WHISTLER, Ralfe Ashton (1930-2023)
colinp
Ralfe Whistler, expert on the dodo whose projects included pub tables and litter-pickers – obituary
‘I wouldn’t say I am an eccentric,’ he told a newspaper. ‘But other people around here do, including my own family’
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….
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 raised in Battle among thousands of stuffed birds that later ended up in the Natural History Museum. He was 12 when his father, by 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. …
At Cambridge he had met Jane McCarthy, a Canadian student from Montreal who was studying English with Queenie and F R 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….
Whistler’s marriage was dissolved in 1999 and he is survived by three sons, two daughters, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, who called him Dodo because “it is easier to say than Grandpa”.
Ralfe Whistler, born August 9 1930, died April 29 2023
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 15 July 2023:
E X T R A C T
Ralfe Whistler obituary
Irrepressible inventor, entrepreneur, adventurer and authority on the dodo
…a cottage in the grounds of his 12-acre family home in East Sussex, Caldbec House, which sits on the site of King Harold’s reputed last camp before the Battle of Hastings, had become a shrine to his love for this doomed creature. Known as the Dodo House, it was stuffed with dodo-themed books, mugs, tea towels, fridge magnets, lavatory seats, paintings, prints and other assorted ephemera, as well as what has been described as the world’s finest collection of dodo bones, droppings and eggshells in private hands…
…Ralfe Ashton Whistler was born in Hastings in 1930. He had been introduced to ornithology by his father, Hugh, an officer in the Indian Police based mainly in the Punjab whose Popular Handbook of Indian Birds was published in 1928…
…Hugh Whistler had married Joan, the formidable daughter of a Liberal peer, the first Baron Ashton of Hyde, whose family, originally from Cheshire, had prospered as cotton mill owners and merchants. The Ashtons were friendly with the Gladstones, with whom they took holidays. They moved south to Vinehall near Robertsbridge, where they lived until the late 1930s, when they decamped to better hunting territory in Gloucestershire…
…he met (at Cambridge Univ) his future wife, Jane McCarthy, who was studying for a postgraduate degree after taking her first degree at McGill in her native Canada. She described him — a handsome 6ft 2in-tall man of considerable charm — as a “Greek god” in a letter to her parents…
…His five children survive him: Hugh is a translator and traveller; Nicholas, a developer; Clare and John, both artists; and Lucy, a school administrator…
…His death certificate described him as “inventor, adventurer and Dodologist (retired)”.
Ralfe Whistler, “inventor, adventurer and dodologist (retired)”, was born on August 9, 1930. He died on April 29, 2023, aged 92
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ralfe-whistler-obituary-p2tw0qnrm