Robert Stebbing’s personal account of the painstaking battle to bring that original legislation into force provides a poignant reminder of the harm inflicted before protection was in place, and of the fact that we absolutely cannot take existing environmental safeguards for granted.
It was 1957 when I started to realise that some bats appeared to be declining in abundance. Partly this was due to the results of annual surveys of hibernating bats in chalk mines in Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, which had been started by others in 1947 (Stebbings 2023). These mirrored the results from similar surveys in the Netherlands which commenced in the 1930s.
Appendix (extracts from Hansard of debates in parliament at the time legislation was being considered)