Brothers in awe

Cherry and Richard Kearton were blessed with that peculiarly British spirit of adventure.

For the two brothers, who together would turn natural history photography and filmmaking into an art form, there was no obstacle that couldn’t be overcome with a tweed jacket, a length of rope and a pair of stout waking boots; no appetite that couldn’t be satisfied by a round of potted meat sandwiches and a pork pie.

Theirs was a journey which began in the village of Thwaite in the Yorkshire Dales and which by the time it came to an end nearly 70 years later had taken in the African savannah, the Australian outback and pretty much every corner of the British Isles. It would also sow the seeds of inspiration in a young David Attenborough. Not bad for the sons of a gamekeeper who received only the most rudimentary formal education and grew up in relative poverty.

“It is quite an incredible story,” says Colin Harding, curator of photographic technology at the National Media Museum, home to a small, but significant collection of the Keartons’ equipment and work. “Richard was born in 1862 and by the time Cherry came along 11 years later, his elder brother had already developed a thirst for nature. When he was just nine-years-old, Richard had fallen and dislocated his hip while climbing a tree to look at a bird’s nest and for the rest of his life he walked with a pronounced limp. Not that it dissuaded him from doing what he loved most. By the time he was 17 he was a sheep farmer, a fanatical birdwatcher and an accomplished photographer.”

As David Attenborough’s latest series Africa has shown, capturing animals on camera is a tricky business and is as much about patience as it is about state of the art cameras. In the Victorian age it was an almost impossible task. “You can’t ask an otter to stand still and, until the arrival of the Kearton brothers, most photographers what you tended to get was stuffed animals set in their native landscape,” says Colin. “It sounds a little odd, but that’s the way it was. However, it was Richard who noticed that birds seemed to take very little notice of other animals and it struck him if you could fashion some sort of camouflage it might be possible to get a better close up.”

Never one to sit on idea. Richard and Cherry began making their own photographic hides, some shaped as cows, others as trees. At other times they displayed Heath Robinson ingenuity, lashing together a few sticks of bamboo into giant tripods, which could only be operated by one brother standing on the shoulders of the other.

“It all looks pretty primitive to modern eyes,” says Colin. “But what they lacked in technology they made up for in boundless enthusiasm. However, quite how they managed to take some of the photographs they did is quite incredible. The equipment they did have was not only very heavy, but also very delicate. Back then cameras required glass plates, which by their nature are very fragile. Yet the risk of breaking very expensive lenses didn’t stop the Kearton brothers dangling off cliff edges or climbing up sheer rock faces.”

In the mid 1880s Richard left Yorkshire to take up a job in London with publishers Cassell and Company and he was joined by Cherry a few years later. Together the brothers collaborated on a series of nature books, including British Birds’ Nests (1895) and Wild Life at Home (1898). Their reputation among natural history academics grew as did their popularity with the public, who were able to vicariously live out their own dreams of boy’s own adventures through the Keartons’ expeditions.

“We have slept for nights together in empty houses and old ruins,” wrote Richard in a preface to one of their books. “Descended beetling cliffs, swum to isolated rocks, waded rivers and bogs, climbed lofty trees, lain in wet heather for hours at a stretch, tramped many weary miles in the dark...endured the pangs of hunger and thirst and the torturing stings of insects, waited for days and days together for a single picture – yet such is the fascination of our subject we have endured all these and other inconveniences with the utmost cheerfulness”

With the advent of moving pictures in the early years of the 20th-century, the Kearton brothers really hit their stride. The decades which followed saw Cherry travel to some of the most far-flung reaches of the world, capturing on film the kind of creatures most Britons had only read about in books. Out in Africa he faced innumerable dangers, but it was back on home soil that his art brought him the closest to death.

Having persuaded aeronautical entrepreneurs Arthur and Percival Spencer to reserve him a seat in one of their airships, on May 4, 1908 Cherry took off from the grounds of a London gas works. The idea was to circle St Paul’s Cathedral before making a gentle descent. Cherry had, unsurprisingly, arranged for a cine camera to be fixed to the airship with the hope of capturing a bird’s eye view of the capital for posterity. However, the expedition nearly ended in disaster when some several thousand feet up a fuel pipe fractured and the engine stalled.

It was something of a miracle not only that Cherry and the rest of the crew scrambled from the wreckage unhurt, but that the footage was also intact and received its first screening the following day. In truth, it was just one of a long list of his accomplishments which also included first man to record a motion picture of a wild bird, first man to film tribeswomen in their native Africa and arguably being one of the world’s very first conservationists.

“You have to remember that back then the closest people had come to a lion was either in a circus or seeing a stuffed specimen in the local museum, elephants did tricks and penguins swam around pools,” says Colin. “It was also an era when exotic animals were seen as sport. They were fair game to be shot at and most people only wanted them for their fur and ivory.”

In 1909 Cherry was on the Serengeti plains when American president Theodore Roosevelt went on his much publicised African safari.

The aim of the trip was to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and by the time the party headed back to the US, 512 had been killed, including 17 lions, 20 rhinos and 11 elephants. It was a death toll which no doubt sat uncomfortably with Cherry whose preferred souvenir was reels of footage.

“Cherry was what we would now call a conservationist,” says Colin. “Unlike many wildlife photographers of the day he did not approve of big game hunting as a sport. As the British Journal of Photography put it, he steadfastly put the camera before the gun.”

By the 1920s Cherry had moved from behind to in front of the camera. He proved a natural on screen, so much so his 1926 film With Cherry Kearton in the Jungle was chosen for a Royal Command performance. Charismatic and deeply enthusiastic about his work, it is little wonder that when Sir David Attenborough saw Kearton giving a lecture on wildlife filmmaking he was inspired to follow in his footsteps.

“Certainly in terms of affecting his audience, including small boys like me, he was out there on his own,” said the now legendary presenter when asked a couple of years ago about his own heroes. “He was a freelance performer. He had a passion for wildlife, but he had to sell it to an audience – and he sold it through his own personality. The ability to get the shots was the big thing.

“What Cherry Kearton did was to get the shots – he always got amazing shots.”

Sir David visited the National Media Museum while filming his series Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild.

He was there principally to reacquaint himself with the kind of cameras he had used when starting out in his career, but hearing of its Kearton collection he couldn’t help but be distracted for a while.

“So much has changed when it comes to the filming and photographing of natural history,” says Colin. “But no matter what technology you have, if you don’t have patience, lots of patience you might as well give up before you even start.”

Richard Kearton died in 1928 and Cherry in 1940, collapsing in the street outside Broadcasting House where he had just recorded yet another wildlife film for the BBC. It was the end of a remarkable story.

“They say don’t they never work with children or animals,” says Colin. “Thankfully for the rest of us the Kearton brothers did and the results were simply groundbreaking.”