Professor Aubrey Manning
Zoologist and broadcaster who held audiences spellbound with his wide-ranging monologues
PROFESSOR AUBREY MANNING, who has died aged 88, was an expert on animal behaviour and a vociferous campaigner on the need for human population control; he became known after his retirement from Edinburgh University as the ebullient presenter of television programmes for the BBC, starting with Earth Story in 1998 followed by Talking Landscapes and Landscape Mysteries; and for Radio 4 series such as Unearthing Mysteries, The Sounds of Life and The Rules of Life.
He ranged far beyond his own specialty, which was largely concerned with the genetics, development and evolution of behaviour in insects and mice, ranging over geology, archaeology and the impact of human beings on the landscape.
Handsome, rangy-limbed, weatherbeaten, anorak-clad and much given to gesticulation, he could hold television audiences spellbound with effervescent soliloquys on subjects from the drainage systems of East Anglia or hedges in the Weald to the castles of the Pembrokeshire coast and the science of plate tectonics.
However, a fascination with varied subjects had been part of his character since childhood. Aubrey William George Manning was born on April 24 1930 in Chiswick, west London, but moved with his family to Englefield Green in Surrey at the outbreak of the Second World War. His new home was close to Runnymede and Windsor Great Park. He became an avid bird-watcher – his first publication was with a school friend on wood warblers, and his first badge in the Boy Scouts was the naturalist badge. Chemistry also became an interest until he nearly blew himself up making fireworks.
From Strode’s School, Egham, he went up to University College London, where he read Zoology, then to Merton College, Oxford, to do postgraduate research in ethology (animal behaviour) with the famous Dutch scientist Niko Tinbergen. After National Service in the Royal Artillery he joined the Zoology department of Edinburgh University as an assistant lecturer.
There, he became something of a star, his lectures attracting students from nonzoology disciplines, and he was appointed Professor of Natural History in 1973. The university eventually took to scheduling his lectures at 9am on a Monday morning in order to get students out of bed. His An Introduction to Animal Behaviour, first published in 1967, is now in its sixth edition.
As well as animal behaviour, Manning became involved with environmental and conservation issues. In 1966 he joined the now defunct UK Conservation Society, the first organisation to argue that human population control is an essential component of a conservation strategy. He founded a Scottish branch and toured the country giving lectures. Later he became a patron of the British Optimum Population Trust.
Inevitably his championing of population control caused controversy: “I’ve been called a fascist and a racist,” he told the Sunday Herald in 2008. “I could certainly answer the racism thing. I believe that western Europe is grossly overpopulated. The strain on the environment is ‘population times resource consumption’ and Britain outstrips Bangladesh, which has three times the population, because of our consumption.” In 2006 he told an all-party parliamentary group that while Britain had a moral obligation to accept some immigration, “we need [it] like we need a hole in the head”. But he remained a “fan of the human species” and was convinced that it was possible to achieve a better balance with nature.
Manning served as chairman (1990-96) of the council of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, where he encouraged the growth of urban nature conservation and raised the profile of campaigns against such activities such as open cast mining and peat extraction. Hearing that an EU fund to promote nature conservation was receiving few applications from the UK and none from Scotland, he was instrumental in securing a bid for £350,000 to restore Scottish lowland raised bogs.
He would show similar energy as president of the Uk-wide Wildlife Trusts from 2005 to 2010, travelling the country giving talks.
His media career began immediately after he retired from Edinburgh in the summer of 1997, when he set off on a BBC science department round-the-world shoot for Earth Story, visiting Switzerland, Kenya, South Africa, Bali, Lombok, Australia, Canada, the US and Iceland. For viewers, the advantage of having a non-geologist explaining geological plates, plume mantles, volcanoes, glaciers and so on was that he could ask questions and draw out answers that could be understood by non-scientists.
His travels continued with The Rules of Life, linking animal behaviour to evolution and visiting meerkats in the Kalahari, seals in the Farne Islands, lions in Tanzania – and wasps in Leeds.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1973 and appointed OBE in 1998.
In 1959 he married the zoologist Margaret Bastock, with whom he had two sons. She died in 1982, and in 1985 he married Joan Herrmann, with whom he had another son.
Professor Aubrey Manning, born April 24 1930, died October 20 2018