Frank Fraser Darling - Career

Career

After running away from school at the age of 15, Darling was sent to work on a farm in the Pennines. He then studied at the Midland Agricultural College (now part of the University of Nottingham), at Sutton Bonington in the Borough of Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire, and obtained diplomas in agriculture and dairying. Soon afterwards he married Marian Fraser ("Bobbie") and took the double-barrelled surname Fraser Darling, which, although he was divorced from Bobbie in 1948, he used to the end of his life.

While working as a Clean Milk Advisor in Buckinghamshire, and longing for a research post in Scotland, Fraser Darling heard about the work of the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University, and in the early 1930s the Director, Francis Crew, offered him a place there to study for a PhD. From 1929-1930 he was Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Animal Breeding and Genetics, part of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, at Edinburgh.

Living at Dundonnell and later in the Summer Isles, Fraser Darling began the work that was to mark him as a naturalist-philosopher of original turn of mind and great intellectual drive. He described the social and breeding behaviour of the red deer, gulls, and the grey seal respectively, in the three academic works A Herd of Red Deer, Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle and A Naturalist on Rona. The Fraser Darling effect, proposed by Fraser Darling in 1938, is the simultaneous and shortened breeding season that occurs in large colonies of birds.

The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to Fraser Darling's hopes of undertaking further research on the grey seal and, being too old for active military service, he chose to farm rather than leave the west coast of Scotland for wartime civilian work. Between 1939 and 1943 Fraser Darling reclaimed derelict land to agricultural production on Tanera Mòr in the Summer Isles. In 1942 the wartime Secretary of State for Scotland, Thomas Johnston, asked Fraser Darling if he would run an agricultural advisory programme in the crofting areas of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. He agreed, and for two years he travelled, taught and wrote articles that were later published in book form as Crofting Agriculture.

In 1949, Julian Huxley, UNESCO's first Director-General, invited Fraser Darling to be one of UNESCO's representatives at the United Nations conference on conservation at Lake Success on Long Island. Huxley had been interested in Fraser Darling's studies on animal behaviour since the early 1940s, and the two had corresponded while Fraser Darling was living on Tanera Mor.

His 1969 BBC Reith Lectures (entitled Wilderness and Plenty) were an important contribution to the growing debate on man's responsibility for his natural environment.