Hugh Brazier: 1953-2026

I first met Hugh Brazier nearly 57 years ago when I started at Bristol Grammar School. Hugh was already there and neither of us might have guessed that we would remain in touch as friends all that time nor that we would both spend much of our time engaged in birds, wildlife and the environment.

Hugh was several years older than me and I probably wouldn’t have got to know him were it not for the school Field Club – a birdwatching club masquerading (rather badly) as a natural history society. Every other Sunday in term we would gather back at school and a minibus full of teenage boys would be taken to local birding spots such as Chew Valley Lake, Brean Down, the Somerset Levels and Slimbridge by two teachers Mr (Derek) Lucas and Mr (Tony) Warren.  There were some more distant trips to mid-Wales, the Solway and North Norfolk and some after-school meetings of talks by ourselves but also by the likes of Eric Ennion.

I’m not sure we knew how lucky we were to have these opportunities but we did relish them and we learned how to identify birds but also how to agree and disagree with each other and still remain friends.  Hugh and I attended a Field Club reunion in 2015 (see Ex Spinis Uvas, and The Present was our Future then), and Hugh wrote a guest blog here about those schooldays, Not the BTO Winter Thrush Survey).

When I went up to Cambridge University Hugh was already there, ringing at Wicken Fen, reading English at Sidney Sussex (he got a first) and the Undergraduate Secretary of the, then, Cambridge, now Cambridgeshire, Bird Club.

After university, Hugh was off to Ireland and was a librarian at Trinity College Dublin and the College of Surgeons. Hugh was able to engage with seabird ringing in Ireland and he visited many of the big seabird colonies out West but on a visit I made in August 1979 he ringed a juvenile Robin in his garden. I know it was 27th August as it was the day that Lord Mountbatten was assassinated elsewhere in Ireland. Hugh became the second (and, to date, longest serving), editor of Irish Birds, the journal of what was then the Irish Wildbird Conservancy and is now BirdWatch Ireland. And it was in Ireland that Hugh and Caroline (another librarian) met and became a couple.

Work eventually brought Hugh and Caroline back to the UK in the early 2000s. He had gone to Ireland as a bachelor with a yearning for seabird colonies and come back a father (of Owen and Ruth), husband, dinghy racer, but still an enthusiast for wildlife and ringing, all wrapped up in a soft Irish accent. By now Hugh was a freelance copy editor of technical books. Initially he concentrated on (rather dull, I think) medical text books but soon established a reputation for bringing a lot to ornithological and ecological works. He edited books published by Bloomsbury, William Collins and Pelagic and written by such luminaries as Prof Ian Newton FRS and Prof Nick Davies FRS as well as many others covering a wide range of ecological, evolutionary and conservation subjects.

I was privileged to have Hugh edit three of my books because not only did he know a lot about spelling, grammar and punctuation but also about birds, ecology and science and it meant that the person making suggestions for change was a friend with excellent knowledge and judgement. Authors who once benefited from Hugh’s help sought him out again and again and publishers realised that he lifted a book to a higher level.  One publisher described Hugh thus “As a copyeditor, he was peerless and helped shape numerous [of our] books. All authors he dealt with commented on how useful the process had been and how much they’d enjoyed a part of the book writing process they hadn’t particularly looked forward to.”.

Hugh was an author himself, with his sister Jan, and they wrote a clever book together – click here.

Hugh was an identical twin and his brother Andrew died of a heart condition in his late twenties which meant that Hugh lived for about 45 years with the knowledge that his heart might let him down in the end. But medical care, and the help of a Left Ventricular Assist Device, meant that Hugh was with us for longer than might have been expected.

In recent years Hugh and I kept in touch through meeting in London, and at Bird Fairs, as well as him suggesting corrections to my texts. We had planned to attend the BTO Conference in Northampton at the end of February together, and he would have stayed a couple of nights with us too, but that was not to be. Last week at the ceremony to celebrate Hugh’s life there were friends from his schooldays (some of whom weren’t birdwatchers!), friends from university days, friends from Ireland, friends from sailing, friends, relatives and more. The most common words used to describe Hugh were funny and kind, both of which he was, but I’d add wise and principled as well.

Hugh had the last word, he left a message for all of us, Caroline, Owen and Ruth and everyone else, to act to stop the world becoming a worse place.

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