TONY SOPER, BBC BIRDWATCHING AND WILDLIFE PIONEER WHO CO-PRESENTED ANIMAL MAGIC IN THE 1960S
Tony Soper, the naturalist and broadcaster, who has died aged 95, was a co-founder, with Desmond Hawkins, of the BBC’s Natural History Unit; he was also its first wildlife cameraman and became its first film producer, making scores of wildlife films that brought the beauty and majesty of the natural world into people’s living rooms.
In the 1980s he devised and anchored the live television Birdwatch programmes (the forerunner of Springwatch), and presented the film series Discovering Birds and Beside the Sea as well as the long-running environmental series Nature on BBC Two; later he became a pioneer of wildlife expedition cruising, taking small vessels on birdwatching trips and lecturing on everything from seaside tripper-boats to cruise liners.
He was also the author of a dozen wildlife books, including the monographs Owls and Penguins. His Bird Table Book, first published in 1965, became a best-seller, helping not only to fuel a rapid growth in organisations like the RSPB but also stimulating the manufacture of bird food, tables and boxes to grow into what is now a multi-million-pound business.
Soper’s Bird Table Book ran to numerous revised editions to take in the latest designs in tables, feeders and bird-boxes, but when it was first published, he recalled, “no siskin had ever taken a peanut, so far as we know. Now siskins are two-a-penny on the bird feeders, joining reed buntings and lesser spotted woodpeckers, and also ring-necked parakeets and other exotic creatures. Even little egrets threaten to invade the garden pond.”
Tony Soper was born in Southampton on January 10 1929 and brought up in Plymouth, where his father Bert worked as a wharfinger and warehouseman, and his mother Ella, née Lythgoe, belonged to the Townswomen’s Guild.
His parents were not particularly interested in the natural world, but one of the dockers with whom his father worked was a keen birdwatcher who would take the young Tony on expeditions in his punt on Plymouth Sound.
Tony was educated at Devonport High School for Boys, before joining the BBC as a trainee studio manager. He recalled that, when he first arrived his hobby of bird-watching was regarded by his colleagues as eccentric, even absurd. Natural history programmes were then the responsibility of the Features office of the Western Region of the BBC, and when he joined there was only one staff member working on wildlife programmes.
Soper cut his teeth as the “nature boy” for Plymouth’s local evening news magazine programme, Spotlight, doing a piece on wildlife a couple of nights a week. He went on to work on Look, a studio-based wildlife series presented by Peter Scott.
The technical beginnings of the Natural History Unit, founded in 1957, were modest.
“We bought our first movie camera – an old Bolex clockwork version – at a shop in the centre of Bristol, and paid for it with petty cash,” Soper recalled. “It did the job, although it only ran for 30 seconds, so you had to press the button two seconds before the animal or bird you were filming did whatever it was going to do.”
But viewers loved it. Armand and Michaela Denis’s weekly On Safari programme became a great hit, while another couple, Hans and Lotte Hass, caused a sensation in the late Fifties when they took their camera underwater in a British television first, revealing the fascinating world of the oceans to a nation that had only just emerged from the austere days of rationing.
Soper became a familiar face on television as co-presenter with Johnny Morris of Animal Magic during the 1960s, and he went on to present many other wildlife programmes. Today the unit which Soper founded is a vital BBC brand, employing more than 200 people, responsible, among other things, for the popular Springwatch and Autumnwatch series.
Series such as Life on Earth (1979), The Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006), hosted by Sir David Attenborough and enhanced by the advent of high definition (HDTV) technology, have drawn millions of viewers worldwide, becoming huge money-spinners for the corporation.
From the mid-1960s Soper worked freelance and, in parallel with his work for the BBC (he also made films for National Geographic), he led film crews and parties of wildlife tourists to such exotic locations as the Galapagos Islands, the Florida Everglades, Africa, South America, Alaska, the Arctic, Antarctic (he crossed the dreaded Drake Passage well over 100 times), and most countries in western Europe.
Lecturing on an ocean liner off the coast of Alaska in 1986, he spotted a family of humpback whales feeding, precipitating a mini-stampede to the rails by the 700 passengers and many of the 400 crew members on board. “I would never have believed it, but the liner began to list,” he recalled.
Soper’s other books included field guides to the Arctic and the Antarctic, The National Trust Guide to the Coast, Oceans of Birds, The Shell Book of Beachcombing and, most recently, The Northwest Passage and, in 2020, The Northeast Passage: A guide to the seas and wildlife islands of Arctic Siberia.
An enthusiastic diver and small-boat sailor, who listed as his recreation in Who’s Who “watching the garden pond”, Tony Soper was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and in 2002 was presented with the Peter Scott Memorial Award by the British Naturalists’ Association
He married, in 1971, Hilary Brooke, a wildlife painter, who survives him with their two sons.
Tony Soper, born January 10 1929, died September 18 2024
2024-09-19T12:41:40Z dg43tfdfdgfd