GREAT SCOTT
For 75 years, visitors have flocked to the wetland wildlife reserve at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. Frank Gardner profiles its founder Sir Peter Scott – sailor, artist, pilot, broadcaster and one of Britain’s greatest conservationists
Frank Gardner profiles Sir Peter Scott, founder of Slimbridge Wetland Centre and one of our greatest conservationists.
“Scott left behind him a treasure trove of intricate watercolours of the natural world”
Peter Scott was ahead of his time.
The founder of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) and co-founder of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) may have left us 32 years ago but his words could hardly have been more prophetic. “The most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world,” he said, “is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and its reality.”
As the world wakes up to the devastating effects of climate change and loss of habitats on this planet’s vanishing wildlife, the groundbreaking work of this man is more important than ever. He was the first person to be knighted for services to conservation, in 1973, and one of his most important projects, the Red Data List, is still used today to alert the world to species under threat.
The multi-talented Scott achieved an incredible amount in his 80 years, leaving behind him a treasure trove of intricate watercolours of the natural world. But perhaps his greatest legacy is the network of wetland centres he founded across the UK, making nature accessible to the general public and, in his own words, causing them to fall in love with it. Sir David Attenborough, who met him when they both worked for the BBC in the 1950s and 60s, once famously said of him: “Peter is and always will be the patron saint of conservation.”
HIS EARLIEST INSPIRATION
Scott was just two years old when his father, the celebrated Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, died in 1912 on his doomed mission to the South Pole. Shortly before he died, the explorer, whose fame generated the quaint expression ‘great Scott!’, wrote a letter to his wife asking her to: “Make the boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games.”
Peter Scott became interested in both. Educated at Oundle School in Northamptonshire and then Trinity College, Cambridge, he co-wrote and illustrated his first book on birds while still in his teens. He studied natural sciences and art history and, as a keen artist with a talent inherited from his mother, sculptor Kathleen Scott, he held his first exhibition in London at the age of just 23.
The following year he experienced something that changed his life. In 1933 Scott was swimming off the Lincolnshire coast when he got caught in a storm. Washed ashore near the village of Sutton Bridge, he found himself looking up at a lighthouse overlooking the Nene estuary and an area of untouched wilderness. Scott was so enthralled by the place he leased the lighthouse for £5 a year, refurbishing it and converting its reception room into his first art studio, painting there until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Scott showed an early prowess at sports, going on to win a bronze medal in sailing in the 1936 Olympic Games. Statues of the man erected years later tend to show a rather stout, thickset figure, usually draped in wet-weather clothing and always clutching a pair of binoculars. Yet he was a renowned sportsman, reaching national championship level in ice skating, and at the age of 53 he became British gliding champion.
Aged 30 when the Second World War broke out, Scott joined the Royal Navy as a sublieutenant, serving on a destroyer in the bitter conditions of the North Atlantic. He later commanded a steam gunboat in the English Channel, hunting down German fast attack craft known as ‘E-boats’. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery and was also decorated with the CBE for designing an ingenious camouflage scheme for the navy’s warships.
FOR WETLANDS AND WILDFOWL
This sounds unbelievable, but initially Peter Scott shot birds for sport. Early in his life, however, he had an epiphanal moment when he watched a wounded bird that he himself had shot fighting for its life on the mudflats of East Anglia, something that helped inspire him to campaign for conservation.
For many people, Scott’s name is inextricably tied to Slimbridge Wetland Centre, the 169-hectare world-famous reserve in Gloucestershire that he founded and which is sometimes dubbed “the birthplace of modern conservation”. Freshwater wetlands, according to the WWT, cover less than 1% of the world’s surface and yet 40% of all species rely on them. In the UK, they account for 3% of the land yet they support 10% of our species. They have been called “the lifeblood” of our planet.
It was from Slimbridge that Scott presented the BBC’s first-ever live natural history programme in 1953. Opened in 1946, this 100-acre West Country nature reserve has become a haven for thousands of wildfowl, including the magnificent Bewick’s swans that fly in each winter from their Arctic breeding grounds in Russia. Scott studied and drew these with such extraordinary precision that he learnt to recognise individual birds by the minutest colour variations on their bills, giving them adopted names as he sketched them.
“Scott recognised individual birds by the minutest colour variations on their bills”
The practice of recording birds continues today – the WWT teams have logged more than 10,000 swans over the past five decades.
MORE THAN AN ORNITHOLOGIST
In 2009 I went to Slimbridge to make a 60-minute BBC Radio 4 documentary on Scott’s life, featuring some of the latest projects, such as the breeding programme to reintroduce rare cranes. Interviewing his widow Lady Philippa Scott, an accomplished naturalist in her own right, in her magnificent study at her Slimbridge home, I discovered that Scott did not just draw birds.
It was the year before she died and the giant picture window looked out on to a constantly moving vista of ducks, geese and swans, often flying in with a noisy splash between the reeds. I remember it was hard to concentrate with so much activity on the other side of the window but Lady Scott wanted to show me her husband’s notebooks from a trip they had done to the tropical reefs of Indonesia. There, painted in exquisite detail, were countless illustrations of an underwater world inhabited by multi-coloured parrotfish, angelfish, triggerfish, grouper and butterflyfish. “You see?” Lady Scott turned to me with a smile, as I leafed through these precious mementos, “he was far more than just an ornithologist.” And it’s true. In 1988 the couple had a coral fish named after them: Cirrhilabrus scottorum.
Peter Scott’s legacy is profound. He was a co-founder and first chairman of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), for which he designed the famous panda logo. The WWT still celebrates his “pioneering attitude and passion” saying that he is “the DNA that runs through everything we do”. Many of the things he did and said ring so true today, and none more so than what he had to tell us about conservation. “We shan’t save all we should like to,” Scott said, “but we shall save a great deal more than if we had never tried.”
Frank Gardner is the BBC security correspondent and president of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). “My mother introduced me to birdwatching while we were living in the Netherlands. I always take my binoculars with me on reporting trips.”
DON’T MISS The author of this feature, the BBC’s security correspondent, tells his own powerful personal story in Being Frank: The Frank Gardner Story, now available on BBC iPlayer.