Collection of tribal combs, Kenya, Tanzania and others

The John Burton (1944-2022) Collection

John Burton grew up in South London, son of Edna (nee Ede) and Andrew Burton, a portrait painter. His preoccupation with the natural world was evident from an early age and at six he made weekly bus-trips with a friend to the Natural History Museum. In his teens he was bird-ringing, taking part in surveys for foxes and badgers, recording bird migration, working on a project to air-lift turtles to the Caribbean and completing a study of hedgehogs.

After finishing school he immediately accepted a position as assistant information officer at the Natural History Museum, later going freelance and turning his hand to writing natural history books. Writing under the name John A Burton he published more than 40 titles, including works on mammals, owls, amphibians, endangered species and ecology. From 1969 to 1971 he was deputy editor of the weekly Birds of the World, published by IPC Magazines. 

During this period he became increasingly concerned with ecology and the extinction crisis, and was compelled to extend his reach beyond simply writing around the subject. He became the first wildlife consultant to the recently formed Friends of the Earth and was at the forefront of a scientific awakening of species extinction and an evolving movement towards World Conservation. He was headhunted by the Fauna Preservation Society and was their chief executive at 31. He then founded TRAFFIC, an organisation that monitors the illegal trade in wildlife, one of the biggest illegal trades after drugs, arms and people, he managed both organisations together for some time. 

In 1975 John hired Viv Gledhill as his conservation assistant. She then went on to work with another great conservationist, Sir Peter Scott, founder of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at his headquarters in Slimbridge. But John and Viv met up again when separately attending a wildlife conference at Kilaguni Lodge in Kenya, they were married in 1980, becoming a formidable team. 

They soon showed how effective they could be. A great friend and conservation colleague, Jerry Bertrand, was president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He came up with the radical notion that the people of New England should look after their migrant birds – by giving money to preserve their wintering grounds. He wanted to extend this idea to places like the rainforest in Belize where 110,000 acres (45,000 hectares) of tropical forest in were soon due to be cleared for agriculture. The Burtons agreed to help him. They were given $15,000 with instructions to turn this into $50,000 in a year. They reached this target within six weeks of launching. This formed the blueprint for the World Wide Land Conservation Trust which the Burton’s created in May 1989. The principle was that the WLT would raise money to buy rainforest: but it was bought and owned by the organisation on the ground in Belize. It was their project: WLT just helped it along.

The campaign was based on a notion of breathtaking simplicity: buy an acre of rainforest for £25. A real acre in a real place. It caught the public imagination: and almost at once WLT was moving forwards, next to a project in Costa Rica, then to an island in the Philippines, after that to REGUA, a rainforest restoration project in Brazil – and on it went.

WLT was founded on an idea of simple genius: that if you take control of the land everything that lives there is safe. If you can save the land you can save the species: all the species that use the place. John and Viv led WLT onwards for 30 years, taking on projects in more than 30 countries and securing more than 1 million acres of land for future generations. 

In 2005 the University of East Anglia appointed John Burton as a visiting fellow in recognition of WLT’s work with its students, and in 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Suffolk, followed by an award in 2018 from the Indian government for his work on conserving elephants. In 2019, he received the Linnean Society’s John Spedan Lewis Medal for innovation in conservation.

John was a collector all his life. One of his first expeditions when he was about 20 was an acquisition trip for the Natural History Museum, collecting traditional music recordings, instruments and costumes in Romania, some of which are now held by Pitt Rivers Museum. His work took him to many corners of the earth and he always came back with an eclectic mix of ethnographica and examples of local crafts. He spent a sabbatical in 2016 in the Gran Chaco of Paraguay, one of his favourite places, meeting with various indigenous groups, particularly the Ayoreo people who he lived and travelled with for a while. The present collection includes rare tribal masks and ceremonial pieces, including pieces from some of the remote and isolated corners of the globe.