BY MARGARET ASHWORTH

I find it surprising how few rabbits I see round here in Lancashire – I think I have seen more hares. I am old enough (just) to remember seeing masses of rabbits on lawns nibbling the grass down to the roots. Then came rabbit Armageddon.

I have been reading a book enticingly titled Myxamatosis by Peter Bartrip. This was a pandemic if ever there was one. It started in Australia where rabbits had become a terrible pest. In 1859 grazier Thomas Austin released 12 pairs of wild rabbits on his property, Barwon Park, at Winchelsea in Victoria. Mathematically one pair of rabbits and their offspring can multiply to nearly 4million in four years, and by 1950 one estimate put the population at 3billion. Another estimate is that there were 20billion by the 1920s. Here is a pre-war picture.

The myxoma virus had been discovered in Uruguay in 1896. It causes rabbits to suffer a lingering and painful death, usually taking about 10-12 days. In 1950, it was deliberately released in Australia to control the rabbit plague. In under three months it had killed hundreds of millions of them.

Rabbits were an agricultural problem in Europe too, and in 1952 Dr Paul-Félix Armand-Delille, a physician and bacteriologist, illegally introduced the disease on to his private estate not far from Paris, apparently thinking it would not spread beyond his boundaries. Within two years it had wiped out 90 per cent of France’s rabbits.

In the early 1950s the British rabbit population was also out of control, numbering up to 100million. There was a great deal of official debate about introducing myxomatosis but before anything had been decided, in mid-September 1953 some dead rabbits were found at Syliards Farm on Major Sidney Williams’s 2,000-acre Bough Beech estate near Edenbridge in Kent. The farm’s tenant, Geoff Wicks, told the BBC: ‘We began to see rabbits lying around all over the place, helpless, heads swollen up, like raw meat their heads were with large blisters.’ The disease spread slowly at first but after the winter it snowballed and by October 1954 every county in England and Wales was affected. The next summer it covered Scotland.

I remember as a child being told that the disease had been officially introduced into Britain, and so I have believed since, but after a great deal of research Bartrip says the likelihood is that infected rabbits were brought from France by one Gordon Williams (no relation to Major Williams) who was the tenant of Ivy House Farm neighbouring Bough Beech. Bartrip stresses that the evidence is circumstantial, but Gordon Williams had contacts in northern France from his wartime service, and he visited France on his motorbike via cross-Channel ferry shortly before the disease was discovered at Bough Beech. Williams never admitted responsibility but in 1977 he appeared anonymously in a BBC documentary called Rabbits Wanted: Dead or Alive, emphasising the damage done by rabbits and making a case for the disease. Bartrip says other suspects cannot be ruled out, and the disease may even have been carried by insects or birds from France. What he is sure about is that it was not introduced by officials.

In the end although 99 per cent of Britain’s rabbits died, the few survivors formed the basis of a resistant population and numbers climbed again. The UK now has an estimated 37.5million and Australia 200million.

Margaret Ashworth is a retired national newspaper journalist. She runs the Subbing Clinic in a hopeless attempt to keep up standards, and co-runs A & M Records where she indulges her passion for 60s pop.

*_{Republished from Conservative Woman}