‘A tawny owl swoops round your head, there is a background scutter of twitchings and scratchings from the depths of cages, a crow called Brian screeches incessantly… the room is suffused with a limey smell.’ In 1984, the Observer’s regular Room of My Own feature got more than it bargained for on a visit to Stanley Clapham’s Victorian terrace in Tooting Bec. Clapham, an architect and adviser on historic buildings for Surrey planning department, had a second life running ‘an ornithological refugee camp’, taking in injured and abandoned birds. Clapham greeted the journalist having just finished bathing his owls: ‘Something I didn’t know about owls until I kept them is how keen they are on bathing – they get absolutely wringing wet.’
White-bearded, smartly suited and inscrutable behind large glinting glasses, he’s pictured clutching Olga, a tawny owl; three more tawnies perch on the shelves behind him. They represent only the tip of a feathery iceberg: ‘There are 20 or more wild birds in this room – three crows, two jackdaws, two jays, a magpie, a dove, a baby pigeon, a one-winged blackbird and 11 tawny owls.’ The garden housed ‘an eagle owl, a buzzard, several ducks and a young seagull’.
Running a de facto bird rescue from a suburban sitting room involved some compromises, as well as a fridge full of day-old chicks. The sofa was protected with oilcloth, chairs were covered in newspaper and the books had to go: ‘The owls started hiding bits of meat behind them.’ Since then, several eggs had been laid on the bookcase (‘Nothing hatched, unfortunately’). The paintings – including some ‘particularly fine watercolours’ – were heavily spattered. Clapham was sanguine: ‘I suppose to have pictures covered with bird droppings is a kind of one-upmanship.’ His wife, Ingrid, was surprisingly accepting of the whole situation. ‘I for one would not take in those blasted pigeons but… you can’t be selective. I love birds too, but with my husband they are an obsession.’
