Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

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I am quite bewildered, and do not know where I am,” wrote Etta, then aged 79, to one of her trusted male ‘Watchers’ at an RSPB reserve (the Watchers were her own invention; a nationwide system of eyes and ears for bird protection). She was born into an evangelical Christian family in Kent, and after her father's death she increasingly campaigned against the use of plumage in hatmaking which had led to billions of birds being killed for their feathers.

In 1903, when an ounce of egret feathers was worth twice as much as an ounce of gold, the RSPB local secretaries were sent on a mission. She vehemently believed that extending the franchise to women would ‘work irrevocable mischief to human progress, to the British Empire, and to women themselves.

The Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act was passed in 1921 and received royal assent on 1 April 1922. Her previous position was taken up by Frank Lemon, and the couple remained in their posts for the next 31 years. This led to the establishment of a six-member committee headed by Julian Huxley of the Zoological Society of London that proposed changes in the management which included fixed terms for elected members.

Support our vendors this winter and beyond If you can't visit your local vendor on a regular basis, then the next best way to support them is with a subscription to the Big Issue. This bullish, determined yet essentially modest woman steered the fledgling RSPB from its all-female origins, in 1889, all the way up to her brutal ejection in 1939.She was made an MBE in 1920 in recognition of her work at the hospital, [2] and in the following year she was appointed as a justice of the peace, thereby becoming one of Reigate's first two women magistrates. A handful of redoubtable women – sort of ornithological suffragettes - who (a good decade before Mrs Pankhurst came on the scene) campaigned with mild militancy against the fashion for feathered hats, and coaxed the nation to fall in love with birds. Frank Lemon died suddenly in April 1935, aged 76, and Etta took over his role as honorary secretary. The bird protection campaign was waged from offices in Westminster, but it was masterminded from Redhill.