of 1890–1 saw long spells of ice and snow, and national newspapers began to urge their readers to feed the birds. In the centre of London, the nature writer W. H. Hudson witnessed working men giving scraps from their meagre supplies of food. As Rob Lambert points out, this coincided with a shift in attitudes in the country as a whole:
Victorian Britain was also dominated by these emerging new sensibilities; by this wave of humanitarianism that developed decade by decade, which was extremely powerful. And the Victorians couldn’t bear to see suffering, so when hard winters kicked in, and birds began to die in Victorian gardens, there was then a battle for control over the Victorian mind – and in the end it was the humanitarianism that won, and the Victorians fed their garden birds in times of great peril.
A major winner from this change in attitudes towards feeding birds was the Robin. This had already become firmly established as the nation’s favourite bird, according to cultural historian Christopher Frayling:
There’s a very rich folklore for the Robin that goes way back – for example where did the Robin gets its red breast? It got its red breast because it plucked a thorn from the crown of thorns – as Jesus was on his way to Gethsemane, a drop of Jesus’s blood falls onto the bird, and thereafter the Robin has a red breast. So it’s associated in a very deep way with the New Testament. So Robins, by Shakespeare’s time, and possibly long before that, are associated with charity and piety.
Historian Keith Thomas notes that the Robin was accorded almost supernatural powers, as in this seventeenth-century poem penned by Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle:
Man superstitiously dares not hurt me,
For if I’m killed or hurt, ill luck shall be.
Robins were also associated with death: if one tapped on a window or came into a house, it was thought that one of the occupants would soon die. Given that Robins would frequently appear on the doorstep in search of food, especially during harsh winter weather, this belief may seem rather odd – but perhaps it marks the unseen boundary between regarding this endearing little bird as a ‘wild pet’, and not allowing it to cross over the boundary into our domestic lives.
Whatever the ambiguities of our relationship with the Robin, by the Victorian era its position in our popular culture had become even more deeply entrenched. Jeremy Mynott tells the complex story behind our present-day association of Robins with Christmas, which arose in the middle of the nineteenth century:
Robins appear on Christmas cards through a rather strange process of causation. Robins gave their name to the first postmen, who wore red tunics, and were therefore called ‘robins’. And on some of the early Christmas cards delivered by these postmen, the Robin was often pictured with a postcard in its mouth, delivering the letter like a postman. So the Robin gave its name to the postman, and the postman gave his role to the Robin.
Another obvious reason for the connection of Robins with the festive season is that they often come into gardens in search of food, especially during spells of ice and snow. But whatever the reason, every year since, highly sentimental images of Robins have appeared on our Christmas cards, an annual renewal of our commitment to them.
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By the start of the twentieth century the foundations of today’s special relationship with the birds living alongside us had already been laid. Although we didn’t yet call them ‘garden birds’, a growing number of people regarded these wild creatures with a sentimentality that would have been inconceivable to their rural ancestors. But this developing picture of harmony was about to be severely tested, with the coming of the First World War.
In August 1914, within days of the outbreak of the conflict, the Defence of the Realm Act was passed. This draconian piece of legislation outlawed many activities, and amendments to the Act later included the wastage of food. Almost overnight, feeding garden birds became illegal, and people were even prosecuted for doing so, including an elderly woman living in Surrey, Sophia Stuart.
According to a report in the Daily Mail, she appeared at Woking Crown Court, charged with the offence of giving bread to wild birds. In her defence, the poor woman stated that she had lost her only son, who had been killed fighting in Mesopotamia; that all she used were the dirty bottom crusts she could not eat. Moreover, she maintained that she had fed the birds for seventy years – and would continue to do so, whatever the court decided.
For this small act of defiance, she was fined two guineas – the equivalent of several hundred pounds today. For Britain’s garden birds, as well as its people, the world had certainly changed for the worse.
The war also cut off supplies of nestboxes, which had been imported from Germany by the RSPB and had proved very popular with householders. The inventor of the nestbox, Baron Hans von Berlepsch, had even been granted the position of ‘Honorary Fellow’ by the RSPB, in recognition of what he had done to help conserve Britain’s birds. The coming of war between Britain and Germany put paid to this fine example of Anglo-German co-operation, and as a result our birds had to revert to finding natural nest sites.
One familiar species wasn’t simply deprived of food and nesting sites, but became one of the first casualties of war on the Home Front. House Sparrows had long been persecuted in the countryside because they ate grain, thereby depriving farmers of part of their harvest. But now people in cities, towns and suburbs also became concerned about the threat they posed to the nation’s food supply, so they joined ‘sparrow clubs’. These organisations may sound benevolent, but they had a very sinister aim, according to Mark Cocker:
The sparrow club was a way of dealing with this urban and suburban ‘vermin species’. It involved a cluster of working-class people who would bring in their tallies from the sparrows they had killed in their allotment or their garden, and the person who had killed the greatest number of sparrows would win a silver cup for that year.
One poster, issued by the grandly named Bedfordshire War Agricultural Executive Committee, reveals the rewards available for those who were prepared to catch and kill sparrows, just as their ancestors had done in Elizabethan times. Bounties offered by the local parish council were a penny for a dozen sparrows’ eggs, tuppence for a dozen unfledged sparrows, and threepence for a dozen fledged ones – which meant that a skilled collector could amass a tidy sum given that, at the time, a pint of beer would have cost about sixpence. Rats provided an even higher reward: as much as two shillings per dozen, though they were presumably harder to catch.
The methods used to catch the sparrows themselves varied considerably, from large nets to specially made cane traps advertised in catalogues. These inevitably caught all sorts of other small birds in the process, as those doing the catching weren’t always either very expert or discriminating. And once caught, the birds weren’t all immediately killed, as Frederick Milton explains: ‘They were taken to gentleman’s clubs or to pubs, where they were then used as targets for trap-shooting.’
Ironically, the actions of the sparrow clubs may have themselves contributed to food shortages, as they did not take into account the beneficial effects sparrows had on killing harmful pests such as insects, especially during the spring when the adult birds were feeding their young.
And ultimately, even though hundreds of thousands of sparrows were killed by sparrow clubs during the war, it may all have been in vain. Because the culls took place in late summer – at the end of the breeding season, when numbers were at their peak – the killing appears to have had very little impact on the overall population.
Ironically, it was what we did in peacetime that would bring about a collapse in sparrow numbers. During the 1920s and 1930s, the coming of motor vehicles meant the end for the main form of urban transport since people had first moved into cities: the horse. The internal combustion engine – in private cars, buses and taxicabs – soon triumphed. Horse-drawn transport rapidly began to vanish from our city streets.
And with it went our old friend – and occasional enemy – the House Sparrow. City sparrows had long depended on horse feed and undigested seeds in horse droppings for food. So the replacement of horses by cars and buses deprived them of a vital resource. Sparrow expert Denis Summers-Smith believes that this marked