Tessa Boase - Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

The Woman Who Saved the Birds

Tessa Boase

One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics... You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under.

EMMELINE PANKHURST, FREEDOM OR DEATH SPEECH,
13 NOVEMBER 1913

I n a glass cabinet at the Museum of London, in the heart of the City, lies a single, purple ostrich feather. It is not a particularly large feather, just twelve inches long, but it is full and heavily luxurious, its tip plump and lolling, its fronds still faintly curled. The colour has faded over time to a subtle shade of blackberry fool, yet it still looks ready to be plucked up and pinned to a lavish hat.

Next to the feather, also in the cabinet, is a dainty, ornately beaded shoe of black kid leather; a shoe so small that you wonder whether women really were more fragile creatures back then. It is a shoe for a dance, not a political rally. But women did things differently in 1909.

Its wearer was borne away from a fracas outside the House of Commons between two burly policemen, her decorous little feet kicking a 50-year-old firebrand carried like a naughty child. Emmeline Pankhurst was less than five feet tall, her shoe size three-and-a-half. The feather stayed attached to the hat that was pinned to her hair, but one shoe came loose in the struggle and was seized by the police as a trophy. How they must have laughed at the Metropolitan police station that night. Cinderellas slipper! Straight from the foot of the notorious leader of the suffragettes that dreadful woman, as she was commonly known.

When Mrs Pankhurst died in 1928 the year the Equal Franchise Act was finally made law her purple feather was saved from her lodgings and preserved by the Suffragette Fellowship. And so started an industry in (often fake, but always well-intentioned) suffragette memorabilia. The feather seemed, to these old militants, the embodiment of their revered leader. It was a potent symbol of all things Pankhurst: her essential femininity, her persistence in the face of brutality and hostility, and her political colours. As every member of the Womens Social and Political Union (WSPU) once knew, white stood for purity, green for hope and purple for dignity.

It was offered to the Museum of London in 1950 as a talismanic object, a holy relic of sorts: for Mrs Pankhurst was never without her plumage. The elaborately feathered hat was an indispensable part of her brand: a way of showing the world that she was no unnatural, mannish harridan intent on a petticoat government. Yet she was also steely, autocratic and dictatorial. She liked a good fight. Like a strutting cocks extravagant tail, Emmeline Pankhursts plumage signified power.

There is another feather or rather collection of feathers kept in a box at the headquarters of Britains biggest conservation charity. They tell a different, yet equally symbolic story. These feathers are not for public display. If you make an appointment to view the archives of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), and if you are lucky enough to gain entrance, this box might (or might not) be brought out to you by the librarian. The records are hard to access, stored in the attics of a Victorian lodge in Bedfordshire woodland. Hardly anybody makes such a request and why would they? Few have heard of the extraordinary origins of the RSPB, although were all familiar with the modern institution that it has become, the British acronym that needs no explanation. The RSPB is a behemoth a charity with over 1.1 million members, 224 nature reserves spread over 160,000 hectares, 2,000 staff and some 12,000 volunteers. It has an annual income of over 140 million and it wields great political power. Its business today is international nature conservation, whether peregrine falcons, pygmy fruit bats or Sumatran rhinos. But its leading figures tend to be bird lovers and the majority of these have, historically, been men. In Britain, birds tend to belong, instinctively it seems, to the boys..

It was not always so. The RSPB was founded by women women with an unusually singular purpose. They were going to stamp out the fashion for feathers in hats. For half a century, from the 1870s to the 1920s, wild bird species were systematically slaughtered around the world for the millinery trade in one of the most lucrative commodity markets on earth. At its peak, the trade was worth a staggering 20 million a year to Britain around 204 million in todays money. In 1891, as the insatiable fashion for feathers stepped up yet another gear, two exclusively womens groups one in Croydon, one in Manchester banded together to save the birds. They gave themselves an ambitious title the Society for the Protection of Birds and their determination was rewarded with a Royal Charter in 1904. As the RSPB grew in scale and stature, so the men involved attempted to take charge.

The women at its helm came largely from the upper echelons of society, but their campaign against the plumage trade would bring them into unprecedented conflict with those from the lower classes. Thousands of invisible working women were caught up within this industrys coils: feather washers, feather dressers, fancy feather workers, willowers, milliners and shop girls. A fight against the plumage trade meant, too, a fight against other, more vulnerable women. In blowing the whistle on murderous millinery, the RSPB would also be pitting themselves against women sister against sister.

Lift the lid on that box at headquarters, and you will find the original essence of the RSPB. Inside are half a dozen millinery trade feathers, much like Mrs Pankhursts dyed, dressed and mounted on wire, each a highly worked hat ornament, all redolent of a particular time and place. Open this box, and you are transported back to the streets and drawing rooms of Victorian and Edwardian society, where every woman of every class wore a hat. In the early years of the twentieth century, when an ounce of feathers from the American snowy egret was worth twice as much as an ounce of gold, the female foot soldiers of the RSPB turned detective. They scoured the great department stores and millinery shops of Britain, cross-examining other women milliners and saleswomen who swore blind that their hat trimmings were artificial, not made from wild bird skins that they were manufactured from horsehair, or grass, or dyed cocks feathers. The feathers in this box comprise hard evidence, gathered in stealth and examined by experts. They are the authenticated proof of a despicable trade. The box was labelled contraband and it symbolised animal cruelty. Today, each feather represents a protected species. You would no sooner wear the exquisitely soft down of a great crested grebe on your head, the tuft from a snowy egret or the cascading rust-red tail of a Raggiana bird-of-paradise, than you would a fox or a white weasel around your neck, with dangling nose and paws. How have our sensibilities been changed so completely?