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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 59
Obituary - Alec Bull Alwyn (Alec) Bull died on August 8, 2023, eighteen days before his 96th Birthday. He was one of East Anglia’s foremost naturalists and one of the country’s leading experts on brambles. Alec was born and raised in Hitcham, Suffolk where his father owned a farm. He went to school in Bury St Edmunds but left at 14 to help on the farm during the war. The farm was mostly arable but, during the war, Alec had to look after the small dairy herd ‘because dad didn’t like cows.’ His interest in the natural world can be traced back to the mid-1940s when, in his later teens, he heard on the radio about an ornithology club for young people. It piqued his interest and he decided to join. His initial interest was in birds, but that same year it expanded to plants when there was ‘a tremendous show of dog roses’, the attractive flowers that indicate that summer is arriving. Armed with the Observer’s Book of Flowers, cigarette cards and Typhoo Tea cards to aid identification, he went on to develop a great expertise in the natural world. He also joined SNS - ‘There was a piece in the East Anglian Daily Times in 1944 by Claude Morley, founder of the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society, asking for information on a certain subject. I sent some notes. He wrote back and asked if I would like to be elected to the society. I did and I’ve been a member ever since.’ The following year he was contributing to these transactions with notes on the Botany at Hitcham listing orchids he had seen on old meadows at the farm. He described the extraordinary survival of ‘two four-acre meadows white with ox eye daisies and with purple knapweed, pink restharrow, yellow rattle and above all, hundreds of fragrant orchids. One of the two, sheltered from the north by a wood full of oxlips, also had early purple and spotted orchids, twayblades, the occasional bee orchid and a small colony of frog orchids. All ploughed up in 1949.’ (see also 1977, A century of change and 2019, Notes from Claude Morley’s Suffolk). He married Rita in 1947, when he was 20 and lived first in Icklingham and then Timworth where he worked as a cowman. He continued working with cows on farms in Suffolk and Norfolk, including another 7 years at Hitcham 1953-60, before ending
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 59 (2023)