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Hugh Cott 1919.
Hugh Bamford Cott was born in Ashby
Magna, Leicestershire, in 1900 and
educated at Rugby School. Attending
one of the first post-war Sandhurst
courses, he was commissioned into the
Leicestershire Regiment in 1919. In 1922, he resigned his commission and went up to Cambridge to study theology with the intention of becoming a priest. However, he took part in the university expedition to Brazil, where he became fascinated with the natural world and, upon his return, switched to zoology.
Lecturing first at Bristol, then at Glasgow University, he accompanied expeditions up the Amazon and Zambezi rivers before completing his doctorate in 1935. His interest in camouflage arose when, after spending hours waiting for a hen partridge to return to her nest, he took some photographs of the empty nest before giving up. When he developed the prints, he was astonished to find that the bird, perfectly camouflaged, had been there all along. His thesis was entitled Camouflage and Warning Colouration in Frogs. In 1938, he became a lecturer in zoology at Cambridge University and curator of the bird collection at the department’s museum. Upon the outbreak of war, he enlisted again, this time in the Royal Engineers as a camouflage instructor. He completed his masterpiece, Adaptive Coloration in Animals, an immense 550-page tome which he illustrated himself. Cott identified the nine types of animal camouflage, including merging, such as the white fur of an arctic hare, disguise, such as a stick insect, and smokescreen, such as the cuttlefish. The book was carried by many officers during the war as a practical guide to camouflage, and is still in use today, judged to be the finest reference book in the field.
During the early part of the war, Cott persuaded the military to use more effective camouflage techniques, such as countershading. He commented that attempts to camouflage vehicles and buildings with paint revealed a failure to grasp the essential factors in disguise, that of surface continuity and contour. He demonstrated his theories in August 1940 by painting two adjacent railway guns – one with conventional camouflage and the other with countershading as seen nearer the top of the photograph. However, he failed to persuade the authorities to adopt his methods, with one RAF officer commenting that while Cott’s methods were undoubtedly effective, they would be too time-consuming and costly due to the need to employ
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