HENRY WILLIAMSON

author of Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon and many other books.

Henry Williamson was born in 1895 in Brockley, part of Lewisham, on the southern outskirts of London. In those days, although Brockley was a suburb, there was still a great deal of countryside all around, not the built up area it is today. In 1900 his parents moved to 11 Eastern Road opposite Hllly Fields in Lewisham. Hilly Fields was a large open space, quite wild in those days, and today quite like a large park. As it still exists you can look this area up on a map of London.

As a young boy Henry Williamson was very interested in everything to do with nature. One of the things he liked doing best was looking for bird's nests and collecting their eggs. Today of course, this is not allowed and is actually illegal but in the early years of the twentieth century there were still a great number of birds about: everywhere was much wilder and there were not the problems of pollution and pesticides that we have today.

When he was old enough, Henry had a bicycle still quite a novelty in those days) and he was able to get right out into the countryside. He wrote very polite letters to several people who owned big estates and parks nearby asking permission to walk on their land and to go bird-watching. He called these places his 'preserves', because the gamekeepers looked after pheasants in the woods and fish in the lakes, so they were 'preserved'. Today we use the word conservation for protected areas. Henry got very jealous if any of his rival school friends tried to muscle in on these special places, although he would often invite his special friends to go with him. This was a very happy time for him.

In 1913 Henry Williamson kept a Nature Diary' in a notebook, in which he wrote down everything that he saw and did on his visits. Years later when he was grown-up and had become a writer, he printed this nature diary in one of his books called The Lone Swallows, which contains a selection of his early essays on natural history subjects.

[see separate pages: 'A Boy's Nature Diary']

In August l9l3 Henry started work as a clerk in a big London Insurance Company. He still went out into the countryside every chance he got. In May 1914 he had his first holiday from work, and was invited to stay with his Aunt who had a cottage in a little village called Georgeham in North Devon, near Braunton. He travelled down on the train, and got very excited when he saw his first buzzard in the sky overhead. Every day of his fortnight he went for long walks in the countryside around Georgeham, going inland to a lovely little wood at Spraecombe (which is still there) where he saw buzzards and owls, and also out along the steep and wild cliffs to a place called Baggy Point, where he was thrilled to see peregrine falcons. When his holiday ended he had to return to London and work, but he vowed to return whenever he could.

Soon after this, the First World War began, and Henry became a soldier and fought in France against the Germans. This was a horrible time and he was often very frightened. He became a Transport Officer and was in charge of men looking after the donkeys and horses that pulled the carts (called limbers) that carried the guns and ammunition to the Front Line, and also food and water to the soldiers. So he had to go up the Front Line nearly every night through all the dreadful mud, with all the enemy guns firing. Even so he often made notes of birds and flowers that he had seen, and sometimes sent home pressed flowers to his mother. We know exactly what he did because he kept diaries and notes, and later on wrote a lot of books about his experiences.

After the war was over he decided to become a writer. His father did not approve of this at all and there were frequent quarrels. So, because he needed peace and quiet to think and write, in the spring of 1921 he decided to go and live in the little village in Devon where he had had such a happy holiday before the war. He rented a small thatched cottage in Georgeham which he named 'Skirr Cottage'. 'Skirr' was the noise made by the barn owls who lived in a hole in the roof. Henry was very fond of owls all his life, and he used an owl design as his 'colophon' - that is, his special mark, and this design was always printed at the end of every book he wrote, which was over 50 altogether.

Henry Williamson now spent a great deal of time walking about the countryside in North Devon carefully observing everything in nature, and also making notes about all the interesting country characters who lived there. He no longer collected eggs but watched the birds and made notes about how they behaved, and also animals and insects and flowers. He had a very powerful imagination, so instead of just writing down scientific facts about what he saw, he made up exciting stories but always based on how things really behaved in real life.

Soon he decided to write a book about an otter. Otters were very plentiful in those days, so much that they were hunted to keep them under control. Henry Williamson joined the Cheriton Hunt, which was his local group, in order to 'gather his material', that is so that he could find out all the facts he needed for the background for his story. At that time, the early 1920s, otter hunting was not considered cruel like it is today. Otters ate a great number of fish from the rivers, especially the trout and salmon, and so the fishermen did not like them. In modern times, otter numbers dropped dramatically, mainly because their habitats were destroyed and pesticides in the water killed them. Otter hunting was made illegal in 1978. But at that time otter hunting was quite a normal part of the country scene and all the village people would go along with picnics to make an exciting day out.

Otters live in rivers and the main rivers in north Devon are the Taw and the Torridge, and they join together to make a big estuary which enters the sea just beyond Barnstaple next to an area known as Braunton Burrows, a large sand-dune complex which in the 1920s was very wild and lonely, and full of seabirds and waders which lived on the mudflats when the tide was out and came onto the marshes behind the Burrows when the tide was full. It is still a lovely place, with lots of very rare wild flowers and insects, especially beetles and butterflies.

Tarka was born in a holt in the river bank at Canal Bridge on the River Torridge. You can find this on a map quite easily. To begin with he explores the river nearby and we learn of his early adventures, and the Hunt with the dreadful sound of baying hounds which the otters dread appears very early in the book. But otters are amphibious, that is they can also go on the land, so in Henry Williamson's story, Tarka (which means little water wanderer) could also go up on the moors. To do this otters follow all the smaller rivers, the tributaries, that join up with the big rivers. If you look at a map you can see how all the rivers make a huge network like a giant tree with all its branches.

Some of these tributaries start on Dartmoor and Tarka goes all that way south and has exciting adventures at Cranmere Pool which is a very famous landmark. Others start on Exmoor and as you read the book Tarka the Otter you can follow Tarka's route on a map right up onto the moor: 'the high country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks' as Henry describes it at the beginning of chapter 14 of the book. Tarka crosses the Chains, as the highest part is called, and hunts frogs in the very dark peat-stained water of Pinkworthy Pond (pronounced 'Pinkerry'), and then continues over the moor and follows a river down to the sea. He travels back along the coast, past Baggy Point and Braunton Burrows and back up the estuary and the River Torridge he reaches Canal Bridge, where he was born when the book opens and where he finally dies in the last great hunt that goes on for eight hours. It is a very sad end for Tarka but lots of things in life are sad for animals and humans.

Henry Williamson walked every mile that Tarka takes in the book, over and over again. He knew every tree, every bend in the rivers, every bridge, almost every stone and blade of grass. He certainly knew everything that happened in the area, where the frogs lived, how the eels behaved, where the heron 'Old Nog' nested and where the kingfisher could be found. He knew what the poachers got up to and how the fishermen worked, what happened to the rivers in flood, and how hard the animals found it in a bad winter, when it snowed and was frosty for weeks on end. He used to tramp about making lots of notes and making himself think as an otter would, seeing the world from an otter's viewpoint. Then he used his imagination to think up all the adventures that you can find in Tarka the Otter. And today you can still visit all those places, which are still just the same as when Henry Williamson first wrote his story, for there is a 'Tarka Trail' that anyone can follow.

(see separate page for information]

By the time he had finished writing Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson had married and had children and the little cottage in Georgeham was too small. So he and his family moved to a place called Filleigh near South Molton, still in north Devon, where he rented a cottage called Shallowford on the estate of Lord Fortescue, where there was a large deer park and most exciting of all, the River Bray ran through the grounds.

Henry Williamson had loved fishing since he had been a boy and so he rented the fishing rights on the stretch of the river next to his cottage. Soon he decided to write a book about a salmon. When it was finished he called it Salar the Salmon. It was more difficult to write about a fish than about an otter, and Henry Williamson had to spend hours and hours, days, weeks, months, watching what the fish did, what adventures they had, and all the things that happened to them. One thing that happens is, of course, that they get eaten by otters, so now the otter becomes a kind of enemy. Again Henry's story is very real, and everything that happens to Salar happens to salmon in real life. We start out at sea in the far away ocean where salmon spend their early days, then Salar comes back to find the place of his birth, swimming back up the estuary, making his way up the River Bray, which starts on Exmoor, so he and the other salmon leap up the weirs (which is a most spectacular thing to see) desperate to get to those quiet pools where mating takes place and the females lay their eggs. We learn what salmon eat and what adventures they have with the fishermen and the poachers, and all the other creatures that live in rivers and the diseases which attack them, particularly the deadly fungal disease, which is what kills Salar at the end of the book.

As Henry Williamson walked about all over the moors and coastline of North Devon he saw so many things happening, far too many to fit into his main stories. So he also wrote articles, short stories, essays, about natural history, many of which were printed in magazines and newspapers, and then later on collected up and published in books. One of these was called Tales of Moorland and Estuaries. Other stories can be found in The Lone Swallows and the Village books, and also in The Linhas on the Downs. Some of these books are difficult to find today but it might be possible to borrow the fro the library. Another wonderful story he wrote is called the Old Stag which is about the red deer which live wild on Exmoor and involves deer-hunting.

Henry Williamson loved walking on Exmoor all his life. His favourite place was the Chains and he loved to have a swim in Pinkworthy Pond, although the water is very cold there and it can be a dangerous place for children. It is very wild on Exmoor and sometimes quite dangerous, especially in a thunderstorm, when there is nowhere to shelter. In August 1952 there was a particularly bad storm when so much rain fell in such a short time that the rivers became torrents and roared down towards the sea sweeping away everything in their path. The worst damage was at Lynmouth, situated at the bottom of a steep and narrow gorge, which the water fell down carrying huge boulders which acted like ramrods tearing away the roads and houses. Henry Williamson wrote about this storm in a book he wrote when he was quite elderly called The Gale of the World. It is a very powerful description of elemental forces. The book is for adults and you might perhaps read it one day, but on a separate page you will find an extract of the storm scene. Rivers and the water in them are not always benign and happy places.

Henry Williamson lived most of his life in Devon, apart from a short time during the Second World War when he had a farm in Norfolk. He was too old to be a soldier then and he felt that it was very important to grow food for the nation. After that war was over he returned to the field he had bought on the hill above Georgeham and where he had built himself a 'Writing Hut', a place of seclusion where he could write in peace. He died in 1977 and is buried in Georgeham churchyard. Even as an old man he would still go for long walks out along the cliffs to Baggy Point, always his favourite place, or up to Exmoor and out along the path to Pinkworthy Pond, or go for a swim in the sea at Putsborough near his home. And he still always watched the birds and the animals and insects and flowers. He would have been very interested to know that the otters are back in the rivers of Devon and elsewhere, and that people are today trying so hard to protect the wild places of this country and of the world, to stop the pollution and use of pesticides so that every little creature can continue to live. He knew better than most that if we destroy the natural world then we are actually destroying ourselves.

Anne Williamson : Spring 1999