Henry Williamson and the First World War

Anne Williamson

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780750935524
• eBook ISBN: 9780752495286
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Henry Williamson is known for his book 'Tarka the Otter', yet his time in World War I trenches affected him profoundly. This book draws on his letters, diaries, photographs and notebooks written at the time to give us a detailed account of life in the trenches of the First World War. It also offers us a rare insight into the making of a novelist.

Chapter One

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A Dreaming Youth

In the summer of 1914 Henry Williamson, at 18½ years of age was, as he wrote in 1964 in an essay published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, ‘a dreaming youth’.¹

I was a dreaming youth who had said goodbye to freedom and happiness; soon I must leave school and be enclosed in a sunless office. My dream lay in the countryside of north-west Kent which began four miles from London Bridge. Here partridges were still to be seen on the Seven Fields of Shrofften. There were roach in the little cattle-drinking ponds, each inhabited by its pair of moorhens. Below the Seven Fields, which sloped to the grey Bromley road, there were trout in the watercress beds by Perry’s Mill. Then came Southend Pond. Thence towards London the River Ravensbourne was dying.…

My own woods, or preserves as I thought of them, were safe. They lay up to a dozen miles away. I was the fortunate holder of a card signed ‘Constance Derby’, giving me permission to study wild birds in Holwood Park at Keston. Squire Norman had also given me leave to roam his woods and coverts at The Rookery, and Shooting Common. Likewise I was allowed to roam the estate called High Elms near Downe, owned by Lord Avebury. My farthest ‘preserves’ were at Dunstall Priory, near Sevenoaks, and Squerryes Park at Westerham. Not that I belonged to such places. I had written formal letters, as instructed in a book of etiquette studied in the public library, to the owners, and in every case had received a gracious reply.

The Williamson family (Henry’s parents, William Leopold and Gertrude, his two sisters, the slightly older Kathleen and Doris, a little younger, and Henry himself) lived at 11 Eastern Road opposite the Hilly Fields in Lewisham in south-east London. Henry Williamson had been educated at the local grammar school, Colfe’s, which was run on the public school principle.² Although he had won an entrance scholarship in 1907 and it is obvious that he was interested in writing from an early age, he was not to prove a scholar. His energies during his school days were devoted mainly to outdoor pursuits. He took a full part in various sports, particularly being a keen cross-country runner and becoming Captain of Harriers in his last year. He was a keen member of his local scout troop, at that time still a very new and exciting movement for boys. It is particularly significant that he was a member of the school rifle team and took part in shooting competitions at Bisley, where he usually took a very high score. Above all he loved to be out in the countryside, cycling around the lanes of Kent looking for birds’ nests and collecting eggs, sometimes with his especial school friends Terence Tetley, Rupert Bryers, Victor Yeates, Hose, and ‘Bony’ Watson (whose christian names are never mentioned) but, as his 1913 Lett’s School Boy’s diary shows, he was at his happiest when alone.

Henry’s entries in his diary show the thoughts of a typical seventeen-year-old youth; the first stirrings of curiosity about sex, the squabbles and intrigues among the cliques and gangs at school, and their pastimes both at school and at home. Particularly noticeable are frequent visits to the local Hippodrome usually with Terence Tetley and Victor Yeates, but mainly the entries refer to ‘birding’ expeditions.

This diary was supplemented by fuller nature notes in an exercise book, now coverless and much stained, entitled rather pompously in the self-conscious way of adolescence, and in a rounded juvenile handwriting, ‘Official diary of observations made in 1913, as supplementary to pocket diary’. These notes were to be used in his writing in later years, first in the early book Dandelion Days³ as a nature diary that the boy-hero Willie kept and then directly as ‘A Boy’s Nature Diary’ added into a revised edition of The Lone Swallows published in 1933.⁴ Here is a direct example of Henry’s intense early interest in natural history and it is evident that, like Wordsworth, ‘fair seed-time’ had his soul.⁵ Apart from the tiniest of amendments here and there (a very few commas and semi-colons added, some full names taken out, and a few paragraphs deleted) the published version was exactly as it was written in 1913 and shows his early ability for writing and a marked tenacity for sticking to his self-allotted task over several months, which was to be one of the strengths of the adult writer, but was perhaps unusual in a schoolboy. Already the obsession for writing was apparent.

Henry Williamson left school at the end of May 1913. Unfitted for and uninterested in university entry (although he had passed the Cambridge matriculation examination that March, admittedly with only 3rd class Honours) his last months at school had been spent in the ‘Commercial Class’ – which according to his later novels was known as the ‘Special Slackers’ by the boys and some of the staff. Here he learnt book-keeping and other clerical skills, and certainly practised shorthand as there are several ‘coded’ messages in his 1913 diary. At the beginning of August 1913 he started work as a clerk with the Sun Fire Insurance Company in an office in the City; a fairly mundane prospect and the first step on the ladder of middle-class mediocrity. But the events of 1914 changed the lives of many, and Henry Williamson in particular.

The summer of 1914 was idyllic for the young Henry. He was ostensibly a young man working in the City and, however humbly, earning his own living (from his diary entries it appears that he was paid £5 every two months supplemented by extra earned from working overtime). Yet he was still little more than a child in his emotional make-up, in his inner psyche. He spent Easter 1914 at the home of his cousins Charlie and Marjorie Boone⁶ at Aspley Guise near Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, where as usual they roamed around the countryside, including the Woburn Estate, looking for birds’ nests. His pocket diary notes that he ‘saw swallows, martin, chiffchaffs, warblers etc’ and found a kestrel’s nest in a nearby field ‘in an old magpie’s nest (in oak tree). Saw birds hovering near, and female flew off nest (one egg, fresh). Just laid today. I don’t think birds will desert.’

Then in May 1914 he went by train to Devon, having been invited to spend his annual two weeks’ holiday with his father’s sister, his Aunt Mary Leopoldina, who rented (seemingly on a long lease) a cottage in the village of Georgeham,⁷ a couple of miles inland from the north Devon coast near Braunton. Apart from his pocket diary he also wrote up notes in the previous year’s ‘Eggs Collected’ exercise book, so precise details of this holiday are known. He spent his time roaming the Devon countryside, climbing the steep hill north out of Georgeham to the confluence of lanes at the top of the hill known as Ox’s Cross, passing the gate that led to the field that he was in future years to buy. No doubt he leaned over the gate to catch his wind after the steep climb and so saw for the first time beyond the empty field that great breath-catching view across the intervening countryside to the estuary of the rivers Taw and Torridge. He continued down the other side into the woods at the tiny hamlet of Spraecombe. On other days he found his way to the huge sand-dune complex at Braunton Burrows at the end of the estuary, and favourite of all, walking out along the cliff path that led to the wild black craggy clifftop known as Baggy Point. This remote and romantic landscape instantly struck into his inner being and became his soul’s home. In later years he would look back at this time as ‘The Last Summer’. In that anniversary essay of 1964 Henry Williamson describes that first journey down to Devon.

With bag and rod, and wearing a new pair of grey flannel trousers and Donegal tweed jacket costing 3s. 6d. and 12s. 6d. respectively, I bought a return excursion ticket at Waterloo for 9s.6d. This left a credit of 8s.3d. in my Post Office Savings book.

Everything seen during the long journey to the West Country from my carriage window was fresh.… Rambler roses grew on all the platforms we stopped at, with beds of wallflower, sweet william, and pansy. Porters wearing red ties, for emergency signalling, spoke in burring voices that made the words unintelligible. Faintly from afar came the cries of sheep, heard during long stops. Enormous glass globes bulged inside the frames of lamp-posts. I wanted the journey to continue for ever. Now we were thundering over iron bridges; below swirled greenish water. An angler with a two-handed salmon rod stood on one bank holding the butt well forward to keep pressure on the fish, which leapt – a salmon! If only they would stop the train.

The valley widened under hills leafy with oaks. Seven buzzards were soaring, tier over tier, in the evening air. Seven! A bird seen hitherto only in photographs in the fortnightly parts of British Birds, by Richard and Cherry Kearton. If only I might find a nest, and take back a buzzard to be tamed, and then set free upon the Hill, where my father and other men flew large kites, in tiers of two and three, some of them almost of man-lifting size and held on winches with steel wire. My buzzard would outsoar them all.

At last, nearly twelve hours after leaving Waterloo Station, we stopped at my destination, a village of thatched cottages and orchards; across the road ran a trout stream. I had been told by my aunt that a jingle would be waiting for me. This turned out to be a small tubby twowheeled affair like a governess cart. A fat Exmoor pony seemed to be asleep in the shafts. The driver had a big brown moustache and said he was Arty who had come for me. We went up a steep hill so slowly that I got out and walked to help the pony which then stopped. I pushed the jingle to keep it from running back …

The days were wide and shining, the sands bore only prints of gull and shore-rat and my own wandering tracks. Sky and sea were fused in a candent blue. I walked all day and every day and in the mystic night of dew on rising corn and the voice of the crake in the later milky mists of moonlight. The white owl floated over the hedge and down the lane. Heather was nearly in bell, and the paler blossoms of ling were appearing among the stunted furze bushes of the moor. Twelve, fifteen, once nearly thirty miles in one day, to Exmoor and back, my face dark brown, my bony limbs all sinew. I fished in the brook, using a dark hawthorn fly, and caught my first trout.

His true 1914 diary was more prosaic and he recorded:

Saturday 16 May

Sparrowhawk and 2 missle [sic] thrushes in field. Barn owl in cottage roof. ‘Cob’. Nightjars ‘reeling’. Cuckoos on gate. Stonechats; hopeless watch for nests.
Sunday 17 May

Spraecombe – deserted tin mines (?silver) works & cottages (wagtail, owl etc). Caves. Cuckoo flying. Cole-tits nest with young. Buzzard hawk & raven (?crow). Barking cry of buzzard & crows shriek when they saw him.

Tuesday 19 May
Found crows nest in coombe at Georgeham – 4 eggs, nearly fresh. There were 4 other crows nests there, all new looking, but empty. Took the eggs.
Wednesday 20 May

Got a fresh willow-wren’s egg. In quarry near coombe, saw Kestrel fly out. Looking for nest in cleft on rocks & saw female sparrow-hawk fly out of ledge at base of furze-bush. One egg. Saw magpies building near.

Mist over sea. ‘Saunton Marshes’ (= Braunton Burrows)
Saturday 23 May
Spraecombe. Yellow bunting. Chiffchaff.
Sunday 24 May
Saunton sands. Ringed plover.
Tuesday 26 May
Goldcrest. 3 nests. Seagulls down cliff.
Saturday 30 May

Spraecombe. Buzzard in fir-tree. Aerie. Many years nests. 3 eggs. Nearly hatched. Luck.

The actual diary note about the buzzard’s nest was expanded just a little more in the ‘Eggs Collected’ exercise book:

May 30

Buzzard, Common (very rare). In wood near mansion at Spraecombe. Wood was sloping on side of hill, composed of ash, fir, oak, and beech. Nest a huge aerie where, keeper said, buzzards have nested for many years. Difficult climb, as nest was situated thus; [a little sketch accompanies this] on horizontal branches. Three large eggs, set hard. One was slightly cracked. Another was scarcely marked at all. The old birds settled at some distance, and uttered plaintive crys: like a large kestrel. There are several pairs about here: they can often be seen soaring over the hills. The nest was I believe, several nests of different years.

Sunday 31 May

Saunton. Plovers (Ringed) Curlews. Saw wild goose.

Whit-Monday 1 June

Home. Baggy point for farewell. Gulls on nest. Cormorant.

‘The Last Summer’ essay fills this briefest of final notes out for the reader:

And on the last day 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. And at last, the black bag packed and the walk up and down hills until the last descent from Noman’s Land, a waste-plot where, of old, suicides were buried, with its views over sandhills to the estuary and far away the blue risen humps of Dartmoor. It was ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 A Dreaming Youth
• 2 Private 9689 and the London Rifle Brigade
• 3 In the Trenches – Christmas 1914
• 4 Promotion
• 5 Transport Officer at the Front
• 6 With the Bedfordshires
• 7 Beyond Reality: Henry Williamson’s fictional writings on the First World War
• Appendix: Maps of the Western Front
• Notes
• Bibliography