The New Naturalist ‘credo’ promised that wild animals, birds and plants would be ‘portrayed in the full beauty of their natural colours, by the latest methods of colour photography and reproduction’ (this promise was quietly dropped once the colour content dropped to almost zero!). The phrasing sounds old-fashioned now, but in 1945 colour film was scarce, and so slow that it could only capture wildlife if it remained obligingly motionless. For the colour plates of Butterflies, published in 1945, live butterflies were said to have been photographed for the first time in colour against a realistic (but not necessarily natural) background.
The first New Naturalist titles were Butterflies by E. B. Ford and London’s Natural History by R. S. R. Fitter. This was to be a numbered series, and, since things never go exactly to plan, these were numbers 1 and 3. There was never any particular order to the titles. The reason why New Naturalist number 1 happened to be Butterflies was that it was the first book to be completed. London’s Natural History was not even on the original wish list. Its author, Richard Fitter, had been asked to write about the Thames Valley but said he preferred to do a book on London. There was, in fact, a fair amount of randomness to the whole process. Many planned books about the forthcoming National Parks or about bird habitats, or even major topics like fish or ferns, were never completed (or not until decades later). Sometimes the Board responded positively to a suggestion, for example for a title about bumblebees or the folklore of birds, especially in the early days when it seemed that the public was ready for almost any subject so long as it was attractively presented.
In the immediate postwar years the New Naturalists sold like hot cakes. Most of the first titles had initial print-runs of 20,000 or even 30,000, and so are still common (though in variable condition) in secondhand shops or on the internet. From about 1950, the sales slackened, partly because of the rising costs of printing, especially colour printing, and also, probably, because the series had lost its initial lustre and punch. The average print-run of titles published in the 1950s was only half that of the ‘40s, while the total sales of most of the new titles published after 1960 were in only four figures (and remain so today).
What, then, made this the longest-running and most highly regarded natural history series of them all? A good start was important, permeated by that messianic wartime vision of the future. The books had things to offer that were new and exciting: colour photography, new ways of seeing wildlife, most notably in the context of their homes and habitats, glimpses of the vast worlds of ecology and evolution behind the lives of familiar animals and plants. The books themselves were attractive and produced with care with hard-wearing buckram bindings, gold-blocking of the title and colophon, and the good printing and layout for which Collins was famous. Being numbered and in standard livery, they were collectible, and became more and more so as the titles accumulated. They were reasonably priced, at 16 shillings in 1945. They sat nicely in the hand and handled well, neither springing shut nor falling flat. They even (or is this just us?) smelled nice, of hayfields in late summer. And then there were the jackets …
The jackets. We come to it at last. The first New Naturalist jackets were bold, imaginative and quirky, quite outside the usual run of natural history book design. They lacked detail or line and yet there was something about them that struck the eye and invited the curious to take down the book and open it. If there was anything remotely like them in the bookshop, it certainly wasn’t on the natural history shelves. On each of the early titles, the letters ‘C&RE ‘appear, followed by the date. Who or what, some must have wondered, was C&RE? Let’s begin with that.
C&RE: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY
The letters C&RE on the New Naturalist book jackets stand for Clifford and Rosemary Ellis; their names are usually spelt out in full on the rear fly leaf. Today these jackets are their best-known work, though book lovers may know some of their other jackets before and after the war, for the Collins Countryside series in the 1970s, or their design for John Betjeman’s Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Within the art world they are remembered more as innovative teachers, Clifford Ellis having run the Academy of Art at Corsham Court for a quarter of a century with his wife Rosemary as a leading member of the staff. But information about them is quite hard to come by. There is no biography, and very little about them on the internet. I attempted a short biography of ‘C&RE’ (as I shall call them) and their work for my book, The New Naturalists (1995), with the help and cooperation of Rosemary and her two daughters, Penelope and Charlotte. This more detailed account builds on that foundation, and, once again, I have relied heavily on information and comments from the family.
Clifford and Rosemary Ellis were at once husband and wife and an artistic partnership. Their collaboration began in 1931, the year of their marriage, and subsequently almost all their published freelance work is signed jointly. By the time the New Naturalist jackets were designed they had taken to using the cipher c&re to express their joint authorship. Such consistent use of a joint cipher is unusual, and needs a little explanation. The initials were put in alphabetical order, not out of any sense of seniority. In the 1930s and ‘40s, ‘r’ sometimes preceded ‘c’ to indicate where she was the initiator and had carried out most of the work. Penelope Ellis explained that its point was that they considered their freelance design work to be the product of two minds ‘collaborating in flexible harmony’. They seemingly never discussed with a third party who did what, and their work on book jackets was usually done behind closed doors. Both were distinctive artists and respected each other’s styles and preferences. The handwriting on the surviving New Naturalist artwork jackets is invariably Clifford’s (as is most but not all of the correspondence), but it would be wrong to assume that the hand that held the brush was normally his. The final artwork was only the last stage in a lengthy process of sketching and thinking, selecting and eliminating, and the creative impulse behind the design was, as they saw it, an equal joint effort. ‘c&re’ indicates a rare and complete fusion of creative thought.
Carting: two straining horses, carter and part of a hay wagon by Clifford Ellis, 1925. Sketch on rough paper in pencil and sepia wash (27.7 x 41.6 cm).
Clifford Wilson Ellis was born in Bognor, Sussex on 1 March 1907, the eldest of four children born to John and Annie Ellis. Artistic talent ran in the Ellis family. His father was a commercial artist, while his paternal grandfather, William Blackman Ellis, was not only a painter and naturalist but, for a time, a skilled commercial taxidermist. ‘Grandfather Ellis’ was also a countryman in the old-fashioned sense with a deep understanding of the land and its wildlife (in Clifford’s boyhood he kept a tame otter which was allowed to roam over part of his house in Arundel).
Another well-known artist in the family was Clifford’s ‘Uncle Ralph’, Ralph Gordon Ellis (1885–1963), a landscape painter and designer of inn signs. During his long career he designed hundreds of signs, especially for the Chichester-based Henty & Constable brewery. One of them, for ‘The Mayflower’ in Portsmouth, was the subject of a postage stamp in 2003. A blue plaque now marks his former home on Maltravers Street, Arundel. Around 1950, Clifford took his younger daughter, Charlotte, to Uncle Ralph’s studio, and she remembers him explaining to them both how inn signs are designed to make an impact from a distance, well above eye level, and how that was a very different matter from being seen close to, on the easel. Clifford, in turn, was to become fascinated by the way subjects are transformed when seen at different angles or against different backgrounds.
In 1916, his father having joined the Royal Engineers and been sent to France on active service, the nine-year-old Clifford