ETTA LEMON: The Woman who Saved the Birds by Tessa Boase, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

'The RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women ... but it was Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives."

Photograph by Saira Archer

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her second novel for adults, The One True Thing, was published in 2025 as one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing. Her first adult novel, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (in paperback as Missing Rose) was a Radio 2 Book Club Choice. In addition to her many fiction titles for young readers she has written This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults. The Hide will be published this autumn. 

As I'm trying not to add to my already overflowing bookshelves, I attended Tessa Boase's event for Rye Arts Festival in September with no intention of buying Etta Lemon. But the talk was so packed, informative and entertaining that I couldn't resist, and bagged a copy before they'd all been snatched from the pile. 

As Tessa Boase points out, birdwatching - especially twitching - is still mainly the preserve of men. But the RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women: Etta (Margaretta) Lemon, Emily Williamson, Eliza Brightwen and Eliza Phillips, names known to only a small fraction of the million-plus members of what's now one of our largest conservation bodies. Of the four, Boase says, it was always Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives. Yet when she began her research, there was 'not a plaque, not a portrait at headquarters, not a mention in the canon .. It was as if (Etta Lemon) had been completely erased from the conservation narrative.' Part of Boase's achievement has been to right that wrong. Etta now has not only her plaque, and a portrait at RSPB headquarters, but this compelling tribute, too.

The trade in plumage, skins and entire birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was horrific, not only because it depended on the mass capture and slaughter of birds in many countries, but also because of harsh conditions for the workers involved in dyeing and tweaking feathers for the millinery industry - a labour force that included children. Millinery was certainly big business; in 1891, Boase records, there were 548 milliners in Greater London alone. Hats were adorned with feathers, wings (classed as 'novelties') and even whole birds; an illustration shows a grotesque hat with what appears to be three budgerigars flattened and fastened around it. 

It's widely known that the great crested grebe was driven to the verge of extinction by fashionable greed for its showy plumage. Whereas once ostrich plumes had been de rigeur, the choice widened alarmingly. Describing a plumage sale in London in 1888, Boase writes: "Here were birds by the shipload." The plumes of snowy egrets were much in demand: an undercover reporter noted that 16,000 packages of these were on sale, along with seven or eight thousand parrots, over 12,000 tiny hummingbirds and "several hundred each of Hawks, Owls, Gulls, Terns, Ducks, Ibises, Finches, Orioles ..." Horrible to contemplate, especially with our hindsight knowledge of the drastic decline in bird populations.

Noting the weekly parade of feathers in church each Sunday, Etta, in her late teens, began her campaign by writing individual letters to 'Feather Bedecked Women', soon joining the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk run by Eliza Phillips, a considerably older woman. The Society for the Protection of Birds was founded in Manchester by another campaigner, Emily Williamson, and began as an all-female group in which members signed a pledge not to wear feathers. These two groups - The Fur, Fin and Feather Folk and the SPB - were brought together by the RSPCA which then, as now, saw itself as a moderate pressure group, distancing itself from 'extremists'. The amalgamation of the two, with Etta as Honorary Secretary, attracted attention, allegiance and - crucially - donations. However, support from highly-placed women led to an exemption for feathers from so-called 'game' birds, the aristocracy not wishing to jeopardise its favoured occupation, field shooting. (Hmm, not much change there, then.) In 1904, with royal approval granted, the SPB became the RSPB.

Boase draws parallels between Etta Lemon and her contemporaries Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett, examining the various approaches to campaign strategies. The suffragettes, drawn mainly from well-heeled women, were highly fashion-conscious and publicity aware. To Etta's distress, bird plumage featured prominently on their headgear - just look at the photographs of suffragette marches - and certainly on the hats of Emmeline Pankhurst herself. (In fact this book was first published as Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather.) There are other ways, too, in which Etta Lemon's campaign was at odds with the suffrage campaign. It seems barely comprehensible to us now that there could have been an anti-suffrage counter-protest, led by women, yet Etta was one of its members. Ironically, as Boase points out, those women who led this faction were bold, articulate and determined - qualities which would have admirably fitted them for politics. 

Although it's taken so long for Etta's conservation work to be acknowledged, she was a public figure in other ways: she became lady mayoress in 1911 when her husband Frank was appointed mayor of Reigate, and during the First World War she took on the management of the Redhill War Hospital, for which she was awarded MBE. 

If it's hard to imagine nowadays that it could have been acceptable to use the feathers of a bird of paradise for adornment, consider one of the modern equivalents: the high status of reptile-skin bags sold by Hermès and other designers, including the iconic 'Birkin' bag. Apparently the singer and actress Jane Birkin wanted her name removed from the item when she learned that crocodiles and alligators were reared for the purpose in bleak conditions and horribly killed, but the name has stuck. If you should want one (though I hope you don't), be prepared to pay upwards of £450,000 - though the real price, of course, is in animal suffering. On the plus side, London Fashion Week declared itself fur-free from 2024, with a ban on wild animal skins too. A ban on the use of wild bird feathers is yet to come. Fashion has a way to go before it can be called cruelty-free, but fortunately there are plenty of latter-day Etta Lemons pushing for change. (Step forward, PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, among other organisations.)

Tessa Boase is as engaging a writer as she is a speaker. Her book, an illuminating sweep of social history, illustrates the much-quoted maxim of the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Etta Lemon: the Woman who Saved the Birds is published by Aurum

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.

More bird-related reviews:

This Birding Life by Stephen Moss, reviewed by Nick Hodges

12 Birds to Save your Life - Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett, reviewed by Linda Sargent

A Sweet Wild Note: what we hear when the birds sing by Richard Smyth, reviewed by Dawn Finch

Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds - Stories of Extinctions by Barbara Allen, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Sheena Wilkinson: BAD GIRLS, A HISTORY OF REBELS AND RENEGADES, by Caitlin Davies

"Bad Girls joins my library of non-fiction about women’s experiences in the past, and I know I’ll return to it many times."

Described in The Irish Times as 'one of our foremost writers for young people', Sheena Wilkinson writes both contemporary and historical fiction for young adults. She has won many awards, including the Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year. Her most recent novel Star By Star, winner of the CBI Honour Award for Fiction, commemorates the centenary of women’s suffrage.

I love fiction, and perhaps best of all I love stories set in institutions. Especially women’s institutions, and especially in the past. I thrill to books about closed communities, with their intense relationships, their special rules, their sense of being worlds apart and worlds unto themselves. My PhD was on fiction set in girls’ schools and colleges, and my work in progress is about a working girls’ hostel, but you could add to that a obsession with convents, hospitals (Call The Midwife scores twice here) and of course prisons. And I am not alone. The success of dramas such as Orange Is The New Black testifies to an abiding fascination with women who break the rules and how society deals with them.

My own first memories of being politically aware involve prisons. I remember the IRA hunger strikes of 1981, and very shortly afterwards seeing women from Greenham Common being sent to prison. This coincided with my learning about suffragette prisoners in the 1910s, so I always knew that prisons were complex spaces. As a student and later as a writer I have spent time working inside prisons, and know that they are places bristling with stories, often harsh and horrifying, always reflecting the world outside as well inside their walls.

So when I heard about Caitlin Davies’ forthcoming Bad Girls, a history of Holloway Prison, some time before publication, I was really excited about it. Because even more than fiction I love social history, especially the history of women’s experience. Sometimes when I feel a bit storied-out I reach for social history as a kind of palate-cleanser. I knew this book was going to tick a lot of my boxes, and when it arrived I was almost scared to start reading it; I had invested so much interest and expectation in it. I’d also rashly agreed to review it for this blog before I even started reading it.

But I needn’t have worried. A quick glance at the contents page was enough to reassure me that this was very much my kind of book, with chapters on subjects ranging from Victorian baby farmers to spies in World War Two, and of course a detailed and horrifying section on the treatment of suffragettes. There are also sections covering sex and relationships, medical matters, and the changing regime at Holloway. The book is comprehensive and thoroughly researched, with a successful balance between telling the overarching factual story of Holloway as an institution and exploring some of the individual characters and events who found themselves incarcerated – or dependent on Holloway for their livelihood. It is dense with detail but always readable and engaging.

Davies writes fascinatingly about the women who worked as warders, and the changing demands of that role from Victorian times until more or less the present day. (Holloway closed in 2016.) I was surprised to learn that many of the wardresses were in fact sympathetic to the cause of suffragette prisoners, though this sympathy was not encouraged, and in fact the opposite was suggested in the press. As Davies says, ‘The press preferred to portray them in opposition to the suffragettes, for… a prison full of inmates and wardresses who wanted the vote was a frightening prospect.’

The book raises important questions about what constitutes crime and punishment, and the extent to which this is determined by changing social mores. Women are particularly vulnerable to this, as their crimes and misdemeanours are sometimes less clear-cut than male crime, and very prone to shifting notions of morality. I had imagined that the prison regime would have been harshest in the nineteenth century, growing gradually more humane, but the truth is more complex than that.

Bad Girls joins my library of non-fiction about women’s experiences in the past, and I know I’ll return to it many times. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in social history, especially women’s history.

Bad Girls is published by John Murray.