RSPB's Emily Williamson: Centenary of victory to be marked with statue

The four designs for the statue will be officially unveiled on 1 July

The "activist, feminist and bird lover" who founded the RSPB is to be honoured with a statue to mark the centenary of the protection act she campaigned for.

Emily Williamson founded the Society for the Protection of Birds in Manchester in 1889 and worked for years to get the 1921 Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act passed into law.

The legislation ended the 50-year fashion for elaborately plumed hats.

Four shortlisted designs for the statue will be unveiled on 1 July.

Hats with large exotic feathers were fashionable for women throughout the Victorian era

The Didsbury-based campaigner began her efforts by inviting her friends over for tea where she asked them to join her pledge to "wear no feathers".

Though it was an unpopular request, she founded the Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889, which merged with the London-based Fur, Fin and Feather Folk two years later.

The society, which boasted an almost entirely female membership, received the Royal Charter in 1904 and fifteen years later, won the victory it had originally been formed to achieve with the passing of the 1921 Act.

'Conservation story'

Andrew Simcock, chairman of the Emily Williamson Statue Committee, said a statue was needed as there was "so much to learn from Emily's story that people will find empowering, particularly at a time when we face such huge environmental challenges".

The designs will be created by four sculptors; Northamptonshire's Clare Abbatt, Essex's Billie Bond, Brighton's Eve Shepherd and Laury Dizengremel, who lives in France.

The unveiling of the sculptures will take place in Fletcher Moss Park, Mrs Williamson's former garden

Abbatt said her design would include both Ms Williamson and her great-great-niece, bird behaviour expert Prof Melissa Bateson, "looking to the skies [and] to the future", while Bond said her work featured the feathers, hats and birds that "were the most important part of the story".

Dizengremel said she wanted "people to have an emotional response to my sculpture of Emily" and Shepherd, whose design features a skirt made of birds, said her piece was about "telling the conservation story".

A spokeswoman for the committee said the designs for the statue of the "activist, feminist and bird lover" would be officially unveiled on the anniversary of the passing of the Plumage Act in Didsbury's Fletcher Moss Park, which was once Mrs Williamson's former garden.

The winning sculpture will be announced in November following a public vote.

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