The changing years of JK Stanford
AP Curtis looks at the life of this one-time Field correspondent
Given that, in 1942, JK Stanford was a lieutenant colonel with the Eighth Army fighting across the North African Desert in pursuit of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, he might have been forgiven for neglecting his writing. It was then, however, that he penned his most enduring work, The Twelfth. The tale of Colonel The Honourable George Hysteron-proteron CB JP is as much a salient warning about taking the natural world for granted as it is a humorous satire on the world of shooting. The ghastly protagonist, who is unhealthily obsessed with shooting only the biggest of bags, is metamorphosed into a cock grouse. In this new form, he undertakes to thwart the Glorious Twelfth on the very moor he was due to shoot that year. This little book, which jovially recounts the events that unfold thereafter, rightly belongs in the canon of British sporting literature. This is often, however, the only aspect of JK Stanford’s life for which he is remembered, an injustice that ought to be redressed. Not only did he write beautifully but his paradigm of effective conservation is as valid in 2021, 50 years after his death, as it was innovative in his own lifetime.
That JK (as he was always known) settled upon a theme of bird preservation for his first published work of fiction is not surprising: he was first and foremost an ornithologist and contributed to some of the most prestigious research projects of his day, while placing great value in low-level observation and recording. During the inter-war years, when Stanford was with the Indian Civil service in Burma, he undertook ground-breaking expeditions into the scarcely touched region of Myitkyina, collecting some 1,769 bird skins, including 40 previously unrecorded species. The findings of the subsequent Vernay-cutting expedition of 1938-9 into north-eastern Burma that he accompanied were donated to the American Museum of Natural History and his meticulous notes from this time were synthesised into the first edition of Bertram E Smythies’ seminal work, The Birds of Burma. His notable success in this field came about because of – rather than in spite of – his down-to-earth approach and belief that conservation should be a daily discipline, not an occasional effort.
At home in Suffolk, Stanford was equally content utilising local knowledge, honing circumspect observation and diligently recording the natural world around him. His great mentor and friend in this regard was Dr Claud B Ticehurst, whom he had met as a child and with whom he thereafter corresponded regularly about bird migration and identification. In the acknowledgements of his book, A History of the Birds of Suffolk, Ticehurst thanks
Stanford for “a very fully detailed local list compiled from his diaries”. Stanford embraced rare opportunities to explore on a grand scale but also recognised the need for regular, local action.
His attitude towards conservation projects was also marked out by pragmatism. This is no more the case when it came to officialdom, with which he was prepared to engage when it was the most propitious route to success, but similarly satisfied to sidestep where more efficacious. The reach of this activity was not confined to his adored native Suffolk: he was often to be found working with the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, monitoring newly returned osprey on Loch Garten in the 1950s or surveying breeding birds on Islay.
AVOCET OBSERVATION
Perhaps his most prominent avian achievement, however, fell well outside any affiliation or potentially bureaucratic supervision. When his brother mooted that hitherto absent avocets might be nesting on the Suffolk marshes, discretion was all in order to avoid an inevitably disruptive furore, or even the potential threat of egg collectors stealing a clutch. It became clear that there were indeed avocets breeding for the first time in the 20th century just a few miles from the family home; Stanford and a small group of accomplices, therefore, hatched a plan to observe and protect the birds clandestinely. They set up a covert camp on the mud, in a
makeshift shelter, to guard the priceless brood jealously until it fledged. The species has since thrived, thanks to Stanford’s innovative approach, which his obituarist described as old-fashioned, suggesting Stanford’s view was “secrecy is better than publicity”.
The most striking aspect of Stanford’s passion for conservation was his empathy with the animals he loved. This is clear in his prolific writing, which included natural history and sporting articles, including for The Field. There was also a steady flow of comic novellas, which amusingly chronicled the lives of country people and the sport they pursued. The heroes of his books are often marginalised, maligned characters who prefer to enjoy the integrity and liberty of the field rather than pursuing conventional careerist success. There is the returning prisoner of war in Bledgrave Hall, whose sole desire is to purchase a coastal farm in eastern England in order to restore it to its proper wetland glory, so that birdlife might return and prosper. In Death of a Vulpicide, a devoted huntsman props up ailing hunts with his own means, controversially neglecting petty politics. Instead, he spends time cultivating good relations with farmers and striving to maintain harmony in his country in his determination to show the best sport possible. The anthropomorphism he employs in his 1958 novella Fox Me, most clearly reveals his consideration of and respect for all living things, quarry included. Through the hero of the book (the fox, naturally), Stanford raises a broad range of issues, from animal welfare to ethical practice to farming, long before such issues were commonplace discussions in country houses up and down the land. The characters in his books poke fun, of course, but also raise serious questions of land stewardship, proper sporting conduct and how to sustain rural communities for the future. In these regards, Stanford blazed a trail: he was forward-thinking, innovative and open-minded.
The passion he possessed for nature and fieldsports ran like a rich seam through his ostensibly traditional life. At his rural preparatory school on the South Downs, he was encouraged to watch sheepdog trials and follow the Brookside Harriers. Rugby School followed, the syllabus of which provided Stanford with sufficient time to catch moths on his windowsill with treacle and clamber up trees to gawp at birds’ eggs. Later, he went to St John’s College, Oxford, where his maturing mind was distracted from a hitherto gleeful exploration of the natural world and forced onto more weighty matters. He railed against episodes of anti-semitism he witnessed at the college (aimed at Leslie Hore-belisha, the future War Secretary) and argued for more rigorous military training in the face of mounting European tension.
His undergraduate studies were curtailed by the outbreak of World War I and he joined the Suffolk Regiment on the Ypres Salient. Even amid the abject horror of the Western Front, however, nature broke into his consciousness at unexpected moments. Through a trench
“His passion for fieldsports ran like a rich seam through his life”
periscope, he spotted a kingfisher perched optimistically above a water-filled shell crater; in a shell-torn tree, he watched a pair of tree-sparrows nesting; as he hid from the light cast by flares, he heard curlew and whimbrel sweeping over his head. Such snatched moments of calm were treasured as if they were jewels.
When he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1919, it became clear that the compassion he had for fauna extended to his fellow humans. He reserved making judgements about indigenous people solely on the basis of white privilege and colonial hierarchy, preferring instead to ascertain the quality of his or her character, and thus discharging his duties as a district magistrate with care. At the outbreak of World War II, he once again found himself under arms, this time in the Ordnance Corps. Here, he was tasked with tackling corruption in the logistical tail of the Army: the misappropriation of equipment, desertion and malingering, which Churchill considered a great threat to the war effort. He spent the war in France, North Africa and finally Germany, where he discovered his eldest son, a cavalry officer, in a prisoner-of-war camp; he presented him with a bottle of whisky to celebrate the liberation.
In September 1949, Stanford embarked on a yearlong exploration of fieldsports, which were a vital means by which he engaged with the countryside. He sought not only to plug gaps in his experience but also to rebut the criticism that he was a charlatan with insufficient authority to write about country pursuits – he had learned that a feckless critic had labelled him “no sportsman at all”. This undeserved epithet became the title of his book about an extraordinary journey that saw him hunt in Galway, shoot snipe in Cork and grouse on Speyside, and watch hare course and dogs trial in
Wiltshire. There could no longer be any doubt about his sporting credentials.
FIELD CORRESPONDENT
His calibre proved, he began to write for The Field in the 1950s, a relationship that lasted into the 1960s. He contributed the weekly column Changing Year for nine years and toured as a correspondent, often accompanied by photographer Leslie Thompson. Features from this period are grouped together in an anthology, The Wandering Gun, which allows the reader to take a flight of fancy around some of the grandest shoots: partridge at Rothwell, Lincolnshire; grouse at Glenprosen, Angus; woodcock at Lanarth, Cornwall. Stanford even sends himself up in the short story Pedagogue’s Day, depicting himself as the protagonist, who writes a column for the local newspaper: “I give ’em a weekly column and a half about what’s happening… county gossip, local politics, and highbrow notes on sport… You know the sort of bilge?”
JK Stanford’s life had many valuable dimensions to it, which secure his place among the great figures of 20thcentury country life. He was a humble and self-effacing man, which is perhaps why he is not better known. Conservation, sporting life and literature all benefitted from his intelligent, caring and practical contributions, and we would do well to learn from the example he set of humility, pragmatism and empathy. The concluding line of The Twelfth provides us with an insight into the stuff that made him tick and why he is someone we should continue to cherish. George Hysteron-proteron, his human form regained and his character reformed, remarks: “So much depends on one’s point of view. I always try to put myself in the other fellow’s place!”
AP Curtis is writing a biography of JK Stanford.