Ralfe Whistler
Authority on the dodo and adventurer whose projects included pub tables and litter-pickers
RALFE WHISTLER, who has died aged 92, was a serial entrepreneur who repurposed the Helping Hand litter-picker, introduced to Britain the combined bench and table found outside many public houses and in picnic spots, and developed prototypes of aids used by children whose mothers had taken thalidomide during pregnancy.
He was also a “dodologist”, an authority on the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), the flightless bird from Mauritius that became extinct in about 1690. He turned his home in Battle, East Sussex, into the Dodo House, a shrine containing paintings, etchings, stamps, carpets, and even a lavatory seat depicting the bird’s image.
The collection includes dodo droppings, dodo bones, a red wine called Dodo Blood and a dodo costume with a papier-mâché head, as well as dodo mugs, wall tiles, tea towels and fridge magnets. “I wouldn’t say I am an eccentric,” he told the Argus newspaper. “But other people around here do, including my own family.”
Whistler’s interest had started as a child when his father, a distinguished ornithologist, was given a glass case containing dodo bones. “I used to show the bones off to people, many of whom were very interested,” he said.
He read everything possible on the subject, discovering how for centuries the bird lived peacefully without natural predators on Mauritius, and gradually lost the use of its wings. When explorers arrived in the 16th century and needed food, the dodo was unable to flee and became an easy catch. It was also hunted by non-native domestic animals introduced by settlers.
By the early 1980s Whistler had started adding to his father’s collection. “I began to look out for books about the dodo and artefacts connected with them, and was amazed at how much there was,” he told the Daily Mail. “Even when the dodo was still in existence it was considered interesting enough to be brought over from Mauritius and put on show in a cage in Piccadilly.”
He commissioned artists to re-imagine the dodo on canvas, met dodo enthusiasts from all over the world, and visited Mauritius. “There’s something very charming about it, and just mention of the dodo tends to bring a smile to people’s faces,” he said. “It must have been a very endearing bird, but its story is really rather tragic. It was such a trusting creature that it probably walked right up to the sailors who killed it.”
Ralfe Ashton Whistler was born in Hastings on August 9 1930, a distant relative of the artists Rex and Laurence Whistler. He was the son of Hugh Whistler, who served with the Indian police in the Punjab and identified many Indian birds, and his wife Margaret, née Ashton, daughter of the 1st Baron Ashton of Hyde. Ralfe’s sister Benedicta, an ecclesiastical administrator in the Church of England, predeceased him.
His parents, who married in Bombay Cathedral, had returned to England in part because his mother’s status as a peer’s daughter caused precedence issues in the stratified Indian police.
Young Ralfe was brought up in Battle among thousands of stuffed birds that ended up in the Natural History Museum. He was 12 when his father, then an air-raid warden, died, and he spent much time with workers on his grandparents’ Vinehall estate, leading to a rich vein of Sussex dialect in his speech.
He once caught an apple thief in the garden by tying a bell to a piece of string from his bedroom; when the bell rang he emerged with a gun and apprehended the culprit, a neighbour. Ralfe was educated at Highfield prep school and Eton (where his VIII won the Ashburton Shield for shooting at Bisley), before reading Land Economy at Selwyn College, Cambridge. During National Service with the 11th Hussars in Germany he was known as the best pistol shot in the Army.
He guarded the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg, where he found that during a metal shortage the workers had improvised with wooden dipsticks in the Beetles on the production line.
At Cambridge he had met Jane Mccarthy, a Canadian student from Montreal who was studying English with Queenie and FR Leavis. They married in 1953 and emigrated to Canada on various occasions, including in 1954, when he became the first tax assessor in Yukon, evaluating log cabins.
An ambition to be a cowboy was fulfilled while working on Fairholme Ranch (now part of Banff national park), then owned by Conrad O’brien-ffrench, one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
On another occasion, while working for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg, he persuaded the company to let him have, for a nominal sum, an island in the Mingan Archipelago that he had spotted while sailing up the St Lawrence River. The other islands later formed a national park to which his island was recently sold. In about 1960 Whistler accepted a family friend’s suggestion that he spend two years in colonial service in Northern Rhodesia, despite having to uproot his young family.
In his first week, a baby was abandoned on his desk. A few weeks later, a man came into his office, put an axe on his desk and announced that he had killed his wife. Whistler kept the axe and later used it for chopping kindling. And Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel, once visited, to see if his bungalow would make a suitable embassy.
Although he was a work-from-home father long before it was fashionable, Whistler had an itch for travel. He left the family behind to spend six months in northern Australia collecting birds and snakes. Another time he took his children to Romania in a Citroën DS estate car (or Safari) with a zebra-painted box on the roof and a real zebra tail dangling from the back.
In 1978 he bought a 525-acre farm near Bennington in the state of Vermont, but he was unable to secure an American visa. That could have been because of an incident in South Dakota when he was arrested for indecent exposure while not wearing a shirt. The farm was instead let to the novelist Richard Ford.
Back in Britain he worked for a gravel company in Leicester, became a property developer in Hastings and was involved with the “Keep Britain Tidy” campaign, championing the Helping Hand litter picker that was once demonstrated in St James’s Park by Margaret Thatcher. With typical panache, he once sent the litter picker to Nasa in the hope that it might be used for cleaning up on the Moon.
Living close to Chailley, the school for disabled children and young adults – some of whom were victims of the anti-morningsickness drug thalidomide, which had been found to cause birth defects – he developed aids for those with no arms or legs.
Whistler also owned an early 19thcentury observatory at Brightling, East Sussex.
He was a regular worshipper at St Mary’s Church, Battle, where his ancestors are remembered in a stained-glass window. He was once asked to stand for parliament for the Liberals, but politely declined.
His dream was to see the dodo brought back from the dead using DNA techniques. “I’m always being asked for scrapings from my dodo bones,” he said in 1998, although the technology is still not sufficiently advanced and the bird remains as dead as the proverbial dodo. “But if the scientists could do it, there’s nothing I’d like better than to see a dodo waddling towards me.”
Ralfe Whistler’s marriage was dissolved in 1999 and he is survived by three sons, two daughters and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who called him Dodo because “it is easier to say than Grandpa”.
Ralfe Whistler, born August 9 1930, died April 29 2023