration between Fawcett, Morris and Lydon was The county seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland. This again ran to six volumes, each with 40 coloured plates, and text by Morris. The firm of Groombridge failed in about 1880, and it appears that neither Fawcett nor Morris made much money from their joint ventures.

Robin Redbreast. Block engraved by Benjamin Fawcett, from a drawing by himself, which appeared in volume 3 of Morris's A History of British Birds (1853)

FO Morris died on 10 February 1893 and is buried at Nunburnholme. Fawcett had died three weeks earlier. The Brynmor Jones Library holds over 100 letters (at DX/21) to FO Morris, including six from Professor Alfred Newton (between 1851 and 1870), and seven from Fawcett (between 1850 and 1871). As might be expected, most of these letters are on the subject of birds. DX/21 also includes a small collection assembled by the Rev. MCF Morris connected with his book on Fawcett, with further original letters to FO Morris, one letter from AF Lydon, various loose plates containing engravings by Lydon, and several photographs of Fawcett, FO Morris, Lydon, and East Lodge, Driffield. A further small collection at DP/180 was purchased relatively recently, and this includes a lithograph of FO Morris, together with ten letters sent to him between 1850 and 1886. In all the collections there is just one letter (dated 4 March 1886) to Morris from that other distinguished nineteenth-century ornithologist, John Cordeaux.

John Cordeaux

Like Morris, John Cordeaux was one of the foremost ornithologists of his day. He was the eldest son of the Rev. John Cordeaux (b.1802) who held livings successively at Tothill, Lincolnshire, and Foston and Flickney in Leicestershire. John the elder married Elizabeth Taylor of Tothill, and they had six sons and five daughters. John, their first child, was born at Foston Rectory on 27 February 1831. He began his education at Sheffield Collegiate School, after his father had become vicar of St Mary's, Sheffield. On his father's move to St Giles, Liverpool, young John and his four brothers moved to Liverpool College. As a child he often visited the home of his maternal grandfather, Christopher Taylor, at Tothill, near Louth, and it was here that he first gained his love of nature, exploring that part of Lincolnshire between the Wolds and the sea. Ironically, he enjoyed shooting from an early age - wild duck, snipe and golden plover. When he was about 22, his great uncle, Richard Taylor, died and left him the right of occupancy of Great Cotes House and the tenancy of an adjoining farm and land. He later became agent for Sir Richard Sutton, and managed the Sutton estates in the Great Cotes area, where he remained for most of the rest of his life. In 1860 he married Mary Anne Wilson of Horton Hall, Cheshire. They had two sons.

Great Cotes, close to Grimsby and about one mile from the Humber estuary, was an ideal place for the study of birds and their migration. Cordeaux's visitors were customarily treated to a 20-mile trek through the marshes to Tetney. His comprehensive natural history records are shown in his four surviving notebooks, one entry from which is particularly poignant:

Dec.2nd [1879]. Very severe frost, water froze in hand basin in bedroom soon after being poured out. Walked in marshes in afternoon . . . there was a flock of 10,000 golden plover . . . when they rose I could not see daylight through them.

Like Morris, his early publications were modest affairs. His first contribution to The Zoologist appeared in April 1864, and concerned an influx of goldcrests on the east coast in October 1863. His first pioneering work was in the area of bird parasitology, in an article which appeared in The Zoologist in March 1869. As a meticulous recorder of natural life, his Birds of the Humber District was based chiefly on observations made during the previous decade. In it he listed 276 species, and provided details of their habitats in the Humber area, including Spurn, to which he was a regular visitor. A revised edition appeared in 1899, in which 322 species were listed.

However, the area in which he perhaps made his greatest impact was migration studies. This may have been influenced by the visit he made in September 1874 to Heinrich Gatke, secretary to the governor of Heligoland (which was a British possession until 1890). Gatke was a renowned expert on bird migration. The two men kept in regular contact by letter thereafter, describing their respective findings to each other.

Cordeaux began his first small-scale enquiry into migration patterns on the Yorkshire and Durham coasts in the autumn of 1876, and published the results in a short paper in The Zoologist in January 1877. These were based on observations collected from lighthouse and lightship keepers. In his own recordings he noted how many of the migrating birds were shot as they came in to land. On repeating the experiments in 1877 and 1878, it quickly became apparent that a rapid fall was occuring in certain species, notably the short-eared owl, as a result of large-scale shootings in previous years.(See illusatration left, probably by B. Fawcett, which appeared in volume 1 of Morris's Birds, 1851.) In Scotland, John Harvie-Brown followed Cordeaux's example, and organised a similar enquiry. Cordeaux and Harvie-Brown undertook a joint enquiry in the autumn of 1879. Printed forms and letters of instruction were sent to 64 lighthouses and lightships around the Scottish coast and 37 stations on the east coast of England. Their report was published in the May 1880 issue of The Zoologist. Alfred Newton, Professor of Zoology at Cambridge, delivered a paper to the British Association at Swansea in August 1880 on their findings and as a result he, Harvie-Brown and Cordeaux were invited to form a committee, with the last as secretary, to report on the next survey. This survey was expanded to cover the west coast of England, the Channel Isles and the Isle of Man, and about 160 stations were involved. Thereafter the Committee became more formally constituted, with an annual grant from the British Association. The ninth and last report was issued in 1887. A summary of the reports was eventually published in 1896.

Between 1864 and 1898 Cordeaux produced some 476 papers, reviews, and other publications. His stature as a researcher was recognised fairly late in life: in 1893 the Lincolnshire Naturalists' Union was founded, and Cordeaux was elected President. In 1896, the Yorkshire Naturalists' Union invited him to be their President. He died on 1 August 1899 and is buried in Louth cemetery. His surviving papers were donated to the Brynmor Jones Library in 1979 by Dr WL Cordeaux, through the good offices of John Cordeaux's biographer (and former head porter in the Library) the late Brian Pashby. The collection includes lecture notes, copies of articles, four ornithological field notebooks (1876-1888) and several hundred letters, including over 100 from Gatke (1874-1895) and 95 from Professor Alfred Newton (between 1868 and 1899).

The Association for the Protection of Sea-Birds

Both John Cordeaux and the Rev. FO Morris were active in the movement to protect birds. Morris's serious interest began in about 1867, when in the early summer he presented a petition to the House of Commons calling for a heavy tax on the possession of guns. He became a vigorous letter-writer and campaigner. When The Animal World first appeared in October 1869 its chief contributors were Frank Buckland, Frances Power Cobbe, and Morris. His first article, entitled 'British birds', entered a strong plea for their protection. For the rest of his life he consistently argued that anything associated with hunting (including game-keepers) should be curtailed or taxed. He, like John Ruskin, was also a strong anti-vivisectionist, and his minor works included A defence of our dumb companions against the cowardly cruelty of the experimentation on living animals. He shared his concern with Cordeaux, and with his colleague and friend the Rev. Henry Frederick Barnes (later Barnes-Lawrence), vicar of Bridlington between 1849 and 1874.

Barnes founded the Association for the Protection of Sea-Birds (APSB) in 1868 in Bridlington. During the 1860s the Victorian obsession with egg collecting and shooting wild animals, and particularly birds, reached a peak. The slaughter of sea birds for 'sport' was widespread, but a noted spot was the area of high cliffs at Bempton and Flamborough between Bridlington and Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast. The mass destruction by sea-borne parties from Bridlington was graphically described by Charles Waterton in his Essays on Natural History (1838). It was estimated that in the 18 miles of coast between Bridlington and Scarborough between the months of April and August some 120,000 birds were taken annually, of which about 108,000 were shot. Day-trippers, many from the Sheffield region, were particularly active in this way. There was also commercial exploitation of birds and their feathers for the millinery trade. Cordeaux's interest was perhaps sparked by his own visits to Flamborough. After one of these in April 1865 he noted that a party of five had shot 600 guillemot and razorbills in one day. In October 1867 one man boasted to him that he had killed 4000 gulls that season.

In 1868 Professor Newton drew attention to this situation in his address to the British Association. This resulted in much publicity, and the levelling of blame on the people of Bridlington and its environs. This persuaded the Rev HF Barnes (1823-1896) to call a meeting of local clergy and naturalists held in his vicarage on 21 October 1868 to consider ways of stopping the practice. Morris was also present. The meeting resulted in the formation of the APSB. Barnes and Thomas Harland were initially named as joint secretaries. Other leading members included Canon HB Tristram, Henry E Dresser, and John Cordeaux. They quickly secured the support of some local landowners, the Archbishop of York, and several local Members of Parliament. One of these, Christopher Sykes MP, of Brantingham Thorpe, introduced a Bill into Parliament which had the support of many scientific organisations. In June 1869 it reached the Statute Book as the Sea Birds Preservation Act. This provided protection for 35 species by introducing a closed season running annually from 1 April to 1 August. The first successful prosecution under the Act took place in Bridlington on 10 July 1869 after a Mr Tasker, of Sheffield, had deliberately shot 28 birds. He was fined a total of £3 19s.

The Act was a first major success, although this was partly offset by the fact that eggs were excluded from the legislation - indeed they were not covered until the passing of the Protection of Birds Act in 1954. After its early triumph the APSB was wound up by the mid-1870s. Other protective Acts of Parliament followed, including the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1880. In 1889 a group of ladies in London formed the Society for the Protection of Birds to campaign against the plumage trade. The Annual General Meeting of the Yorkshire Naturalists' Union held in Scarborough on 14 November 1891 established what later became known as the Protection of Wild Birds' Eggs Committee, several members of which had previously been members of the APSB. The new Committee became the Protection of Birds Committee of the YNU in 1979.

The Rev. HF Barnes-Lawrence later became Rector of Birkin in the West Riding (1874-1893) and a Canon of York Minster. A Memorial tablet commemorating his work in general and his pioneering actions on behalf of sea birds was unveiled in Bridlington Parish Church in 1931 by his son, the Rev. AL Barnes-Lawrence. A collection of letters and other documents of the Association was donated to the Brynmor Jones Library in 1995 by the YNU's Protection of Birds Committee. Notable correspondents include: the Rev. FO Morris (5 letters), Professor Alfred Newton (15), John Cordeaux (4), Christopher Sykes MP (9), Frank Buckland (6), HE Dresser (12) WH Harrison-Broadley MP (1), and the sixth Duke of Northumberland (1).

Though largely forgotten, the work of Morris, Cordeaux, Barnes-Lawrence, and the APSB endures. The strength of the Brynmor Jones Library's collections represented by their archives has recently been enhanced by the arrival of the papers of Dr Michael Clegg, the former museum curator and writer, who died in 1995. He, too, in the meticulous tradition of Morris and Cordeaux, left behind a wealth of field notes and diaries from his time in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire - particularly at Spurn and Gibraltar Point. Taken together, they represent a valuable source for ornithologists and natural historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.

Brian Dyson