MANY thanks to Looking Back reader Roger Lane who has got in touch to tell us about the life of a famous fellow West Stafford resident.

Reginald Bosworth Smith had a keen interest in birds and would publish his observations in ‘Bird Life and Bird Lore’.

He is buried at St Andrew’s Church in West Stafford but very few people are aware of him and his fascinating life.

His daughter Lady Grogan wrote a book about her father called The Life of Reginald Bosworth Smith.

In the book, published in 1909, she tells the tale of her father as a schoolboy raiding a raven’s nest.

Reginald Smith was a boarder at Milton Abbas School, then located in Blandford.

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-winter, 160 years ago, Reginald asked his housemaster for permission to set out with a friend to Badbury Rings and back, about six miles each way, so that he could climb a small tree in order to add a raven’s egg to his collection.

Tradition said that many attempts had been made to reach the ravens’ eyrie without success.

Reginald, known as ‘Boz’, later reminisced of his ‘pride in the possession of the first raven’s eggs I had ever seen.’ On a snowy day on February 26, 1855 Boz and his friends plucked the ravens’ eggs from the tree at Badbury Rings.

Boz bought ‘a hammer and a packet of the largest nails we could get, some 60 in number and some 10 inches long.’”

Coaxing nails into the tree, Boz was surrounded by birds croaking and barking fiercely.

Boz had nails in a tin box tied around his waist and let it down with a string from time to time to get it refilled by his companion.

In his memoir, Boz writes: “As I climbed higher, the work grew more dangerous, for the wind told more, and a slip would now not only have thrown me to the ground, but have torn me to pieces with the nails which thickly studded the trunk below.”

Boz eventually got to the nest and saw it contained four eggs – it had taken him an incredible two and a half hours to attain them.

He regarded the two speckled grey and green eggs he kept for posterity as ‘amongst my treasured possessions’.

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Reginald’s father, the Reverend ‘Reggy’ Smith was the Rector of West Stafford and his mother Emily actively supported him.

Born in 1839, the second of 12 children, Boz was to outlive all but four of his siblings, most of whom are also buried in St Andrew’s churchyard.

Boz was a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, before deciding to become a Master at Harrow.

He was an ‘outstanding’ teacher of the Classics and of History and wrote several biographies, including the controversial ‘Mohammed and the Mohammedans’, about which the former PM William Gladstone wrote several letters to him.

Boz studied all types of birds scientifically and published his findings in Bird Life and Bird Lore.

In 1903, when presenting prizes at his old school, Boz spoke of this escapade and of scrambling down a cliff to a heron’s nest, as if to encourage others to follow his example.

After his death in 1908 his former headmaster wrote to his family: “I have always regarded his memorable achievement at Badbury Rings as containing the great element of his character – indomitable perseverance – a determination to complete whatever he undertook.”

Thank you to Roger for sharing these books with us containing memories of a very different time when egg collecting was not the illegal hobby it is today.

*DO you have any information on bird egg collections in Dorset from days gone by? Or perhaps you have more information on ‘Boz’ Smith.

Looking Back would love to hear from you.

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