Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

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Yet Etta Lemon was an impressive speaker, earning the admiration of male journalists at international bird conferences. Her legacy is the RSPB, grown from an all-female pressure group of 1889 with the splendidly simple pledge: Wear No Feathers. Other early members included the wealthy, unmarried Catherine Hall, and the 15-year-old Hannah Poland, a fish merchant's daughter.

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. It was here that local worthies once gathered for dinner around the mahogany dining table; dinners that got ever more elaborate when Frank Lemon was made Mayor of Reigate in 1911.A fascinating trip into the history of the RSPB (which was a complete surprise) and its links to the suffragette movement. And the work had its own problems—for employment was seasonal and the girls had to find other work when feather work closed after each season. Tessa Boase grew up in the Ashdown Forest, Sussex; studied English at Oxford and Italian in Florence; and has worked for a variety of magazines and national newspapers including The Daily Telegraph. The Act had limited effect, since it only banned the import of feathers, not the sale or wearing of plumes. In 1904, the queen gave her approval for the SPB to be incorporated by Royal Charter and become the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds RSPB.

Also, to tell the truth, I didn’t quite know the difference between suffragettes and suffragists before reading this either).

Lemon could not continue as honorary secretary since the charter excluded women from leading the organisation. The two movements ran somewhat parallelly and even contrary to each other for while Mrs Lemon sought a ban on plumes (and indeed whole birds) on hats, Mrs Pankurst’s ladies were encouraged to be more fashionable and lady-like which included flaunting these elaborate creations; Mrs Pankurst sought the vote for women while Mrs Lemon opposed it!

A handful of redoubtable women – sort of ornithological suffragettes - who (a good decade before Mrs Pankhurst came on the scene) campaigned with mild militancy against the fashion for feathered hats, and coaxed the nation to fall in love with birds. 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. A more ridiculous picture could scarcely be transmitted to future generations than a portrait of some of the huge hats, bristling with wings and tails, and flopping plumes of preposterous length, beneath which some women have been seen this year,” she wrote in her 1907 annual report for the RSPB. Margaretta (Etta) Louisa Lemon MBE (1860-1953) of Reigate was a co-founder of the all-female organisation that later became the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).Ada Nield is a kind-of local celebrity where I live and I’m working on a campaign to commemorate her in statue form, so this bit felt very relevant to me. Etta Lemon ran the long eco-campaign against the feather trade with single-minded tenacity, triumphing with the Plumage Act of 1921. This goes into both the suffragette/suffragist perspective as also the anti’s which included Etta Lemon and Mrs Humphry Ward–but it was interesting while the men on the anti side raised arguments about ‘natural’ inequality, biological differences and such, the women felt that they did need to play an active role in society–many of them were playing one (even a political one), but that they didn’t need the vote for it. Mrs Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes, smartly dressed, their hats adorned with the feather fashions of the day, striving against a male dominated society to get votes for women.