Well, it is our fault. Reds frolicked happily in the forests of England undisturbed (more or less) until one dread day in 1876 when a Victorian landowner thought it would be a jolly wheeze to import a couple of those unusual greys from North America. The guilty man can now be named as Thomas Emmet Brocklehurst of Henbury Park in Cheshire. A time traveller with a shotgun could save a lot of trouble.
We have a lot of grey squirrels around here on ground that used to belong to the Brocklehurst family - now we know the reason for all the local squirrels. We hope the cat will get around to reducing the numbers!
Also I see that a lot of web pages claim that it was TV Brocklehust (rather than the above Emmet), but apparently there are mentions of a Thomas Unnet Brocklehurst in the local Silk Heritage Centre which suggests that the Independent has it wrong and that the rest have confused their V's with their U's. Google gives me one relevant hit for Unnet Brocklehurst (apart from suggesting Uunet :-))
which appears to confirm the Americas connection.
Brocklehurst, Thomas Unnet, Mexico To-Day: A Country with a Great Future, and a Glance at the Prehistoric Remains and Antiquities of the Montezumans, 1883
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