Mel Roberts: The Man With A Vision

Mel Roberts working hard at the Butterfly Park

It seems that all successful community projects are started by an inspiring leader or two, who build round them a bigger team. Mel was that leader, with his infectious enthusiasm, time to devote to the Park, and the boundless energy required to drive the Park project in its early stages. His attitude was always “can-do”, when the rest of us were far more cautious. But Mel was self-effacing and self-mocking, with a wicked sense of humour.

Mel was awarded Wirral CVS “Volunteer on the Year” award 2001. He was embarrassed to accept as he said he had the dreams, but many others had put it in to practice. Typical of Mel's modesty – we would never have had the idea of the Park without his dreams. Mel was a political atheist - he did not believe in any party but was politically active in getting things done. He taught us to make good use of our politicians, for publicity, making links and finding grants – which we continue to do. It is thanks to Mel that we have had good support from local councillors and MPs throughout the life of the Park.

The photograph below shows Alison McGovern MP (second on the right)

Mel was adept at publicity and spreading the word about the Park in the local community. While we were seeking the lease, he made a booklet of his photos showing the wildlife of the Park, persuaded Max Spielmann (local photography company) to do around 30 copies of the photos, and used the booklet to advertise what we were trying to do. The booklet entitled “A proposal for the re-development of the old Alma Street Goods Yard at Bebington and New Ferry station” had a diagram on the front cover of a siding with light industry hitting the buffers and a nature refuge going forward. Mel was really on the ball producing that booklet just as planning permission for light industry lapsed. It was well-used in the first few years of the Park as we gradually gathered volunteers and visitors.

Mel Roberts' book
"A proposal for the re-development of the old Alma Street Goods Yard at Bebington and New Ferry station"

We also still have several large boards of his photos of the park and its wildlife, used at various exhibitions.

Mel visited schools, especially Grove Street, where he was made most welcome, his quirky sense of humour appealing to children. At one stage local children called him the “caterpillock of New Ferry” and regularly greeted him in the street.

Mel became increasingly unwell from 2000 and died on 12 November 2002. But he had by then built a good team to keep the Park running. We missed him, but we carried on. His memorial event was held on the Park on 24th November 2012, with over 100 people present. An apple tree was planted in his memory and his ashes buried at its foot, where his memorial plaque stands. He regarded the Park as his greatest achievement.  Mel was delighted to know he would be recycled back into the Park and said he would look more attractive as an apple tree.

He would be amazed, but we think delighted, at how the Park has prospered since.

Hooray For Our Insect Champions

Cheshire Wildlife Trust's July newsletter invites you to take action to help the decline of insects...

Today we’re launching Reversing the Decline of Insects, a report commissioned by The Wildlife Trusts as part of our Action for Insects campaign. Reversing the Decline of Insects is a positive look at the great work that is being done across the country to stop the potentially catastrophic loss of insects and help them to recover. With examples from farming, community groups, landowners, Wildlife Trusts, local authorities and individuals we hope to inspire more people to become insect champions and make a real difference for insects!

Reversing insects' decline

It's business as usual for Cheshire Wildlife Trust, working with landowners and farmers to encourage wildlife friendly farming practices and create new habitats. This makes space for insects, helping bees, butterflies and beetles to thrive and play their glorious part in the food web.

Earlier this year, we also began discussions with some of your local Councils to see how we can support them in making positive changes to help insects recover. The Trust is asking Councils to:

• reduce their use of pesticides

• create more space for insects on their land and road verges.

Plans were delayed with lockdown but now that restrictions are easing, our work can restart. It's really pleasing to see that Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester and Wirral Borough Council are willing to work with us to help tackle insect decline. We're now able to approach other councils across Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Warrington to ask them to take Action for Insects too.

Become an insect champion

Today's report highlights what organisations, farmers and landowners are doing to stop insect decline. We also need you in your homes and communities to act if we're to stop insect numbers plummeting.

If you haven't already, please take Action for Insects and download your FREE Guide to Taking Action for Insects at home or in the community. These free resources are packed full of top tips on how to garden organically, how to stop using chemicals that harm wildlife and how communities can take action and embrace a little bit of wildness.

Many of you have already signed up and we love hearing how you’re getting on. A survey told us your most popular actions are:

• leaving parts of your garden to grow wild (84%)

• planting insect friendly plants (83%)

• building log pile houses and bug hotels (72%)

Share your tips

We can all learn and be inspired by the success stories of others who've stopped spraying chemicals or have changed how they plan their garden to benefit insects and wildlife.

However we know that it's not always easy. So if you have a top tip of how helping insects has benefitted the wildlife in your garden or local neighbourhood do share it with us (pictures are always encouraged).

As always, thank you for your support and stay WILD!

Cheshire Wildlife Trust Film at the Butterfly Park

Last weekend Cheshire Wildlife Trust filmed a video at New Ferry Butterfly Park to mark the 25th Anniversary of the reserve. They met the volunteers and found out more about the reserve. Hope you enjoy watching.

The Opening of New Ferry Butterfly Park: 1995

By early 1995 we were ready to open the bottom half of the Park to the public. It was European Nature Conservation Year and Mel Roberts (who had the original dream of creating a nature reserve here) organised a grand opening for 15th July, with Lyndon Harrison MEP as the guest of honour. Two years of preparation had secured the boundaries, set out paths and begun vegetation management.

Mel’s little granddaughter Hannah presented Lyndon with a water-colour painting by Mel as a thank you. (One of Mel’s many talents was as a good water-colourist, usually painting plants and birds). Bebington High School brought a play about railway safety (trespass on the electrified lines was still a regular problem), and we had around 200 people attend – to the surprise of many!

The opening was a proud moment for Mel who had campaigned for over two decades to get this nature reserve underway. What patience! The hedges then were merely whips barely poking above the competing grass. The grass was rather rough tussock grass without a sight of buttercups or red clover.

The photograph below shows how the meadow, that you can see in the background of the picture above, looks today. What a difference.

Cowslips on the lime waste meadow

Once the Park was open, Sunday opening continued until the end of August (later extended to mid-September). Mel took a large share of the wardening – but then, visitor numbers were few, so he simply sat outside his garden gate and welcomed any who turned up.

Now we have a bank of about 20 volunteers to warden on Sunday afternoons and act as guides for groups who book visits throughout the opening season. Last year (2019) we welcomed around 3,000 visitors.

This year we have new T shirts and sweatshirts featuring our own logo so you can easily spot our wardens.

The Creation of a Nature Reserve

Having got the lease, we all took a bit of a rest for a few months over winter, then started tackling the site in earnest in spring 1994. The first workday to start shifting fly-tipped rubbish was on 21 May. Over that summer many things got done. Mel had done grant applications in other community roles, so knew how to set about it. Our first grant, from English Nature, hired a JCB to clear the mound of soil from the entrance (the soil made the ridge between the perching wall and the siding). That mound has been put across the entrance road some years before to stop travellers and fly-tippers accessing the site. It is now between the perching wall and the siding.

Mel hard at work on the lime waste area

We needed to fence the short southern edge of the park for security – vandalism, trespass and petty crime were still very much present. We rapidly realised we couldn’t fence all along the approach road with security fencing - the cost would have been enormous – so we decided to fence across level with the railway engineer’s fence and gate, which needed a short run of about 40m but secured the vast majority of the site. The estimate was £4600 – in 1994 a major sum, especially for a new project to find. We eventually found the money from 2 separate grants. One involved some rapid work. We were told on one Thursday of a grant available through RSNC (now The Wildlife Trusts national office), but the application had to be in on Friday and a postal strike had just ended, so the post was massively delayed. One of the council officers involved with us, Steve Foden, had access to a fax machine (remember this is all long pre-email and internet). The form was faxed to there, Hilary collected it and filled it in (we had all the estimates and information ready thank goodness), she picked up the children from school on Friday and took them and the form to the council office, from where it was faxed though with a note to say the supporting information would be in the post on the Saturday. We got the grant! The fence was installed in October 1994 and we heaved a sigh of relief that the worst of the vandalism was now fenced out.

Mel always called himself “the world’s best scrounger” – but all for the community things he was involved in, never for himself. As we cleared masses of fly-tipped rubbish to the road inside the gate, he persuaded Wirral Borough Council to collect it with their bin lorries for free. 7 wagon-loads went that first summer, and several more the next year. Meanwhile, the railway decided to replace the western (rail-side) chain-link fence with a security fence, greatly to our relief as the fence was nominally, according to the lease, our responsibility, and panels of chain-link had a habit of walking off-site to local pigeon lofts. Mel scrounged some of the old fencing to make our first compost bins. Mel insisted on taking part in the workdays (then and for several years fortnightly on Sundays, plus some weekday work especially by Howard and Mel). Mel hid the pain he was often in, but usually spent the day after a workday in bed for his back to recover.

Volunteers at one of the workdays

An early achievement in making the Park so successful was the tool container, thanks to a grant found by Gordon Reid and Mel doing the planning application. It makes events so much easier to organise by solving the tool logistics, so there are no limits to volunteers because of tools.

Playing boule by the container

It also provides central storage space for the educational materials, the Wirral Wildlife gazebo and tables, and the all-important tea boiler and refreshment supplies. Volunteer workdays still run on tea and coffee!

Taking a break for refreshments

The History of the New Ferry Butterfly Park Site

History trail leaflet available on our website
https://www.wirralwildlife.org.uk/new-ferry-butterfly-park

Once steam trains finished on the Birkenhead - Chester line (March 6th 1967) the railway yard would have fallen into disuse very quickly. The larger pieces of metal were removed for recycling but sleepers and various oddments were left behind.

A coal truck

British Rail had planning permission for industrial use but never succeeded in selling it for development. The original road access (Alma Street) had been blocked some years previously and obscured by fly-tipping. The goods yard was just left to go derelict, and nature moved in. The yard became a social problem, being used for drug-taking, drug-dealing, and small-scale crime such as emptying out stolen handbags, wallets and even safes. It was also used for children’s play and various other things – at one point a horse was tethered there.

In 1975, Mel (Melville) and Barbara Roberts and their family moved into 20 Windsor Close, backing on to the goods yard. He watched and recorded the wildlife on the goods yard, taking many photos.

Mel Roberts

In 1991 Mel decided to have another go at getting recognition for the natural value of the site. That June, Hilary Ash was helping staff a stall for Wirral Wildlife, at an event at Ness Gardens. Mel Robert told her about the wildlife on the derelict railway goods yard behind his house, especially butterflies and other insects. Hilary had done her PhD on derelict industrial land so she knew that interesting wildlife could live on derelict sites. Hilary went to see the goods yard in early July 1991. Impressed with the site and Mel, she told Wirral Wildlife committee about it and chairman Frank Cottrell (whose main natural history interest was butterflies) took the matter to Cheshire Wildlife Trust Council and staff. There was some doubt among the staff as urban nature conservation was beginning to make waves in 1991 but was still a new development. However the CEO Keith Roberts was interested, and the CWT Council agreed to let Frank and Keith pursue the possibility of taking it on as a nature reserve. Mel meanwhile organised a public meeting and got around 30 people there, including police, schools, Riverside Housing Association, local councillors and other community representatives. There followed nearly 2 years of negotiation with British Rail Property Board. When the red tape got impossible, we approached the then MP, Barry Porter, for help. He succeeded in getting things moving, and a lease to Cheshire Wildlife Trust was signed in September 1993. It was for a minimum 3 years, but indefinite after that.

Key people in pushing through that long 2 years, apart from Mel, were Frank Cottrell and our first NFBP chairman, Gordon Reid. Gordon arranged funding to re-fence the long eastern side, where the railway fence had long since fallen down, through Merseyside Safer Cities. The agreement with CWT was that the Park would be run by its own local group, financing itself and not needing any significant staff time. It was set up as a “community nature reserve” with a committee including local people who were not Cheshire Wildlife Trust members, as well as some who were. Mel got students from Bebington High School to come up with a name for the Park. New Ferry was already a run-down area and it was important that the name New Ferry was in the title.

After years of effort New Ferry Butterfly Park opened its gates to visitors on 15th July 1995.

Mel always viewed one role of the Park as helping towards rejuvenating New Ferry. We hope we do help with that by giving local people a wildlife-rich place to visit.

The opening of New Ferry Butterfly Park on 15th July 1995

Frank Cottrell presented with a gift for long service by Alison McGovern MP at Open Day 2017

New Ferry Butterfly Park: How a Derelict Site Became a Nature Reserve

Over the next few weeks we will publish several blog posts about the value and history of New Ferry Butterfly Park.

New Ferry Butterfly Park opened its gates to visitors on 15th July 1995.

This year should have been a celebration of its 25th Anniversary but that is postponed because of the Covid19 restrictions.

Over the past 25 years the reserve has become a haven for wildlife thanks to the management plans and hard work of its volunteer community. Its value has been recognised by the Awards it has received.

In 2014 we received our first Green Flag Award and raised it in the presence of the Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside and the Mayor of Wirral. Each year since we have retained it.

In 2015 New Ferry Butterfly Park was thrilled to be nominated for Defra's Pollinator Champion of Champions Award. We did not win first prize but were given a winner’s certificate and we were extremely pleased to see the importance of pollinators being highlighted.

Last year (2019) the Park received the Liverpool Echo Environmental Award in the Community Impact category. This was in recognition of the role the Park plays in the local community.

Under normal circumstances the New Ferry Butterfly Park Opening Day on the first Sunday in May is a feature of the local New Ferry calendar, attracting in the region of 800 - 1000 people in recent years.

Local people regularly visit on Sundays from May to the beginning of September when we are open from 12 – 4 p.m. We have three guided trails with leaflets: a Nature Trail, Art Trail and History Trail.

As well as these activities, pond dipping is supervised by the wardens and everyone is thrilled to see the newts and other water creatures.

Local schools, especially St John’s and Grove Street, use the Park for class visits in the summer term. Many uniformed organisations and other groups, varying in age from toddlers to the more mature like U3A, visit each summer for guided tours. At the end of a visit younger children do a craft activity.

Last year (2019), including Open Day, Sunday afternoons and booked visits, we had 3000 visitors.

The nature reserve is thriving and a future post will show some of its inhabitants. We hope that we will soon be able to resume our many community interactions.