Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Natural history photographer and pioneer of flash and high-speed flash bird photography, who lost an eye to a tawny owl.
On the island
Eight records
Track 1
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:08Eric, what part of the country do you come from?
Oh, I'm a thoroughbred cockney. I was born within the sound of Bo Bells and very proud of it.
Presenter asks
0:17Which came first, photography or natural history?
Well, I suppose natural history came first, because my mother says that when I was only … two years of age I used to escape out in the garden and … spend all my time collecting beetles and snails. And then, when I was only six, I took my first bird photograph. I bought the camera. I paid 35 Bob for it, all saved out of halfpence and pennies and farthings. I took it straight up to our local playing fields, found the songwriter's nest, rested the lens on the front of the nest, and just took the photograph. I didn't realise there was anything so complicated as focusing or anything like that. I took it back home and got my oldest brother to develop it. Well, you can imagine what it was like. It was just a horrible blur, but it did make me realise there was much more in photography than I'd first thought.
Presenter asks
0:58Was it your first ambition to be a natural history photographer?
It it always has been, yes.
Presenter asks
1:01Was it your first job when you left school?
No. … when I left school in nineteen twenty six I drifted into the motor car industry and stayed there until the firm that I was working for went broke in nineteen twenty nine. I was on the unemployment market. And I just tried to find a job, but there were just none available in those days. And so I spent the time going up to the zoo taking photographs of the various different new arrivals, as well as babies that were born. I used to rush the negatives back home, develop them, and print from the wet negative, and rush them around Fleet Street, and more often than not, just didn't sell anything at all. It was very tough.
Presenter asks
2:12Now when did it become possible for you to get out of the studio and spend all your time in the open air photographing birds?
Well that came in 1936 after I'd collected together quite a library of photographs and was able to have a pretty steady sale on them. But it was in 1937 that I got the best publicity stunt I suppose imaginable because I was trying to photograph a tawny owl one night. The bird came down and attacked me in the pitch darkness. Her claw penetrated my eye and I had to be rushed back to Morfield's Eye Hospital in London. They operated within ten minutes of my getting there hoping to save the eye but failed to do so. A fortnight later I had to have it removed completely. Two days later I went back to Wales and I photographed that tawny owl.
Presenter asks
3:02Eric, how many countries have you visited to photograph bird life?
Oh, you ought to give me a warning of that question, Roy. Let me see. I've been up to Lapland, to Sweden, to Holland, to Spain, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
“a bird came down and attacked me in the pitch darkness. Her claw penetrated my eye and I had to be rushed back to Morfield's Eye Hospital in London. They operated within ten minutes of my getting there hoping to save the eye but failed to do so. A fortnight later I had to have it removed completely. Two days later I went back to Wales and I photographed that tawny owl.”
“I found that I had illustrated seven hundred different books. … I have had illustrations in seven hundred different books. Almost all over the world. In fact, I think almost every country but China.”
“I want to photograph very much the great bustard, and we came … into an ace of getting photographs of it last year in Hungary, but unfortunately tragedy occurred at each of the nests. … the other is, of course, the great eagle owl, which is a most wonderful bird with deep orange eyes.”