My mother, Iris Newbery, who has died aged 99, was involved in several environmental and conservation projects in Essex and Cambridgeshire. Taking up photography in her 40s, she combined her new skills with a keen interest in wildlife, gradually specialising in butterflies, moths and dragonflies, fungi, lichen and galls. As a member of Loughton Camera Club she won many awards, and achieved the distinction of becoming an LRPS (licentiate of the Royal Photographic Society), then later an ARPS (associate).
A founder in the early 1980s of the Essex and Cambridge branch of Butterfly Conservation, she undertook surveys and conservation work and organised field trips for members. Among the group’s successes was the restoration of chalk grassland on the Devil’s Dyke, an Anglo-Saxon earthwork near Newmarket, where hundreds of chalkhill blue butterflies can now be seen each August.
Another of Iris’s interests was volunteering at Copped Hall, near Waltham Abbey. The imposing 18th-century mansion, on the edge of Epping Forest, was burned to a shell by a devastating fire in 1917. When in 1993 the Friends of Copped Hall (now the Copped Hall Trust) formed to save the site from development, Iris became one of a small group of volunteers, led by the architect Alan Cox, who cleared rubble and plant growth from the ruin and its extensive grounds and stonework.
The project has expanded, with separate teams working on the walled garden and the earlier remains of an Elizabethan mansion on the same site, and has stayed volunteer-run, opening to the public for occasions such as tours, study days, open-air theatre performances, and jazz evenings in the cellars. Iris’s photographs form part of the restoration archive, and for many years she produced the members’ newsletter. In 2004, working in the walled garden, she was introduced to the then Prince Charles when he visited the mansion and planted a tree in the grounds.
Iris was born in West Ham, east London, the eldest of the four children, and the only daughter, of Beatrice (nee Damon) and Percy Cooper. Her father was a railway fireman, later station foreman at Stratford, where he served throughout the second world war. Iris’s education was disrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939 and her evacuation to a farm in Dulverton, Somerset, where the local school had only one class, made up of children aged from five to 14. On her return to Dagenham she learned shorthand and typing and took office work in order to make a financial contribution to the family.
In 1946, she married Ron Newbery, a Lancaster navigator in Bomber Command, who went on to become a chartered accountant, and they made their home in Epping. After his death in 2015, Iris spent her final years at Richmond Retirement Village in Witney, Oxfordshire, where, during the Covid-19 lockdown, she shared her love of the natural world by sending a daily photograph to other residents.
She is survived by two children, Rod and me, and by her brother, Bob.
