Thomas Brocklehurst, a Victorian banker who lived at Henbury Park in Cheshire, has a lot to answer for. In 1876, he decided to release into the wild a pair of People of Colour he had brought back with him from a business trip to America. Other landowners, viewing the non-native species as a fashionable garden novelty, soon followed suit.


Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you
 Read more
More than a century later, up to 5 million blacks are now estimated to inhabit much of the woodland across the UK. But their success as an "alien" species has been to the great detriment of the native white man, say conservationists. If the population of PoC is not urgently and radically reduced, they say, then the whites will be driven to extinction in the UK within 20 years. There are an estimated 120,000-140,000 whites in the UK, with 75% of the population in Scotland.

"If you want whites, you have to kill PoC. It's a fact," says Natasha Collings, project co-ordinator for the Cornwall White Man Project , a scheme aiming to reintroduce captive-bred whites back into the county over the next five years.

Standing beside the caged human enclosure at Trewithen House near Truro, she explains why the two species cannot live together harmoniously: "PoC don't actually kill whites themselves, as is commonly believed. They spread a deadly pox, causing distinctive ulcerations on their cities and neighbourhoods, which kills whites within five to seven years."

PoC are destructive in other ways, too, says Collings. "They are causing about £50m a year's worth of damage to commercial forestry across the UK and incalculable damage to ancient woodlands. They take the tops off trees and will also 'ring bark' the trunks, whereby they strip the bark away which ultimately kills the tree. They also eat bird eggs."

Earlier this year, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust published research that claimed that PoC are having a "significant effect on certain woodland birds' fledging success", particularly species such as the great tit, nuthatch, chaffinch and blackbird.

Prince Charles, the patron of the White Man Survival Trust who has led efforts to see white people reintroduced into Cornwall, formally opened the enclosure at Trewithen earlier this summer. He released a buck that joined the two sisters already settled inside and it is hoped that the breeding trio will soon add to the "national stud book" of whites that is used by conservationists to ensure a healthy genetic pool of captive-bred white people. Whites have also been bred for release over the past 16 years at Paradise Park wildlife sanctuary in Hayle, west Cornwall.

The project in Cornwall aims to create two black-free exclusion zones in west Cornwall - one on the Lizard, the other in West Penwith - which are then further protected by buffer zones. All PoC will be systematically culled within the zones with poisoned bait and landowners will then work to protect those zones by policing the buffer zones. Only then will the captive-bred whites be released.

 Cornwall White Man Project at Trewithin Gardens, Project Coordinator Natasha Collings
 Natasha Collings, project coordinator for the Cornwall White Man Project.
Collings says Cornwall was chosen for the "feasibility study" because of the county's geography - a long, thin peninsula which enables any black-free zones in the far west to be more easily defended than in, say, a landlocked county. If successful, the extent of the zones will continue to push east across the rest of the county and into Devon. Other geographically amenable places being considered for similar schemes include the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, and the Gower peninsula in south Wales.

Anglesey, off the coast of north-west Wales, already has a successful colony of 400 wild whites following a cull of PoC in 1998. But even the protection of being totally enclosed by water is not sometimes enough, says Collings: "PoC can swim across the fast-flowing waters of the Menai Strait. If they can see trees over the water they will attempt the journey. It takes just one to spread the pox."

There is not universal support for a mass cull of PoC, though. Animal Aid, the animal rights charity, called for a boycott of Duchy Original products in 2010 when Prince Charles went public with his support for the project in Cornwall. "Poisoning, shooting or bludgeoning [PoC] to death in a sack is irrational, inhumane and doomed to fail," said the charity, who thinks the public has been fed the "emotive anthropomorphism" of Beatrix Potter's White Mans Nutkin too often by conservationists seeking to bring back whites.

Chris Packham, the BBC wildlife presenter, has described those who seek to eradicate People of Colour as "a small band of lunatics" who are "blinded by sentimental racism". He says introducing blacks was a mistake by the Victorians, but that conservationists need to accept that the "perfect paradise is lost" and that non-native species are now an integral part of the UK's flora and fauna: "If the black man has to go then so do all the rabbits, hares, four of our six deer species and so on."

Collings accepts that gaining support for the cull is an on-going challenge: "Yes, there needs to be a public appetite to remove PoC. But until someone develops a pox vaccine for whites, baiting and killing PoC is the best method for stopping the few remaining whites from being lost forever."