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Miss Birdseye first appears in telephone records in 1951 living at 9 Clinton Terrace. Miss Freda Lovesey, who remembers her, says she had retired from teaching and lived with her sister who acted as the housekeeper; this would have been her younger sister Mrs Ruby Brooks. Miss Lovesey says the nickname given to her by her pupils was, not unsurprisingly, “Tweet Tweet”.  She lived in the town until her death in the summer of 1985, her sister predeceasing her in 1981. Eva left a bequest in her Will to the Temple Methodist Church and they used some of the money to purchase an electric organ which is still in use (1).

Eva Birdseye was born in Lee, Kent, in 1894 to Sidney George Birdseye, a hosier and outfitter, and his wife Mary. Around the time of WW1 she took a B.Sc. course and a Diploma in Geography at London University and became a teacher. I think she must have travelled to India to work fairly soon after obtaining her degree. She is mentioned as attending a meeting held at the Willingdon Training College Madras in 1925 when it was decided to form a Geographical Association at Madras to promote the study of Geography in South India. The inaugural meeting of the Madras Geographical Association was held in March 1926 and Miss Birdseye as a Vice President proposed a vote of thanks to the speaker. She wrote an article in 1926 (2) which was cited as the first devoted to regional geography in India (3). This analysed the topography, geology, water supply, drainage and climate and how these influenced the vegetation and farming and other human activities for the region.

In 1932 she was recorded as being a professor at St. Christopher’s Training College (on leave that particular year) and was confirmed as a Vice-President of the Indian Geographical Society the same year (4). By 1934 she had become the Principal of the Weslyan Mission Girls’ High School at Royspettah in Madras (5) and was President of the Indian Geographical Society in 1940 presenting a paper “Climate and Weather” the same year (6).

She published two books in India, one in English in 1938 entitled “Eurasia and India, with some treatment of General Geography” and another of 213 pages in Tamil co-authored with Ma Canmukacuntara also in 1938 called “Ten_kantankalum vata amerikkavum” (7). I assume this is about geography and possibly that of North America as vata can mean northern according to an online Tamil dictionary.

Miss Birdseye resigned from her post and returned to England arriving in Liverpool in December 1946, and Miss Lovesey tells me that she then took up a post at Edgehill College in Bideford which was one of a number of independent schools owned by the Methodist Church. This was a boarding school. She hadn’t finished publishing however, because in 1951 she revised and enlarged the 4th edition of a book entitled “The Teaching of Geography” by E A Macnee and in 1962 also worked on the subsequent edition (7).

Researched and Written by Roger Lendon, © March 2015

(1) www.budleightemplemethodist.org.uk/home/our-history
(2) “Some aspects of the geography of Madras”  J. Madras Geographical Association 1926 pp 45-48
(3) Fifty years of Science in India by Shiba Prasad Chatterjee
(4) The yearbook of the Universities of the Empire 1932
(5) Indian Geographical Journal Vol.9 1934
(6) Indian Geographical Journal Vol 15 1940
(7) WorldCat Member Library Worldwide

BS-B-00070 Biography