Partings
David Bellamy
1933 - 2019
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| photo by Alan Warren |
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| view from Ngara Mountain |
It feels like a long time ago, 1986, and I was the new Warden
living in a damp old farmhouse in Low Barns Nature Reserve, Witton-le-Wear, County Durham.
Not long back from living in Malawi and slightly out of everything, it was good
to make a new friend
Just up the river a bit, lived the Durham Wildlife Trust's Trust’s then President*,
who, every so often would pop down for a chat and to see how I was doing. Those
informal conversations started a friendship that lasted the rest of David’s
life. Sometimes the family would come too, a family of so many shapes, sizes
and starting points that to this day I am still not sure that I remember
everyone. They were a family that simply absorbed people growing, gathering,
thriving.
I think there can be few naturalists of my generation who
did not know of David Bellamy and his enthusiasm, that larger than life cheeriness
that stomped its way across TV screens and inspired so many of us. To meet him
as an individual was lovely: to find the enthusiasm was not at all feigned,
that the field botanist lived behind the TV personality and revelled in the
moss and the wet.
David celebrated the accessible wild: he enjoyed the
everyday places and the wet, boggy and squelchy. His excitement did not need
the most beautiful shot, or rarest species, or most difficult to reach places.
It just needed somewhere, anywhere. It just needed to be among growing things
We had a friendship that started there on the banks of the
Wear but that lasted until David’s death last year. We didn’t see each other
often but kept in touch and that cheery enthusiasm was like an ever present smile
on the horizon.
A pair of thwarted dancers, we shared many experiences and
many delights (moss, frogs, loud laughter, cheerful people, commitment). We disagreed,
too. David’s stance on the human role in climate change lost him many friends,
but the friendship endured and I always trusted that he acted from the strongest
personal integrity. Being arrested in 1983 during protests over the building of
the Franklin River Dam in Tasmania was always a good example and a moment he
was proud of. He had paid his own way there and again this mattered. He had not
been flown out as some celebrity photo-op but had gone because it a cause that
mattered, something that should be done. There was always a readiness to act,
to do what felt right, to say what he felt was right even if no-one else
agreed.
That is what lasts and what I will remember: cheerfulness, enthusiasm
and passion, a joy in the world and a readiness to act…
Photos: all by myself apart from the picture of David himself by Allan Warren on Wiki Commons
