The Observers Book of Birds was my first bird book. I still have it – minus the but carefully wrapped in brown paper. It has been with me since May 1964. I know this because I wrote dates in the index, next to the birds names, and the earliest dates are from May 1964 - for example: Nuthatch 20/5/64.
I used to pore over the pictures in this little book and dream of seeing one of the rarities described: a Hoopoe or a Waxwing or a Golden Oriole.
‘The Observers Book of Birds is one of the very few books I did not dispose of when I sold my house in Reading in 2017. It is a precious relic of my youth, when the summit of happiness was watching bullfinches on a crisp December morning in Whiteknights Park.
I have just researched the book on the internet. It was first published by Frederick Warne in 1937, the very first book in the Observers series. My edition is dated 1962. The Preface is written by S. Vere Benson, Honourable Secretary of the League. For some reason she has concealed her sex; however, we know she is
My internet search yielded little about Miss Benson. There are no photographs of her. The best I could find was here: The anonymous author of this page states that her name seems to have been Stephana, though she never permitted this degree of familiarity on her ... She seems, at some point, to have Mrs. H.T. Hillier, but – apart from regular revisions of the Observers Book – to have stayed bibliographically silent until 1970, when she unexpectedly with ‘Birds of Lebanon and the Jordan Area. Perhaps she had been swept away by some Sheikh of Araby.
The books Foreword is written by the Rt. Hon. Frances Countess of Warwick, about whom my internet search yielded spectacular results. There is a long entry for her on Wikipedia which does not mention her Foreword but states that she kept a menagerie of birds. Her full name is Frances Evelyn Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, and she led an eventful and scandalous life. As well as being a campaigning socialist who established colleges for the education of women in agriculture and market gardening, she
was the mistress of the Prince of Wales, later Edward V11. She gave birth to five children, four of them out of wedlock, fathered by three different men. She narrowly escaped a prison sentence for the enormous debts her extravagant lifestyle incurred. She wrote her Foreword to ‘The Observers Book of Birds the year before she died. How many readers of this wholesome, often twee, little volume know that the Foreword was written by a serial adulteress and royal concubine?
Now let us return to the author of the book, Miss S. Vere Benson. She is sentimental about birds and often describes them in human terms. On Page 7 she writes: The bird is the most and vitally and joyously alive of all the creatures, and most species are capable of very wonderful parental affection and Courage, regardless of danger and even death, is the rule, not the exception, with the mother and often with the father bird. She writes at length about some very interesting and lovable bird personalities, including a Great Northern Diver, a Shag, a Razorbill and a Guillemot. She refers to each of these birds as he.
birds does not stop her from castigating a bird for letting the side down. The Cuckoo is not admirable, being polyandrous and a parasite, without care for its young. And writing about the Chough, she says: Unlike the rest of its family, its character is as white as its plumage is black.
Her real talent, though, lies in her ability to vividly describe the calls or notes (as she puts it) of birds. Here is a selection:
A rather quiet ‘chick. The song is too well known to need much description.
