Emma Louisa Turner

Emma Louisa Turner or E L Turner (9 June 1867 – 13 August 1940) was an English ornithologist and pioneering bird photographer. Turner took up photography at age 34, after meeting the wildlife photographer Richard Kearton. She joined the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in 1901, and by 1904 she had started to give talks illustrated with her own photographic slides; by 1908, when aged 41, she was established as a professional lecturer.

Turner spent part of each year in Norfolk, and her 1911 image of a nestling bittern in Norfolk was the first evidence of the species' return to the United Kingdom as a breeding bird after its local extinction in the late 19th century. She also travelled widely in the United Kingdom and abroad photographing birds.

Turner wrote eight books and many journal and magazine articles, and her picture of a great crested grebe led to her being awarded the Gold Medal of the RPS. She was one of the first women to be elected to fellowship of the Linnaean Society and the first female honorary member of the British Ornithologists' Union. Though not a graduate, she was also an honorary member of the British Federation of University Women. She lost her sight two years before her death.

Early life

Emma Louisa Turner was born on 9 June 1867 in Langton Green, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to John and Emma (née Overy) Turner. She was their fourth and last child, following a sister, Mary, and brothers John and Frank. Her father was a grocer and draper with three shop staff. The family was affluent enough to employ a governess and a servant, and to send Emma to a boarding school.

Turner's mother died in 1880, when she was aged 13, and with the death of her elder sister Mary in 1891, Turner's life appears to have been mainly family-based, even after she started her photographic career. This continued at least until the death of her father, aged 83, in 1913. She may also have helped look after her brother Frank's children between the death of his first wife, Annie, in 1895, and his remarriage some five years later.

She first visited the Norfolk Broads in 1901 or 1902. Her early contacts included the gamekeeper Alfred Nudd, who would punt her to photographic locations, and his relative Cubit Nudd, who became her general helper on site. Another gamekeeper and professional wildfowler, Jim Vincent, used his extensive knowledge of the area to find birds and nests. Turner's friend, the Reverend Maurice Bird, probably introduced to her by Richard Kearton, kept a natural history diary for 50 years and was therefore also able to share information with her.

For a quarter of a century, Turner lived and worked for part of each year, at Hickling Broad in Norfolk. She stayed mainly on a houseboat of her own design, which she named after the water rail (Rallus aquaticus), the first bird that she photographed in the Norfolk Broads. The flat-bottomed boat was transported to Hickling on a trolley, and launched in March 1905. She also owned a hut on a small island in the south-east of Hickling Broad, which became known as "Turner's Island". The hut was used as a photographic darkroom and a spare bedroom when visitors stayed.

A highlight of her career, in 1911, was finding with Jim Vincent, and photographing, a nestling bittern (Botaurus stellaris), a species that had not been recorded as breeding in the UK since 1886. Her nest photographs included those of the rare Montagu's harrier (Circus pygargus) and the first known breeding ruffs (Calidris pugnax) in Norfolk since 1890. Unusually for the time, the Whiteslea Estate, which owned much of the broad, and for which Vincent worked from 1909 to 1944, actively protected its birds of prey. Although both Montagu's and the then even rarer marsh harrier (Circus aeruginosus) bred there at the time, neither was mentioned in her book Broadland Birds.

Emma Turner was a pioneer of bird ringing in the UK, being allocated the first-ever small-size rings (numbers 1–10) issued by Harry Witherby's British Bird Marking scheme in 1909. She also participated in a short-lived Country Life ringing project. In practice, she seems to have done little, if any, ringing after the first year.

She seems to have been generally fit, and was described as being "quite capable with a punt or rowing boat", but she suffered bouts of illness throughout her life, with a notable attack in the summer of 1907. The cause of her illness is unknown, although tuberculosis has been suggested.

She went to Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island in the autumn as a guest of Edward Hudson, owner of Country Life magazine, and stayed there for the 1914–15 winter right through to May. The island is a bird migration hotspot, and rarities she saw there included a great grey shrike (Lanius excubitor) and a White's thrush (Zoothera aurea). She also made several boat trips to the Farne Islands, away.

alt=Monochrome photograph of Turner in a cook's apron and hat. She holds a saucepan and a measuring cup. On a table in front of her are several flans, still in their metal dishes

Probably in early 1913, Turner bought a house in Girton near Cambridge, her permanent home for the next decade. Her journals for 1916 and early 1917 are missing, but it appears that from the middle of the First World War, she was working as a part-time Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) cook at an auxiliary military hospital at Cranbrook, not far from Langton Green.

Turner's first trip abroad came in early summer 1920, when she went to Texel island in the Netherlands. She explored the island by bicycle, her main target species being those that no longer bred regularly in the UK, including the black tern (Chlidonias niger), ruff, black-tailed godwit (Limosa limosa) and avocet (Recurvirostra avosetta). She was particularly struck by the large numbers of singing nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos). A trip to Italy in late 1922 in which she visited its major cultural centres seemed largely committed to art and architecture, a rare ornithological comment in her journal being a sighting of a blue rock thrush (Monticola solitarius).

Scolt Head

The National Trust had purchased Scolt Head Island in Norfolk in 1923 for its terns and other breeding birds, but was concerned about the damage done to the nesting colonies by egg-collectors, and, inadvertently, by visitors walking around the island. By this time, Turner was established as a photographer, bird expert and author. The Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society (NNNS) proposed to appoint a "watcher" (warden) to supervise the reserve, and when Turner was told they were struggling to find someone suitable, she volunteered herself, thus becoming the first resident "watcher" for the island.

Aged 57, Turner found herself living on the reserve in a basic hut during the breeding season, with no electricity supply, and significantly dependent on rain for fresh water. Once protected, the birds prospered, the number of breeding pairs of common terns (Sterna hirundo) and Sandwich terns (Thalasseus sandvicensis) rising from 17 to 800 and from 59 to 640 respectively by 1925, her final year. She was frequently described by the press as the loneliest woman in England, but she pointed out that she never felt lonely, and often had visitors.

In 1929 she travelled to Amsterdam as a member of the International Ornithological Congress, which organised excursions to Texel, Naarden Lake and Zwanenwater. Around 1933 she went on a Mediterranean cruise with Chief Constable of the Isle of Man, Lieutenant colonel Henry William Madoc and his wife. They saw more than 150 species, including 52 that were new to Turner. After this trip, her journals become sporadic and incomplete, and she seems not to have travelled abroad again.

Recognition James Sant's 1906 painting of the admission of women to the Linnean Society of London in 1904. Turner is at the extreme left.

Turner was awarded the 1905 Gold Medal of the Royal Photographic Society for her photograph of a great crested grebe. Then aged 38, she was one of the younger women admitted.

Emma Turner was one of the first four female honorary members of the British Ornithologists' Union (BOU) admitted in 1909, involved in the 1933 appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles.

She was a vice-president of the RSPB, although she later fell out with the organisation following what she considered an unfair and dismissive review of her 1935 book, Every Garden a Bird Sanctuary. The reviewer, in the RSPB's 1935 winter issue of Bird Notes and News had said it "showed signs of haste and extraneous matter gathered in to fill vacancies ...".

Last years Turner lost her sight two years before her death on 13 August 1940, and an operation to remove her cataracts was unsuccessful. Her estate was valued at probate at £3031.

Legacy

Turner was a pioneer in her photographic work in terms of her preparation, achievements and aesthetics,

She was also respected for her writing, which attracted plaudits from national newspapers including The Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian and The Observer. The Observer, reviewing Bird Watching on Scolt Head commended the book for the author's knowledge and commitment, and said of the quality of the writing "It is as good as anything in the Voyage of the Beagle". Her book, Broadland Birds, published in 1924 formed the basis of a radio programme about her life, Emma Turner; a life in the reeds, broadcast by the BBC in 2012, produced by Sarah Blunt and with sound recordings by Chris Watson.

Publications

Turner produced hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs in her life, many of which appeared in her numerous publications.

She wrote eight books, She contributed to other journals, most frequently the Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society. for which she wrote more than 60 articles, and she also contributed frequently to other local and national publications including four articles in The Times on Norfolk wildlife. Her photographs were often published in the RPS's The Photographic Journal, and in 1917 she co-authored a technical article on the half-tone process in the same publication.

In addition to her professional writing, Emma Turner kept pocket diaries and daily journals. These, along with press cuttings and photographs, were donated to the BTO in 2011, although her handwriting is so illegible as to require specialist assessment.

Selected articles Some of the better-known of her many articles include: