Plans for £100k statue of Manchester woman who founded RSPB

It is no flight of fancy. Councillor Andrew Simcock is to cycle 400 miles to help raise £100,000 for a statue. And he does have a successful track record when it comes to campaigning for women from Manchester who changed the world to be honoured.

The sculpture will be placed in Fletcher Moss Park, Didsbury, Manchester where the gardens are rich in birdlife and flora. Tree creepers, bullfinches, siskins, both song and mistle thrushes and the nuthatch are regular visitors.

The setting is fitting for a lasting reminder of a woman who founded what would become the largest conservationist charity in the UK. The woman, who matched the suffragettes for passion, was Emily Williamson.

Join our WhatsAp p Top Stories and Breaking News group by clicking this link.

The middle-class wife of a solicitor, Emily persuaded Victorian society ladies to flock to the avian cause. Their target was the excesses of the millinery trade in the 19th century.

Their disgust was at the mass slaughter required to satisfy the fashion for exotic feathers to decorate women's bonnets. Beautiful, vibrant birds, like the great crested grebe, kingfisher, heron the great and little egret, and owls, native to the UK, were in the sights of hunters for their attractive plumes.

In the 1880s feathers were the height of fashion. A single order of feathers placed by a London dealer during the period included 6,000 bird of paradise feathers, 40,000 hummingbird, and 360,000 from various East Indian species. The trade was worth £2m a year at its Edwardian peak ( the equivalent of £240m today) and London was its centre.

Emily, who lived at The Croft, now a café in Fletcher Moss Park, founded The Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889 to oppose the use of