Tessa Boase

I’m a journalist and and English Lit graduate. I love a good story.

I also relish the process of research. There’s no more exhilarating way to spend the day than at the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell, faced with a green baize tray full of tightly folded documents covered in spidery Victorian ink. This mining of the past is addictive ⁠— for where does a history writer stop? Every detail seems to add to the picture; details that are then all too often cut in the book’s editing process. But at least you know.

I know, for example, that the police officer who arrested feather washer Alice Battershall for stealing two ostrich plumes in 1885, was a 27-year-old ex-butcher. I also know that P.C. Wackett was subsequently found swearing, idling with a woman and drunk while on duty, and that his pay was docked several times before being struck off, on 9 May 1901, with “chronic rheumatism and bad feet.”

Was all this relevant to young Alice’s arrest? Perhaps not, but it made it feel all the more real, rather than just a line in a Guildhall ledger. This process of peeling back the onion skin layers is one of the great joys of archival research. Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather involved many such moments.

I’m often asked how I came across the obscure story of the RSPB’s origins. The answer lies in an old family photograph of a beach scene in Cornwall, taken on a chilly English summer’s day in 1913 (see above). My great grandfather-in-law, Captain Harold Glass, presides over a painfully uptight gathering of women and children ⁠— with one exception.

Standing at his side is a confident woman who looks as if she has flown in from another era. She wears on her head a hat topped with a pair of white wings. Every time I looked at this old photo, I was drawn to the hat. Who wore hats like this? What did the wings signify? Who had shot the bird, prepared the wings, fastened them to the hat? Were women wearing hats like this in other countries, or was it a peculiarly British thing?

In investigating the winged hat, I tumbled into a vanished world. The hat led me backwards, via old photographs, museum archives and fashion editorials, to the vexed question of animal rights, and to the conservation activists of the day. The “Feather Fight” was a burning women’s issue, every bit as emotive as the campaign for the vote. Here was a great, untold story.