Heritage: William Henry Hudson's life in Hampshire

William Henry Hudson’s life in England began in Hampshire on a bright, early May morning in 1874, when he stepped off a ship at Southampton. 

He was 32 years old, and had come from South America to the land of his ancestors, to seek his fortune as a naturalist. “I’m not coming with you to London,” he promptly announced to his fellow voyagers. He wanted to go straight into the woods and fields to see and hear British birds. 

Nearly 30 years later Hudson published his classic Hampshire Days, his love letter to the county, its wildlife, people and places. He had written part of it while a long-staying guest at his friend Sir Edward Grey’s fishing cottage on the River Itchen. It was an idyllic spot, the tin-roofed building festooned in roses and other flowering climbers. Shrikes, wrynecks, nightingales, kingfishers and cirl buntings nested nearby. 

Liberal statesman Sir Edward and his wife Lady Dorothy Grey recognised Hudson’s genius and helped him to secure a civil list pension in 1901, and British citizenship. 

Hudson rarely dedicated books, but Hampshire Days was inscribed to the Greys: “Northumbrians with Hampshire written in their hearts.” 

Hudson never minced his words and was always brave and occasionally scathing in his opinions, especially of those who threatened the survival of rare and beautiful birds. When Hampshire Days was reviewed in The Times he responded: “It censures me for speaking disrespectfully of naturalists. When I lash out at collectors I expect to be hit back.”

Another favourite Hampshire base for Hudson was Royden House (or Manor) at Brockenhurst, which he described as: “The ideal beautiful house – a wonderful gem of red brick in its green and flowery setting… And the birds are wonderful. No cat or dog to frighten them: the shyest ones have become tame. In a yew close to the front door a bullfinch has a nest full of young; and a couple of yards from the bullfinch a bottle-tit [long-tailed tit, today] has a round nest as big as a coconut hanging from a yew twig. You can look into it and see the mother sitting on her young. Close by a robin is sitting on a cuckoo’s egg; and as for thrushes, blackbirds and starlings one could fill half a bushel with the young birds in the small garden. In the evening you hear owls hooting, nightjars reeling and woodcock grunting and whistling.”

Hudson campaigned relentlessly for his beloved wild birds, nationally and locally, including to create “a general bird protection scheme in Hampshire… I am doing what I can in my small way by writing to the Hampshire people I know on the subject.”

His good friend the Vicar of Milton was on board: “Mr Kelsall will do all in his power” Hudson reported.

He also campaigned to save special local places, including one common “which I am trying to save from complete disfigurement by the wholesale removal of gravel… the lord of the manor (the Duke of Wellington) and the commoners have been tamely submitting to this vandalism: but something can be done to prevent the utter ruin of a beautiful spot, and I hope to be not less successful about this place than I was some time ago about the Old Deer Park [at Richmond].”

Of all the English counties he explored, Hudson rated Hampshire highly. He never moved from his London home in the end but came close to buying in Hampshire. In 1906 he was asked by ‘a young Scotch naturalist’ to suggest the best place in southern England to find birds he wouldn’t find in Scotland. Hudson wrote back to recommend Selborne and the Hampshire landscape around it. The young Scot later sent a note on the exotic species he found, which included the Dartford warbler.

“I am always grateful to be told of a new locality of the bird,” Hudson responded, “and always express the hope that it will be told only to those who are anxious to preserve it from the collectors.”
Hudson was an all-round naturalist, with a forensic eye, and endless patience. Ahead of his time, he believed in studying his subjects in the field, not just in the laboratory. He described finding crickets in the forest, and “going there day after day to spend long hours in pursuit of my small quarry. Not to kill and preserve their diminutive corpses in a cabinet, but solely to witness the comedy of their brilliant little lives.”

He would spend long hours quietly watching, listening, and communing with nature. “I came to prefer one spot for my midday rest in the central part of the wood, where a stone cross had been erected some seventy or eighty years before. It was placed there to mark the spot known from of old as Dead Man's Plack. According to tradition, it was just here that King Edgar slew his friend and favourite Earl Athelwold.” Hudson’s short book about this legend was published late in his life: Hampshire was ever in his thoughts. 

Hudson visited the Isle of Wight during his first few days here. Following his trail, I was delighted to find a great white egret at Brading Marshes, an early pioneer of a species now reclaiming these islands. Hudson lived just long enough to witness the ban on plumage imports, a business that had decimated egret populations, and so many others. How he would have loved to see the return of these and other birds for which he fought so hard, and the nature reserves such as this that have helped them. 

I was also pleased to discover that the oil painting of Hudson that hangs at RSPB headquarters is based on a photograph taken near Lyndhurst. He is depicted crouching on a knoll clutching his binoculars, dapper in his wool suit and cap, quiet witness, in a sense, to all that came next.

I have wanted to give voice to this ever-present but speechless presence, and so will give the final words to Mr Hudson, describing a magical moment here in Hampshire. 

“In the New Forest; when walking there one day, the loveliness of that green leafy world, its silence and its melody and the divine sunlight, so wrought on me that for a few precious moments it produced a mystical state, that rare condition of beautiful illusions when the feet are off the ground, when, on some occasions, we appear to be one with nature, unbodied like the poet's bird, floating, diffused in it. There are also other occasions when this transfigured aspect of nature produces the idea that we are in communion with or in the presence of unearthly entities.”

By Conor Mark Jameson