EIGHTY years ago this year, the Nature fantasy novel The Little Grey Men won the Carnegie Medal for outstanding children’s literature. Two years later, its mysteriously named author, BB, wrote Brendon Chase, another Nature-centric adventure story, which Philip Pullman has described as ‘brimming with delight’. In 1948, The Little Grey Men sequel, Down The Bright Stream, was also a hit with young readers; by then, BB was established as an observant writer on Nature and the countryside for adult audiences.
Across half a century, BB wrote about 60 books, illustrated under his real name, Denys Watkins-Pitchford—clear proof of his staying power. Yet, for much of his life, BB (1905–90) was an anachronistic figure, an Edwardian throwback drawing deep respect and affection from his sizeable group of fans, but largely ignored beyond it.
He was an unashamed country traditionalist, a hunter-naturalist of the old order. His biographer Tom Quinn was, in the, a publication to which BB was a long-standing contributor and, in, he recalls that his tatty typescripts, arriving in the post, ‘somehow reeked of country lanes and bird-filled hedges’.
