Henry Williamson Collections Series

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'.

Written originally as a way of paying off unexpectedly high bills during his early years of farming in Norfolk – 'There was one thing for it: to pay off the debts by writing', he wrote in his farming classic The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941) – these beautifully written articles by Henry Williamson, set in both Norfolk and Devon, are counterpointed and given immediacy by the inclusion of the evening's headlines after each article, depicting the deteriorating international situation as the Second World War begins. Williamson had taken over the derelict farm in 1937, at a time when the farming industry was seriously depressed; by the time that war was declared, the farm was given an 'A' grade.

Henry Williamson remains best known for his classic nature stories, Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. The Daily Express helped to launch his literary career in the early 1920s, and also gave him much support during the latter half of the 1960s, which represented a late flowering of Williamson's long relationship with the Express. The 38 articles collected here for the first time were published in the Daily Express between 1966 and 1971. Subjects range from graphic descriptions of the battles of the Somme and Vimy Ridge, written on the fiftieth anniversaries of the battles, to essays on ecology and conservation – in particular, in support of banning the hunting of otters, and a trilogy of essays on the occasion of a congress of the World Wildlife Fund held in London in 1970. The late Richard Richardson, a talented wildlife artist whom Williamson had known in Norfolk, was commissioned by the Express to illustrate several articles, and his attractive drawings are also reproduced here.

Covering Williamson's last months at Shallowford in Devon, the family's move to a derelict farm in North Norfolk, the difficulties encountered by a total beginner to farming – including the disastrous crash in the price of barley in 1938 – and the opening months of the Second World War, these 45 articles written by Henry Williamson (author of Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon) for the Daily Express between 1937 and 1939 form a fascinating contemporary record of those times. Ten million Daily Express readers enjoyed them then – now you can join them. Also included are four of Williamson's's classic short stories, set in the North Devon countryside.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon, the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Between 1937 and 1945 he farmed 243 acres of difficult land in North Norfolk, bringing a near-derelict farm to an A grade classification during the years of the Second World War. Throughout those years he was writing newspaper articles, to help finance the farm. The 82 essays contained in A Breath of Country Air – originally published in two volumes in 1990-91, now gathered in a single e-book – bring together Williamson's weekly pieces in the London Evening Standard, written during 1944 and 1945. They are broadly concerned with day-to-day happenings on the farm, featuring particularly his two young sons Rikky and Robbie, together with other reflections on country life. Further pieces poignantly describe the end of Williamson's farming dream, with the sale of the farm and auction of implements and the family's move 60 miles south to Botesdale, in Suffolk. The book concludes with a 15-part serial, 'Quest' (originally published in Women's Illustrated magazine in 1946) which records the period immediately after the move. Richard and Robert Williamson – Rikky and Robbie – have written the Forewords; Richard remembers these stories 'as a video of my beautiful years, faithfully recorded . . . I can with the greatest clarity smell the new ploughed fields, hear the owls, and see the little grey Ferguson on those far away fields of the Norfolk farm'; while for Robert, after the move to Botesdale, 'being away at school, the holidays were greatly enjoyed, and Henry has captured the mood of these holidays, now that the strain of the farm had gone'.

Henry Williamson remains best known for his nature stories, Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. A serving soldier throughout the First World War, when he was demobilised in 1919 Williamson began to learn the craft of writing, and for a brief period was a tyro journalist with the Weekly Dispatch, owned by Lord Northcliffe. The articles collected here represent the very earliest published writings of Henry Williamson, appearing in the Weekly Dispatch between July 1920 and January 1921 during his short-lived Fleet Street career. They include 'The Country Week' (short nature sketches) and 'On the Road' (a weekly column on light cars that offered occasionally somewhat dubious advice!). Williamson's fictionalised account of this period in his life appeared in The Innocent Moon (1961). First published as The Weekly Dispatch: Contributions by Henry Williamson (1920-21), the e-book has been revised, with a new introduction by John Gregory, and retitled On the Road.

Henry Williamson remains best known for his classic nature stories, Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Less well known is that for a twenty-year period Williamson was a contributor to the prestigious American literary magazine Atlantic Monthly, with contributions including examples of his nature sketches, short stories (including perhaps his best, 'A Crown of Life'), and tales of his later experiences when farming in North Norfolk during the late 1930s and the early years of the Second World War. Central to the collection is 'Salar the Salmon', a condensed version of Williamson's best-selling novel which successfully preserves, in the Atlantic's phrase, the 'pulse and vitality' of the original. Now collected for the first time, this makes a perfect anthology of Henry Williamson's work.

Whether the reader is an angler, naturalist, country lover or simply receptive to Williamson's limpid prose, A Clear Water Stream embraces all these passions. The Williamson family moved to Shallowford on the River Bray in North Devon, England, in 1929. With his typical zest, the author set about revitalizing the river, stocking it with both salmon and trout, and building low weirs, thus creating new pools and improving the flow of water. Mistakes were made, with sleepless nights spent worrying over poachers, predators, and upsetting the natural balance. Williamson's error was to apply a chalkstream ethic to the Bray, and upland, acidic water. His introduction of water-crowfoot, a relatively uncommon plant in West Country upland streams at that time, was the cause of much consternation among local fishermen. There are stories of entertaining sojourns spent fishing in the Hebrides, Florida and Canada, and joyous moments with his children, but throughout, the thread - which is the stream - enchants the reader to the finale. Henry Williamson's impassioned observations were later to become the genesis for his classic work, Salar the Salmon. A Clear Water Stream is a delightful tale, interspersed with the author's deepest emotions. Henry Williamson's message, nearly eighty years later, stands as a prophetic work of genius. The River Bray today runs clear and vibrant. Salmon and sea trout still ascent to the foot of Exmoor, and the diminutive but beautiful wild trout continue to dimple the river's surface.

The Adelphi was an English literary journal founded by John Middleton Murry and published between 1922 and 1955. Noted contributors included Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, H. E Bates, and Henry Williamson. For a brief period – three issues only, beginning with the October-December 1948 issue – Henry Williamson took over the editorship from Middleton Murry, before handing the magazine on to George Godwin. However, Williamson's first contribution to the magazine was in September 1924, with a short essay (included here), 'The Doom of the Peregrine Falcon'. Also selected for inclusion are a number of important essays – for example, 'The Lost Legions' and 'Notes of a 'Prentice Hand' – together with 'A Note on Tarka the Otter' (which includes the original ending to that classic of nature writing) and Williamson's five editorial pieces which have the overall title of 'Words on the West Wind'. The distinguished Cornish poet, Charles Causley, is also represented here, with his 'Man into Fox', an insightful essay on the importance to him of Henry Williamson's writing. Williamson championed many young writers, and none more so than James Farrar, who served in the RAF during the Second World War and was killed in 1944, aged just 20. A talented writer but unpublished at his death, Farrar left behind poems and prose of a high quality. Williamson published several pieces by Farrar in The Adelphi, which are included here – 'Hayfield' and 'Atlantic Coast', and other fragments. Williamson both edited and wrote the introduction to the collected works of Farrar, The Unreturning Spring, first published in 1950. Anne Williamson contributes an introduction to this collection, 'The West Wind Blows Again' providing the background to Williamson's involvement with The Adelphi, while Richard Williamson, Henry's son, waxes lyrical on 'That Damned Motorcar' (HW's temperamental Aston Martin, which plays its part in Williamson's editorials).

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon, and particularly the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Between 1951 and 1969 he published his great work, the fifteen-volume novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, the story of Phillip Maddison. While he was writing these he was also continuing to write short pieces for newspapers and magazines. From a Country Hilltop is a collection of 58 such essays written between 1958 and 1964, which were published in the Co-operative Society's Home Magazine and, in its Out of Doors series, the Sunday Times. The 'country hilltop' was his haven, the field at Ox's Cross in North Devon that he had bought after the success of Tarka the Otter, and where he had built his writing hut. These short essays – personal musings on life, his children, North Devon (now known as 'Tarka Country') and other subjects – show HW's descriptive powers at their best. Nowhere is this shown better than in 'The Last Summer', a longer piece that is an evocative personal re-creation of the last golden summer of 1914 before the outbreak of the First World War and life changed forever; it was published in 1964 in the Sunday Times Magazine to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the war.

Henry Williamson remains best known for his nature stories, Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. This collection comprises a selection of Williamson's work from a number of sources, including book introductions; contributions to anthologies and magazines; a series of articles in the Evening Standard from which the collection takes its title; and two significant essays. The theme is one of people, places and events which had a far-reaching effect on Henry's life – his schooldays; the Christmas truce on the Western Front in 1914, at which he was present; Richard Jefferies; Francis Thompson; Williamson's farm in Norfolk, and North Devon. The print book was dedicated to Fr Brocard Sewell, a friend and stalwart champion of Williamson's writing, who died on 2 April 2000. In tribute to Fr Sewell, his essay 'Henry Williamson: Old Soldier', first printed in John O'Londons' Weekly in 1961, is also included.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon, the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Between 1937 and 1945 he farmed 243 acres of difficult land in North Norfolk, bringing a near-derelict farm to an A grade classification during the years of the Second World War. Throughout those years he was writing newspaper articles, to help finance the farm, and Green Fields and Pavements is a collection of the articles that he contributed to the Eastern Daily Press between 1941 and 1944. Williamson's eldest son, Bill Williamson, who worked on the farm throughout the war years from the age of thirteen, has written the Foreword, and the pen and ink drawings are by Mick Loates. Nearly seventy years on, these beautifully written pieces make fascinating reading. Beginning during the dark days of the war, prior to the turning point of El Alamein, and ending before D-Day, Henry Williamson presents a many-faceted, sometimes humorous, picture of life as it was on the Home Front during those years: of agriculture at a time when only the large farms could afford the new American combine harvesters, and the small farmer built his stacks and waited for the threshing machine; of literature and art, with reviews of contemporary books; of the countryside and its wildlife; and the poignant stories of Cheepy, a tiny chicken that mothered a brood of guinea fowl chicks, and Hooly, the young tawny owl adopted by the Williamson family. The war is an ever-present background, with references to the Eighth Army in North Africa, soldiers training in the fields, and the thunderous bomber streams – of the RAF at night and the US Eighth Air Force filling the East Anglian skies by day. Country Life magazine's reviewer commented: 'This is a bedside book of high quality; delightfully written and well illustrated, full of fascinating detail and description. I recommend it warmly.'

The Notebook of a Nature-lover recalls Devon as it was some eighty years ago. This enchanting anthology was originally written as a regular column for the Sunday Referee, and reflects Henry Williamson's unique ability to communicate his understanding of and his passion for the English countryside, whether it be observing salmon and sea-trout leaping in the River Bray (his classic tale of Salar the Salmon was written during this same period), watching partridges in his field and a spider in its web, walking on Dartmoor and Exmoor, or tales of his young children exploring the natural world around them. Henry Williamson (1895-1977) is best remembered today for his much-loved Tarka the Otter and his other nature stories – The Old Stag, The Lone Swallows and The Peregrine's Saga among them. A farmer during the Second World War, he recounted his experiences in The Story of a Norfolk Farm and in four collections of his journalism collected and published posthumously by the Henry Williamson Society (available as e-books): Chronicles of a Norfolk Farmer (1937-1939), Heart of England (1939-1941), Green Fields and Pavements (1941-1944) and A Breath of Country Air (1944-1946). After the war he returned to North Devon where, between 1951 an 1969, he wrote his major work, the semi-autobiographical 15-volume novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered today as a 'nature' writer, the author of the much-loved classics 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the 'Flax of Dream' tetralogy and his major work, the 15-volume novel sequence 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. What is not so well known is that during the late 1930s he became a broadcaster of some repute on the BBC. 'Spring Days in Devon' collects twenty-two of his talks, broadcast on the wireless between December 1935 (his very first appearance in front of the microphone) and 1954. Subjects include reminiscences from his own inimitable viewpoint of the West Country and its flora and fauna; the significance in his life of the barn owl; four talks on the lives of English animals (otter, badger, stoat and red deer - the last, memorably, given from the studio as if it were a live outside broadcast); and the difficulties encountered on becoming a farmer in Norfolk, following his move there in 1937 to reclaim a derelict farm. As an Afterword, the history of the working relationship between the BBC and Henry Williamson is told in 'Henry Williamson and the BBC', by John Gregory. It is clear from his scripts that Williamson put as much care into the writing of these as he did into his books; they are of a high and immediate quality, and remain immensely readable today. All surviving scripts have been gathered into two volumes and published as 'Spring Days in Devon' and its companion 'Pen and Plough', both now available as e-books.

'Genius of Friendship', long out of print, is a memoir by Henry Williamson recounting his friendship with T. E. Lawrence – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. This was a friendship through correspondence, for the two men actually met only twice. It had its beginning in a long letter critiquing Williamson's Hawthornden Prize-winning book 'Tarka the Otter' that Lawrence sent to Edward Garnett from India early in 1928, and which Garnett then forwarded to Williamson. The memoir quotes extensively from Lawrence’s letters to Williamson, which are both literary and personal in content, and make for fascinating reading. They continue up to Lawrence’s death in 1935; indeed, Lawrence’s last act, before his fatal motorcycle accident, was to send a telegram to Williamson arranging a meeting; he crashed while returning from the post office. The telegram is reproduced as a frontispiece to the book.

This is a collection of important essays by Henry Williamson on books and writers, first published in 1994, and now expanded. The first piece, 'Threnos for T. E. Lawrence', is in its middle section a revised version of much of 'Genius of Friendship' (1941). However the beginning and the ending are different, relating to the circumstances of 1954 when the essay appeared in 'The European', the distinguished periodical. Richard Aldington had let Williamson know by his letters that after years of research and reflection, he had come to regard Lawrence as a deeply flawed and mendacious character, very different from the popular conception of the heroic 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Williamson, on the contrary, through Lawrence's books, letters and two personal meetings with him, held him in the highest regard. He wanted to restate this before the publication of Aldington's book, and hence this essay, which begins with an account of his visit in 1949, with Christine, his second wife, to Aldington in France. Other contents are: 'Some Nature Writers and Civilization', the prestigious Wedmore Lecture that Williamson gave to the Royal Society of Literature in 1959, considering the authors Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson; 'In Darkest England', the presidential address that Williamson gave to the Francis Thompson Society in 1967, in which he describes his discovery of Thompson's poetry in the crater-zones of the Western Front; three short pieces on Richard Aldington, Roy Campbell and Arthur Machen; and a collection of Williamson's prefaces and introductions to books of authors whom he admired (Douglas Bell's 'A Soldier's Diary of the Great War'; John Heygate's 'Decent Fellows'; H. A. Manhood's 'Little Peter the Great'; Izaak Walton's 'The Compleat Angler'; V. M. Yeates's 'Winged Victory'; James Farrar's 'The Unreturning Spring'; Walter Robson's 'Letters from a Soldier'; and the 1973 reprint of 'The Wipers Times'). Also included are Williamson's illuminating forewords to his own books 'The Pathway' and 'The Labouring Life', which were only printed in the scarce limited editions. The final piece is not by Williamson but is of particular interest, being the text of T. E. Lawrence's long letter to Edward Garnett (who forwarded it to Williamson), in which he gives a detailed – and entertaining – criticism of 'Tarka the Otter', then about to be published. From this letter arose the correspondence and friendship between these two men.

Although Henry Williamson (1895–1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon and the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon, he wrote many other highly regarded novels. There has been a tendency for critics of his work to attempt to analyse the man rather than the writing that he produced in a career lasting over fifty years. The exception was John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), and this brilliant, long essay considering Williamson's novels first appeared in the posthumous collection Katherine Mansfield and other Literary Studies (1959). Murry had a distinguished career as a literary critic, and his essay remains essential reading for those who want to understand better Williamson's writings. It is written in a clear, elegant style, while the literary analyses of the works give to the essay its greatest distinction. The novels that Murry considers include the four that make up the tetralogy The Flax of Dream (The Beautiful Years; Dandelion Days; The Dream of Fair Women; The Pathway); The Star-born; The Gold Falcon; The Phasian Bird; and the first four volumes of Williamson's magnum opus, the fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (The Dark Lantern; Donkey Boy; Young Phillip Maddison; How Dear is Life). He thought highly of the books making up the Chronicle, and recognised them as major novels in the great and central tradition of English fiction. Of How Dear is Life he wrote, 'I do not know of any picture of the 1914–1918 war which can be compared with it for sheer power of enduring in the reader's memory. In a queer way it is not terrible; it does not haunt so much as satisfy the imagination. It is human, it is humorous, it is pathetic, it is noble – and, above all else, it is beautiful. It is the work of a truly gifted artist, come at last, after much inward travail, to a mastery of his own self-disturbing powers, and working on the grand scale.'

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered today as a 'nature' writer, the author of the much-loved classics 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the 'Flax of Dream' tetralogy and his major work, the 15-volume novel sequence 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. The first three of the novels comprising 'The Flax of Dream' were among his very early works. 'The Dream of Fair Women', the third in the series, was first published in 1924. 'The Dream of Fair Women' is set in Folkestone in the immediate post-First World War period of 1919, where Williamson, then still a soldier, was stationed. It tells the story of the love affair of the hero Willie Maddison (essentially Williamson himself) with the very desirable Eve Fairfax, the young wife of an army officer living in Folkestone. There are vividly written scenes of the town and its inhabitants during the summer of 1919, and in particular the Peace Day celebrations which took place on 19 July, culminating in a grand ball. This era and place are also captured in two books in the 'Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight' series: 'A Test to Destruction' (1960) and 'The Innocent Moon' (1961). 'Recreating a Lost World' explores the real Folkestone and its personalities at that time, identifying the real-life models for fictional characters and showing how Henry Williamson translated place and people, and his own experiences, into his novels. The text is by Anne Williamson, with quotations from 'The Dream of Fair Women'. It is illustrated with eleven unique photographs from the Henry Williamson Estate's literary archive and other illustrations.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered today as a 'nature' writer, the author of the much-loved classics 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the 'Flax of Dream' tetralogy and his major work, the 15-volume novel sequence 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. What is not so well known is that during the late 1930s he became a broadcaster of some repute on the BBC. 'Pen and Plough' collects twenty-one scripts of the broadcast talks given by Williamson between 1936 and 1967. Ten of these were broadcast only in the BBC's Empire Service (forerunner of its renowned World Service) in 1938/39, and concern the countryside and farming – the BBC called them 'nice, pleasant, dreamy talks, to make people homesick for England'. A further four talks are about Williamson's ongoing struggle to bring life back to the derelict farm in North Norfolk that he had bought in 1937, while one of the later broadcasts has the intriguing title 'On Seeing Marilyn Monroe'. There is a separate section of talks on books and writers, including broadcasts on R. D. Blackmore's famous Exmoor novel Lorna Doone, and the novelist Arnold Bennett. 'Pen and Plough', with the companion 'Spring Days in Devon' (both available as e-books), contain all forty-three of the surviving scripts of Henry Williamson's popular talks for the BBC.

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'.