David James BellamyOBE (18 January 1933 – 11 December 2019)[1] was an English academic, botanist, television presenter, author and prominent environmental campaigner in the UK and globally. His distinctive, energetic style of presenting became well known to UK television audiences in the 1970s and 1980s. Later in life, he made some sceptical statements about climate science.
Early and personal life
Bellamy was born at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London to parents Winifred May (née Green) and Thomas Bellamy on 18 January 1933.[2][3] He was raised in a Baptist family and retained a strong Christian faith throughout his life.[4] As a child, he had hoped to be a ballet dancer, but he concluded that his rather large physique regrettably precluded him from pursuing the training.[3]
Bellamy married Rosemary Froy in 1959, and the couple remained together until her death in 2018.[2] They had five children: Henrietta (died 2017), Eoghain, Brighid, Rufus, and Hannah.[4] A resident of the Pennines in County Durham,[3][6] Bellamy died from vascular dementia at a care home in Barnard Castle on 11 December 2019, at the age of 86.[2]
Scientific career
Bellamy's first work in a scientific environment was as a laboratory assistant at Ewell Technical College[7] before he studied for a Bachelor of Science degree at Chelsea.
In 1960 he became a lecturer in the botany department of Durham University.[8]
The work that brought him to public prominence was his environmental consultancy on the Torrey Canyon oil spill in 1967, about which he wrote a paper in the leading scientific journal, Nature.[9]
Publishing career and related
Bellamy published many scientific papers and books between 1966 and 1986 (see #Bibliography). Many books were associated with the TV series on which he worked. During the 1980s, he replaced Big Chief I-Spy as the figurehead of the I-Spy range of children's books, to whom completed books were sent to get a reward. In 1980, he released a single written by Mike Croft with musical arrangement by Dave Grosse to coincide with the release of the I-Spy title I Spy Dinosaurs (about dinosaur fossils) entitled "Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me?" (backed with "Oh Stegosaurus"). He performed it on Blue Peter wearing an orange jump suit. It reached number 88 in the charts.[10]
Promotional and conservation work
In the early 1970s, Bellamy helped to establish Durham Wildlife Trust, and remained a key player in the conservation movement in the Durham area for a number of decades.[11]
The New Zealand Tourism Department, a government agency, became involved with the Coast to Coast adventure race in 1988 as they recognised the potential for event tourism. They organised and funded foreign journalists to come and cover the event. One of those was Bellamy, who did not just report from the event, but decided to compete. While in the country, Bellamy worked on a documentary series Moa's Ark that was released by Television New Zealand in 1990,[12][13] and he was awarded the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal.[14]
In 2002, he was a keynote speaker on conservation issues at the Asia Pacific Ecotourism Conference.[16]
In 2015, David Bellamy and his wife Rosemary visited Malaysia to explore its wildlife.[16]
In 2016, he opened the Hedleyhope Fell Boardwalk, which is the main feature of Durham Wildlife Trust's Hedleyhope Fell reserve in County Durham. The project includes a 60-metre path from Tow Law to the Hedleyhope Fell reserve, and 150 metres of boardwalk made from recycled plastic bottles.[17]
Broadcasting career
After Bellamy's TV appearances concerning the Torrey Canyon disaster, his exuberant and demonstrative presentation of science topics featured on programmes such as Don't Ask Me along with other scientific personalities such as Magnus Pyke, Miriam Stoppard, and Rob Buckman. He wrote, appeared in, or presented hundreds of television programmes on botany, ecology, environmentalism, and other issues. His television series included Bellamy on Botany, Bellamy's Britain, Bellamy's Europe and Bellamy's Backyard Safari.[18] He was regularly parodied by impersonators such as Lenny Henry on Tiswas with a "gwapple me gwapenuts" catchphrase. His distinctive voice was used in advertising.[19]
Activism
In 1983, Bellamy was imprisoned for blockading the Australian Franklin River in a protest against a proposed dam.[16] On 18 August 1984, he leapt from the pier at St Abbs Harbour into the North Sea; in the process, he officially opened Britain's first Voluntary Marine Reserve, the St. Abbs and Eyemouth Voluntary Marine Reserve.[20] In the late 1980s, he fronted a campaign in Jersey, Channel Islands, to save Queens Valley, the site of the lead character's cottage in Bergerac, from being turned into a reservoir because of the presence of a rare type of snail, but was unable to stop it.[21]
In 1997, he stood unsuccessfully at Huntingdon against the incumbent Prime Minister John Major for the Referendum Party. Bellamy credited this campaign with the decline in his career as a popular celebrity and television personality. In a 2002 interview, he said it was ill-advised.[22]
He was a prominent campaigner against the construction of wind farms in undeveloped areas, despite appearing very enthusiastic about wind power in the educational video Power from the Wind[23] produced by Britain's Central Electricity Generating Board.
David Bellamy was the president of the British Institute of Cleaning Science, and was a strong supporter of its plan to educate young people to care for and protect the environment. The David Bellamy Awards Programme is a competition designed to encourage schools to be aware of, and act positively towards, environmental cleanliness. Bellamy was also a patron of the British Homeopathic Association, and the UK plastic recycling charity Recoup from 1998.[2]
Views on global warming
In Bellamy's foreword to the 1989 book The Greenhouse Effect,[24] he wrote:
The profligate demands of humankind are causing far-reaching changes to the atmosphere of planet Earth, of this there is no doubt. Earth's temperature is showing an upward swing, the so-called greenhouse effect, now a subject of international concern. The greenhouse effect may melt the glaciers and ice caps of the world, causing the sea to rise and flood many of our great cities and much of our best farmland.
Bellamy's later statements on global warming indicate that he subsequently changed his views. A letter he published on 16 April 2005 in New Scientist asserted that a large proportion (555 of 625) of the glaciers being observed by the World Glacier Monitoring Service were advancing, not retreating.[25]George Monbiot of The Guardian tracked down Bellamy's original source for this information and found that it was from discredited data originally published by Fred Singer, who claimed to have obtained these figures from a 1989 article in the journal Science; however, Monbiot proved that this article had never existed.[26] Bellamy subsequently accepted that his figures on glaciers were wrong, and announced in a letter to The Sunday Times in 2005 that he had "decided to draw back from the debate on global warming",[27] although Bellamy jointly authored a paper with Jack Barrett in the refereed Civil Engineering journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, entitled "Climate stability: an inconvenient proof" in May 2007.[28]
In 2008 Bellamy signed the Manhattan Declaration, calling for the immediate halt to any tax-funded attempts to counteract climate change.[29] He maintained a view that man-made climate change is "poppycock", insisting that climate change is part of a natural cycle.[30][31]
His opinions changed the way some organisations viewed Bellamy. The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts stated in 2005, "We are not happy with his line on climate change",[32] and Bellamy, who had been president of the Wildlife Trusts since 1995,[11] was succeeded by Aubrey Manning in November 2005.[33] Bellamy asserted that his views on global warming resulted in the rejection of programme ideas by the BBC.[30][34]
Recognition
Bellamy also held these positions:
Patron of Recoup (Recycling of Used Plastics), the national charity for plastics recycling
In 2013, Professor Chris Baines gave the inaugural David Bellamy Lecture at Buckingham Palace to honour Bellamy's 80th birthday.[54] A second David Bellamy Lecture was given by Pete Wilkinson at the Royal Geographical Society in 2014.[55]
^Bellamy, D.J.; Clarke, P.H.; John, D.M.; Jones, D.; Whittick, A. (1 December 1967). "Effects of Pollution from the Torrey Canyon on Littoral and Sublittoral Ecosystems". Nature. 216 (5121): 1170–1173. Bibcode:1967Natur.216.1170B. doi:10.1038/2161170a0. S2CID4201940.
^McKerrow, Bob; Woods, John (1994). Coast to Coast: The Great New Zealand Race. Christchurch, New Zealand: Shoal Bay Press. p. 77. ISBN978-0-908704-22-4.
^"Moa's Ark". NZ on Screen. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
