Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, vol. 97 (2004), pp. 249-254 
Wiltshire and Other Things in Common: 
Sir Peter Scott CH CBE DSC FRS (1909-1989) 
and Bernard Venables MBE (1907-2001) 
by Brian Edwards 
The Wiltshire associations of two well known twentieth-century artists and environmentalists are explored and illustrated. 
Wiltshire is not a place that springs to mind 
alongside the names of Peter Scott and Bernard 
Venables. Both were outstanding individuals, 
widely respected for many things beyond their 
foremost international reputations as artists. As 
well known conservationists and writers, they 
influenced generations of countryside enthusiasts 
and lovers of natural history; but they each had 
‘ many achievements besides. 
Renowned for founding the Wildfowl and 
Wetlands Trust and instrumental in founding the 
World Wide Fund for Nature, Scott was of course 
famously the son of the ill-fated polar explorer 
Captain Scott. He also won the DSC as a wartime 
gunboat commander, gained an Olympic Bronze 
medal for single-handed dinghy sailing, was 
skipper of an America’s Cup yacht, and became a 
British Open Gliding Champion and a competition 
ice skater. Scott’s writings, radio broadcasts and 
television programmes made him a household 
name that was inevitably linked with Slimbridge 
where he established the Wildfowl and Wetlands 
‘Trust in 1946. 
Venables, like Scott, was an avid schoolboy 
angler who had also gratuitously graduated from 
the time-honoured traditional self-taught school 
of stick, string, and pin. Primarily recalled as 
author-illustrator of the most widely influential 
best selling angling book of all time, Mr Crabtree 
Goes Fishing, Bernard Venables has been described 
without exaggeration as an adventurer and with 
genuine diastrophic esteem as the ‘Venerable 
Venables’. It seems quite incredible to reflect upon 
Venables continuing to either fish, paint or sculpt 
— and some times enjoying all three activities — 
each day of the week at the age of 93. But it is even 
more extraordinary to learn that at an age when 
most had accepted state retirement and sought the 
fireside and slippers, his enthusiasm for David 
Livingstone’s explorations saw Venables 
undertake, partly on foot, a hazardous 1,200 mile 
trek down the Zambezi from its Congo source to 
Mozambique. 
A leading conservationist in the movement 
backed by the Anglers’ Co-operative Association to 
clean up Britain’s polluted waterways, Venables 
could also look back on being the record holder of 
the largest rod-caught shark, hooked in 1959, and 
experiencing two seasons in small open boats 
whaling with the hand-held harpoons of the Fayal 
Islanders in the Azores. If this doesn’t appear a 
comfortable apposition alongside the idea of 
conservation, it might also be recalled that Peter 
Scott was a ferreter and wildfowler in younger days 
and, while punting with Dick and Tim Maurice (of 
the ‘Marlborough Doctors’) at Manton, perfected 
the capture of Graylings by striking them harpoon- 
style with the pole. 
Venables and Scott were not’ only 
contemporaries of similar age, but they were also 
Mount Pleasant, The Cartway, Wedhampton, Devizes SN10 3QD 
