Lady Phillipa Scott passed away last week at the age of 91. She was a photographer and the wife of Sir Peter Scott, the environmentalist and artist who was a key figure in the founding of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961 and instrumental in getting WWF into China in 1980.
According to a BBC news story, she suffered a fall at the Scott home at Slimbridge on the Bristol Channel (and the home of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust) and died last Tuesday night. The Guardian has a more thorough obituary.
I interviewed Lady Scott back in 2008 in an effort to find out about the origins of the World Wildlife Fund logo for a BBC Radio 4 documentary I was writing. OK, we know the logo’s a panda and that her late husband Sir Peter drew it but I wanted to get to the bottom of the discussions that led to the choice of this particular animal. She recalled Gerald Watterson, then secretary general of the IUCN, going to Slimbridge to draw pandas. She also confirmed that Sir Peter was very upset when the World Wildlife Fund rejigged the original logo in 1986. “They took the highlight out if its eye and they altered it slightly, which he was not pleased with,” she told me.