SPARROW EXPERT

Press, Volume C, Issue 29657, 30 October 1961, Page 2

SPARROW EXPERT

New Book !By SUSAN VAUGHAN} Mrs Clare Kipps is a neat, friendly woman, with a homely, agreeable air of a London sparrow. I know Mrs Kipps will take that as the compliment it is meant to be.

For Mrs Kipps is very fond of the sparrow, “Faithful, wise and sociable,” she calls it. After a lifetime of study she is one of the world’s authorities on the bird. In learned journals she is referred to as a passerologist—"from the term passer domesticus, the Latin term for the sparrow family,” she told me.

Other not-so-learned people know about Mrs Kipps and her sparrows through her book, “Sold for a Farthing," which has sold 130.000 copies in Britain and many more overseas—and at rather more than a farthing. I dare say most of them will be reading her second book, “The Story of Timmy,” when it comes out in the New Year.

Quite rightly then, Mrs Kipps, a 71-year-old widow, has been invited as a special guest to next month’s celebrated “Women of the Year" luncheon in London.