The Peregrine: 50th Anniversary Edition. J. A. Baker
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popular RSPB film circuit alongside three others, entitled High Life of the Rook, Avocets Return and Adventure Has Wings. The title and spare commentary are drawn directly from Baker’s text, which also begins with an editor’s note: ‘The Essex coastline is threatened by development. J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer, shows that it has aesthetic as well as scientific value.’
‘On the Essex Coast’ appeared a year after Collins published The Hill of Summer, and is full of the passion Baker feels for his county, and the frustration that lay behind his anger at peregrines killed by the ‘filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. The essay describes the Dengie, a fist-like wedge of coast that stretches north from Foulness to Mersea. An outcry ensued over the plans for development, and they were finally shelved, in part because of the oil crisis in 1973. It was an early conservation campaign, and Baker’s article clearly contributed positively. Indeed, in his use of what is now a potentially offensive phrase, a ‘Belsen of floating oil’, perhaps we get a sense of his despair. The infamous 1967 Torrey Canyon super-tanker disaster was still fresh in the memory. When the ship broke up on the Seven Sisters, flooding oil into the sea, and onto the Cornish coast, the government decided to bomb and napalm the oil, creating a hellish scene that would have seared itself into the minds of many people, including Baker. It was a less politically sensitive time, and perhaps, in using the image, he intended to shock.
The Birds article reveals a man who was willing to harness his powerful writing to support the emerging environmental movement. Had Baker remained well, surely he would have written much more. Indeed, were he alive now, like so many of his octogenerian contemporaries, he would still be fighting for Essex and for many other wild places, and urging us not to be ‘soothed by the lullaby language of indifferent politicians’.
John Fanshawe, February 2011
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