“We’ve been delighted by the warm response to this project, and to have been able to give some much-deserved recognition to such an important figure in our shared history”.
Lesley Hindley, Archivist, British Trust for Ornithology
The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) ran a series of outreach activities this year to raise awareness of bird photographer Emma Turner and the collections that their archive holds about her life.
Born in 1867, Emma Turner was not only pioneering in her techniques to achieve incredible photography but was also a trailblazer in the male-dominated field of ornithology. Indeed, Turner was the only woman among 11 signatories that announced the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology in The Times in 1933.
The project’s main outreach activity was the BTO Archives’ first-ever external exhibition, following Lesley Hindley’s appointment in 2022 as the Trust’s first archivist. The BTO archive is based in Thetford, Norfolk, but an opportunity arose to work with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT) visitor centre in Hickling as this is where Turner had spent much of her life on a houseboat. Teams on both sides collaborated to create exhibition panels exploring Emma Turner’s work and stories from her life.
The exhibition ran at Hickling centre from April to May and was then displayed at the BTO headquarters in Thetford for six weeks. Around 2000 people visited the centre while the exhibition was open. During its opening weekend, BTO Archives staff hosted a display of original documents, answering questions about the archive from both bird enthusiasts and casual visitors.
The BTO and NWT tapped further into the centre’s tourist audience by adapting some of the regular boat trips around the Norfolk Broads and dedicating them to learning about Turner. On one weekend, over 50 people took the archive-inspired ‘Lady of the Reeds’ water trail to learn more about the photographer’s life.
The team was also keen to engage the local community specifically. As well as distributing flyers in the area about the exhibition, they organised a talk at Hickling Barn Community Centre by James Parry, who had written a biography of Turner. Around 70 people bought tickets for the talk and enjoyed hearing about a piece of their local history that had previously been unknown to them.
Finally, to ensure that Emma Turner’s contribution to the local area was celebrated in the long term, BTO and NWT opened a new permanent interpretation panel at the Hickling Broad visitor centre, unveiled by Turner’s great-niece.
These successful outreach experiments have inspired the BTO archive to consider taking the exhibition panels to other locations and to create new exhibitions in the future. The project expanded the BTO archive’s reach beyond its Thetford base to other parts of the county and has given many more people a fascinating insight into Emma Turner, ornithology and the Norfolk Broads.