(Another) Good Day in the Office

Posted on May 26, 2019 by nager

You know the feeling when something turned out really well and you can’t stop thinking about it? Something where all the hard-work and moments when it nearly didn’t happen were worth it. And where, in the end, after a huge amount of team work and a couple of late nights, it all comes together and is simply amazing. And then you can’t stop feeling maternal and proud and saying to people ‘Have you seen this thing? It’s my baby and it’s amazing’.

I hope I haven’t built it up too much, but that’s just how I feel about the 60^th Anniversary Exhibition at Loch Garten to celebrate the pioneering work of Operation Osprey.

We had a tiny budget of £5000, which shrank further to £3000 once other essential items for the reserve had been purchased. Although Loch Garten isn’t strictly within my geographical area of work, as I cover the Southern and Western parts of Scotland, I’d offered assistance to a stretched team, and I had ideas. IDEAS!

While I was writing the interpretation plan for the reserve I was simply gripped by the stories from the early years of Operation Osprey: intrigue and mystery, goodies vs baddies, true heroes of conservation, boys’ own adventures and a military operation to protect the ospreys.

And the nostalgia, the NOSTALGIA…..…those photos of the camp from the 1950s and 60s where they lived in and the caravans in which the ‘cook-caterers’ rustled up three hot meals a day (majoring on mince and tatties) for the watchers. This was an exhibition just begging for the retro/vintage touch. And how better to create something with a miniscule budget than to be scouring Glasgow’s numerous junk-shops and the famous Barras in search of vintage bits and pieces to create the exhibition. This was definitely a job for me.

The Barras Market: the place to get absolutely everything

But before we could make an exhibition we needed the content – there was an archive of stuff at The Lodge (RSPB HQ) but we knew that they would be reticent to lend it to us. We needed an ambassador who could read the whole archive, sort the wheat from the chaff and advise on the key documents and objects that we needed for our exhibition. But who on earth would have the time and inclination to do a task like this? Enter Alice Shaell, a volunteer who had already gifted me her professional time as an ‘information architect’ to write interpretation for Loch Lomond. Alice became my ‘specialist volunteer’ and got started on the archive. She went to the Lodge and painstakingly transcribed key passages from the log-books, roping in her mother as an expert in 1950s spidery handwriting, and read everything they held at the Lodge.

We knew what we needed for the exhibition but it proved too difficult get them to Loch Garten safely and we were stumped. What on earth were we going to do? An exhibition isn’t an exhibition without original artefacts to link the viewer with the past.

I found out you could still buy curtain wire. And it comes out of the same tin it did in the 1950s….

And then, a MAHOOSIVE box of documents mysteriously materialised from under someone’s desk at our Scotland HQ, full of Operation Osprey documents dating back to 1954. If I was feeling melodramatic I would say that, if this was ‘Exhibition: The Movie’ then this is the turn in the plot that happens when the protagonist has reached her low-point and simply can’t see a way forward. It seemed that this box had been passed from trusted staff-member to trusted staff-member down the years and survived various office moves. The custodian heard we were doing an exhibition and asked if it would interest us. WOULD IT INTEREST US? DOES A BEAR POOP IN THE WOODS?

We couriered the box to Alice and she read the lot. She found that most of the documents that were in the Lodge archive had an equivalent in our box and so the exhibition started to take shape. The stories of the heroes (the stories of the women needed a bit more research and digging), the letters and job adverts, the candid (and non HR compliant) comments about the quality of the volunteers, and the need for bikes without cross-bars, George Waterston’s planning documents for the 1959 season, and, most significantly, George’s report from that 1959 season when Ospreys bred successfully for the first time.

So I got started at creating the set and layout for the exhibition and went out trawling the best of Glasgow’s ample junk shops. I wanted the set to look like the inside of the 1950s caravans of Operation Osprey – a white gloss-painted chest of drawers would contain the documents under Perspex, and vintage photo frames would house the photos of our heroes. And, in my mind’s eye I saw the kind of material you would see in a 1950s kitchen on an Operation Osprey theme. It would be sewn into twee cushion covers and curtains for the caravan windows.

My original thought that we’d be able to get an original caravan interior and use for the set was dashed pretty quickly but Jess, from Loch Garten, mustered a team of incredibly talented volunteers who created the bench seats in plywood and painted the chest of drawers.

After an intense two days of installation, with further sterling work from expert volunteers (and a late night on a sewing machine by a very kind brand-new member of staff from Cairngorms Connect going WAY beyond the call of duty) we got it done. And here it is, Please do try and get down to Loch Garten to see it if you can, it will be there until September.

The Women of Operation Osprey: Part 1

Posted on April 5, 2019 by nager

In preparing the exhibition to celebrate the 60^th Anniversary of Operation Osprey, one of the most rewarding things has been uncovering the stories of the women involved. Women were in camp from the very beginning but their voices are, more or less, absent in the archive and accounts of the early days.

The first thing I read to get acquainted with the story of Operation Osprey was the 1971 account of the return of the Osprey to the UK by Philip Brown. Two names emerged immediately as important: Betty Garden, a camp stalwart, and Isabella MacDonald, to whom the book is so charmingly dedicated.

“Miss MacDonald was a remarkable lady who foster-mothered scores of lucky children, yet still found the time to welcome so many of us who watched over the ospreys, with apparently inexhaustible kindness and a quiet encouragement that gave many of us renewed faith, strength and enthusiasm when the fates were against us”

I was intrigued, especially by Isabella as, despite this dedication, she doesn’t appear within the pages of the book apart from a passing mention. Isabella was the crofter of Inchdryne who gave Operation Osprey Base camp its home in 1959, hosting them until the mid 1980s, and her hospitality is a central part of the story.

My partner in crime in researching the stories for the exhibition, Alice Shaell, who kindly gave a great deal of her professional time in a voluntary capacity, found some correspondence relating to the constant battle to persuade Miss MacDonald to accept some payment for her hospitality. The letters show how much respect and affection those at Operation Osprey held her in, and how grateful they were of the kindness she showed towards them.

Alice and I went to visit Isabella’s niece, who now crofts the land at Inchdryne, and was still a teenager when George Waterston set up Operation Osprey. Marina Dennis is an impressive woman, having a lifetime in crofting, journalism and public service behind her, including twelve years as a Commissioner at the Crofters Commission. Still an active crofter, and young for her age, she writes a column for the local paper and is still involved in an advisory capacity in a myriad of things. Marina welcomed us into her warm, spacious bungalow and we sat by large windows looking over her croft, towards Abernethy Forest.

Marina told us that this land had been crofted by her family since they were cleared from the Braes of Castle Grant in 1809. What is now a patchwork of fields set within birch woodland and Caledonian pine was, back then, a boggy forest where Marina’s forebears would have had to clear the land, build a house, and start to create a new life for themselves.

We started by referring to her aunt as Isabel, as she is named in Brown’s book, and were immediately corrected. “She was Bella. Everyone knew her as Bella” said Marina. Isabella [pronounced Eye-sa-bella] had been a common name in the area, there was an Isa, an Isabella and she was Bella. Marina took down a photo of her Aunt from the wall to show us. Bella, white hair swept back into in a black beret and wearing a navy dungarees was sitting on a grey Fergie tractor. A boy of around 15 sits on the plough behind. Marina explained to us that was Billy, one of Bella’s foster children.

Miss MacDonald fostered around 40 children over the years, most of which came from Edinburgh and Glasgow. “She always took boys, as she thought girls were too much of a handful” said Marina; and, as the mother of two teenage girls, I nodded vigorously in agreement. Almost all of the children stayed with Bella until they had finished their schooling and many stayed on in the area, including Billy.

She went on to tell us about how her aunt and George had hit it off as soon as they met, “The osprey nest that first year was on the common grazings” she said waving her hand towards the wet grassland dotted with trees a few hundred metres behind her home. The team had set up watches in a rough hessian tent on the common grazings in 1958. The account of the nest-raid from the logbook inventively describes the ground as, “a bog that was very boggy”.

“George was very good with local people” said Marina, “he really understood indigenous communities, and people round here liked him. It was the same on Fair Isle” she added. George had set up Fair Isle Bird Observatory after the war, a decade before he started Operation Osprey.

When George was looking for a spot for Operation Osprey base-camp Bella offered a site not far from her house at Inchdryne “It really was the spark between George and Bella that ignited Operation Osprey” said Marina. George had asked whether she could host base-camp and she said yes. “It was Highland hospitality, she didn’t do it for payment or any gain. It’s just how Highlanders are.” And it seems from all the accounts of Bella from the archive that this hospitality was far more than offering a place to pitch camp, park caravans, and the all-important water supply; it was hospitality in the fullest sense of the word, offering volunteers and staff at Operation Osprey a kindness and open-hearted welcome that came from her extraordinary generosity of spirit.

When we left, Marina directed us to the spot Bella had allowed Operation Osprey to use for all those years. In that quiet glade among the pines I imagined the bustle of base camp; caravans, canvas tents, phone lines and George’s famous Dormobile, and I thought of Bella MacDonald’s immeasurable contribution to the project and what a truly remarkable woman she must have been.

60 Years of Operation Osprey

Posted on April 3, 2019 by nager

Why would I be packing my car on a Sunday evening with a glass display cabinet bought from the Salvation Army shop for £25 packed with 4 large slabs of foam and 2 second hand pale pink textured curtains? And why have I crammed every nook and cranny of the car with junk shop finds? Inside a 1940s leather suitcase, belted into the passenger seat, is an expanding jewellery box lined with crimson velvet, six books on birds from the 1950s, four metres of curtain wire and a battered stove-top kettle. An aluminium bucket jammed behind the driver’s seat holds a tea set of four flowery cups and saucers, and a rolled poster print of a pale green canvas frame tent in a pine wood clearing, a young man is lying on the ground by the tent looking up at the sky.

This last item gives a clue as to what all these items have in common. The pine wood is at Loch Garten in Speyside, and the tent is part of the camp set up in 1958 to protect the Ospreys that returned to Scotland to breed following their extinction. This year is the 60^th Anniversary of their successful breeding season in 1959 and the assorted items of bric-a-brac in my car are going to become part of an exhibition at Loch Garten to celebrate this very special occasion.

The temporary exhibition will reflect the original camp that early Operation Osprey volunteers would have experienced; the caravans and the canvas tents, the eternal stewpot and the discomfort of the forward hide. A document from 1959 shows that the camp had 3 kettles, two tin openers, four cups and saucers, but only two spoons, three forks and two knives. Somewhere among the stash of goodies in my car is a full set of cutlery as listed in the stores inventory, found by sorting through trays and buckets of silverware and utensils in one of Glasgow’s fabulous treasure troves of junk and vintage.

We want to celebrate the Operation Osprey heroes from the early days, and also those of today, with this exhibition. The main hero is, of course George Waterston, who conceived, and led Operation Osprey (and, according to the stores list, lent the project 4 egg-cups, 4 dish cloths and a billycan outfit). However, all the way through Operation Osprey, to the present day, the RSPB, has relied on dedicated volunteers, supporters and of course our members to keep the show on the road. The debt of gratitude that Operation Osprey owes to these ordinary and extraordinary people is represented in this document found in the archive. Along with this note, to Isabella MacDonald, who hosted Operation Osprey Basecamp and its many wardens, volunteers and cook-caterers from 1959, was a sheaf of correspondence discussing rent, with Operation osprey suggesting she raise the rent and she refusing.

The exhibition will be in place from the start of May, and will showcase some of the original documents from the early days to give a candid and contemporaneous insight into the very early days of Operation Osprey.