Oliver Pike: a Brief Memoir
by Prof. Jonathan Dollimore
I was around the age of four when my family moved into the
house where my grandfather, Oliver Pike, had lived for many
years. It was near the village of Billington, and about a
mile from the town of Leighton Buzzard. A one-storey house
built of wood, it was set in grounds deliberately left quite
wild to encourage wildlife. Added to that, the place opened
out onto surrounding countryside. Nearby were some wonderful
small lakes, and the workings which supplied the legendary
sand of that area. Across these places we wandered and
trespassed when they were deserted, sometimes risking life
and limb in the process. (Sorry Mum!) It was an ideal place
to grow up. It was also where Oliver Pike had produced some
of his noted wildlife photographs and films.
Born in Enfield in 1877, he became, along with Richard and
Cherry Kearton and R.B. Lodge, a pioneer wildlife
photographer of the 1890s. He obtained his first camera at
the age of 13, and his first book, In Birdland with Field
Glass and Camera was published in 1900. It went quickly into
six editions. Twenty four more books followed. He is also
remembered for his design of a lightweight camera, which was
eventually marketed by others and called the "Birdland" and
used worldwide.
Around 1906 Oliver Pike became deeply involved with the
cine-camera and was to go on and produce over 50 wildlife
films. During the second quarter of the last century he also
travelled extensively throughout the British isles, both to
make his films, and to show the and give lectures on all
aspects of the countryside. His most remarkable trips were
to St Kilda in 1908 and also in 1910 (along with Paton and
Dr Hutchinson) and also Bass Rock, Ailsa Craig and the Outer
Hebrides.
In the late 1940s he suffered a stroke and was unable to
continue his work. It was shortly after that that we went to
live in his old house. He and my grandmother continued to
live with us, in a small bungalow newly built in the
grounds. He would sit outside for long parts of the day and
we children - there were four of us, all boys - would talk
with him about many things, but especially the countryside
and his work. He had fond memories of many of the films he
had made. One of them had been shown at the Palace Theatre,
London on a daily basis for a full month in September 1907.
He was proud of having filmed, in 1922, a cuckoo laying its
egg in the nest of a Meadow Pipit. I recall especially the
stories he told us about the badgers he had tamed in that
very garden, and of the amazing tricks these intelligent
creatures got up to in the house when he and his wife were
away. I suspect that she was less enthusiastic that these
creatures were allowed the run of the house: one of their
tricks was to roll up carpets into tunnels. They were not
kept in captivity and eventually met the fate of many tamed
wild-life still allowed to run wild; too trusting of other
human beings, they were shot by a "neighbour".
In 1907 he was awarded the Fellowship of the Royal
Photographic Society, and in 1948 was made Honorary Fellow.
Oliver Pike died in 1963, and my family finally left that
house in 1975. Some years later, travelling in the area with
a friend, we made a detour to see the place again. We
arrived to see it being bulldozed to the ground. Shortly
after that the area was flattened and concreted over to
become a huge parking lot for inter-continental lorries. Of
my grandfather's and my family's life there, nothing
recognizable remains except the odd tree we climbed. Since
then I have dreamt about it time and time again. Ordinary
rather than disturbed dreams, they are, none the less, a
kind of mourning for a past irretrievably gone.
But some 15 miles away, at the wildlife reservoirs near the
villages of Marston and Wilstone in Buckinghamshire, it is a
very different story. It was in the memorable stillness and
ordinary beauty of these places that Oliver Pike, almost a
century ago, found inspiration for his work. It was there
too that he met Anne Primrose Chapman. Living nearby, she
had already been warned by her parents to be wary of this
"fast young man" who came from London with motor car and
camera. They were married in 1914 and she became his most
enthusiastic co-worker. She survived him by over twenty
years, dying in 1986.
And it was to these reservoirs, summer after summer, that
my family used to go as I grew up. We boys learned to swim
in the one at Wilstone, and fish in the other at Marston.
When I last visited them a few years ago, both places,
thanks to their protected status, were almost exactly the
same as they were in my childhood and as my grandfather knew
them. Thinking now of his last visit there I recall Thomas
Hardy's poem "At Castle Boterel". The poet returns for the
last time to a place holding memories of early love. He
recalls a walk with a girl and, as he drives away from the
place, in the rain, he looks back one last time "at the
fading byway":
And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking
And I shall traverse old love's domain
Never again.
Thomas Hardy: March 1913
Jonathan Dollimore
March 2001
This piece was originally written for the preface of the
2001 reprint of The Birds of Ayrshire by E. Richmond Paton
and Oliver G. Pike [ISBN 1897604025]. The
reprint was published by Castlepoint Press and the
paperback is available from some Internet sellers.
