He was the face of marine conservation for 3 decades. He made a huge impact for conservation through his larger than life personality, his generosity and his TV media profile. He could excite and engage an audience like no other. Lots of people will have stories like Jean Luc’s simply because he helped so many people.

Dr Jean-Luc Solandt  ‘Dear Colleagues,   So the great man died. David Bellamy was instrumental in the early days of MCS – helping with the first dive surveys, and pioneering work in many areas, including kelp surveys – Operation Kelp in 1968. This is likely to have been the first citizen science project involving sports divers. It lead the way to the idea for Underwater Conservation Year (1977) and the raft of diver based citizen science projects that were its main focus.

I met and actually worked with the great white bear that is D Bellamy in 2001 when we launched the Fiji Mamanucas Conservation Project for Coral Cay Conservation in 2001 – a year or so before I joined MCS. After a 20 hour journey on Air New Zealand via Auckland, and back to Fiji (where he spent most of the three long flights either snoozing or editing his autobiography), we landed in Nadi airport on the west side of the archipelago. We had an appointment at the British High Commission that evening in Suva on the other side of the island, so transferred to an internal twin-prop aircraft for the early evening flight. His immortal line that I’ll never forget as we took off in an electrical storm was ‘look even the fans are called ‘bedlam” (making a joke out of the brand of the fans inside the small aircraft as we were battered on the runway before taking off). No sweat for him! And on landing he pulled a linen suit out of his bag – white (he wore a lot of white), and said ‘never fails’ – when pointing to the creased suits we pulled from our bags. He used that suit on many expeditions. Basically he was good company – spending a lot of time in bed, then being ‘released’ to audiences to jump around and enthral everyone with joyful wondrous stories of coral reef diversity from around the world – whilst we sat ‘at the back’, never sure what would come next (usually me talking some boring twaddle about the science behind reef conservation measures). Another thing that struck me was that people ( in airports) checking him in, or in any way interacting with him would simply say how much he was part of their lives, and they looked genuinely awe-struck – and he was always very gracious at these moments.’

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Dr Jean-Luc Solandt – Marine Conservation Society
01989 561594 / 07793 118387  www.mcsuk.org