Richard Fitter; writer of wildlife field guides
Hyfler/Rosner
The Independent
05 September 2005
Richard Fitter was a prolific writer of wildlife field
guides and one of the best-known British naturalists of the
20th century. His mould-breaking book published by Collins
in 1952, Pocket Guide to British Birds, was arguably the
first modern British field guide. Comprehensively
illustrated with paintings by his friend R.A. Richardson, it
made life easier for the birdwatcher by dispensing with the
traditional order and grouping together birds by size and by
their habitat. If you saw a big bird on the sea-shore, you
had only to turn to the relevant page. Although Fitter and
Richardson were criticised by traditionalists, post-war
birders liked the book, and over 100,000 copies were sold.
At the time of his death, the ever active Fitter was working
on a flora of France.
In 1955, Fitter teamed up with David McClintock to write The
Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers. Once again, Fitter dispensed
with tradition. Rather than begin with buttercups and end
with grasses in the approved order, he grouped the
illustrations by colour, so that, for example, all
similar-looking yellow flowers, whether they were
buttercups, celandines, cinquefoils or rock-roses, appeared
side-by-side. Together with its well chosen field notes and
asterisks to denote rarity, the guide became a firm
favourite for a generation of wild flower lovers.
Over more than half a century, Richard Fitter wrote a dozen
field guides on birds, plants and the countryside. In his
91st year he joined the artist Marjorie Blamey and his son
Alastair (now Professor of Ecology at York University) to
produce what is widely regarded as the best illustrated
British flora of our time, Wild Flowers of Britain and
Ireland. It includes several characteristic Fitterian
innovations, including an illustrated glossary and keys,
close-ups of fruits and flowers and thumb-nail distribution
maps for every species. Exceptionally among recent field
guides, there are no European flowers added purely to extend
sales.
From an early age, Fitter was obsessed with making records.
He made lists of birds and plants from his rambles and car
journeys, and maintained a small library of notebooks,
reports and card indexes. His habit of recording the first
dates of wild flowers was put to unexpected use in the 1990s
when observers began to note that frogs were spawning and
migrant birds arriving earlier than usual. Fitter's 50-year
run of records of over 500 plants formed a unique source of
data, which, when analysed, revealed that spring flowers
were opening up to a month earlier, and that a few species,
such as white dead-nettle, had extended their flowering over
winter. The records also showed that climate change is very
recent, with no evidence of change before 1990.
Richard Fitter was born in 1913 in south London, the only
son of Sidney and Dorothy Fitter. He was a keen birdwatcher
from boyhood; his earliest memory was of sitting in his pram
watching ducks on the pond at Tooting Bec Common. Like many
boys of his generation, he collected common bird's eggs, but
once he acquired a pair of binoculars, his passion turned to
living birds. He was encouraged by E.C. Arnold, headmaster
of Eastbourne College, where Fitter boarded, and a keen
ornithologist. An inveterate list-maker and notebook-filler,
Fitter began to record birds for the London Natural History
Society, and took particular interest in two birds that had
only recently begun to breed in Britain, the little ringed
plover and the black redstart.
Following the fortunes of the black redstart took Fitter and
his binoculars to such unlikely birding spots as Westminster
Hospital, the British Museum and even Trafalgar Square. His
running censuses of urban birds also brought him into
contact with other leading birdwatchers, such as Max
Nicholson and James Fisher. He and Fisher became perhaps the
first motorised urban birdwatchers, one of them driving
while the other craned from the window, counting birds as
they came in to roost.
Surprisingly, given his passion for wildlife, Richard Fitter
studied Economics at the LSE. His father ran a
meat-importing company and hoped that the young Richard
would develop a business sense. However, after graduating,
Richard Fitter instead joined the research staff at the
Institute for Political and Economic Planning (PEP), founded
in 1931 to investigate the economy, education and health.
Working with another naturalist, Tom Harrison, he showed an
aptitude for report writing in clear, non-technical English,
and for summarising complex information in accessible form.
He brought this talent to bear on his subsequent posting to
Mass Observation, which applied the principles of social
science to build up a picture of ordinary life Britain.
His work in PEP and Mass Observation gave Fitter a broad
perspective of the social community which he brought into
his observations of birdlife. He later summed up his life's
main occupation as "observing wild and human life". The
first fruit of this fusion was his great book London's
Natural History (1945), published as one of the first
volumes in the still-running Collins New Naturalist library.
The first fully comprehensive urban natural history, and
making use of the notes he had accumulated since childhood,
Fitter traced the changing nature of the city's wildlife,
including its most recent manifestation, the greening of
bomb sites in the East End of London.
Fitter wrote the book with Trollopian regularity, devoting
to it two hours every evening after his day time war service
at the Operational Research Station of Coastal Command. The
book was published just as the European war ended in May
1945. Helped by its ground-breaking colour photographs, over
40,000 copies were sold to a war-weary public. Denied access
to the countryside for much of the war, townies were keen to
see what home ground could offer.
Fitter's all-round knowledge of nature and his experience
with social report-writing led to an invitation to serve as
secretary to the Wildlife Conservation Special Committee
chaired by Julian Huxley charged with making proposals for
nature conservation as part of the post-war construction.
Fitter visited many of the places proposed as nature
reserves, finding many of them much damaged by military use,
or even ploughed-up during the national emergency. His
recommendations helped to frame the "shopping list" which
resulted in Britain's first National Nature Reserves.
In need of more regular employment, Fitter and his family
left London in 1946 for the pleasant Cotswold town of
Burford, where he became deputy to John Cripps at The
Countryman magazine. For eight years he was also "open air
correspondent" for The Observer, contributing a column
called "Fitter's Rural Rides". Although written in the
spirit of William Cobbett, Fitter's perambulations were
principally about the gentler pleasures of roaming and
observing wildlife, especially in the Home Counties.
Having witnessed the loss of many of the places he knew in
pre-war days, Fitter became an active conservationist. He
helped to set up BBONT, the naturalist's trust for the home
counties of "Bucks, Berks and Oxon". With his wife, Maisie,
who edited its magazine, Oryx, he joined the Fauna
Preservation Society (now Fauna and Flora International),
becoming its Honorary Secretary in 1964 and effectively
running its British business. Fitter travelled extensively
on society business and represented it at conservation
meetings in Britain.
His other conservation-related activities included his
membership of the Species Survival Commission of the IUCN
(International Union for the Conservation of Nature), which
he joined in 1963, later becoming chairman of its steering
committee. He also had a stint as information officer for
the Council for Nature and as secretary and treasurer of the
British Trust for Ornithology. He was involved in the
preparatory work that led to the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). In later
years, Fitter became fascinated by the Galapagos Islands,
where his son Julian had settled as a wildlife guide in the
1970s.
Most of his conservation work was voluntary and unpaid. From
1953, when he and Maisie bought their beautiful family home
on the crest of the downs at Chinnor, Oxfordshire, Richard
Fitter earned his living from writing. He was author of
nearly 30 books, with a range of subjects scarcely rivalled
by any other natural history writer. They included a popular
Penguin Dictionary of Natural History (1967), The Penitent
Butchers (1979), a history of the Fauna Preservation Society
written with Peter Scott, a biographical work, Six Great
Naturalists (1959), and The Ark in our Midst (1961), a study
of animals introduced to Britain.
Above all, he will be remembered for the field guides,
covering not only wild flowers and birds but freshwater
life, grasses and ferns and the countryside, as well as
locality-based books on finding wildlife. He possessed to an
unusual degree the necessary persistence, encyclopaedic
knowledge, card-index memory and literary method to produce
one field guide after another without apparent strain while
continually inventing new ways of bringing user and subject
together. He was an ideal companion in the field, happy,
relaxed and with an interesting - but never overwhelming -
view on everything he saw. His family shared the wildlife
bug - his wife and lifelong natural- history partner Maisie,
whom he married in 1938, and his sons Julian and Alastair,
were also distinguished naturalists.
Peter Marren
Richard Sidney Richmond Fitter, writer and naturalist: born
London 1 March 1913; research staff, Political and Economic
Planning (PEP) 1936-40; research staff, Mass Observation
1940-42; assistant editor, The Countryman 1946-59; director
of Intelligence Unit, Council of Nature 1959-63; member,
Species Survival Commission, IUCN (International Union for
the Conservation of Nature) 1963-88; Honorary Secretary,
Fauna Preservation Society 1969-81; married 1938 Maisie
Stewart (died 1996; two sons, one daughter); died Cambridge
3 September 2005.