Lady Scott

Image of the Barnes wetland centre

I always loved grandparents – and engaging with their generation of friends. So when it came to environmentalism, which I fell backwards into in the early 1960s, raising funds for the embryonic WWF in 1961, it was perhaps only natural that the likes of Gerald Durrell, Max Nicholson and Peter Scott felt like adoptive (but distant) grandparents. I recall reading Durrell’s books when very young and impressionable (coincidentally, BBC4 re-ran a film version of My Family & Other Animals last night, after a stunning film by Professor Armand Leroi exploring the lagoon off Lesvos where Aristotle practically invented biology) and visiting the Scotts’ Slimbridge wildlife reserve when at prep school at Glencot in Somerset.

Much, much later, I came to work with Max in founding Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, with the late David Layton. I met Durrell at a preview of one of Phil Agland’s films sometime in the mid-1980s – and found him delightful. Sir Peter I had met when he was one of the judges for the Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowships, one of which I was awarded in 1981. He was wonderfully supportive. I met him again in Guiting Power, shortly before he died, with Lady Scott – who was enchanting. I remember her telling me that my presentation had left her “fizzing with energy”, but then I suspect that was her default setting.

Her obituary appears in The Times today, along with a couple of tremendously evocative photographs. This mentions the book, The Art of Peter Scott, a copy of which I was recently sent by WWF, which he co-founded with Max and others in 1961, and where I am now a member of the Council of Ambassadors. The book has been in the Volans office for a month or so, on one of our new book stands, open on a double-page spread that features a glider – which, alongside all those graceful wildfowl winging through Scott-rendered skies, nicely captures the sense of uplift and possibility that we stretch towards at Volans.

Apart from the book, I think of the Scotts every time we wander round the corner in Barnes to the wetland wildlife reserve that he played such a key role in creating. What an extraordinary couple they were!