established Clive Lovatt

CLIVE LOVATT

In the years before BSBI News was launched the Society had two scientific journals. Watsonia ran from January 1949 to August 2010 and in 1967 had papers on Trifolium occidentale, British aquatic Myosotis, radiate Senecio vulgaris, Irish Sisyrinchium and cleistogamy in Spartina, as well as an important nomenclatural update for the forthcoming Critical Supplement to the Atlas of the British Flora (1968).

More or less running in parallel, Proceedings of the Botanical Society of the British Isles began in April 1954 and after increasing to a larger format, came to an end in May 1969. Essentially it was a journal to which a general member, not working in academia or a museum could expect to contribute. Thus by comparison in 1967 there were papers on Teesdale plants, changes in the Flora of Leicestershire, keynote presentations, notes and keys from the Flora-writer’s conference, and Personalia and Notices to Members, a several page section that was more or less unchanged in style and content from when it had appeared in the Year Book (1949–1953). This would often include requests for information or samples for scientific study or to assist Flora writers.

In his outstanding account of 150 years of BSBI’s history, David Allen (The Botanists, 1986) wrote that in 1967, a change of printers (from the generous and almost in-house Buncle & Co. Ltd to a more commercial press) and the burgeoning of the annual Abstracts from Literature relating to the Vascular plants of the British Isles (47 pages when last issued in the Proceedings and 68 pages when first appearing as a separate publication in May 1971) were putting pressure on the Society’s finances. Council voted to merge the two publications (hiving off Abstracts), but the amateurs and professionals had different views and the continuing editors of Watsonia were resistant to reducing the professional impact of their journal. As David An early Watsonia cover from 1967, a few years prior to the start of BSBI News.

Allen explained, ‘The existence of just the one, forbiddingly learned main periodical hardly served as an inducement, moreover, to the less learned majority who needed to be recruited as members. Three years later, therefore, in 1972, BSBI News was started to help redress the balance’.

In her article in BSBI News 100, BSBI News 100 not out! Mary Briggs (who was Hon. Secretary from the time of the second issue in July 1972) explained that after Proceedings was discontinued, ‘for some years notes and notices for meetings and BSBI affairs were printed on loose sheets of paper and mailed with Watsonia, etc.’ She continued, ‘The sheets were not numbered and mostly undated, easily mislaid and it would now be difficult to trace a complete set (even in BSBI Archives?)’. This was exactly what Clive Stace found recently when he was trying to establish what the BSBI publications archive was missing, and he asked David Pearman who asked me to help, and the two Clive’s compared notes.

Between the demise of the Proceedings (last issue May 1969) and the launch of BSBI News (January 1972), there were four members’ newssheets issued, evidently accompanying four of the five issues of Watsonia published in that period. (We doubt if Personalia would have been issued with Watsonia for December 1969 as well as in January 1970.) First, there was an undated double sided foolscap sheet headed Personalia and Notices to Members, issued with Watsonia in January 1970 according to the copy provided by Clive Stace. Then, there were three issues of the A4 Newsletter which I found in my own collection, dated July 1970 (2 pages), March 1971 (2pages) and July 1971 (4 pages, on two loose sheets). In the first issue (January 1970) the Horticultural Adviser to the Ministry of Transport wrote with his regret that access to motorway verges for botanical survey was prohibited by law but he offered to suggest similar places beside trunk roads. Of particular interest here is the unsigned lead note in the July 1971 issue, headed ‘the future of the Newsletter’. Forming as it does a manifesto for the next 50 years and more, it is quoted here in full. This is the last issue of the newsletter in this form.

In future B.S.B.I. News will be sent out at the same time as the regular notices of meetings etc., [with] the first issue in January 1972. This will be a handy-sized publication of several pages giving more, and more topical, news of British plants and people connected with them. It is hoped that members will contribute items on activities, discoveries, personalities, or other information of general concern. Its precise contents have not yet been fully settled and will in any event be influenced by members’ wishes and contributions. Its object, however, will be more fully explained in the first issue, is to interest a wider range of people and so increase membership, and so benefit everyone.

The editor is Mr JE Elsley, the botanist at the RHS gardens at Wisley, who has a good knowledge of wild plants as well as garden ones. He will welcome suggestions and contributions.

In BSBI News 100, Mary Briggs explained that ‘In 1971, David McClintock, President at the time, had the vision and determination to initiate a news journal for the Society, although at the time the need for this was not unanimously agreed’.

In the first article in the first issue of BSBI News, a long President’s introduction, McClintock started by comparing BSBI and the Wild Flower Society. ‘The WFS has done sterling work … but the great National Society is the B.S.B.I., and the B.S.B.I. only’. He pointed out that the annual sale of the two main wild flower books of the day (one of which he had co-authored) was 15,000, and that RSPB membership had doubled in three years to over 70,000, whilst BSBI membership was static at 1,700. ‘Birds are not forty times as popular as wild flowers’, he felt. The membership ratio is now more like 400 times in RSPB’s favour.

David McClintock was blunt and to the point, particularly in the way that he dealt with the loss of Proceedings. Even if it saved money, it resulted in ‘an impression that the Society was above the level of the ordinary wild flowerer’, who then comprised threequarters of the membership. Meanwhile Watsonia