Helen Brotherton

Without 93-year-old Helen Brotherton, Brownsea Island would be a playground for the rich instead of the wildlife haven we know from Autumnwatch, writes Martin Barber.

Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour has a long and varied history dating back to at least 500BC, but it was during the early 1960s the island was first secured as the home for wildlife that thousands of people hold in affection today. Helen Brotherton, 93, rallied the people of Poole to help secure the island against commercial development when it came onto the market in 1963.

At the time plans were mooted to turn Brownsea into a playground for the rich with the introduction of a marina and luxury homes, but Helen was determined it should remain a haven for wildlife.

Love affair with nature

Born in Lincolnshire in 1914, Helen moved to the Midlands just a few weeks later and grew up in Lemington. Her love affair with nature began almost immediately. At the start of the 1940s she worked in Norfolk to teach at the Norwich School for Girls, specialising in natural history - but at the end of the Second World War it was time to head south to Dorset.

"It was madly exciting to me to go round and find things like smooth snake and sand lizard, thing I had never seen before," she says. "And we had red squirrels in the garden in Canford Cliffs." Helen started to enjoy her life on the south coast, spending her days botanising and watching the wildlife - which including many happy hours on Brownsea.

At the time, visits to the island were not to be shouted about. It belonged to Mrs Bonham-Christie. A recluse, she'd banned all public access to Brownsea, but that didn't stop Helen. "I used to trespass on Brownsea," she says. "It was very, very hard work walking because it had been burnt and you were walking under rhododendron and over dead trees but it was very enjoyable."

Following the death of Mrs Bonham-Christie in 1961, her grandson gave the Island to the Treasury in lieu of death duties. The National Trust agreed to take over the responsibility for Brownsea, but only if an endowment of £100,000 was raised.

Securing Brownsea for wildlife

Helen swung into action, getting the people of Poole to pledge money to secure the island's future as a place where wildlife would come before profit. Within the first week of her campaign £10,000 had been raised and the National Trust agreed to take Brownsea under their wing. It was also the start of what we now know as the Dorset Wildlife Trust, which today has 25,000 members.

It was a learning experience all round as Helen and volunteers started to manage the habitats on Brownsea to help the wildlife flourish. "The peacocks were horrified and flew up into the trees," she remembers. "When we got sika deer they stood and looked at you and didn't feel alarmed and birds were the same.

"There was a thing call a green sandpiper and that just stood and look at you as they'd never seen people where they were from in the far north. The robins had never seen people and had never been fed and didn't know what breadcrumbs were. It was that starving winter [1962/63] and it must have been desperately hungry. Quite a lot of things lived on in that winter, there were things alive that were dead all over the county, quite a lot of little birds as there are hot springs under Brownsea."

Wildlife champion

Helen has been championing wildlife all her life. Now president of the Dorset Wildlife Trust and founder of the Portland Bird Observatory, she's a keen supporter of programmes like Autumnwatch.

"I like to think about other people sharing some of the pleasure we've had, as we've had endless pleasure," she says. "If people get pleasure out of wildlife then they are going to be more careful about it. So I've decided even if it's going to make a certain amount of disturbance, I'm very glad you've come and I do hope people will enjoy looking at it and feel we must do something about whatever is needed at the time.

Wildlife education

Helen Brotherton doesn't get to Brownsea quite so much now, but it's never far from her heart. Each day she watches the island's wildlife come and go from her home overlooking Brownsea in Poole Harbour. Her love affair with nature started as a young girl, but in her eyes it's never too late for people to learn about the environment, its habitats and the wildlife to be found within it.

"It sounds presumptuous, but the answer is education, education, education. The more they know the more interesting they become," she says. "For instance I told a keen gardener that wasps cut up caterpillars and take them home to feed the children. They'd gardened all their life and they'd never seen that.

"Instantly they start looking round and having seen what wasps are up to, then they come back and tell you something else, a green woodpecker licking up ants. If you can just get them on to something, they progress. You might find different pleasure in colour or sound and you get it all with natural history, or what ever you like to call it. It's good for everything and if you know about it, you don't harm it."