Now he's caring for the river

The 50-year love affair began for Dick Mayon-White back in his days as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital. In moments of stress or boredom as a young doctor-in-the making at the famous London hospital, he would gaze down from the window, never to be disappointed by the sweeping river below.

The attraction of the Thames has somehow never faded for Dr Mayon-White, who since retiring as the man responsible for combating infectious diseases in Oxfordshire has been working as a volunteer river warden.

The former county community physician and consultant in communicable disease control has effortlessly moved from keeping Oxfordshire healthy to caring for the river, which has always run through his life — because, for him, the two jobs are closely linked, being about public health and the environment.

“My old job prepared me for this,” said Dr Mayon-White, for so long preoccupied with the likes of measles, flu, legionnaires’ disease and vaccines.

“I recognise the importance of one’s environment for health. One of the reasons in Oxfordshire why we should all be concerned about the wellbeing of the river is that we depend upon it for our drinking water supply.”

Now at the age of 70, he has finally got round to writing a book, with Wendy Yorke, of the Thames River Trust, about the river that he has spent decades exploring on foot, bicycle and in boats from canoes to a steam launch and coastal motorboats.

Entitled Exploring The Thames Wilderness, it offers a guide to the natural Thames, focusing on the 154 nature reserves along the length of the Thames — and Dr Mayon-White has visited and photographed them all from the source of the Thames at Kemble and Thameshead to a wildlife haven at Southend Foreshore.

It turns out that the retired public health consultant, of Frenchay Road, North Oxford, is just one of 55 river wardens, charged with ensuring Father Thames remains in good condition.

“We check broken gates, barriers to access, signs and fallen trees that might be blocking the river. We look out for bank erosion, sources of pollution and people mooring where they shouldn’t.”

Most wardens also take a plastic bag with them to pick up litter on their walks, with their duties undertaken entirely on a voluntary basis.

All are given responsibility for a particular patch — Dr Mayon-White’s being from King’s Lock, above Oxford, to Eynsham — and all would claim to be warden of the best and most precious stretch of the river.

It was this friendly rivalry of the river wardens that was to inspire him to write the book, for which he also took scores of photographs.

“Everyone would always say their patch was brilliant, so we thought, ‘let’s record all the good things and share it with other people’. So I got all the wardens to tell me what they liked, assembled all the information and put it online.”

While talking about the project at the Beale Park Boat, the idea was taken up by a commissioning editor from Bloomsbury.

The book presents the Thames as an often undiscovered haven of stunning scenery and wonderful wildlife.

For all the fame of its stretches through cities and towns, Dr Mayon-White suggests there is a hidden wild and natural side to the river for us all to find.

“Everyone knows places like Port Meadow but there are places really difficult to discover like the Withymead Nature Reserve at Goring, which is only open on Sundays in April and May, when the lilies are in flower.

“Here in Oxfordshire there is a huge variety of land ownership. Land is owned by BBOWT (the wildlife trust) and the National Trust but there is community-owned land, for example, at Hurst Meadow, Dorchester, and Streatley Meadow, where local people decided that they just did not want the land to be developed and got together to raise funds.”

Writing it brought back a lifetime of memories from days when his three children were growing up. The project was made more poignant because he began work on the book shortly before the death of his wife, Valerie, 18 months ago.

“When I worked at High Wycombe we would canoe on the Thames at Marlow and we came to Oxfordshire in 1971. A lot of people ask me how long I have been working on the book. In a sense I have been working on it for the last 50 years.”

Some wardens, he chuckles, have pointed out that the county figures prominently in the book. He points out that he did have to rise at 5am to take early morning pictures over in Essex, but revealing the book begins with a poetic description of Port Meadow on a winter morning and ends with a photograph showing the meadow at the end of the day.

So how does he feel about the controversial university accommodation blocks that so many claim has ruined historic views from his favourite place?

“Well, I don’t have any real knowledge about politics and planning,” he said. “But it is very noticeable. I think it is such a shame. For me it spoils that particular view.”

But setting aside the development so close to home, his highly personal assessment of the river’s 150 best places suggests most changes have been positive — and for him the wildlife remains the best indicator of the river’s health and water quality.

It reminds us that back in 1957 the Thames was viewed as so heavily polluted and incapable of supporting life that it was declared biologically dead by the Natural History Museum in London.

“The Thames is much cleaner than it used to be,” he said. “It now supports more than 125 different fish species, including salmon and sea trout. You see it with the fish and birds like herons, kingfishers, grebe and cormorants. When I was a young man in London you would never see herons and cormorants.”

One big plus is that farmers have reduced run-off of fertilisers and pesticides from fields to streams, fencing cattle away from riverbanks and improving farming practices.

Even at the end of the book there will be people who may still be unable to quite view the river as a hidden wilderness — but they will be those who don’t not know the Thames and its wildlife half so well as Oxford’s river doctor.

Exploring The Thames Wilderness by Richard Mayon-White and Wendy Yorke is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99).