R. S. R. Fitter
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Life
Fitter was born in London, England, on 1 March 1913 and was educated at Eastbourne College and the London School of Economics. He was the only son of Sidney and Dorothy Fitter.
In 1938 he married Alice Mary (Maisie) Stewart (died 1996) and they had two sons and a daughter.
He was recruited to the Institute for Political and Economic Planning in 1936, and in 1940 moved to the social research organisation Mass-Observation to investigate civilian morale for the Ministry of Information.
During the Second World War he worked at the Operations research section of the RAF Coastal Command. During this time he worked for two hours each evening on a comprehensive urban natural history of London, which was published in May 1945 as London's Natural History, his first book.
After the war in 1945 he was appointed secretary of the Wildlife Conservation Special Committee of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, which made proposals for nature conservation as part of the reconstruction after the war.
In 1946, Fitter became assistant editor of The Countryman and moved from London to Burford, Oxfordshire. "With the publication of The Pocket Guide to British Birds (1952), illustrated by R.A. Richardson, Fitter became a bestselling author." In later life he moved to Great Shelford, Cambridge.
He died in Cambridge on 3 September 2005, survived by his children.
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Work
Fitter wrote many books and was active in various areas relating to nature and conservation. His wife Maisie was a colleague and collaborator on many of his researches. They were joint authors of The Penguin Dictionary of British Natural History (1967).
His son, Alastair Fitter, is a professor of biology at the University of York. They collaborated on three books: Guide to the Countryside (1984); Field Guide to the Freshwater Life of Britain and NW Europe (1986); and Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland (2003). In 2002 father and son jointly authored a paper in Science analysing the changing phenology of plant flowering times due to global warming.
He wrote the Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds (1952), which started a series of field guides by various authors, setting a style which was helpful to the inexperienced observer by the way it was organised and explained, placing short texts alongside pictures. This had birds grouped according to habitat, size and colour, rather than the biological classification which traditional books had done. His Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers (with David McClintock, 1956) had pictures grouped by colour for easier identification. His Fontana Wild Flower Guide (1957) showed which plants might be found in different counties.
He was heavily involved with nature conservation organisations including the Council for Nature, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society (now Fauna and Flora International) where he was Honorary Secretary. He also served on the councils of the RSPB and the British Trust for Ornithology, and founded the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Naturalists' Trust. In 1968 he was one of the founders of the British Deer Society, which aimed to help with study, management and control.
He was also involved in the search for the Loch Ness Monster, being a director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau.
Honours
- Order of the Golden Ark in the Netherlands (1978)
- Peter Scott Medal from the British Naturalists' Association (1998)
- Christopher Cadbury Medal from the Royal Society for Nature Conservation.
In 2008 the British Naturalists' Association instituted a Richard Fitter Memorial Medal which is awarded annually to an individual who is a dedicated active field naturalist.
Hobbies
Fitter collected 'bird inn signs.' He wrote about his hobby in the Birmingham Daily Post, published Tuesday 22 March 1955. Fitter wrote that "I just note them down in my diary whenever I see them. I started during the second winter of the war, as a kind of light relief from the somewhat grim preoccupations of those days." By 1955 Fitter had several hundred signs in his collection of some 38 different bird species. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000619/19550322/326/0015