Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

Product Information

The SPB had its own office in London by 1897, and sent more than 16,000 letters and 50,000 leaflets; it had 20,000 members by the following year. To these hundreds of poor young women, feathers represented not a living thing (in fact, few had ever had any real contact with birds having lived in the city all of their lives), but certainly a living, ready money (feathers stolen at work), and a symbol of respectability and acceptance. Weekly auctions in London, the hub of the world’s plumage market, would routinely sell single lots containing perhaps 4,000 tanagers, or 5,000 hummingbirds. Every year she visited them, from Hascosay in the Shetlands to Breydon Water on the Norfolk Broads, listening to their concerns.

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). Boase doesn't just tell us about the life of Etta Lemon, she transports us back in time to follow the story of the RSPB.lb) of their decorative breeding plumes, this implied that billions of birds were killed to meet the British demand alone. Here were two passionate women—one lionized, the other forgotten—entering the political sphere at the same moment in history. The constitution for the newly merged society was written by Frank Lemon, who also served as its legal advisor. Moving

Hannah assumed that only the female swan would sit on the nest – but then she saw them swapping nest duties, ‘giving each other a break. She worked for many other organisations, including the Royal Earlswood Hospital, the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, and the local Red Cross branch. As a girl (see below), she would publicly denounce any woman wearing plumage in her Blackheath family church.Soon, men, women and children of all classes began to feed the birds, watch the birds – and (crucially) care for them. 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. They had impressive organisational skills (Etta Lemon in particular), and their campaigns included both directly targeting wearers (with pamphlets and such) and even manufacturers, to trying to push through a bill for banning this cruel practice through the influential male members of the society.