Newly Catalogued: The Richard Fitter and IUCN Collections

The Linnean Society has just uploaded two new collections to its archive catalogue as part of an ongoing project to catalogue archival material relating to nature conservation. These collections follow the upload of the archive of conservationist Max Nicholson (NIC) last year. These two new collections, Fitter and IUCN, relate to persons and institutions involved in conservation between the 1950s and 1990s.

Richard Sidney Richmond Fitter was an English conservationist who became involved in natural history work while studying at the London School of Economics, where he met notable conservationists like Max Nicholson. He worked for the Institute for Political and Economic Planning, the Ministry of Information and the Operations Research section of the Royal Air Force Coastal Command. During this time he wrote his first book “London's Natural History”, which was published in May 1945.

Fitter was appointed Secretary of the Wildlife Conservation Special Committee of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning where he looked into creating and supporting new nature reserves as part of post war reconstruction.

Fitter was an accomplished author, often collaborating with his wife Maisie in research and writing. In 1946, he became the Assistant Editor of a monthly magazine, “The Countryman”. He moved out of London to Burford in Oxfordshire where, in 1952, he published “The Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds” and in 1972 he published, “The Birds of Britain and Europe, with Africa and the Middle East”. Later in life, Fitter collaborated with his son Alastair on three books and a paper analysing the affect of global warming on plant flowering.

Fitter was involved in multiple conservation organisations over the years. He was Director of the Council for Nature, served on the councils of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the British Trust for Ornithology, founded the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Naturalists' Trust (now Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust), and helped found the British Deer Society. He was Honorary Secretary of the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society (now Fauna and Flora International) and was on the steering committee, chairman and member of honour of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. He was also Director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau.

Later in life Fitter moved to Great Shelford, Cambridge. He famously collected inn and pub signs with bird themes, a hobby he started during the Second World War. He continued to write, research and teach right up until a few months before his death in 2005.

Fitter was a prominent Fellow of The Linnean Society of London. He received several prestigious awards from around the world and in 2008, several years after his death, the British Naturalists' Association instituted a Richard Fitter Memorial Medal, awarded annually to an active field naturalist.

The papers the Linnean Society hold relate to organisations Fitter was a part of (including the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Naturalists' Trust and World Wildlife Fund), conferences he attended (such as the Council for Nature’s “The Countryside in 1970”), and his conservation subject files. The latter were files relating to various conservation themes containing cuttings, correspondence, articles, photographs, lists and surveys.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature or IUCN was founded in 1948 in Fountainbleau as an international nature conservation and sustainable resource research organisation focusing on data gathering, analysis, advocacy and education. It publishes a well-known series of "Red Lists" of threatened species, charting the current research into plants and animals of conservation concern.

Initially known as the International Union for the Protection of Nature (between 1948 and 1956), and occasionally as the World Conservation Union (between 1990 and 2008), it was involved in the establishment of several other organisations including the World Wildlife Fund / World Wide Fund for Nature, TRAFFIC, and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre.

This collection is an amalgamation of papers from a number of sources including Max Nicholson, Richard Fitter FLS, and Gren Lucas FLS. The papers mostly relate to the setting up and running of the Union, Council papers, General Assemblies, Program Advisory Committee, Conferences IUCN was involved in, and the Conservation Monitoring Centre. The collection also contains papers of five Commissions run by IUCN: The Commission on Ecology, The Commission on Education and Training, The Commission on Environmental Planning, The Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas, and The Species Survival Commission.