Author Conor Mark Jameson explains his need to bring to life the conservation mission of Henry Salt’s long-time friend.
William Henry Hudson was a reluctant celebrity. In the final year of his life, in 1922, he asked his friends to destroy his correspondence, to thwart biographers and help him ‘disappear’. Henry Salt was one of those who – happily for us today – ignored him. A scattering of Hudson letters to Salt survives, across 30 years, helping us plot their friendship, which began in the early 1890s. They discussed subjects like their respective books, and Richard Jefferies, and diet, in their correspondence, and much more besides at their meetings in London. They had many common interests, though Hudson’s focus was much more on the protection and restoration of wild birds. His empathy for all non-human animals – like Salt’s – was profound.
Hudson’s origins were exotic and possibly traumatic, and his flourishing came late. His life has curious parallels with Salt’s, who was ten years younger. Salt was graduating from Cambridge University around the time Hudson was arriving on a ship from Argentina, in 1874, to seek his fortune in London.
Struggling to make ends meet, Hudson married his landlady, in 1876. This may have prevented his forced return from whence he had come. It gave him a roof over his head, after a period of rough sleeping in London parks. Salt was married not long after, to Kate, the daughter of a fellow Master of Eton. (Their wives died within two years of each other, soon after the end of World War 1.)
In 1886, Salt’s first book A Plea for Vegetarianism was published, at around the same time Hudson at last began to have publishing breakthroughs. He had endured a decade of toil and rejections, and long hours amassing knowledge in the British Museum library.
Both men shared an interest in the writings of Richard Jefferies. Jefferies had almost crammed his life’s work in before Salt or Hudson had published anything. In September 1899 Hudson stayed at Jefferies’ former home in Goring, about which he wrote to Salt in a letter in January, 1900. In November of that year Hudson went to a vegetarian restaurant in St Martin’s Lane, London, where he joined members of the Humanitarian League including Salt and Ernest Bell, of whom he also became a staunch admirer.
Salt and Hudson corresponded in summer 1922, less than a month before Hudson’s death. Typically, Hudson had recently declined the RSPB’s offer of establishing an annual ‘Hudson Lecture’ in recognition of receiving his life’s savings. It was a game-changing amount for the campaign group, amassed in late life from American publishers and movie studios for book rights. Ernest Bell – ‘a man of the most beautiful character, who spends his life and money in working for causes with which I am in sympathy’ – agreed to be an Executor for Hudson’s will. Bell was on the Council of the Bird Society, and a publisher, and Hudson trusted him implicitly to execute his primary wish to support the cause with the proceeds from his books. These had enjoyed a late surge of popularity in the USA in particular. There were also movie rights sold to Hollywood for big bucks.
What Hudson would have made of the trickle of biographies that followed his death – and more recently my own investigation – we can only guess. But I think that anything that helped the cause of conservation would have pleased him. He might even secretly approve of the monument and sanctuary in Hyde Park, created in his honour and unveiled by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in 1925.
Hudson made a deep impression on young, old, rich and poor. His was an extraordinary life, from the humblest of beginnings.
I was drawn to researching a biography after becoming intrigued that so little was recorded about how Hudson came to be the only man in the room when in 1889 a group of women gathered in a London drawing room to plot the downfall of the multi-million-dollar global trade in wild bird plumage and skins. That Hudson – an unschooled, battle-scarred and impoverished ‘gaucho’ from the Pampas of South America should be present in this determinedly all-women endeavour – well, it was too beguiling a scenario not to investigate and try to bring to life. Not much seemed to be known about any of them, and the organisation that they were creating – the RSPB today – had never had the time or resource to research their story in any depth. It is not, in the end, what a conservation charity exists to spend its money on, so I took up their cause.
And though the traces of the founders have been sparse, there was also a ‘red herring’. It has always been said that they first met in the Croydon, Surrey, home of Eliza Phillips, the ringleader. Hudson lived in Westbourne Park, West London. How he came to know Eliza – well, there’s something of a gap in the fossil record. I worked out that the first meetings were hosted by Catherine Hall, at her home in Notting Hill, a ten-minute walk from Hudson’s house. It was at the later Croydon home of Mrs Phillips that Salt first met Hudson. By 1894 the two men were exchanging letters, complimenting each other on their writing. Hudson was invited to Salt’s Surrey home, at Oxted. Later, Hudson was also invited to Brighton, at the time Salt was establishing The Humane Review, to which Hudson was soon contributing articles.
Hudson was mercurial, and his inclination to take up such invitations was unpredictable. It’s interesting that in one late letter Salt appears to assume Hudson could speak at an even he was holding. Hudson never spoke in public, to adult audiences (he spoke occasionally to groups of children). He had what today we would call social anxiety. He didn’t do fine dining either.
Hudson was on his feet till his dying day; but he ran out of time to finish two books. One he paid for himself – a litany of lost British birds, illustrated in full colour – to bring home the tragedy of our lust for trophies. The happy part is that his successors have helped to bring most of these birds back to the British Isles. The other is A Hind in Richmond Park, a book about animal senses. Salt’s similarly-themed The Story of My Cousins also came out in 1923.
Henry Salt wrote a profile of Hudson in 1930, in his Company I Have Kept. It is a useful and measured evaluation of Hudson’s magnetic and often mysterious personality. His quiet charisma, wisdom and candour were much valued by his friends. He expressed his truths sometimes quite forcefully. In one letter he disapproves of Salt’s lack of regret at the persecution of larger ‘predatory’ birds – even if Salt had made clear that he would of course never do the persecuting himself.
Like many people who knew Hudson well, Salt conceptualised his friend as a caged eagle, having seen him in his London ‘tower house’ – a garret room in a belfry-like structure. Hudson called it his ‘Illimani’ – after a high peak of the Andes. The following story told by Salt I think is defining of Hudson. ‘I am reminded of another prisoner,’ Salt writes, ‘a real eagle, about whom I consulted him at a somewhat later date. A friend in Sheffield, troubled by the sight of a golden eagle caged in a bird-fancier’s shop, had offered to buy the bird if I could arrange to set it at liberty in some suitable place; but Hudson’s opinion was against the plan. “I cannot advise you,” he wrote, “to advise your correspondent to release the eagle. The bird, after four years of captivity, will have no chance at all, for even if released in the wilds of Scotland, where the bird is protected, the other free eagles would probably persecute it to death. In any other part of the country it would be promptly shot.”’
Finding W. H. Hudson, Conor’s biography of Hudson’s campaigning life, is published by Pelagic.
Finding W. H. Hudson – Conor Mark Jameson – 9781784273286 – Pelagic Publishing