The changing years of J K Stanford

Ornithologist, sportsman and Field correspondent, he was also a conservationist, whose pragmatic approach is still relevant today

- AP CURTIS

Given that, in 1942, JK Stanford was a lieutenant colonel with the Eighth Army fighting across the North African Desert in pursuit of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, he might have been forgiven for neglecting his writing. It was then, however, that he penned his most enduring work, The Twelfth. The tale of Colonel The Honourable George Hysteron-Proteron CB JP is as much a salient warning about taking the natural world for granted as it is a humorous satire on the world of shooting. The ghastly protagonist, who is unhealthily obsessed with shooting only the biggest of bags, is metamorphosed into a cock grouse. In this new form, he undertakes to thwart the Glorious Twelfth on the very moor he was due to shoot that year. This little book, which jovially recounts the events that unfold thereafter, rightly belongs in the canon of British sporting literature. This is often, however, the only aspect of JK Stanford’s life for which he is remembered, an injustice that ought to be redressed. Not only did he write beautifully but his paradigm of effective conservation is as valid in 2021, 50 years after his death, as it was innovative in his own lifetime.