David Bellamy: Botanist and campaigner who became an unlikely household name

He was a familiar TV presence in the 1970s and 1980s, but his reputation was later sullied by climate-change denial

Bellamy was an outspoken champion of environmental causes (ANL/Rex)

With his broad, bearded, bashed-in features and much imitated growly voice, David Bellamy was one of the most recognisable faces and voices on television in the 1970s and 1980s.

Bellamy, who has died aged 86, was also a tireless and often outspoken campaigner for environmental causes around the world. In 1983 he was jailed for his part in a protest against a dam in Tasmania that would have flooded one of the best remaining rainforests on the island.

Latterly he courted controversy by dismissing the climate change predictions of environmentalist and former US vice president Al Gore as “poppycock”. He insisted, however, that his views were grounded in science. He said he had no political agenda and was in no one’s pocket.

He was much the same off the camera as on it, never happier than when he had an appreciative audience, especially of children. His monologues came in an apparently effortless avalanche of enthusiasm, mixing up purple passages, hard ecology and often ingenious, sometimes dreadful, puns with heedless abandon. He was a genuine scientist and an international authority on peatlands. His metier, however, was as a populariser and campaigner, in which activities he was energetic, endlessly inventive, and genuinely passionate.

Yet in the mid 1990s, Bellamy ruined his reputation in green circles by his stance on carbon emissions and global warming, which was opposed to most of the conservation charities he supported. His campaign against wind farms was publicly ridiculed by George Monbiot and others. Bellamy claimed he had been blacklisted by the BBC and ITV for his unorthodox views, and also for standing against the then-prime minister John Major for the UK Referendum Party in the 1997 general election (although Bellamy insisted he was a socialist at heart).

Bellamy was bought up in Carshalton, south London, where his father was a pharmacist at the local branch of Boots. Both his parents were strict Baptists. An early interest in chemistry led to experiments with homemade fireworks and an explosion that set his bedroom on fire. Until biology became his consuming passion, his favourite subject was English literature.

He had to retake the A-levels needed for his prospective medical career, and while doing so took up a post as a laboratory assistant at Ewell Technical College. One of his jobs was to take students on field trips to the Peak District, and it was at Raventor Youth Hostel, aged 20, that Bellamy claimed he became a botanist. (The hostel now has a plaque in his honour.)

Bellamy and his grand-daughter at the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick, 2007 (PA)

He enrolled for a biology degree at Chelsea College of Science and Technology and studied for a doctorate under his mentor, the botanist Francis Rose. On the strength of this he successfully applied for the post of lecturer in botany at Durham University, where he remained a member of staff for 20 years.

With his growing international outlook, he acquired experience in rainforest ecology in Sierra Leone, arctic tundra in Canada and coral reefs in the Indian Ocean. He also made a lecture tour of the Indian subcontinent as a visiting professor.

His distinctive style brought him to the attention of BBC bosses, who invited him to write and present a TV series, Bellamy on Botany (1972). It was a success, appealing to children and adults alike, and thereafter offers came thick and fast.

For the next 20 years Bellamy was rarely off the screen for long, writing, presenting and performing a steady stream of programmes (and their spin-off books) that included Bellamy’s Britain (1974), The World of Plants (1975), Bellamy’s Backyard Safari (1981) and Bellamy’s New World (1983). His muffled lisp, with its frequent exclamations of “weelly interesting”, was a gift to comedians, most notably Lenny Henry with his catchphrase “gwapple me gwape nuts” (which Bellamy always denied ever saying). In 1980 he released a single, “Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me?”, which he performed on Blue Peter wearing an orange jumpsuit. It reached 81 in the charts.

Bellamy left Durham University in 1982, although he continued to hold an honorary professorship. He continued to present television series up to the mid-1990s, but after that was more of a global conservationist. A workaholic who hated sitting still, he accepted between 300 and 400 engagements a year, spending only about 30 days per year at home. When he was jailed in Tasmania in 1983, his wife Rosemary commented: “For the first time in our married life I know exactly where he is.”

Accusations of climate-change denial would later sully his reputation. In a 2004 Daily Mail article he denounced the theory of human-made global warming, arguing that the current warming had largely natural causes, and that Al Gore’s predictions were huge exaggerations. He complained that the herd instincts of scientists left him nowhere to publish articles stating his point of view, and that he no longer trusted peer-reviewed journals to deliver objective science.

He was embittered by his quarrel with the green movement, and by what he was convinced was blacklisting by television (though more likely his fall from grace was due to a swing in fashion towards younger presenters). In his late seventies he continued to write and to hatch new projects, including a ballet script. His autobiography, Jolly Green Giant, was published in 2002.

His wife Rosemary died last year. He is survived by four of his five children.

David James Bellamy, botanist, writer, broadcaster and environmental campaigner, born 18 January 1933, died 11 December 2019