Phil Hollom

Phil Hollom, who has died aged 102, was one of the last of the circle of British bird enthusiasts which established ornithology as a proper scientific discipline.

Hollom helped to establish the modern approach to studying bird populations in the 1930s by organising a national inquiry into the status of the great crested grebe in Britain. He also wrote or co-wrote several handbooks, including the Collins Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (1954), which helped to transform British birdwatching from a hobby pursued by a dedicated minority into one of the country’s most popular leisure pursuits.

Hollom’s contributions to ornithology began shortly he left school in 1930, when the noted ornithologist Harry Witherby introduced him to Max Nicholson, whose How Birds Live (1927), following on from Julian Huxley’s The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914), helped to establish the discipline.

With Nicholson’s encouragement, Hollom teamed up with the future “Barefoot Anthropologist” Tom Harrison, then a student at Cambridge, and in 1931 the two young men agreed to collaborate on a national survey of the great crested grebe. It was a daunting task, not least because they had no funding, even for postage, but also because the post-First World War construction boom had created many gravel pits which, filled with water, were an ideal environment for the birds. As a consequence they found there were more than 1,000 “lakes” to be examined, many of which did not appear on any maps.

They set about writing to well-known naturalists, ornithologists, taxidermists, landowners and the like, and appealing through the letter columns of newspapers for information on nesting haunts. In this way they recruited some 1,500 volunteer surveyors, and had to deal with some 5,000 pieces of correspondence.

The Great Crested Grebe Enquiry was one of the earliest national censuses of a single species, and certainly the most ambitious at that time. The results, published in British Birds in 1932, concluded that the breeding population in England, Scotland and Wales was around 1,200 pairs – up from an estimated 50 pairs in 1860. “We can recommend this sort of hobby for those people who find life dull,” Harrison informed the journal’s readers in his introduction to the completed survey.

^{Great crested Grebe (ALAMY)}

The inquiry demonstrated the potential of cooperative birdwatching and helped to inspire the establishment, in 1932, of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), whose long-term monitoring data on the status of British birds (currently maintained with the aid of some 40,000 volunteers) sets the international standard for studying the effects of environmental change on wildlife.

The second of five sons (his brother Jasper would serve in the 1960s as Chief Cashier of the Bank of England) Philip Arthur Dominic Hollom was born on June 9 1912 at Bickley, Kent.

He clearly remembered, as a four year-old, being lifted up to peer into the nest of a song thrush and being captivated by the bright blue of the eggs. “As a boy I was fascinated by birds and I used to catch them using a garden sieve held up by a twig and a piece of string,” he recalled in a recent interview. “Of course, that would be unthinkable today, but in the 1920s it was the only way that I was able to handle birds.”

Hollom was educated at the King’s School in Bruton, Somerset, where he excelled at athletics, read Nicholson’s How Birds Live under the sheets in his dormitory and decided to embark on his own study of nesting house martins and swallows in the vicinity. It was in this way that he got to know Harry Witherby, who was in charge of the national bird ringing scheme. In the summer of 1929 Hollom ringed more than 250 swallows. He continued to survey the birds every year until well into his 90s.

^{Phil Hollom as a young man}

By the time he teamed up with Tom Harrison, Hollom was working for an export merchants and living in Surrey, where he spent many happy hours watching birds at a sewage farm near Weybridge; he was excited in June 1932 when he spotted an avocet, which had supposedly become extinct in Britain in 1840 and would not recolonise successfully until after the Second World War.

After the outbreak of war in 1939 and a period in the Auxiliary Fire Service, Hollom joined the RAF and did his pilot training in America, where he recalled flying close to a flock of vultures on his first solo flight in December 1941.

On May 20 1943, while serving with Coastal Command off the Isle of Arran, flying a Wellington Mk VIII torpedo bomber on flare dropping and night attack duties, meteorologists failed to inform his squadron that a sea mist was making the horizon look higher than it was, with the result that he and two other pilots misjudged their height and flew into the sea. Hollom managed to bale out but his three crew members lost their lives, as did the crew of one of the other planes.

Later posted to No 271 Squadron (Transport Command), Hollom took part in operations Overlord, Market Garden and Varsity, towing gliders and dropping paratroopers and supplies for the campaign in Europe. On one occasion he was tasked with getting hold of champagne for an officers’ mess party and flew to Rheims where Jean Pol Roger presented him with 11 cases for the mess and a dozen half bottles for himself.

After the end of the war in Europe, in July 1945 he flew more than 20 flights, taking a Ministry of Aircraft Production mission round German aeronautical facilities, including V-2 rocket facility, slave labour camps at Nordhausen, and the secret German aviation research and development plant at Volkenrode.

In August 1945 he was posted to No 24 Squadron, then a VIP transport squadron, and the following year was appointed pilot to the Anglo American Commission on Palestine, flying its members on a six-week tour of the capitals of Europe and the Middle East — 31 flights in all. On this expedition he met Prince Lichtenstein (“very good on birds”, he recorded in his diary); joined the Commission’s audience with the King of Saudi Arabia; and had lunch with Kim Philby’s father St John, a noted Arabist and ornithologist, after whom Philby’s partridge (Alectoris philbyi) is named.

In 1946 Hollom returned to the export company he had joined before the war, working in its South American department. In the early Sixties he joined the finance house Bowmaker, where he remained until his retirement as company secretary aged 65.

Beginning with a trip to Germany in 1933, Hollom undertook birdwatching expeditions to more than 50 different countries and also participated in three famous expeditions organised by Guy Mountfort, founder of the World Wildlife Fund – to the Coto Doñana in Spain in 1957; Bulgaria in 1960; and Jordan in 1963.

^{Hollom, back row on far right, on an expedition to Coto Doñana, Spain, in 1957}

Hollom took on the task of condensing the five volumes of Witherby’s A Handbook of British Birds into a single book. Published in 1952, The Popular Handbook of British Birds was concise, readable and affordable to a new generation of bird watchers and went into five editions. Frustrated by the lack of good field guides for the countries he visited, he went on to team up with Guy Mountfort and the illustrator Roger Tory Peterson on A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, first published by Collins in 1954, which is now in its fifth edition and has never been out of print. The book was dedicated to “our long-suffering wives”, followed by a quote from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor: “She laments, sir… her husband goes this morning a-birding.”

Hollom went on to publish The Popular Handbook of Rarer British Birds (1960) and, from the early 1970s, was part of the team assembled by Max Nicholson to work on the texts for Birds of the Western Palearctic, a tour de force published in nine volumes between 1977 and 1994. He joined forces with Richard Porter and Steen Christensen to publish Birds of the Middle East and North Africa in 1988 and was as a council member and vice-president of the Ornithological Society of the Middle East.

Hollom was the longest-serving member of both the BTO and the British Ornithologists’ Union, serving in various roles on both bodies (he wrote the BTO’s first field guide Trapping Methods for Bird Ringers) and winning medals. In 1951 he became a member of the editorial board of British Birds magazine under Nicholson, whom he succeeded in 1960. He also served as founder chairman of the British Birds Rarities Committee, established in 1959 to assess claimed sightings of rare bird species.

In 1947 he married Jenefer Bell, who died in 2011. Their daughter and two sons survive him.

Phil Hollom, born June 9 1912, died June 20 2014

Our fellows, the doctors who diagnose and treat cancer, have registered major concerns with us about the planned model for commissioning cancer services in Staffordshire (NHS cancer care faces privatisation, 2 July). We applaud the ambition of joining up care for a population larger than that usually served by a single NHS organisation and the desire to focus services on the needs of patients. However, we fear that there may be unintended consequences.

Illustration by Gary Kempston; GKIMAGES.COM

These changes could destabilise vital cancer diagnosis and treatment services, and are already leading to planning blight with regard to service improvements. This could lead – in the short-term – to worse services for patients. This is a brave initiative but one that must be considered a gamble in a health economy still feeling the effects of the Mid-Staffordshire disaster. Long-term planning has proved an elusive goal in UK public services. The leaders of this initiative are in no position to predict, let alone control, what might happen over the period of the 10-year contract – politically or financially. It seems unlikely that the architects of these changes will be able to see through their vision or to be held accountable for its consequences. What we may see is contracts that cannot be dismantled without severe penalties. Greater clarity is required with respect to the role of the “prime provider” who will not in fact be providing services but managing services provided by others.

It is clear that those on the ground who will be relied on to make this happen have yet to be meaningfully engaged, and we have made their concerns known to Macmillan Cancer Support and NHS England who are leading this initiative. Clinicians share the ambition for an integrated approach to cancer care and must be more closely involved if this gamble is not to fail.
Giles Maskell
President, Royal College of Radiologists

• The Transforming Cancer and End of Life care programme in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent is an innovative and brave example of the voluntary and public sectors working alongside patients, carers and health and social care professionals to deliver the best possible outcomes for people affected by cancer.

Inspired by the experiences of people with cancer or those who have cared for someone at the end of their life in the area, this programme will test an integrated approach to the commissioning and management of care. By appointing one organisation to take responsibility for managing the whole cancer care journey, we can demand truly seamless care, and ensure no patient or carer gets lost in a complex system.

Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and NHS England will appoint organisations with expertise in managing contracts, ensuring that all the service partners work collaboratively around each patient and will not change the organisations who directly deliver cancer care services. Whoever is appointed will be subject to rigorous oversight and scrutiny for quality, patient safety and outcomes, whether they are from the NHS, the voluntary sector, or from the private sector.

At the heart of this programme is the desire to truly reach and improve the lives of people affected by cancer. That’s why Macmillan and our partners have made sure people affected by cancer, alongside clinicians, have been and will continue to be involved in the programme at every stage.
Ciarán Devane
Chief executive, Macmillan Cancer Support

• Last night I attended and spoke at a book launch of Mike Marqusee‘s book The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer, where he spoke movingly about his treatment at Barts and his fears that the attacks on the NHS will mean patients in the future will not have the excellent care he has received.

Surely the combined CCGs in Staffordshire should have been talking to their existing NHS hospitals and asking them to collaborate to provide a more responsive and streamlined service before embarking on this huge experiment with taxpayers’ money? In the previous decade, the NHS (under Labour) made great strides in improving cancer services through networks such as that in east London, yet in 2011 Andrew Lansley withdrew funding for these despite their proven successes.

Now we have groups of GPs, with no training in epidemiology, oncology or commissioning, making plans to spend millions on an untried system with private companies, who have no experience in cancer care, eagerly waiting to make profits from these sick patients. Similarly, the Cambridgeshire CCG, which wants to try a radically different system of care for the elderly, is planning to spend over a billion pounds of our money. This is madness, and the dishonesty of the current government (“there is no privatisation“; “there will be no top-down reorganisation”) is matched by the Department of Health’s spokesperson who said: “NHS competition rules have not changed under this government.” What about the Health and Social Care Act 2012, or the section 75 regulation that was passed this year? It is time for the public to wake up, stand up and fight for our NHS by lobbying their MPs.
Wendy Savage
President, Keep Our NHS Public

• The finger of responsibility for the exponential privatisation of the NHS points ineluctably at the Liberal Democrats, in particular Nick Clegg and Shirley Williams. Given that this did not feature in the coalition agreement, it should have been Clegg’s job to scrutinise Andrew Lansley’s white paper. Had he done so he could have halted the whole scheme. Then Williams promised to have section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act amended in the Lords to reduce, if not abolish, the requirement to tender for services. This didn’t happen. But it’s not good enough for Andy Burnham to say that the public has not given the government permission to “put the NHS up for sale”. What is now needed is a clear Labour election pledge to reverse all NHS privatisation since 2010.
Robin Wendt
Chester, Cheshire

• Surely we should be concerned if cancer services are to be detached from the NHS and provided at the whim of private companies? Health minister Jane Ellison admits that the government has lost control of the NHS so presumably big companies are chasing the NHS dollar with little public control. As a GP for nearly 30 years, I know that patients are at their most vulnerable when they have a potentially fatal illness, and are not able to make choices easily or monitor their care. Such patients especially need to feel that the single purpose of their carers is get them as well as possible for as long as possible, and not to have at the back of their mind that companies are making choices for profit rather than for them.
Dr Ron Singer
Chair, doctors’ section of Unite

• Will private contractors be paid on a fee-per-case basis, and thus make more profits if their patients don’t live for long?
Dr Richard Turner
Harrogate, Yorkshire

In America, “40 million go to bed hungry every night” (Kennedy). In Britain, 2.5 million pensioners live below the poverty line. One person’s wealth exceeds the combined wealth of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. Even throughout the developed world there is widespread poverty and wretched living conditions. But Jeremy Paxman (Newsnight is made by idealistic 13-year-olds, 28 June) believes that a determination to work towards a saner system is “a fool’s errand”. At the height of his ancient 64 years, he scorns such teenage “dreams”. I have news for him. At 97 I am not alone in believing that such dreams are not only vital but also perfectly realisable. I am still politically fighting fit, realistically optimistic and prepared, despite all that has happened, to go on fighting, pace pessimistic Paxo.
Len Goldman
Brighton, East Sussex

As writers for children, our job includes inspiring our readers and encouraging them to understand the potency of imagination and thought, in the hope that when they grow up they can use them to help improve the real world. As taxpayers and adults committed to the welfare of children, we are saddened by the lack of political imagination which has led to millions of children in this country who are abused, neglected or suffering from mental health difficulties being denied appropriate care.

We find it unacceptable that Ofsted has declared that one in seven councils in England fail vulnerable children with “unacceptably poor” standards, within a structure described as “manifestly and palpably weak”. In a survey of social workers by Community Care, 73% of social workers questioned said they can’t do their job properly, leaving children at risk because demand outweighs resources; 78% said they spend less than a third of their time in direct contact with children. Both the NSPCC and Young Minds have raised alarms about child protection and child mental health systems being unable to cope with the scale of the problem, and about the negative impact both on children and on workers who want to do their best.

Kids Company’s taskforce – See the Child. Change the System – plans to bring together leading thinkers and clinicians to initiate a fundamental redesign of child mental health and social services systems, so that vulnerable children can be given the care they need with dignity and warmth. We want all political parties to unite behind it.

Impoverished political imagination has sustained a depleted system that betrays vulnerable children and the practitioners dedicated to helping them. As a society, we have to put a stop to this waste and cruelty, and step up to the challenge of creating the best possible child protection and mental health system. Our children deserve it.

Philip Pullman
Francesca Simon
Anthony McGowan
Julia Jones
Louisa Young
Mary Hoffman
Patrick Ness
NM Browne
Kevin Brooks
Pippa Goodhart
Lucy Coates
Sally Nicholls
Michele Lovric
Terence Blacker
Matt Haig
Philip Ardagh
Catherine Johnson
Kate Lord Brown
Carol Drinkwater
Gwen Grant
Zizou Corder
Janie Hampton
Debi Gliori
Meg Rossof
Jill Dawson
Lydia Syson
Janie Hampton
Debi Gliori
Harriet Castor
Georgia Byng
Lynn Huggins-Cooper
Jill Dawson
Lauren Child
Sue Purkiss
Kate Saunders
Rachel Bradby
Melvyn Burgess
Beverley Naidoo
Samira Osman
Kath Langrish
Anne Rooney
Eleanor Updale
Catherine and Laurence Anholt
Jamila Gavin
Graham Gardner
Prodeepta Das
Lynn Reid Banks
Annemarie Young
Anthony Robinson
Alan Chatsworth

The French ban of the burka in public encourages some to call for the UK to follow suit

Sir, Britain should also ban the burka as France has done (report, July 2; “Veiled women suffer hostility on streets”, July 3; letter July 4). As a female I consider the growing number of black burkas (or MBOs, moving black objects, as the Americans called them in the Gulf War) a breach of my human rights.

It is terrible to think that women living in the UK are forced by men to wear these garments, an insult to women in this modern world. If people come here to get away from some dreadful country, they should assimilate here.

Josephine Drost

London E14

Sir, Women who wear the veil create a distance between themselves and others. The veil is antisocial. Being deaf I rely on being able to read lips. I have ignored women in the veil who have spoken to me essentially because I cannot hear what they say.

A friend who is a shop worker in the East End of London says she always has a slight panic whenever someone enters wearing a veil. She doesn’t know if it is a woman or a male robber who is using it as a disguise.

Andrew Hayward

London SE19

Sir, I am a middle-aged, middle class, well-educated white woman happy to live alongside anyone who behaves like a decent citizen no matter what their creed or colour. However, I would never attempt to communicate with a woman wearing a niqab because the mouth is covered. This prevents any dialogue. I would not know if she were talking to me; I could not lip-read and would have no idea if my approach was welcomed or rejected as the smile (or grimace) is covered. Is this a failing in me or a barrier created by the wearer of the niqab?

Vivienne Lloyd

Cambridge

Sir, Dr Irene Zempi’s experience on wearing a veil in Leicester would be as nothing to a western woman’s when wearing a summer dress or a cross in a Muslim state.

Richard English

South Petherton, Somerset

Sir, UK law regarding the covering of the face in public is dangerously contradictory and discriminatory. On the one hand, it fails to protect Muslim women by turning a blind eye to the unlawful tyranny of male relatives who often violently enforce the wearing of the veil. On the other, it discriminates against all men and all non-Muslim women who (merely because they are not Muslims) can be legally prevented from covering their faces in public. This practice makes a mockery of our laws relating to the identity of the individual, as well as the principle of equality before the law.

Stephen Porter

London NW6

Sir, In Europe we are used to seeing nuns wearing similar dress to the niqab with the important exception that we could always see their face. Does it occur to women who wear

a veil that we might feel uncomfortable in their presence? It is important in western culture to see the whole face.

Personally I do not mind what men or women wear as long as the whole face is visible. Those who choose to live here should be aware of the effect the niqab has. If I visited a Muslim country, I would expect to wear a scarf and a long skirt and be modestly dressed.

New antibiotics are no use without a global campaign to fight drug resistance

Sir, David Cameron is right to identify the threat posed by antibiotic resistance as a critical one, and to promote work to seek new antibiotics. However, that work will have only short-term impact unless there’s a coordinated, global campaign to prevent the development of further resistance to existing and new antibiotics. That means careful management of human treatment, but also an end to factory farming, which by its nature relies on heavy and often continuous antibiotic use to maintain stressed animals in crowded conditions, and ideal conditions for the development of new strains of pathogens that threaten both animal and human health.

Natalie Bennett

Leader, Green Party

Sir, Fifty years ago I was working in a laboratory in East Africa. I found that my young African assistant had set himself up as a specialist in the treatment of venereal disease in the local village, offering penicillin injections to his patients for the price of one shilling. He admitted that one ampoule and one needle served ten patients. Ironically, the local European-run clinic offered proper treatment free. I confiscated his stock of long out-of-date penicillin and bought my assistant a camera so that he could set himself up in the less dangerous profession of portrait photographer at one shilling a shot.

There is little doubt that similarly inadequate practices in antibiotic treatment have contributed to the problems we are now facing.

Walter Wolff

London W11

Sir, About 30 years ago a comprehensive article in The Times warned about the future dangers to health due to over-prescription of antibiotics. A pity the government of the day did not pay more attention.

Gerald Hooper

Poynton, Stockport

Sir, I was intrigued to see that patients are to blame for the antibody crisis (Thunderer, July 2) and yet the doctor (Theodore Dalrymple, a retired prison
doctor) writing the article admits to doing the same thing himself — ie, “I have never finished a course of antibiotics in my life” thereby contributing to the problem. If doctors really do know best (and they do), then it is a shame as a doctor, that he does not follow the specialist advice himself.

John Berry

Countesthorpe, Leics

Sir, Throughout the 1990s we ‘hosted’ teenage students from east Asia (the majority from China) who were here to learn English. It was usual for their parents to send them with plentiful supplies of antibiotics. They would take the tablets at the first sign of a cough or sniffle and put them away as soon as the symptoms departed.

I am told that in many countries no prescription is needed for even the most powerful antibiotics. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to learn that antibiotic-resistant diseases are increasingly encountered by medical professionals.

However, it seems disingenuous to assume that by restricting UK patients’ access to antibiotics, or even that of patients across Europe, the development of resistant bacteria will be slowed. A superbug can easily develop in people and in places where restricted access to antibiotics simply does not apply.

Heather Matthews

Cambridge

Some greenbelt sites are appropriate for homebuilding so the rules against it should be relaxed

Sir, As usual the RIBA has gone off at half-cock (“Build on green belt, top architects urge”, July 2). Lord Rogers has supported brownfield development; architects have produced exciting housing for difficult urban sites; and industrially scarred tracts (eg, Greenwich peninsula) are being developed for housing. So the RIBA should be supporting architects in creating architecturally and environmentally satisfying homes, and not urging future governments to go for the soft option of unprotecting green belts just to give pattern-book house builders access to more profitable sites.

Patrick Hogan, RIBA

Beaconsfield, Bucks

Sir, I own a site in the green belt, a former scrapyard now used for lorry storage; my neighbour runs a haulage company. Our vehicles have to pass a school in our village and cause problems for mothers and cars dropping off their kids, and vice versa. HGVs and children do not mix; the danger is obvious and both businesses would like to sell out for housing (the only realistic way to have the sites decontaminated and have enough money left over to relocate to a modern industrial estate). The local people are broadly in favour, but the local authority is not interested.

What a sad state the planning system has come to when a scrap yard is protected green belt, the school and village have heavy truck traffic with drivers at their wits’ end avoiding kids on bikes and the planners prefer to build on fields a few miles away.

Philip Justice

Underwood, Notts

There is no single explanation for the wide variation in the use of different cancer diagnostic tests

Sir, Cancer is not rare (Dr Mark Porter, July 1) with over 300,000 new cases and more than 150,000 deaths each year in the UK and rising. Its diagnosis is difficult and depends on clinical judgment and timely use of the right test. GPs have never had better access to such lab tests across the NHS. Yet there is a five-fold variation in the use of the PSA test for prostate cancer and a nine-fold variation in the use of CA125 for ovarian cancer. There is no single explanation for such variations. Appropriate use of these tests is more likely to improve the care of individual patients and the use of shrinking NHS resources than to harm or waste them (Dr Sarah Murray, letter, July 1).

Uniform and rapid communication of results of all tests from pathology labs requires the development of a National Laboratory Medicine Catalogue (a library of tests used by the NHS), whose NHS funding is at risk. It is vital to protect this project.

Dr Archie Prentice

Royal College of Pathologists

The Attorney General clarifies his views about prosecutions for rape and conviction rates

Sir, Contrary to your headline (July 3), I categorically did not say that more rape trials would be futile. In mentioning the conviction rate, I was merely highlighting that it is unwise to simply rely on one statistic in isolation to show progress, because we have to look at the full breadth of the work being done by the police, prosecutors and others. It is that work which will give victims of this terrible crime the confidence to come forward and know that justice will be done — that is what is most important.

I am wholly supportive of the work being done to ensure that victims feel they can come forward, and the work by the CPS to see whether there is anything that would improve the conviction rate. I am very pleased by the great efforts being made to bring more cases to court.

Dominic Grieve, QC, MP

Attorney General

Flytipping is partly encouraged by councils’ failure to operate legal rubbish removal services

Sir, I am concerned about the difficulty of disposing of rubbish connected to home improvements. I had 20 small bags of brick rubble last year. My recycling centre allowed me to take only two bags per week. I offered to pay for collection but there is no collection service for such waste. The rules at recycling depots are often draconian. No wonder homeowners are increasingly paying illegal flytippers to get rid of household items, at £100 a time.

Linda Miller

Dereham, Norfolk

Related Articles

• A villain on horseback who couldn’t ride so well

  04 Jul 2014

• Pensioners must start paying National Insurance to save the NHS

  04 Jul 2014

Related Articles

• A villain on horseback who couldn’t ride so well

  04 Jul 2014

• Call in the dogs for tighter airport security

  04 Jul 2014