Douglas Hey

1914 - 2008

First Director of the Department of Nature Conservation of the Cape Province
Author of publications on Nature Conservation

Nature Conservation in South Africa owes much to his drive and enthusiasm

Douglas Hey was born in East London in 1914. He attended Mc Lear High School. He studied Zoology and Chemistry at Rhodes University (BSc) and the Stellenbosch University (MSc and D Sc, both cum laude, 1942) He worked as schoolteacher for a year and then as a researcher at the Jonkershoek Hatchery in Stellenbosch and at Leuven, Belgium.
1942: Director of Inland Fisheries
1949: Diplomas in Limnology, Hydrobiology and Pisciculture from the University of Louvain, Belgium.
1952: Director of Nature Conservation of the Cape Province
1959: Study Tour of the United States on an American Leader Exchange bursary
1970: Visiting Professor to Colorado State University
1972: planned and helped install a degree course in Nature Conservation at the Department of Forestry of Stellenbosch University, where he lectures
1974: Visiting Professor to Utah State University

Douglas Hey was a fellow and the treasurer of the Royal Society of South Africa, an active member of Council of the Zoological Society and served on the Boards of Trustees of a number of organizations, among them the South African Museum and the National Botanic Gardens.

Obituary By John Yeld : A pioneering guardian of Cape nature is dead at 93 (Found at the Alumni webpage of Rhodes University)

I need a better photo, please contact me!

A key chapter in the history of nature conservation in the Cape has closed with the death in Pinelands of veteran conservationist Douglas Hey. He was 93.
In a valedictory address at the memorial service at the Pinelands Presbyterian Church, one of Hey's two sons, University of KwaZulu-Natal physics professor John Hey, said his father's love of nature had been nurtured during a childhood spent in the small towns of the Eastern Cape where his father; Sydney Hey, a postmaster, had spent his free time fishing in the rivers and freshwater streams, gathering material for his now-classic work on fly-fishing, The Rapture of the River.
The son followed in his father's fishing footsteps: after completing his zoological studies and research at Rhodes and Stellenbosch universities, he began his career with the Inland Fisheries Department in the beautiful Jonkershoek Valley near Stellenbosch. He also studied limnology in Belgium and fisheries projects in the then-Belgian Congo.
In 1952, the Department of Nature Conservation of the Cape Province was founded and Hey appointed its first director - a position he held until retirement in November 1979. He also served briefly as head of the then-National Monuments Council.
Hey paid particular attention to public education, producing pocket-sized field guides on protected fauna and flora. He hosted a popular radio programme Talking of Nature, which he shared with a team of naturalists, and wrote a regular column, Bewonder en Bewaar (Admire and Conserve), for Die Burger newspaper. His many popular books on nature, published in English and Afrikaans, included Wildlife Heritage and Water Source of Life.
The province's museum services then fell under Nature Conservation, and Hey introduced the policy that each museum should aim to represent aspects unique to its area, rather than have duplicated general collections. This manifested as the 1820 Settlers' Museum in Grahamstown, the Shipwreck Museum in Bredasdorp, and the Museum of Farming Implements and Equipment in Albany.
In the course of his work, Hey became friends with other prominent conservationists and naturalists, notably Dr S H 'Stacey' Skaife of Hout Bay and Dr Marge Courtenay-Latimer at the East London Museum, discoverer of the famous coelacanth, the 'living fossil' fish. He won numerous awards and honours in South Africa and internationally, including the Cape Tercentenary Foundation medal, Cape Times Centenary Medal, the Freedom of the City of Cape Town, and the State President's Award for Meritorious Service.
Hey was probably best-known for his one-man commission of inquiry into the control and management of Table Mountain, producing a report in 1978 that was instrumental in the proclamation and subsequent conservation of the Cape Peninsula Protected Natural Environment, roughly the area of what is now the Table Mountain National Park.
The guiding principles in Hey's efforts in conservation were those of people's curatorship and stewardship of nature and their duty to exercise care over natural resources and to be responsible in using them, Hey jun. said.
'He discusses these ideas in his autobiography, A Nature Conservationist Looks Back.' - One of two passages read at Hey's service was written by naturalist Rachel Carson, most famous for her seminal work on the impact of pesticides, Silent Spring. She wrote: 'It is a natural and not an unhappy thing that life comes to an end, when that intangible cycle has run its course. For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the great ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.'
CAPE ARGUS, 17 April 2008