From botanist to TV star
David Bellamy, who has died aged 86, did for botany and ecology what David Attenborough did for biology, but his refusal to stick to the politically correct environmental script meant that he was not universally loved by his fellow campaigners.
Bellamy was an academic for 20 years before he hit Britain’s television screens. His chance came in 1967, when the supertanker Torrey Canyon foundered off Cornwall, disgorging a slick of oil. The BBC invited Bellamy to talk about marine pollution and he did so next to a mussel-encrusted pipe that was discharging raw sewage into the sea.
With his lumbering Wild Man of the Woods looks, arm-waving enthusiasm and muffled nasal drawl (‘‘not so much emitted as extruded’’, according to one interviewer),
Bellamy was a
TV natural.
‘‘That may be shhh, you-knowwhat to you and me, but to a mussel, that’s cordon bleu,’’ he said, turning an advertising catchphrase into a conceit about the harm big business was doing to the planet.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the BBC’s ‘‘Bouncing Botanist’’ was a television regular, leaping over ‘‘wocky pwotuberwances’’, enthusing over ‘‘twee pherns’’ or plunging his hands lovingly into evil-looking sludge to declare it a ‘‘bweeding gwound for amazing organisms’’.
He hosted numerous shows (Bellamy’s Backyard Safari; Bellamy’s Seaside Safari (in which the miniaturised botanist was seen being gobbled up by a cuttlefish and chased by a crab); and Bellamy on Botany – to name a few). He was a regular on the children’s show
Blue Peter and even had a hit record with
Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me?
Bellamy was serious about his environmentalism. In 1983 his incarceration in an Australian prison for trying to obstruct (successfully in the end) the building of a dam on a Tasmanian river brought him international recognition. Later the same year he threatened to chain himself to the railings at 10 Downing Street unless the government signed the World Heritage Convention, and he was vociferous in his opposition to plans to site an underground nuclear waste dump at Billingham.
He launched campaigns to clean up Britain’s beaches, curb peat extraction, save the rainforests and stop pollution of coastal waters. While it is not surprising that he was unpopular in the corridors of power, more curious was the vitriol he encountered from the green movement.
His willingness to work with industry offended many: he was widely condemned for taking on the case of a housing developer who wanted to build homes on a marshland site in Hull, home to Britain’s largest colony of frogs (Bellamy claimed that his clients wanted advice on how to preserve the frog colony; critics charged that the scheme had a better chance of getting planning permission with Bellamy’s name on it).
‘‘I’m proud to be eccentric. You can have all the power in the world, but you can’t turn a wheel unless you’re a crank.’’
As time went on Bellamy strayed further still from the path of ‘‘environmental correctness’’, speaking out in favour of hunting and suggesting it would be reasonable to build a monorail on the Galapagos Islands, an idea summarily rejected by the Galapagos Conservation Trust, of which he happened to be president.
But it was a series of contentious public statements about man-made global warming – namely his belief that it is ‘‘poppycock’’ – that put him on a collision course with the green consensus.
His television career effectively came to an end after a 1996 appearance on Blue Peter when he dismissed wind farms as little more than green totemism.
Then in 2005 he had a bruising spat with the environmental journalist George Monbiot, who found that, in claiming that 555 of the 625 glaciers monitored by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, were ‘‘not shrinking but in fact growing’’, Bellamy had misquoted an original source which said that 55 per cent of the 625 glaciers were growing, not 555.
Bellamy, as one interviewer observed, did not ‘‘so much think outside the box as outside the entire removal van’’. ‘‘I’m proud to be eccentric,’’ he admitted. ‘‘You can have all the power in the world, but you can’t turn a wheel unless you’re a crank.’’
David James Bellamy was born in 1933 at Carshalton, Surrey. His father, Thomas, was a pharmacist at Boots and his mother Winifred a ‘‘housewife of the old ‘stay at home and look after the family’ tradition’’. His father, who had begun his career when chemists made potions out of real plants, brought David up to love botany, though, extraordinarily, his early ambition was to be a ballet dancer. By the age of 14, however, he was forced to conclude that he did not have the build for pas de deux.
At school he failed his 11-plus and his mathematics O-level (five times) and, aged 14, landed up in hospital with concussion after attempting to make fireworks out of the innards of an unexploded doodlebug. His hearing never recovered from the explosion.
After leaving school he ended up as a lab technician. He studied botany at Chelsea College of Science and Technology then took a PhD at Bedford College. By the age of 27 he was a junior lecturer at Durham University. There, his ebullient energy and fruity diction made him a cult figure.
Bellamy served, at various times, as president of the environmental group Watch; the Youth Hostels Association and Population Concern. He was a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund and a patron of the British Homeopathic Association. He was also patron of the West Midlands Youth ballet, for whom he wrote a ballet entitled Heritage.
He wrote some 40 books and numerous scientific papers. His autobiography, Jolly Green Giant, was published in 2002. He was appointed OBE in 1994.
He married Rosemary Froy in 1959; they had a son. They also adopted three girls and a boy. The family lived in a converted millhouse with a menagerie of dogs, cats, rabbits and chickens. – Telegraph Group