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Global wildlife populations have halved in just 40 years” – WWF’s Living Planet Report 2014.
“Wildlife’s continued decline highlights the urgent need for sustainable solutions to humanity’s increasing demand on our natural resources,” reports WWF and ZSL in the Living Planet Report. Professor Ken Norris, Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London said: “The scale of biodiversity loss and damage to the very ecosystems that are essential to…
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Nature: friend or foe?
“Many people think that animals of all kinds can be neatly put into groups and labelled Friend, or Foe; or Harmless, or Harmful. Unfortunately, nature does not work like this, and there are very few creatures in this country that can be described as wholly beneficial or equally destructive… This business of friends and foes…
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It’s true, Maxwell Knight’s notoriety isn’t without controversy…
His skills were honed as a member of Rotha Lintorn-Orman’s British Fascists who imported the ideology of Fascism. He was the group’s spymaster and managed to assemble a large number of amateur sleuths, who reported regularly on Communist group activity. It was his success during these pre-war Fascist interventions that made him a must-have recruit for…
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Maxwell Knight – the spy-runner who loved nature
Maxwell Knight was the original “M”, a spy-runner who, with the help of young case officers, was responsible for counter-subversion and managed successfully to penetrate the British fascist movement. He was undeniably MI5’s most gifted agent-runner, and his sixth sense for enlisting would-be talented agents lead to him recruiting Joan Miller from within MI5 to…
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Why didn’t Maxwell Knight publish The Frightened Face of Nature?
Maxwell Knight was aware of the furore and criticism from chemical companies and others when Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring in 1962. Indeed, he credits her work in his unpublished manuscript. She wasn’t the only one in those years who drew attention to environmental problems and was criticised for not being “proper scientists”;…
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BIRD GARDENING – HOW DID IT START?
Knight the pioneer: How did ‘bird gardening’ become established in British life? Simon King reveals its origins in the ideas and writing of the famous WW2 spy catcher – none other than Maxwell Knight. The practice of putting out food for birds in gardens is more popular now than ever before, with more than half…
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Camberley Natural History Society’s Exhibition at Surrey Heath Museum – Photo blog
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How did ‘bird gardening’ become established in British life?
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Maxwell Knight’s cabinet featured in Cage & Aviary Birds publication:
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New Statesman: Cuckoos, le Carré, and conservation: the forgotten files of the real-life “M”
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The Guardian: Spectre of destruction: the lost manuscript of the real-life ‘M’
“Breaking open a locked cabinet belonging to Maxwell Knight, naturalist and spy, yields not Top Secret documents but a passionate scientific plea…” – Read Simon King’s article in the Guardian to learn more about the cabinet’s contents and the real-life M’s unpublished manuscript, The Frightened Face of Nature (28 October, 2015). Copyright: see acknowledgements
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M’s (Maxwell Knight) Spectre: The Frightened Face of Nature
During the 1960s Maxwell Knight – the real-life “M” – was working on a manuscript entitled The Frightened Face of Nature, snatching brief moments to record his thoughts on how man had treated nature so unfairly for the first fifty years of the twentieth century. The manuscript documented Knight’s greatest fears that, time was running…
