"You always had to watch your step when out with Pauline.  I can hear her now warning me to take care where my feet were placed due to unseen plants etc.    Pauline was a person who loved nature, loved her village and was so proud of her family. 

If there was a survey needed to be done the first name on the list was Pauline's , Turtle Doves at 4 am, Newts at lunch time and then a Moth or Bat survey deep into the evening. When Pauline and Ian attended the conservation sites they always came with a home baked cake for all to share.

 Pauline was a highly respected botanist who was a major part of the Dark Bordered Beauty program , growing at home their food plant Creeping Willow.

 In the last few months the conservation team from Butterfly Conservation joined forces with Scarborough Field Nats.,  Whitby Field Nats., The Carstairs Trust  and local villagers working to clear an old quarry site near Pauline's home.  A site where in the summer months Pauline would walk a Butterfly transect recording many species; her favourite  being White letter Hairstreak.  Pauline even found and photographed the Butterfly in its pupae stage, something  she was so proud of.

 From us all who are members of this site Rest in Peace it was a pleasure to have worked, laughed, cursed and share time with you."         

He explained: “It was an absolute wilderness – we had to fight our way in and you couldn’t walk through it. We actually used tanks and a light armoured vehicle to clear a space.”  Foxglove Covert now covers 100 acres and has been intentionally developed as a rare mix of 12 different habitats. Its woodland, wetland, and moorland is amongst the top three bird-ringing sites in the country.  On retirement from the Army, Major Crease continued to work full time for the MoD as the deputy commander for the Military Training Estate. This role allowed him to continue to oversee matters at Foxglove.  Passionate about conservation, he also led the team for Operation AUK, an annual assessment of seabird levels at Cape Wrath. However it was for Foxglove he will be most remembered. More than 500,000 people have visited since that opening day. His warm personality charmed guests, be they the Prince of Wales, politicians, community or youth groups. He was always the same – passionate and knowledgeable. Never one to let things slide or stand still, Major Crease's enormous energy and enthusiasm ensured that the reserve was properly staffed, funded and constantly moving forwards.

In recent months, he became increasingly ill and was forced to stop working in his job and at Foxglove.

Major Tony Crease MBE BEM died peacefully at his home in North Yorkshire on January 4, aged 73.

David Baker (a past Chairman of Yorkshire Branch) writes: I first met Roy whilst we were both working at the Wakefield Area Offices of the Yorkshire Electricity Board in 1981 when we looked after customers rather than shareholders. Our employment, however, was in different departments and during my eleven months at Wakefield our meetings were more likely to be in the canteen rather than work related. He was very much an outdoors man, very keen on natural history in his hometown area where he pursued his interest in butterflies. His love of the outdoors led him to organise an attempt on the Lyke Wake Walk in 1977. He led members of the YEB Wakefield Social Club on the route from Osmotherly, near Northallerton, to Ravenscar on the Yorkshire coast. This entailed tramping over 40 miles of extremely rough heather moorland within 24 hours. Roy accomplished the walk twice and supported two further expeditions in the following years. My next meetings with Roy were at Butterfly Conservation events during the late 1990s when he tried his best to encourage me to join the Yorkshire Branch Committee. We had both retired from the now privatised YE, but I was still sufficiently occupied and was not tempted to take up the offer until 2005 when I took over the Chair for eight years. However, by 2003, after his eight years at the helm, Roy had stepped down from the Chair but remained on the Committee for a further ten years, several as Minutes Secretary and/or Secretary until finally stepping down altogether in 2013. Over many years Roy gave up a lot of his time to act as a Species Co-ordinator, Vice- County 63 Butterfly Recorder and Weather Statistics Co-ordinator, providing his excellent reports on both butterflies and weather of our annual Lepidoptera Reports. 

Howard Frost (past County Butterfly Recorder and holder of various Committee posts since becoming associated with Yorkshire Branch in 1980) writes: I shall miss Roy as both a friend and a colleague, and someone who has worked amazingly hard to help develop and create the Yorkshire Branch we see today. On retirement in the early 1990s Roy decided to add a new interest to his life by joining the Yorkshire Branch of Butterfly Conservation. He was already a very keen mountaineer and artist with several books to his name illustrated with his own paintings. From 1993 he was writing articles for our newsletters and producing some excellent sketches. In those days we were limited to a black and white production produced on a spirit duplicator, so sketches were the main means of adding illustration. How times have changed! In 1995 Roy responded to an appeal for more Committee Members and by the end of the year had become Vice-Chairman, followed by a quick step up to Chairman the following year, a post he then held for 8 years. And as if that were not enough, he also became VC63 Records Co-ordinator when we launched a new recording system aimed at producing our first Annual Report covering the year 1996. That job he kept going until 2013 as well as writing various species reports. If ever we were stuck for a sketch or an article, a phone call to Roy would produce the desired material within a day or two. So, at a time in the 1990s when the Yorkshire Branch was suffering growing pains due to a surge in membership and a changeover of Committee personnel, Roy brought an important degree of stability and calm. He was the epitome of a reliable, hard-working executive!

Another of Roy's special interests was the weather. As a mountaineer, that probablybecomes second nature, but Roy took it a lot further and produced a valuable book highlighting exceptional weather in the British Isles over recorded time. So not surprisingthat he helped Yorkshire weatherman Paul Hudson with some of his activities and rose to the occasion to help produce the weather reports for our Annual Reports which he kept up for some 21 years. You can read his latest and sadly his very last contribution in the recently published 2018 Report. He was also a great supporter of our efforts to produce a book on the Butterflies of Yorkshire and his chapter covering 200 years of Yorkshire Weather with its season by season analysis in chart form was one of the special contributions which helped to make our regional book rather different from most others and earn us an accolade as the then best-ever regional butterfly guide as assessed by

David Dunbar in his 'British Butterflies a History in Books' published by the British Library

in 2010.

Peter was a wizard with a Moth net. Peter's records from his garden were second to none. He would telephone me and say 'Bedstraw Hawk Moth'.. 'Do you want  photo'? 

 He will be missed by so many  (Allan Rodda)

He was recently interviewed by Sara Frost

When and how did your interest in wildlife begin?

“My fascination with wildlife started at a very early age. Like most boys, I collected anything I could find – be it pond life, feathers, butterflies or birds’ eggs. The latter was a particular passion; one day aged eight, I didn’t go home after school, and instead went ‘egging’ with some older boys. We collected along the River Swale, in Yorkshire, finding nests of Yellowhammer and Linnet. My school cap stuffed full (and feeling very pleased with myself), I was on my way home when I was suddenly confronted by a huge policeman – my parents had reported me missing! Once home, I was given a terrible telling-off, though my parents seemed angrier about the egg-collecting than about my disappearance. However, my father felt guilty, as he had previously bought me ‘The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs’. The policeman suggested that I be given the book on the birds themselves instead, and I never looked back; I soon had keen birdwatching friends, and my hobby gradually morphed into an obsession which has grown with me. I still have both books, and while I love watching all wildlife, I retain a dark sense of guilt about my early egging days!”

What was your ‘day job’?

“I retired in 2000 after 25 years with the North Yorkshire Police, where I had various roles; I spent eight years in Scenes of Crime (now known as CSI), and completed several attachments to drugs, traffic and tasks forces, before ending up as a sergeant at a small station outside Scarborough. In the late 1980s I became a Wildlife Liaison Officer, progressing to overseeing wildlife investigations, liaising with NGOs and sitting on the PAW (Partnership for Action against Wildlife Crime) publicity committee. 

What other interests do you have outside of wildlife?

“I dabble in technology (computers and software) but photography in all its forms has been my other great love in life. I started back in the days of prints and transparency films, and was lucky that my Scenes of Crime training included a 10-week photography and fingerprinting course, during which I learnt all about f-stops, shutter speeds, lighting and depth of field. In those days we still used huge 8x4 inch plate cameras to photograph footprints and twin-lens reflex cameras for other work. We had to develop and print all our own black and white films (colour was only done at HQ), and that experience helped enormously with my wildlife subjects. I have also ventured into wedding photography for my colleagues (amongst the most stressful of jobs), done studio work with my local photographic club, and recently taken baby portraits of my grandkids. Wildlife photography is a different challenge – animals move a lot, unlike my previous subjects, which often had a chalk line around them – but with digital cameras the results are instantaneous!”

What current conservation projects or issues most interest or concern you?

“Habitat loss and changes are always a contentious issue. Locally, I have spent the last 40+ years helping to put Filey and (since 1998) its bird observatory on the map. I am keen to see it grow, protecting as much habitat as possible for future generations, and I am proud of what has been achieved. However, with age and the amount of time I am away, I have decided to take a back seat from this year, and allow younger members to take over the bulk of the work.”

Which three people would you invite to dinner?

1. “Jack Hargreaves – his programmes in the 1960s called ‘Country Boy’ and ‘Out of Town’ inspired me to look closer at my natural surroundings.

2. Any British TV police character from the 70s – The Sweeney was one of my favourites.

3. David Attenborough, obviously.”