Henry Williamson
Henry William Williamson was an English author who wrote novels concerned with wildlife, English social history and Ruralism. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 for his book Tarka the Otter.
Early years
Henry Williamson was born in Brockley in south-east London. In early childhood his family moved to Ladywell, and he received a grammar school education at Colfe's School. The then semi-rural location provided easy access to the Kent countryside, and he developed a deep love of nature throughout his childhood.First World War
On 22 January 1914, Williamson volunteered as a rifleman with the 5th Battalion of the London Regiment, part of the British Army's Territorial Force, and was mobilised when war was declared upon Imperial Germany on 5 August 1914.In November 1914, he went to France with the London Rifle Brigade's 1st Battalion, entering the Western Front's trenches in the Ypres Salient, where he witnessed the Christmas Truce between British and German troops. In January 1915, he was withdrawn from the winter trenches with trench foot and dysentery and evacuated back to Britain. After convalescence, he was commissioned on 10 April 1915 as a second lieutenant with the 10th Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment. In May 1915, he was attached for training to the 2/1st Cambridgeshire Regiment at Newmarket. In October 1915, he was transferred to the 25th Middlesex Regiment at Hornchurch. He volunteered to specialise in machine-gun warfare, and in January 1916, joined No. 208 Machine Gun Company of the Machine Gun Corps at Belton Park, Grantham. In May 1916, he entered hospital in London with anaemia, and was granted two months' medical leave. He rejoined No. 208 MGC and in February 1917 departed Britain with it for the Western Front, the unit taking the field with the 62nd Division. Williamson acted as his company's transport officer and, in June 1917, he was gassed while transporting ammunition up to the front line. He was returned to the UK, spending the next few months in military convalescent hospitals. In September 1917, he was attached for garrison duty as the adjutant of the 3rd Bedfordshire Regiment at Felixstowe. Classed B1 by an Army Medical Board, from the effects of the gas, he was judged to be unfit for active service. After a year at Felixstowe, and frustrated at the nature of garrison life, Williamson attempted to get back to front-line action in September 1918 with an application to be transferred to the Royal Air Force, but this was rejected due to his medical classification. He then applied for a transfer to the Indian Army, which was granted, but the war was ending and the order was cancelled. He spent a year afterwards on administrative duties demobilising soldiers from military camps on the south east coast of England, and was discharged from the army himself on 19 September 1919.
Williamson became disgusted with what he considered to be the pointlessness of the war, blaming its causation on greed and bigotry. He became determined that Germany and Britain should never go to war again. Williamson was also powerfully influenced by the camaraderie that he had experienced in the trenches, and what he saw as the bonds of kinship that existed between the ordinary British and German soldiers.
Early writing
He told of his war experiences in The Wet Flanders Plain, The Patriot's Progress and in many of his books in the semi-autobiographical 15-book series A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.After the war, he read Richard Jefferies' book The Story of My Heart and this inspired him to begin writing seriously. In 1921, he moved to Georgeham, Devon, initially living in Skirr Cottage there. He married Ida Loetitia Hibbert in 1925 - she was descended from the Hibbert family that founded its fortune as slave owners and traders in Jamaica on both her mother and father's side - they had six children. One daughter, Margaret, was the first wife of the guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream.
In 1927 Williamson published his most acclaimed book, Tarka the Otter; it won him the Hawthornden Prize in 1928, and made him enough money to pay for the wooden hut near Georgeham where he wrote many of his later books, often sitting alone there for 15 hours a day. The wooden writing hut was granted Grade II listed status by English Heritage in July 2014 because of its "historical interest". Tarka also sparked a friendship with T. E. Lawrence who had similar views about the need for a lasting peace settlement in Europe. Lawrence died in May 1935 shortly after receiving a telegram from Williamson, which has sparked some conspiracy theories.
In 1936 he bought a farm in Stiffkey, Norfolk. The Story of a Norfolk Farm is his account of his first years of farming there.
Politics
In 1935, Williamson visited the National Socialist German Workers Party Congress at Nuremberg and was greatly impressed, particularly with the Hitler Youth movement, whose healthy outlook on life he compared with the sickly youth of the London slums. He had a "well-known belief that Hitler was essentially a good man who wanted only to build a new and better Germany." Opposed to war and believing that wars were caused by Jewish "usurial moneyed interests", he was attracted to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and joined it in 1937. Mosley became Hereward Birkin in Williamson's Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.On the day of the British declaration of war, Williamson suggested to friends that he might fly to Germany to speak with Hitler to persuade him away from war. Following a meeting with Mosley later that day, however, he was dissuaded from his plan. At the start of the Second World War, Williamson was briefly held under Defence Regulation 18B for his political views, but he was released after only a weekend in police custody. Visiting London in January 1944, he observed with satisfaction that the ugliness and immorality represented by its financial and banking sector had been "relieved a little by a catharsis of high explosive" and somewhat "purified by fire". In The Gale of the World, the last book of his Chronicle, published in 1969, Williamson has his main character Phillip Maddison question the moral and legal validity of the Nuremberg Trials. This book also hinted at a plot to rescue Rudolf Hess from Spandau prison.
Williamson initially retained a close relationship with Mosley in the immediate aftermath of the war, but when he brought Mosley as his guest to the Savage Club, the former BUF leader was asked to leave. Williamson refused Mosley's request to join the newly established Union Movement and indeed, his suggestion to Mosley that he should instead join him in abandoning politics altogether led to the two men falling out. Nonetheless, Williamson would write for the Mosleys' theoretical journal The European. He also continued to express admiration for aspects of Nazi Germany after the war.
Post-war life and writing
After the war the family left the farm. In 1946 Williamson went to live alone at Ox's Cross, Georgeham in North Devon, where he built a small house in which to write. In 1947 Henry and Loetitia divorced. Williamson fell in love with a young teacher, Christine Duffield, and they were married in 1949. He began to write his series of fifteen novels collectively known as A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In 1950, the year his only child by this marriage Harry Williamson was born, he edited a collection of poems and short stories by James Farrar, a promising young poet who had died, at the age of 20, in the Second World War. From 1951 to 1969 Williamson produced almost one novel a year, while contributing regularly to the Sunday Express and The European magazine, edited by Diana Mosley. He also contributed a number of reviews and articles to The Sunday Times.In 1964 he had a short affair with the novelist Ann Quin, who was nearly forty years his junior. This all put great strain on his marriage and, in 1968, Christine and he were divorced after years of separation.
In 1974 he began working on a script for a film treatment of Tarka the Otter, but it was not regarded as suitable to film, being 400,000 words long. Filming went on, unknown to him, and the film of Tarka the Otter, narrated by Peter Ustinov, was released in 1979.