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| The Garden planted for pollinators at The Coach House, Marks Hall |
P is away, so Dad and I thought we would go to the inaugural Ted Hooper Memorial Lecture on 18th April 2016. We weren't sure what to expect but as it was the inaugural lecture, nobody else knew what to expect either.
The venue was the lovely Coach House at Marks Hall. More usually a venue for wedding receptions (we went to one there and it was great), the Coach House and its intimate walled garden are situated in a deer park and arboretum. Now run by a trust that seeks to implement the wishes of the last owner, for hundreds of years Marks Hall belonged to the Honeywood family whose coat of arms included an oak tree with a wild bee nest in it.
So who was Ted Hooper?
Ted wrote the fantastic "Guide to Bees and Honey" ("the Bible") which is still recommended to novice beekeepers as one of the best books on the subject. Ted, we learnt, worked for a bee farmer in Hampshire before moving to Essex in 1962 as County Bee Inspector. As CBI he taught hundreds of beekeepers, not just in the County, but all round the country and even overseas. He looked after 700 hives and taught commercial beekeepers and amateurs everything related to bees from anatomy to carpentry. He was actively involved in the BBKA and in setting the syllabus for beekeeping qualifications. We could tell by the size of the audience that he must have inspired a great many people, hence the inaugural lecture(s). There were really two of them.
The two lecturers both knew Ted well. Margaret Thomas described how Ted encouraged her and her husband to develop their interest in beekeeping and nudged her to write and lecture herself. A forthright and engaging speaker, Margaret told us about her own memories of Ted. She was honoured to be asked by Ted to update the diseases section of the Bible and more recently to edit Ted's lost book, see below.
Clive de Bruyn was taught beekeeping by Ted and eventually succeeded him as CBI in 1984 building on Ted's achievements. Clive was wearing a rather old fashioned jacket - think Roger Moore, 1970s safari style - and it immediately became apparent that this was just to demonstrate that he could still fit in it after he showed us his first slide, a photograph of him with Ted from the 1970's in which Clive was wearing the same jacket!
It transpired that Ted wrote a book in the 1980s for new beekeepers in the belief that there was a need for a simpler guide than the Bible. He sent it to his publishers who went bust. The book was "lost" but came to light while Ted was still alive and he asked Margaret and Clive to update it for a modern audience. I was able to get my copy of "The Beginner's Bee Book" signed by Margaret and Clive to go with the signed copy of the Guide to Bees & Honey that I was given when we first got our bees.
To learn far more about this revered beekeeper, see the link below to the BBKA obituary.
http://www.bbka.org.uk/local/bigmedium/obituaries/ted-hooper-1918-2010.shtml
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