Stumberleap, and other Devon writings: Contributions to the Daily Express and Sunday Express, 1915-1935: Henry Williamson Collections, #1

By Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon,Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. His long association with the Daily Express, which supported him from the outset of his literary career, actually began without his knowledge, when his father submitted to the newspaper the letter that the young Henry, then a private with the London Rifle Brigade, had written from the trenches, describing the famous 1914 Christmas Truce in which he took part. The entire text of the Express's article is published here for the very first time. This is followed by some of Williamson's earliest published writings, from 1921 to 1935, with nature essays and sketches of village life in Georgeham. The book also includes some of Williamson's finest writing on the Great War, with the two series 'And This Was Ypres' and 'The Last 100 Days', together with the moving 'I Believe in the Men Who Died'. It finishes with some of his classic short stories, including 'Stumberleap' (which the Express called 'The Finest Animal Story Ever Written'), the mysterious 'Whatever Has Happened?', and 'The Heller'. The book comprises 38 articles, together with accompanying illustrations from the Express, and other contemporary photographs of Georgeham. The revised e-book published in 2014 includes four further recently discovered articles by Williamson, written under the pseudonym of 'John Dandelion'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Apr 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507476

Henry Williamson

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895. Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy. He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka. His writing falls into clear groups: 1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird. 2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 1914–1918, both in England and on the Western Front. 3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books. Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full. The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.

Book preview

Henry Williamson in 1921

This collection first published 2005

E-book edition 2013

Revised e-book edition 2014

Smashwords edition

The Henry Williamson Society

14 Nether Grove

Longstanton

Cambs

Text © The Henry Williamson Literary Estate

Introduction © John Gregory

ISBN 978-1-878507-47-6 (EPUB)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

CONTENTS

Introduction

The unofficial truce

In the country

A terrified passenger

Sport among the rubbish heaps

Honeymoon flight of the nightjars

Kingdom of the thirsty

Bird mystics

Death at 150 miles an hour

Samaritans

Winged prophets

Proserpine returns

Brock

Buzzards

A house of no morals

‘Scarecrow Cottage’

The woman of Scarecrow Cottage

The day’s round at Scarecrow Cottage

Reynard run ‘stiff ’

The tale of a cad

Elegy

Salmon fishers

My owl-ghosts

The tame cuckoo

A night symphony

And this was Ypres

A Devonshire donkey

Char-ley

The simple life, by John Dandelion

More simple life, by John Dandelion

My neighbour’s baby, by John Dandelion

My uninvited visitors, by John Dandelion

A seaside episode

A bird-blasted wood

Fourteen years after

The last 100 days

Windwhistle Cross

I believe in the men who died

Stumberleap

What I am teaching my children about God

Home

Whatever has happened?

The heller

Introduction

In 1914 Henry Williamson was a callow, sensitive eighteen-year-old, who had joined the Sun Fire Insurance Office in the City of London straight from school. At the beginning of the year he had joined the London Rifle Brigade as a Territorial, as much for the £4 grant and the annual summer camp as from any patriotic motive. That May, as his annual holiday, he joined his Aunt Mary Leopoldina, who had rented a cottage in Georgeham, a village in the remote north of Devon. The young Henry was captivated by the village and the idyllic area around it, and when it was time to leave he visited ‘my near and familiar sands and headland and to all I said Goodbye, I shall return, speaking to tree, cliff, raven, stonechat, and the sky as though they were human like myself ’ (‘The Last Summer’, Sunday Times Magazine, 2 August 1964).

War against Germany was declared on 4 August 1914. Two months later Henry, mobilised as a private in the London Rifle Brigade, landed in France with the 1st Battalion. On Christmas Day the Battalion was in the frontline trenches at Ploegsteert Wood, and took part in the Christmas truce, when Germans and British fraternised in celebration. The next day Henry wrote an excited account of it to his mother, and his father sent the letter to the Daily Express; he was not the only proud parent to do so. On Monday, 4 January 1915, the Express ran the story of the Christmas truce, and included an edited extract from the letter. The complete article is reprinted here for the very first time; it is significant, in that it marks the unwitting opening of what would be an association of over 55 years, for Henry’s last contribution to the Express appeared on 27 March 1971.

Henry returned to Georgeham when on leave in August 1916, with his friend Terence Tetley; and again after the war, though not yet demobilised, in August 1919, when he was accompanied by Mabs Baker, whom he had met while stationed in Folkestone. It was probably for this holiday – a romantic tryst with a married lady – that Henry rented Skirr Cottage, for in The Sun in the Sands (set in the early 1920s, though not published until 1945) he writes of 1921: ‘Suddenly I remembered the cottage in Devon, which I had rented, on impulse, two years previously, for five pounds a year.’

Henry had determined to be a writer during the war, and during 1920 was working on his first novel, The Beautiful Years (published in 1921). He had also to earn a living, and for a few months worked as a journalist on the Weekly Dispatch. He was not cut out for the job, however, while he also found living at home with his parents and sisters stifling and claustrophobic. In early 1921 he began contributing a series of short articles, under the heading of ‘In the country’, to the Daily Express, and it was while he was writing these that matters came to a head in his home life, and he remembered, ‘Of course, the Devon cottage! It had never occurred to me that I had a home of my own. My own home!’ (The Sun in the Sands). And ‘In the country’ for 19 March 1921 reflects his move down to Skirr Cottage: ‘This west country by the sea is swept by great rushings of salt wind coming from the booming Atlantic; the fields are a rich brown, and no wheat has yet risen from the earth.’ Henry had found his spiritual home.

In Georgeham he continued to work on his novel; and to provide an income he wrote nature essays and sketches of village life for the Daily Express, and short stories that were placed by his agent Andrew Dakers with magazines and journals. This present book contains all these Express essays and sketches from the early 1920s, and through them we can trace his development as a writer: while early ones show the clear influence of Richard Jefferies, Henry begins to find his own voice and style, and to produce confident, superbly crafted vignettes such as ‘A Devonshire donkey’ and ‘Char-ley’. They would later find places in his published works, particularly The Lone Swallows (1921) and The Village Book (1930).

The Great War, and his experiences in it, never left Henry – although he had been unwounded he was certainly mentally scarred – and this collection contains some of his finest writing on the subject. The series ‘And this was Ypres’ resulted from a visit with his brother-in-law to the Salient in June 1927. These moving and poignant articles, which appeared in the Express between 20-23 July 1927, were timed to coincide with the opening of the new and impressive Menin Gate memorial on 24 July. Henry would use them in his first book about the war, The Wet Flanders Plain (1929); the book was prefaced by an ‘Apologia pro vita mea’, which was first published as an Express article entitled ‘I believe in the men who died’ (17 September 1928). This is a powerful piece of imaginative writing, which struck a chord with the newspaper’s readers – some of their responses are reproduced here. The second series of articles, ‘The last 100 days’, was, unusually, never used by Williamson subsequently. It takes the form of nine dispatches, appearing exactly 10 years to the day after the events described, and cover the momentous final Allied push in 1918, and the collapse of the German army, a remarkably skilful feat of arms which seems seldom remembered today.

Between 1930 and 1935 the Daily Express published three of Henry’s classic short stories: ‘Stumberleap’, from The Old Stag (1926), which it called ‘the finest animal story ever written’, ‘Whatever has happened?’ and ‘The heller’. The last two would remain uncollected in book form until Tales of Moorland and Estuary was published in 1953. ‘Whatever has happened?’ appears there as ‘Where the bright waters meet’, and is one of Henry’s most unusual stories.

I have included the original illustrations used by the Daily and Sunday Express, even when the same stock photograph of the author is repeated; and it is curious to note that the 1921 photograph of Henry with his incipient beard is used as late as 1927. (He was proud of this, and in The Sun in the Sands writes of ‘stroking my soft beard, the dark brown hairs of which were turning fair with the bleaching of the May sun’.) Curious too, that while two more recent photographs are used in 1928, in 1930 the newspaper reverts to twice using another photograph from 1921!

I have also taken the opportunity to include some photographs of Georgeham, which date from Edwardian days to 1968. These show that the the centre of the village has scarcely changed in a hundred years and more; Skirr Cottage today is still as Henry Williamson knew it, externally at least. Although he lived there for only a little over four years, Skirr – so-called by Henry because of the noise made by the barn owls which nested in its roof – will always be associated with him through his writings. On 6 May 1925 Henry married Loetitia Hibbert, and they moved from Skirr shortly thereafter to nearby Vale House. The growing Williamson family lived in Georgeham for a further four years, before moving to Shallowford, twenty or so miles away, in the autumn of 1929. By this time, however, Henry had bought a field, Windwhistle Cross, otherwise Ox’s Cross or Oxford Cross, at the top of the hill on the road out of the village, where he built his writing hut, and thoughout his long life he would return here. He died in August 1977, and was buried in the churchyard at Georgeham, close by Skirr Cottage.

My thanks must go to Anne Williamson, who has provided a number of photographs from the Henry Williamson Literary Archive; Tony Evans, for his loan of photographs of Georgeham from the R. L. Knight Collection, and information about the village; Dr Mike Maloney for his research at the British Newspaper Library; and Express Newspapers for their permission to reprint the articles and illustrations from the Daily and Sunday Express, and to reproduce a copy of the back page of the Express from the issue for 24 July 1927. The articles themselves are published with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Henry Williamson Literary Estate.

The present book completes the Society’s collections of Henry Williamson’s many contributions to the Daily Express. Previously published are Chronicles of a Norfolk Farmer (2004), covering the years 1937 to 1939, and Days of Wonder (1987), which covers the years 1966 to 1971.

John Gregory

A note to the revised e-book edition:

I originally researched these Express articles in the late 1960s. I had written to Henry asking him about these, and he replied by postcard dated 22 May 1969: ‘I think the D.E. (small) articles began in 1921. There were some few S. Express articles about 1922-3. Comic ones in D.E. by John Dandelion.’ My researches failed to uncover any by ‘John Dandelion’, and they became an unsolved mystery. Then in March 2014 it was pointed out to me that the Express had now digitised its archive; that it was freely accessible online; and that a simple search under ‘John Dandelion’ had resulted in four hits – articles published between January and March 1928. My thanks must go to Phil Pearson, who gave me this information.

The e-book edition of Stumberleap and other Devon writings has now therefore been revised to include the four ‘John Dandelion’ articles, and represents Henry’s complete contributions to the Express newspapers between 1915 and 1935.

John Gregory

August 2014

The unofficial truce

British and German Soldiers Keep Christmas Exchange of Visits

Fraternisation between the opposing trenches was the keynote of Christmas-day, according to a number of letters from men at the front. As one writer points out, however, there were no Prussians among the German troops!

Private H.W. Williamson, of the London Rifle Brigade, writes:-

‘I am writing this from the trenches. It is eleven o’clock in the morning. Beside me is a coke fire, opposite me a dug-out with straw in it. The ground is sloppy in the actual trench, but frozen elsewhere. In my mouth is a pipe, presented by Princess Mary. In the pipe is tobacco. Of course! you say, but wait!

‘In the pipe is German tobacco. Ha! Ha! you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench. Oh, dear no! From a German soldier. Yes: from a live German soldier from his own trench.

‘Yesterday the British and Germans met and shook hands on the ground between the trenches and exchanged souvenirs. Marvellous, isn’t it?

‘This happened only for about a mile or two on either side of us (as far as we know). It came about like this. On Christmas-eve both armies sang carols and cheered, and there was little firing. The Germans (in some places eighty yards away) called to our men to come and fetch a cigar, and our men told them to come to us.

‘This went on for some time, neither fully trusting the other, until after much promising to play the game, a bold Tommy crept out and stood between the trenches, and immediately a Saxon came to meet him. They shook hands and laughed, and then sixteen Germans came out. Thus the ice was broken.

‘Our men are speaking to them now. They are Landsturmers and Landwehr, I think, and Saxons and Bavarians (NO Prussians). Many are gentle-looking men with goatee beards and spectacles, and some are very big and arrogant-looking. I have some cigarettes that I shall keep, and a cigar I have smoked.

‘We had a burial service in the afternoon for the dead Germans who perished in the last attack that was repulsed against us. The Germans put For Fatherland and Freedom on the cross. They evidently think their cause is a just one.’

Bombardier Carson, of the R.F.A., writes: ‘We had bully beef and biscuits for the last five days, including Christmas-day. It was rotten to have these delicacies on such a day, but plenty of plum duff helped us to realise that it was Christmas-day.

‘Not a shot was fired all day by either side. Friendly relations existed between the two forces. Men walked out of their trenches to chat with each other, and we exchanged cigarettes for cigars and chocolate.

‘One of their officers told our officer that he expected the war over in three weeks, as they had been told that they had captured the entire Russian army.

‘I think that is the way they keep up the spirit of their troops, but it is quite a mistake to say that they are short of anything. They are perfectly well equipped in every respect, both in clothes, boots, and military equipment, with plenty of grub. Every man has a pair of field-glasses, also a luminous watch for night work.’

The following are extracts from an interesting letter, dated Christmas-day, written to his mother by Lieutenant Kenneth Forbes* of the London Rifle Brigade:-

‘Every one is in the best of form, and simply overflowing with presents, including a very good one from the 2nd Battalion, the Queen, Princess Mary, and cards from the King and Queen and the General commanding the Division.

‘Every one is full of sport, including the Germans, and the comic stories reported this morning are innumerable. They have got a real German band just opposite us, and last night the uproar was just terrific, all the Germans singing and all our regiments cheering.

‘They finally became so bucked that they gave us God Save the King in English, and Home, Sweet Home, which was encored. The last we heard was shouts of Cholly goot vellows, though whether they referred to us or themselves is uncertain.

‘I had a long talk with four German officers, and we exchanged Christmas greetings and cigars. Three of them had Iron Crosses. The regiment opposite are Saxons, and they really seem to be good sportsmen, although, of course, it is difficult to tell, and we have to be very careful. We were thinking of arranging an international lunch, but our artillery began shelling them again, and so we had to return to our trenches and carry on.’

The following interesting letter from the front has been written by Mr Lees Smith, M.P. for Northampton, who has been