Phil Hollom at the age of 99, being shown a Red Kite Milvus milvus chick (photo: Keith Betton) Born 2 years before the outbreak of World War I, at Bickley, Kent, on 9 June 1912, Phil Hollom had a long and remarkable life of just over 102 years, which ended peacefully at his Surrey home on 20 June 2014. What follows are essentially personal reminiscences of 40 years of ornithological friendship and collaboration between him and me. A fuller and more general account of his life by Ian Wallace has been published in British Birds (107: 771–776). The 1940s (when I began serious birdwatching), through into the 1950s and 1960s, were an exciting period for young ornithologists – far higher populations of common birds, so much to be learnt, so few books – and the pre-WW II decade was perhaps even more so, with ornithology not so long out of the museum. Until the mid-1950s there were no field guides (which we now expect to have available for almost anywhere in the world). The RSPB reached just 10 000 members by 1960, compared with over a million now. Because active birdwatchers were so thin on the ground, one quickly got to know any others. When Phil Hollom was at school in the 1920s, his most up-to-date books were Thomas Coward's three-volume The Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs (1920–25) and Max Nicholson's How Birds Live (1927). But Phil was already ringing birds and had begun periodic counts of local nests of Swallows Hirundo rustica and House Martins Delichon urbicum – a project that he still regarded as ‘ongoing’ when he last returned there over 75 years later. In 1930 Phil met Harry Witherby and soon other senior ornithologists. He and the later renowned polymath Tom Harrisson then organized the first national Great Crested Grebe Podiceps cristatus Enquiry, 1931 (Br. Birds 26: 62–92, 102–131, 142–155, 174–195, 246–291). Witherby et al.'s five-volume A Handbook of British Birds (1938–41) became the standard reference through and after World War II. I first met Phil in the late 1940s, probably at a meeting in 1948 of the now defunct 1937 Bird Club, an organization limited to 25 members who dined together monthly in London on winter evenings before discussing a set subject. I don't remember Phil ever introducing a subject because, through modesty, he did not like taking centre stage. Over the next few years, we got on pretty well, even though I was less than half his age then. We made one or two trips together to such places as Cley, Norfolk, and I especially remember a very cold day there when his rather old car's heater would not work. Although Max Nicholson was only 8 years older than Phil, he had helped to set up the BTO in the 1930s and in 1928 launched the National Census of Heronries Ardea cinerea that continues to this day. In 1950 Max was appointed senior editor of British Birds (BB) after the untimely death of Bernard Tucker at the age of 49; Phil joined the board in 1951. My association with them became much closer when I was asked to be assistant editor in 1952, then executive editor in 1954. Max remained as senior editor until 1960, when Phil took over. Max remained on the board and about that time Stanley Cramp joined us. We four had monthly meetings in a small restaurant in Soho. These years were particularly significant for BB as many projects were launched there. Max, Stanley and I were each closely involved in various capacities in two or more of most of the national ornithological and conservation bodies (Br. Birds 100: 10). Phil, more of a free agent, was sometimes better able than the rest of us to distinguish the wood from the trees. Apart from the development of BB, these meetings first raised the concept of the Birds of the Western Palearctic (BWP). They also helped to convince me in particular that grid-mapping bird distributions in Britain and Ireland by 10-km squares was feasible when majorities of the BTO Council and committees considered such a project impossible – but the doubters gave way and eventually the 1968–72 Breeding Atlas was born. Phil's contributions at the BB meetings were invaluable. Progress with Max's and my investigations into what became known as the ‘Hastings Rarities’ were another point of discussion: Phil and the BOU Records Committee (of which he was then chairman) fully accepted our conclusions and, with our agreement, he deleted all the Hastings Rarities from the revised edition (1962) of his The Popular Handbook of Rarer British Birds. In 1959, starting with the assessment of 1958 records, Phil and I set up the BB Rarities Committee (BBRC), asking eight others to join us on a panel that became affectionately known as the ‘Ten Rare Men’. Earlier, though never regarding ourselves as ‘twitchers’ (a term that only came into being in the late 1950s), Phil and I sometimes went to see a reported rarity. One such, in Lincolnshire in autumn 1952 (Br. Birds 46: 51–55), was surely Britain's first Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto, a species expected to arrive here after its rapid spread north-west across Europe. We then became over-cautious about this individual because we found a Nottinghamshire dealer who claimed to have imported some, but with hindsight we became convinced that they must have been Barbary Doves S. ‘risoria’: the Lincolnshire bird stayed in its territory for several years, and should now be reassessed as the first British Collared Dove. An American vagrant that we went to see was the first British Myrtle Warbler – now nominate Yellow-rumped Warbler Setophaga (Dendroica) coronata – in Devon in January 1955 (Br. Birds 48: 204–207): this interested us as there had long been a school of thought that American passerines could not possibly cross the Atlantic. In some ways Phil was a loner. He was not fond of committees (apart from those dealing with the identification of rarities). He was, however, a member of three of Guy Mountfort's ground-breaking expeditions, to Spain's Coto Doñana in 1957, to Bulgaria in 1960 and to Jordan in 1963, though he had already been to two of those places on his own years earlier. In 1961 he and I dropped out of Guy's expedition to Hungary and, instead, visited the Danube Delta with Stanley Cramp. Phil was a very efficient traveller who always managed to pack everything he needed into a small haversack and an even smaller suitcase. With such light equipment he would sometimes appear at places where he had learnt other birdwatchers were going to be. In June 1953 Dougal Andrew, Ian Pennie and others were on a 4-week expedition to Swedish Lapland when Phil suddenly materialized by bus from Finland, bearing proofs of the forthcoming Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (1954) by Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort and himself. This was the first single-volume identification book for western Europe and its impact was enormous. I like to think that the most important parts (excepting Roger Peterson's fine illustrations, of course) were the individual species maps which Phil had drawn, these being the first cockshies at distributions of all European species. Phil's other major contribution was to BWP, and he and Max Nicholson were the only two of the original editors/authors who stayed the course from conception in 1966–70 to completion in 1994. Phil made many additions and corrections and, not least, provided personal sound recordings of no fewer than 80 species. I was very fond of Phil, whom I last sat with at Max's 90th birthday celebration at the Athenaeum in 1994 and I believe I was the first to name him in print (more than once) as the ‘quiet man of post-war ornithology’, for he was a gentle person and not in the least pushy. His powers of concentration were shown by his writing much of his correspondence in longhand, and similarly correcting proofs, on the train to and from his London office. A few years ago I was interested to find, when analysing the first Wiltshire Bird Report, covering 1929, that two of its 28 contributors that year were PAD Hollom, then a boy at King's School, Bruton, in Somerset, and EM Nicholson, who had both supplied casual observations (Hobby 37: 93–117). There is no indication that they knew each other, but this must have been the first time that the names of these two outstanding ornithologists were printed on the same page.