Why travel? The wildlife wonders I shoot at home
PHOTOGRAPHER Stephen Dalton has a unique way of capturing animals in nature – he snaps them from his home.
Many of his pictures may look like they have were taken in the wild but in most cases the “natural” habitats are really his brilliant creations.
A master of high-speed wildlife photography, Stephen spends days building sets to recreate their natural environments in his home or nearby countryside.
In his latest book, Capturing Motion: My Life In High Speed Nature Photography, he tells how he has developed his techniques for over 50 years. Stephen said: “Nobody had ever seen how insects fly, or even how they managed to make the extraordinary aerial feats we now take for granted, so I thought it would be fascinating to attempt to photograph them in full flight in high-speed.
“There were many serious technical problems which had so far evaded photography. Also it was a challenge, an area of photography that had never been seriously attempted before.”
Some were shot in the wild but many were found in nature near his Sussex home. He said: “The flying insects had to be photographed in controlled conditions. Just look at the complex and precision set-ups to realise this was the only way.”
THIS lost royal penguin cuts a lonely figure as the odd one out in a colony of gentoo birds.
The penguin – with its Boris Johnson-like golden crest – swam more than 5,000 miles from its Pacific Ocean home before arriving at the Falklands Islands.
Photographer and conservationist David Higgins, who took the pictures at Kidney Cove, thinks “Boris” might have spent months at sea.
The 51-year-old, from Hull, a biodiversity project manager for Falklands Conservation, said: “It must have got lost following its prey and found itself thousands of miles from its breeding grounds between New Zealand and Antarctica.
“It must have been very surprised when it came ashore to find the gentoo penguins.”
LOVED and loathed in equal measure, Larry Flynt Jr was a rags-to-riches porn publishing king who spent years battling lawsuits in court to defend his controversial views. A self-proclaimed “smut pedlar who cares”, he founded the hardcore pornography magazine Hustler in 1974.
By 2015, his empire of publications, strip clubs, casinos and “adult” shops was estimated to be worth $400million.
An attempt on his life in 1978 by the serial killer and white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin left him paralysed from the waist down. He subsequently used a £17,000 goldplated wheelchair and was reliant on painkillers before undergoing surgeries to numb his nerves.
His life and many legal lawsuits were the subject of the hit 1996 film, The People vs. Larry Flynt, starringWoody Harrelson Jr.
Born into poverty in a rural part of Kentucky, Flynt Jr was the eldest of three children born to Larry Claxton Flynt Sr, a sharecropper, and Edith, a homemaker.
He left school in the eighth grade and joined the army aged 15 using a forged birth certificate, leaving with an honourable discharge. After a stint as a bootlegger, he and his brother opened the first Hustler Club in 1968 in Dayton, Ohio. As he opened more clubs, he launched a two-page, promotional black-and-white newsletter, which proved very popular.
As the US sank into recession in 1973, he evolved the newsletter into Hustler magazine, which would eventually reach a peak circulation of three million. The content was lewd, making Playboy look tame by comparison. But Flynt Jr never pretended to abide by standards of taste or decency.
In 1975 Hustler published topless paparazzi photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. That same year Flynt used a cover image of a naked woman’s head being fed into a meat grinder. He briefly con
verted to evangelical Christianity in 1997, at the behest of Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of then President Jimmy Carter, but that lasted just one year.
His most famous legal spat saw him sued for $50million for printing a sexual cartoon parody of evangelist Jerry Falwell in 1983.
Flynt successfully appealed at the Supreme Court using the First Amendment’s freedom of speech.
Following years of health complications he died of heart failure.
Married five times, he leaves four surviving children. His daughter Lisa Flynt-Fugate died in a car crash in 2014.
LIKE Princess Anne, she bore the title Princess Royal. Like Princess Diana she suffered inner agonies, which led to nervous breakdowns. She was the daughter of a king and sister to two more – but almost nothing is known of the sad life of Princess Mary, the now-forgotten aunt of our present Queen.
Shy yet haughty, smiling but remote, she was chilly and distant with her children. She married a womaniser, 15 years her senior, who only proposed to her for a bet.
But despite being the only daughter of the mighty king-emperor George V and being brought up in luxury and riches, life was a struggle for Mary.
Her childhood was dominated by her bullying father and she spent her growing-up years acting as peacemaker between the king and his sons.
Much of the time was spent at York Cottage on the Sandringham estate – “grotesque, with minute rooms, and peculiarly unattractive,” according to one visitor, and far too small for a married couple with six children.
In such cramped conditions, and augmented by the number of staff required to keep the show on the road, tempers flared. Behind closed doors the warring Windsor household, far from being a model of decorum, would do credit to an EastEnders script.
Gradually the king’s sons – David, Bertie, Harry, and George – escaped their suffocating upbringing, though the youngest, Prince John, died aged only 13 from an epileptic seizure. Mary, the last to see him alive, mourned – and got left behind.
“I do resent the foul way my father treats her, imprisoning her and not letting her lead a normal life – ruining her chances of getting married, or even of existing as a girl of her age should,” wrote her brother David, the Prince of Wales.
She was not even allowed to pick her own clothes – “Like a prim wax doll,” wrote one columnist after seeing her in an outfit chosen by Queen Mary. Her public persona, too, seemed dominated by her starchy mother – “They really ought to leave her at home, she’s so awkward and unattractive,” wrote one socialite, “dressed and unpowdered like a kitchen-maid”.
The idea was that Mary, in keeping with age-old royal practice, would be used to make a dynastic alliance between Buckingham Palace and some suitable royal house.
THE king and queen had their eye on Prince Ernst August of Hanover, a descendant of King George III, who was heir to the throne of Hanover, from whence Britain’s ruling house originally came. The plan came to nothing, and by the age of 24 it looked as though Mary would never marry – nobody, in her parents’ eyes, was good enough for her.
There’d been a childhood romance with Lord Dalkeith, heir to the Duke of Buccleuch, but despite the family being the biggest landowners in Europe, Dalkeith was deemed “not rich enough to marry the King’s only daughter”.
“It’s a tragedy, a royal heartbreak,” confided one of Mary’s friends, but the King and Queen were adamant. Nobody knows quite what went on between Dalkeith and the princess, but it’s juicily described as an “illicit attraction” in a new book, the first-ever biography of Princess Mary, by writer Elisabeth Basford.
With Dalkeith crossed off the list of possibles and with time marching on, when her possessive parents finally did let Mary go, it was to a womanising aristocrat, Harry
Lascelles, who’d soon inherit the title Earl of Harewood and was said to be the richest unattached nobleman in Britain.
“News of the engagement provoked much ribald comment,” wrote Harry’s cousin Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles in his diary soon after.
“Princess Mary, though only 24, was reputed to be unmarriageable. And Harry, who was nearly 40, was said to have proposed to her for a bet at his club.”
Clever and well-read, Lascelles had been a brave and accomplished soldier, but was “notorious for picking out the smartest women in England as the object of his rather transitory attentions” and was a man of “uncertain temperament” who despite valiant service in the First World War, had been court-martialled twice. So he was more than a handful for his inexperienced bride.
It can hardly be viewed as a love match.The picture of them on their wedding day is almost heartbreaking – he, prematurely old and stiff (his nickname was the Dismal Bloodhound); she, looking like a lamb to the slaughter.
Think Charles and Diana – it was an arrangement, and little more. Her brother David thought she married for the money, and certainly the king was impressed by the size of Harry’s bank balance, though he sobbed when finally she thankfully fled her York Cottag e prison into the arms of her husband.
But over the years, the rumour-mill continued to whisper that the marriage was a “loveless match”. Queen Mary disliked Harry and when, years later, he died, she refused to attend the funeral or his memorial service.
Nonetheless, as a newlywed Mary set to work being a wife, mother, and working member of the royal family. From the start she was determined she would do her bit for The Firm, and for a time her work-rate almost matched that of her successor as Princess Royal, Princess Anne.
But after ten years of marriage and the birth of two sons she was finding the pressure too much to bear. Her biographer describes her as timid and nervous, struggling to make public speeches which had newly become an important part of any royal visit.
“It was a cause of continued anxiety – Mary would often tie herself in knots and overthink her concerns prior to an event,” sympathises Basford.
It led in 1933 to a complete breakdown, with Mary losing more than two stone in less than four months. Doctors appear to have been at a loss to pinpoint exactly what was wrong, and in less than a couple of years she underwent two major operations.
With her brother David’s 1936 Abdication to be with his divorced American lover Wallis Simpson, the pressures increased.
Mary was called back from Harewood, her husband’s ancestral home, to look after her mother, becoming a companion and comforter – and for four months she barely saw her two children.
And once again she was called upon to be
‘I do resent the foul way my father treats her, imprisoning her and not letting her lead a normal life’
TROUBLED CHILDHOOD: Mary with her parents, King George V and Queen Mary
the peacemaker, only this time it was between her brothers David, now demoted to Duke of Windsor, and Harry, Duke of Gloucester – who hardly improved matters by describing Wallis as “that bloody bitch”.
Mary wasn’t altogether saintly, however: as war engulfed the nation, her brother Bertie, now King George VI, together with Queen Elizabeth, did sterling work meeting their embattled subjects.”
Mary remained unimpressed. The American diplomat William Bullitt, wrote: “The Queen’s sister-in-law, the Princess Royal, goes about England talking about her [the Queen’s] ‘cheap public smile’.”
PRE-WAR, it looked as though Princess Mary still had a part to play in royal life, but her niece Princess Elizabeth, now our Queen, soon became the star of the show. Eyebrows were raised when Mary failed to show up at Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip in 1947 – after all she was Lilibet’s godmother as well as aunt – and the rumour-mill suggested it was because the Duke of Windsor hadn’t been invited. It made page one headlines that day.
But Elisabeth Basford argues Mary was on the brink of a second nervous breakdown and