Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter: A brief look at his Life and Writings in North Devon in the 1920s and '30s, the area known today as Tarka Country: Henry Williamson Collections, #20

By Henry Williamson

In early 1921 the young Henry Williamson, traumatised by his experiences in the First World War, moved from London to a tiny cottage in North Devon, seeking solitude and renewal. Here he began to make his name as a writer with nature stories and sketches about rural life and his early novels; and here he wrote the Hawthornden Prize-winning 'Tarka the Otter' which remains the book for which he is probably best known today.

This short anthology serves as an introduction to Henry Williamson's early writings about North Devon, which served to establish his reputation as perhaps the foremost British nature writer of the twentieth century.

There are extracts from Williamson's classic novels 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', as well as from less well-known works including 'The Village Book', 'The Labouring Life', 'The Lone Swallows', 'The Pathway', 'The Children of Shallowford' and 'On Foot in Devon'. The extracts have been selected and edited by Tony Evans, who has also written accompanying explanatory notes, and Anne Williamson contributes a short biography which focuses on Williamson's life in North Devon up to 1937, when he left to farm in Norfolk.

The selections are illustrated by contemporary photographs sourced from both local collections and Henry Williamson's own albums, together with two maps of North Devon and Georgeham (the latter drawn by Williamson in 1932), the area today known as 'Tarka Country'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Mar 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781873507711

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

Author of Tarka the Otter

A brief look at his Life and Writings in North Devon in the 1920s and ’30s

The area known today as Tarka Country

First published 2001

E-book edition 2014

Smashwords edition

The Henry Williamson Society

14 Nether Grove

Longstanton

Cambridge

© Henry Williamson Literary Estate; Henry Williamson Society

Prepared by Tony Evans and Anne Williamson on behalf of The Henry Williamson Society

Cover photograph: Henry Williamson on the path leading to Baggy Point, overlooking Putsborough Beach, 1921

ISBN 978-1-873507-71-1 (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.

Henry Williamson’s Writing Hut in his Field at Ox’s Cross

Drawing by Peter Rothwell

Henry Williamson’s Owl Colophon

which appeared at the end of each of his books

CONTENTS

Henry Williamson’s Life in Georgeham and North Devon

by Anne Williamson

A Selection of Extracts from the Writings of Henry Williamson

with explanatory notes by Tony Evans

1. ‘Reminiscence’ from The Labouring Life (1932)

2. ‘The Lone Swallows’ from The Lone Swallows (1922)

3. ‘Uncle Joe’ from The Village Book (1930)

4. ‘Muggy’ from The Village Book (1930)

5. ‘The Railway Bridge’ from Tarka the Otter (1927)

6. ‘Braunton Burrows’ from The Pathway (1928)

7. ‘The Estuary of the Two Rivers’ from Salar the Salmon (1935)

8. ‘Appledore and the Revenge’ from The Pathway (1928)

9. ‘The Fair’ from The Labouring Life (1932)

10. ‘Winds of Heaven’ from The Children of Shallowford (1939)

11. ‘Saunton Sands’ from Goodbye West Country (1937)

12. ‘Willie Maddison’s Home at Shelley Cove’ from The Dream of Fair Women (rev. ed. 1931)

13. ‘The Redds’ from Salar the Salmon (1935)

14. ‘A Journey on the Lynton Railway’ from On Foot in Devon (1933)

15. ‘Humpy Bridge’ from The Children of Shallowford (1939)

Illustrations

Frontispiece: Henry Williamson outside Skirr Cottage, Georgeham, 1921

Map of North Devon showing places of importance to Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson’s own sketch map of the Georgeham area drawn in 1932

Photographs have their own captions. We are extremely grateful for kind permission to use photographs from the R. L. Knight Collection. Other photographs are from the Henry Williamson Literary Archive; the photograph of the blue plaque on Vale Cottage is © John Gregory.

Most of Henry Williamson's early writings about North Devon have long been out of print, although copies of his books can readily be found in second-hand bookshops. It is hoped that this short book will provide an introduction to his life and writing in North Devon for those readers unfamiliar with them. There has been some slight editing of the extracts.

Henry Williamson outside Skirr Cottage, Georgeham, 1921

HENRY WILLIAMSON’S LIFE IN GEORGEHAM AND NORTH DEVON

Anne Williamson

Spring 1921

In the early spring of 1921 – about 10 March – the shattering roar of a powerful motorcycle exhaust was heard echoing off the thick hedges guarding the sunken lanes, so typical of North Devon, that wind their way up the steep hills overlooking the small market town of Braunton. It was headed towards Georgeham, a hamlet hidden away on the moorland just inland from the wild cliff known as Baggy Point, and virtually overlooking the yellow sands of Putsborough Beach.

Soon the noise was filling the narrow street, echoing off church tower and cottage walls, as the motorcycle swung round the corner of the churchyard and down a short steep hill to a small unkempt cottage where it stopped abruptly. In the normal silence of Georgeham village, the noisy cawing of rooks nesting in the tall elms in the churchyard next to the cottage became dominant again.

The villagers knew that sound: they knew the motorcycle, a Brooklands Road Special Norton, numberplate LW82, as they had known its predecessor, LP1656, and they knew its rider – a tall, thin, rather wild young man – for he had ridden down from London several times over the preceding five or six years, escaping from the fret of the city and the horror of the First World War for short holidays, before roaring back up the road that crossed Exmoor to return to the capital city.

Only this time it was different. This time Henry Williamson had come to stay. Now aged 25, he had decided to live permanently in the tiny thatched cottage which he rented for £5 a year, and which he had named ‘Skirr’ after the noise made by the barn-owls occupying the roof space under the thatch, which they entered by a large hole made in the end facing the church.

For this nervous, gauche, abrupt young man had determined to be a writer. Born on 1 December 1895, Henry had been brought up in the south-east London suburb of Lewisham, and had survived the four years of the First World War. He had begun to write towards the end of the war while recuperating in an Army convalescent home at Trefusis on the mouth of the River Fal in Cornwall. For the past few months he had been working in Fleet Street, at first as an advertising canvasser for The Times, but then as a reporter, particularly writing motoring notes for the Weekly Dispatch, but also nature articles and short stories about the lives of animals and birds, and flowers of the countryside which he loved, which were being published regularly. But all the time he was hard at work writing his first novel.

In February 1921 this book, The Beautiful Years, was accepted for publication by Collins Publishers, and Henry was paid £25 on signing the contract. The book was to be published that autumn. It was to be the first volume in his early series of four books called collectively The Flax of Dream. This title was taken from a phrase in a small mystical volume written by his Aunt Mary Leopoldina, his father’s sister, who had given Henry much encouragement.

So he had decided to leave the family home where he felt very restricted, particularly by the friction between himself and his father, to go and live in this remote rural Devon village where the wild Romantic scenery would calm his nerves,