Wildlife photographer and champion of conservation with her husband, Sir Peter Scott Philippa Scott, widow of the 20th century’s greatest conservationist, Sir Peter Scott, has died at the age of 91. For almost four decades – from their marriage in 1951 until Scott’s death in 1989 – Phil, as Lady Scott was always known, worked in close partnership with her husband. In the words of Sir David Attenborough, “the Scotts put conservation on the map, at a time when it was not a word that most people understood”. She was born Philippa Talbot-Ponsonby in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where her British naval officer father was recovering from tuberculosis, and spent her early years on a farm in Orange Free State. In Britain during the second world war, she served in the Land Army and then did intelligence work at the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. She spent a year in postwar Belgrade, capital of what had by then become communist Yugoslavia, for the Foreign Office, before returning in 1947 to what she later recalled as “cold, grey England”, undecided as to her future career. When a friend suggested she apply to work for Peter Scott at his London office she did so, and to her surprise was offered the job immediately. Two years later she moved to the headquarters of the newly founded Severn Wildfowl Trust (later the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, WWT ), at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, becoming Scott’s secretary. Her rural upbringing proved useful: as she remarked in 2005: “I think he appreciated the fact that I was basically a country girl and I knew how to round up ducks and geese without frightening them.” They had met several years before, during the early years of the war, when Scott was engaged to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard but by 1951, Scott’s marriage to Howard was over, and in August that year he and Phil married while on a bird-ringing expedition in Iceland. She became stepmother to Peter’s daughter, Nicky; and in 1952 gave birth to a daughter, Dafila, followed in 1954 by a son, Falcon. During this period the Scotts were busy turning Slimbridge into the world’s finest collection of ducks, geese and swans. By the late 1950s Peter – already a renowned artist – had developed another successful career as a TV presenter with the series Look, produced by the BBC Natural History Unit

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