I first got in touch with John shortly after his book, A Merlin for Me, came out in 1999. I had mixed feelings when I first heard about it. I had started avidly hawking with Merlins in 1970 and had written several articles about them over the years. I always hoped to write a book about Merlins someday, but John beat me to it. I read his book, though, and it was great. I wrote to tell him so, and we always kept in touch after that.
We met in person for the first time in the late summer of 2006. I was in Caithness, Scotland, hawking with Roger and Mark Upton, when John suggested that me meet in the North of England, near Hadrian’s Wall, and spend a few days crow hawking with Nick Fox. Of course, I jumped at the chance. We had an amazing time watching Nick hawking on horseback, slipping his falcon at crow flocks, as other people galloped behind him. It was a colossal show as the birds rang up high above us, with the falcon fighting to get an altitude advantage over the crows, some of which would eventually plummet earthward with the falcon in hot pursuit. I’ll never forget it. Nick flew several falcons while we were there, and they were all excellent.
After that, I began dropping in on John and his wife Nancy whenever I visited England. They lived in the quaint market town of Louth in Lincolnshire, where John had spent decades as a schoolmaster before retiring a few years earlier. You could tell he had been a great teacher—one of those who was always understanding and supportive of his students. Interestingly, he had first become interested in falconry as a schoolboy, when famed falconer Captain C.W.R. Knight (who was the David Attenborough of his day and also the uncle of Phillip Glasier, author of As the Falcon Her Bells) put on a show at his school, flying his legendary Golden Eagle, Mr. Ramshaw. And later that day, Knight sat next to John at dinner and had a long conversation with him. (Geoff Pollard once told me that he had also been inspired to take up falconry when Knight visited his school.)
John was a scholar of falconry. In addition to authoring A Merlin for Me, he translated and published D’Arcussia’s Falconry, The Mirror of Falconry by Pierre Harmont, and The Falconry of Francois de Saincte Hilaire (the last two in a single volume). And I’m happy to say, we both wrote chapters in The Complete Merlin, and signed each other’s copies.
I remember visiting the Lofts once several years ago with my sister Janet and my youngest daughter Gwen (who now works at the Archives of Falconry). He took us to his favorite local pub, the Wheatsheaf, which had been there since the 17th Century. John told me that he and several other prominent British falconers—including Roger Upton, Stephen Frank, and Gordon Jolly—had gathered there once in the mid-1960s to lament the population crash of the Peregrine Falcon, whose numbers were plummeting across Europe and America. “Will we be the last generation of falconers?” they seriously wondered.
