Peter has loved wildlife since a very young age and was able to turn this passion into a career of teaching others to love nature too.
Learning to love wildlife at an early age
I’m going to start at the beginning – what led me to Wensum Lodge. I am through and through a wildlife person: birds, butterflies, moths, the lot. And I was a tutor at Wensum Lodge.
People ask me where that interest came from. I’m getting asked that all the time. So I think I’ll start at the very beginning and explain. And the answer is, I don’t really know. It didn’t come from any person in particular, but as a child you were often given a wide variety of colourful books and the ones I gravitated towards were ones that were connected to nature. So from a very early age I was always interested in the outside world and the natural environment and I gravitated towards people who could help me along my road.
In the primary school we had a nature study class, which is something that maybe doesn’t occur these days. The teacher who taught this was my favourite teacher. I was completely on her wavelength because she was enthusiastic and I was already enthusiastic and I had a lot to learn. Then when I went into secondary school, once again, a very significant figure was the teacher who used to take us out on nature rambles and natural history rambles. We had a natural history society and again, I absolutely loved that. The teacher was particularly interested in birds, but he was interested in everything else as well. I kind of feel that I’m in his mould. I feel that, you know, birds are my focus, but I’m interested in the lot and interested in learning about everything.
The next person I met was a GP. I probably linked in with him via the teacher. Can’t remember exactly how, but he was very supportive. He would take me and one or two others out birdwatching. We would only have been about 13, 14 or 15. He would take us further afield. I come from the north west and we used to go up to the Solway Firth in Scotland and along the North Wales coast. He was a big figure in ornithology. He had various positions in societies that were actually at the forefront of the subject, which was a developing science; it still is. He was also a photographer and very kind man. He always had time for young people and sharing his knowledge and his love of nature.
Travelling and higher education
After I finished school I couldn’t settle into any kind of mainstream work. I tried, but this was all I really wanted to do. When I was still at school I came from the Wirral to Suffolk to do some volunteering at Minsmere Reserve in Suffolk, which possibly would have been the major nature reserve in the country, a real flagship reserve in connection with wildlife.
I then worked and travelled all over the world for several years in connection with bird projects and just bird watching. I wanted to go anywhere I possibly could, including some very inaccessible places such as Iran. I travelled around Alaska, and across the Sahara.
Then I thought I’d better get a qualification because the sort of work I’d been I’d been doing was basic, such as labouring and bar work, but working very long hours so I could earn lots of money to travel. I wanted to move on from this and ideally to continue as a bird teacher in some shape or form. So I came to Norwich to the University of East Anglia. There wasn’t a course in ornithology – and I don’t think I would have wanted to do one anyway because I can do all that research myself – so I did a course in anthropology which tied in very much with the travelling I’d done and some of the interesting experiences I’d had along the way.
We are getting towards Wensum Lodge here. I remember something my father said to me when he realised that I was obsessive about birds. I perhaps didn’t do other things that other teenagers would because it was all about birds. And as I’ve just explained, I was dogged about earning money so I could travel and bird watch. My father accepted that it was quite a nice interest to have, but he said ‘You have to bear in mind that birds and wildlife are very interesting, but people are too’. He might even have said people are more interesting! I said ‘Okay dad’, but I think probably through my life subsequently, I have very much enjoyed roles where I’ve been involved with people. If I can sort of combine the two by being a tutor and by being an enthusiast and encouraging other people to share in the same way as the teacher did with me, I feel that’s what I want to do.
At the end of university my intention had been to go to Australia, which is one place I hadn’t been. I was thinking that maybe this would be the place to go and operate as a tour operator in some shape or form and make a living out of it, but then I met my wife at university and we bought a house. We managed to put down some money for a mortgage and then it didn’t really seem appropriate to be a tour operator whereby you’d be away travelling all the time. So the compromise was that my wife used to come on the trips with me and we were both working.
I got a job in admin and accountancy, which paid the bills and it meant that we could go on holidays to places that I hadn’t been in the world. We continued going to Mexico, Venezuela and other places. Then we had our daughter and it became a little bit harder to travel to the more adventurous places when you have a young child. It was at that point I kind of switched tack. I’d earned enough money to be self-supporting and support the family so I was able to get away from the work which I didn’t enjoy. That was when I moved into the realm of adult education. I should explain when I was at university and I started running birdwatching classes I met somebody there who was teaching Latin American dancing and Portuguese and he had suggested to me that I offer a birdwatching class from an adult education centre. And that’s what I did at Wensum Lodge.
Working and teaching in Wensum Lodge
Straight away I enjoyed it and I’m still doing it now. That was would have been 1980 or 1981 and I’m still doing it nearly 45 years later. I did the evening classes while I was continuing to do other work. I knew some people in the field and managed to get a job. Unfortunately it was an admin job, but it was still interesting because I was meeting people at the various centres I worked at and I was the person who was there to help the tutors and to help the students.
This led me to Wensum Lodge where my role was better than the others I’d done because with them I’d been in an office really and just had to be available for the start and finish of the classes. At Wensum Lodge my role was being there on the desk in this lovely open plan environment. I loved the place when I went there and I was due to be running a residential ornithology course there, but unfortunately that coincided with the first cutback that I witnessed and the residential courses came to an end. There was accommodation at Wensum Lodge so people could come from different parts of the country and stay there and do courses. I never actually got to do that, but I did continue teaching my course there and elsewhere.
It was particularly nice teaching at Wensum Lodge though, because Wensum Lodge is a fantastic mishmash of interesting buildings. During the eight years that I was on the desk there in all sorts of different roles I was even involved on occasion with actually showing people around. I was always finding places, nooks and crannies or entire rooms that I’d never actually come across before. There were rooms underneath the ground. There was a fantastic bar full of atmosphere that really felt like it was hundreds of years old – which it was. There was a café down by the river and when I went there the place was absolutely vibrant. It was very important for a lot of people. It was their social life and it was an opportunity for them to learn something as well.
And the courses at Wensum Lodge were so varied – antiques restoration, wine tasting, dancing classes. I mean, just everything you can think of. There were lots of language classes both for people just wanting to learn a language or to get an accreditation. There were ones for people who actually wanted to go and do a GCSE or an A level and for others who didn’t. The range of subjects was very, very wide and all the rooms were interesting in their own way. I loved teaching in those rooms, they just had such a great feeling to them.
It was also wonderful from the point of view of spending time with these tutors who had all sorts of interesting specialisms. The colleagues who I was working with were also interesting people.
Teaching at Whitlingham Broad and schools
I moved after a few years out to Whitlingham. This was partly because there was a little bit of pressure on the rooms at Wensum Lodge because there were so many different courses. The opportunity to teach at Whitlingham seemed like a very good one for me. There was a nice café there and there was a teaching room which was bright and airy. Although it didn’t have the old feel that Wensum Lodge has, the building had some fantastic windows where we could actually watch birds while we were having coffee. I’d be teaching up in the room, we’d have our coffee break and we’d sit there and we’d look out of the window. And that was great too.
I was with Adult Education at that stage and I even moved on to working for the Family Learning department. This took me out to schools and I was working with families, with parents and young children and talking to them about birds and wildlife and getting them engaged in activities, together with a colleague who perhaps had a little bit more experience with working with young people. We’d go out on walks and actually look at what was out and about in the natural world. And, you know, throughout all my time, I’ve always had fantastic feedback.
I’ve been involved with lots of different sectors and there have always been people who’ve absolutely amazed me because of their sharp eyesight, their hearing, their ability to take in virtually everything I’ve told them. There’ve always been some amazing groups and some amazing people. I never taught an accredited course, so I was quite keen that there was never going to be any pressure on anybody. If they wanted to come in and learn just for fun and not do any homework, that was absolutely fine. Just take out of it whatever they could. I would always recommend books and I would give them information if they wanted to actually go on and do some sort of accreditation. Some people did. There were some good stories. There was one person who went to Africa on a Save the Rhino campaign. There was someone else who got a complete degree in ornithology. There was someone else who came on my courses for some time and then went to the local RSPB group and did something fairly similar himself. I regarded it as a compliment because he was reaching out to people that I wasn’t involved with and doing the same kind of thing as I did. His daughter became so interested that she did a degree in ornithology. So I feel that I kind of did my bit really and I’m still doing it in spreading the word and keeping in with the mould of this teacher going back all those years who inspired me so much and gave me so much pleasure in my life.
Memories of Wensum Lodge
More on Wensum Lodge. One very happy personal memory which I have was that when our daughter was born there was a creche at Wensum Lodge. One afternoon a week my wife would come to do her Spanish class and bring my daughter with her. The class started at one o’clock so that coincided with my lunchtime. I have lovely memories of the door opening, because you never knew who was going to come down that ramp and round the corner. You’d hear the door go and you’d be looking, it would be my daughter, and she was only one. She’d come down the ramp and she’d see me on the other side of the desk and come around the back of the desk. Then my wife would go and do her course and we would go and have our lunch together at this lovely café by the river and maybe feed the ducks. She went to it for a good year or more – maybe a couple. It was a very well-resourced creche and the people there were really lovely. It was helpful for her to become a social person like I am. That’s quite a good story and you know, there were so many others. I think the overriding memory I have was of the place being absolutely thronging with people, all doing different things and in a lovely environment. I should also mention the artwork. There was always artwork around and the art classes used to exhibit their work in the reception area. There was always art going up on the walls or being changed over.
There were people living on the boats on the river who used to pay mooring fees. We didn’t see too much of them, but they were there. There was a whole cross-section of society which was really quite amazing. The other thing I remember, which actually was coming to an end by then, was just along the road from Wensum Lodge there was a pub called the Ferryboat Inn. I’d remembered this pub from my university days. It was absolutely full of life and had a fantastic atmosphere on a Friday night. And it really felt that King Street, which is where Wensum Lodge is located, was absolutely buzzing at that time and it felt really great to be a part of that.
I do have to say that when the funding did dry up… well it’s rather sad that we’ve reached a point now where Wensum Lodge is actually closed. I haven’t kept in touch during the years after I left 17 years ago but I find that quite sad. I’m hopeful that maybe something can happen to turn things around, but it’s a difficult situation. I know it’s an expensive listed building, but it has such a fantastic history going back hundreds of years. I just like to hope that there may be some future for it because it’s played an important part in my life.
Still teaching about the wildlife I love and enjoying travelling
So just bringing things up to date, as I referred to before, I’m still running the courses that I do. I’m freed from the pressure of having to do the quite substantial amount of paperwork that was required in order to get the funding to run the courses. I can now operate in my own way. I can do my own evaluations and I can communicate directly with students or potential students. It also means that I have time to do other things that I want to do as well. I’ve had a time where I did lots and lots of travel and I had a time when I didn’t do that and I’m just kind of getting back into it again.
Now, I think when you reach a certain point in your life you have to assess what it is that you really want to do and make sure it happens because we only have a certain amount of time. While you’re fit and healthy and enthusiastic, if you possibly can, get out there and do it. Things changed a little bit during Covid for me and for the rest of the world. The major change that took place was that I actually stopped! The format of my courses was a classroom session one week and a field trip the following week. So the classroom session would be for a couple of hours, the field trip for four hours and it would run through the term: it would be classroom session, field trip, classroom session, field trip. So when it came to Covid people were desperate to continue going out birdwatching, but less desperate to be indoors with each other in a room. So within the parameters of what we were able to do, I continued as best I could. The students were keen to do that, but when we came out the other side some of them were still not so keen on going back in the classroom because the Covid issue lingered for quite a long time. I thought that I’d done an awful lot of classroom teaching and a lot of theory so maybe in the future we’d incorporate the theory into the outdoor stuff.
So the course just consists of field trips! During the terms we have six four-hour field trips. I’m now running that just for two courses through the year and I have other work running wildlife events up at the coast at holiday parks as well. I go under the name of Wildlife Norfolk.
This has been quite an exciting year for me because my nephew is a geologist and he was working in Antarctica on expedition ships and arranged for me do an expedition with him to Antarctica. I’ve come back from that fairly recently and it was a wonderful experience. My wife had contacts in Buenos Aires, so I also spent a couple of months in Argentina and got to know the birds of Argentina. I hadn’t been to the southern part of South America. It was all very wonderful. I came back, did part of the course, again went to Morocco with my wife, where I saw a new bird for me. I don’t see new birds very often in our region of the world. My plan is just to continue in that vein.
But, you know, Wensum Lodge was an era. It very much played its part. It set a framework, if you like. I haven’t mentioned that I’ve also taken groups far and wide around Britain and Portugal, but at the moment I’m really focusing on the courses I do here.
That’s my story anyway. Thank you to Wensum Lodge.
Peter Walton talking to WISEArchive in Norwich on 3rd April 2025 © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
Peter Walton talking to WISEArchive in Norwich on 3rd April 2025 © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
