Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

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When the secretary of the RSPB, Linda Gardiner, retired in 1935, there was a proposal to replace her with a man, apparently to give the society greater acceptability. She enjoys gardening, reporting on environmental topics, and spending her time outside snowboarding or foraging. For three decades, Etta and her local secretaries battled to quench the insatiable fashion for feathered and bird-bedecked hats – a fashion decimating birdlife around the world.

The title "Society for the Protection of Birds" was dismissed as "very ambitious" by one British Museum naturalist, "for a band of ladies who do nothing but abstain from personal iniquity in the matter of bonnets. She's married with children, and lives between the Sussex coast and a farmhouse in the Sabine Hills, Italy, where she produces olive oil. Emily Williamson founded her all-female society in anger at being barred from the all-male British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU).As a girl (pictured, below), Etta would publicly denounce any woman wearing plumage in her Blackheath family church. Today few know that Britain’s largest nature conservation charity was once inextricably linked to the towns of Redhill and Reigate. Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved Birds tells the story of Margaretta ‘Etta’ Lemon, who worked for around five decades to bring an end to a cruel practice—the slaughter of millions of birds every year, simply for the millinery industry—and who was also a founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). But politics and compromise were very much a part of the process, for the issue of game birds raised by member Julia Andrews was shut down and Miss Andrews even removed, with the society declaring that its focus would remain the millinery trade.

Together with the wildlife activist Eliza Phillips, [d] in 1889 she founded the all-women Fur, Fin and Feather Folk at Phillips's home in Croydon to campaign against the plume trade. Bringing her story to life has convinced me that every campaigning group needs an Etta as well as an Emily – and that characters like Etta will always earn themselves enemies. I enjoyed following the journey of the two campaigns—their successes and failures, the ways in which they intertwined, and the stories of the two formidable ladies—Etta Lemon and Emmeline Pankhust—who played crucial roles in each (there were many others too, like Winifred Duchess of Portland in the bird campaign; Millicent Fawcett leader of the suffragists; and even Mrs Humphry Ward, prominent among the Anti-suffragists, among many more whose contributions we learn about as well).In supporting the Antis, Mrs Lemon was entirely representative of her class, her Christian beliefs and her conservative mindset.

Eventually, the two were combined and absorbed by the RSPCA but continued to remain for a while a society run by women. The Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act was passed in 1921 and received royal assent on 1 April 1922. Yet her triumphant battle against 'murderous millinery' has been eclipsed by the campaign for women's votes, led by the elegantly plumed Emmeline Pankhurst. And it wasn’t just feathers but whole wings or even whole birds affixed to hats in what would certainly look grotesque to us today but was the height of fashion in its day. Although the new organisation adopted the SPB title, in practice the London group provided most of its administration.A heroine for our times, Etta Lemon campaigned for fifty years against the worldwide slaughter of birds for extravagantly feathered hats. Both movements involved decades of struggle and considerations of politics, fashion and of course economics. There is a lot of shocking detail uncovered about the trade in birds as decorative elements for Edwardian hats, so in that regard, Etta was absolutely on point. I felt I read too much about the suffragette/suffragist campaign a while ago and too many descriptions of force-feeding to want to go through more just yet, so it’s useful to know about the dual perspective in this one!

In the United Kingdom, Etta Lemon campaigned for 50 years against the slaughter of birds for elaborate fashion. Politics reared its head at other times too, in Mrs Lemon’s later days when she was pushed out of the society she cared about so much. Emily Williamson of Manchester was the gentle, compassionate founder who invited her friends to tea in 1889 and got them to sign a pledge to Wear No Feathers. Etta made such a nuisance of herself that the Queen capitulated, putting her name to the RSPB cause.Four bronze maquettes were unveiled on the Plumage Act centenary, 1 July 2021 in Emily’s former garden, now a public park in Manchester. I thought that this gave me a much broader understanding about Edwardian society and the anti-suffrage perspective – something I’d not considered deeply. The upcoming generation of male birders impatiently dismissed the RSPB’s female founders as elderly, unscientific, Christian do-gooders.