Gilbert White - Commemoration

Commemoration

His house in Selborne, The Wakes, now contains the Gilbert White Museum, as well as the Oates Memorial Museum, commemorating Frank and Lawrence Oates. Each summer it puts on "Gilbert's Games" where visitors can try a range of traditional countryside activities.

The Selborne Society was founded in 1895 to perpetuate the memory of Gilbert White. It purchased land at Perivale in West London to create the first Bird Sanctuary in Britain, known as Perivale Wood. In the 1970s, Perivale Wood became a Local Nature Reserve. This was designated by Ealing Borough Council under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. It was at the instigation of small group of young naturalists led by Edward Dawson, with the support of Andrew Duff, Peter Edwards and Kevin Roberts.

The Gilbert White Fellowship was founded in 1932 by Winifred Boyd Watt, a historian and naturalist. It was based at Oxford, but was unable to gain continued financial sponsorship. Suggestions to revive it have been made in 2010 as part of the Selborne Society's Gilbert White Memorial Library relocation.

White is quoted by Merlyn in The Once and Future King by T.H. White.

A biography of White by Richard Mabey was published by Century Hutchinson in 1986, and won the Whitbread Biography of the Year award.

A documentary about White, presented by historian Michael Wood, was broadcast by BBC Four in 2006.

He is commemorated in the inscription on the heaviest of eight bells installed in 2009 at Holybourne, Hampshire.

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