Memorial Service: Hugh Mellor CBE James Hughes-onslow

Admirers of Hugh Mellor gathered at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes to pay their respects to the former Chairman of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.

‘Hugh took over as Chairman of WWT in 1997,’ said the current chairman, Martin Spray. ‘The Trust at that time was in grave financial difficulties. However, Hugh, being the measured visionary, persuaded the Council of Trustees to press ahead with Peter Scott’s last great visionary project, the London Wetland Centre. This £17 million scheme was by no means a trivial decision but has taken the Trust to a different level, with the Centre being internationally renowned and influential.’

WWT founder Sir Peter Scott’s London Wetland Centre opened in 2000. David Attenborough described it as the most inspirational conservation project in Britain. Sir Peter was the first person to be awarded a CBE for wildlife conservation. Sir David, Martin Spray and Hugh Mellor later became CBES themselves.

Ben Hay told how Mellor progressed from Harrow to the Coldstream Guards and Oxford, where he won an athletics Blue and might have run in the Olympics if he hadn’t been injured. He then worked in a merchant bank, which sent him to Australia. In 1965, he met his wife Sally, then a music student and later a concert pianist. He asked if he could attend her Stravinsky lessons and they were married six months later.

In 1970 Mellor bought a farm in Buckinghamshire and became heavily involved in local conservation issues.

Daughter Sari Robinson read ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’ from The Merchant of Venice. She said he could recite Shakespeare all the way to the north of Scotland on an eight-hour car journey. Son Andrew Mellor read from Australian Scenery by Banjo Paterson.

‘Hugh’s love of the wild was instinctive,’ said fellow conservationist Ben Hay, ‘an instinct encouraged from boyhood by his mother’s love of the country and by holidays spent at North Berwick. The thrill of first seeing gannet, eider duck and sanderling would never leave him.’

Meriel Darby, daughter of Lord Home, said, ‘I imagine him arriving in heaven, blown away by the wonder of it all but, being Hugh, quite soon looking around for ways to help things along and, armed with a shovel and pick, releasing a choked-up stream or damming it to create a wetland.’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW