Charles ELTON frs (1900–1991)
Ecologist
E. J. SCOVELL (1907–1999)
Poet
61 Park Town, Oxford
Charles Sutherland Elton was born in Withington, Manchester to Oliver Elton, literary scholar and translator, and his wife Letitia, née Maynard. He attended Liverpool College and read Zoology at New College, where he studied under Huxley. He began his research during pioneering expeditions to Spitzbergen in the 1920s, where he investigated the life-cycles of small mammal populations under Arctic conditions. His seminal survey of Animal Ecology (1927) created a new field. In 1932 he became the first editor of a Journal of Animal Ecology and established at Oxford a Bureau of Animal Population. From 1936 he was university reader in animal ecology and senior research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, posts he held until retirement. Elton was elected FRS in 1953; he received the Society’s Darwin medal in 1970 and the Linnean Society’s gold medal in 1967.
Elton sought to enhance the scientific basis for the study of animal behaviour, changing ‘natural history’ into ‘ecology’: the quantitative and experimental study of living organisms in relation to their environments. His work popularized notions like ‘food chain’ and later ‘ecosystem’. From 1949 Elton helped to found and sustain Nature Conservancy, the first official body to promote the cause of British wildlife. ‘Conservation', he already believed, ‘should mean the keeping or putting in the landscape of the greatest possible ecological variety’: a strikingly modern formulation. By the 1940s his local base was Wytham Woods (which had been gifted to the University), where he set up the first long-term research projects. His field diaries from that period, recently made available online, are a key source for the history of ecology as well as models of meticulous observation. Elton’s book Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (1958) founded another sub-discipline; while his Pattern of Animal Communities (1966) brought a summation of his achievements.
© by courtesy of Rob Elton
Edith Joy Scovell was born in Sheffield to Canon Frederick Scovell and his wife Edith Anne, née Hall, a New Zealander. After boarding at Casterton School, she went up as a scholar to Somerville College, Oxford, and read Classical Moderations, then English. She wrote poetry from her undergraduate years at Somerville up to her death. Her first collection Shadows of Chrysanthemums was published in 1944 followed by three other collections at considerable intervals. The Space Between was published as late as 1982. She accompanied her husband to Central and South America and the West Indies as a recorder and field researcher, and many of her poems contain minutely observed details of the natural world exquisitely captured. She was much admired by fellow poets and anthologists such as Geoffrey Grigson, Philip Larkin, and more recently by Andrew Motion. Her Collected Poems, published by Carcanet, came out in 1988 and she received the Cholmondeley award in late recognition of her achievement. She was a very private person who did not seek celebrity.
She had married Charles Elton in 1937 and from 1949 they lived at 61 Park Town where Charles tended the community gardens.
61 Park Town is the house immediately to the left of the arch. The blue
plaque can be glimped on the right-hand side of the house, near the back.
Sources:
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Charles Elton article by Kitty Paviour;
E. J. Scovell article by Anne Ridler
The plaque was unveiled at 61 Park Town on 8 June 2024. Professor Caroline Pond gave the tribute to Charles Elton. A tribute to E. J. Scovell by Professor Michael Schmidt was read out by the poet Isabella Mead. Among those attending were Cllr Tiago Corais (Deputy Lord Mayor), Dr Rob Elton (son), Mrs Wilma Elton, and other family members, scientists, and Park Town residents.
Photographs taken at the unveiling ceremony:
- Professor Robert Evans (Chairman of the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board) making the first speech in the Park Town community garden prior to the unveiling
- The unveiling of the plaque by Professor Caroline Pond and Dr Rob Elton
- Members of the Elton & Scovell families with the plaque
- Dr Elton, Professor Pond, and Isabella Mead, flanked by Cllr Kellie Hinton (Chair of South Oxfordshire District Council) and Cllr Tiago Corais (Deputy Lord Mayor of Oxford)
Speeches:
- Tribute to Charles Elton by Professor Caroline Pond
- Tribute to E. J. Scovell by Professor Michael Schmidt (read at the ceremony by Isabella Mead)
Oxford Mail, 14 June 2024: “Blue plaque honours Oxford ecologist and poet wife”
Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board
CHARLES ELTON FRS
1900–1991
Father of animal ecology
Conservationist
E. J. SCOVELL
1907–1999
Poet and wife
Lived here
1949–1992
Department of Biology,
University of Oxford
