Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  As secretary of the National Trust, Hardwicke Rawnsley lent his public support to efforts to promote the Herdwick. His son Noel, along with S. D. Stanley Dodgson, an energetic stockman from Cockermouth, promoted the Herdwick as a pure-bred sheep stock when they started the Herdwick Sheep Association in 1899. Rawnsley and Dodgson worked hard to improve the breed, and to get geographically far-flung sheep men to agree on pedigree registration and exhibition standards. By 1916 the Herdwick Sheep Association and several other groups of breeders had coalesced into the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association. The first Flock Book was published in 1920, ironically the same year that Hardwicke Rawnsley died.3

  Rawnsley’s efforts to preserve the culture of fell farming played a role in Beatrix’s remarkable decision to buy Troutbeck Park Farm in the summer of 1923. A year later she became one of the very few female members of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association, an indication of her commitment to their preservation, as well as to the farming, breeding and shepherding customs that surrounded them.4

  Troutbeck Park Farm occupies the head of the Trout Beck valley, which runs up into the fells to the north-east out of Windermere, through the quaint seventeenth-century village of Troutbeck. The road rises dramatically to the Kirkstone Pass, the highest road in the Lake District. From the Pass there is a superb view out over the head of the valley with its remarkable Tongue (Old Norse tunga or tableland between the two valleys) that joins Hird Gill on the one side and Hag Gill on the other. The picturesque white farmhouse and outbuildings of Troutbeck Park Farm are nestled at the foot of the Tongue on the valley bottom. It was then, and is still, a magnificent property of nearly 2,000 acres; a spectacular farm, one of the largest in the Lake District, with the capacity to support several thousand sheep.

  Like the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, Beatrix’s purchase of Troutbeck Park Farm began an equally momentous entrepreneurial adventure. Both were creative endeavours, and in both cases her love of the natural world, her delight in country life, her willingness to work hard and her instinctive business acumen were essential to success. But Beatrix could not have undertaken this new enterprise without the knowledge and dedication of her country solicitor husband, William. While she was accepted, even liked, by many of the locals, she would always be an ‘off-comer’. By 1923 her wealth, her unpredictable crustiness, even her absorption with farming and her animals set her apart. William Heelis, on the other hand, had a long connection to Westmorland. His familiarity with old district families and their properties, his participation in sports, hunting and country dancing, and his easygoing personality were vital assets. Without William’s expertise and political finesse, Beatrix could never have become the successful landowner, farm manager and sheep breeder that she did. The restoration of Troutbeck Park Farm was a joint business venture by two people who shared a love of the countryside, had a passion for its preservation, and supported the mission of the National Trust.

  William, always attentive to potential sales of farm properties, had learned that developers were poised to buy the rundown Troutbeck Park, intending to build holiday houses on the bottom land. With his help Beatrix had the advantage over her competitors, and outbid the developers. The purchase of Troutbeck Park Farm was an ambitious effort under any circumstances. The deed for the farm contains twenty-five separately described parcels. She paid £8,000 for the 1,875 acres. The farm was conveyed to her on 28 August 1923. Beatrix became a significant landholder in the Lake district, and the owner of a large and important flock of Herdwick sheep. Her engagement with the restoration of this unique landscape became an absorbing passion, all but replacing her interest in writing books for children. All her creative efforts were directed into farming, breeding Herdwicks, and promoting their importance to the culture of the Lake District.5

  Troutbeck Park Farm had always been a magical place for Beatrix. Once an ancient Norman deer park, it was home to a variety of bird and animal life, stands of old forest, ruined walls and ancient stone huts and cairns. From her earliest visit to Windermere in 1895, Beatrix had loved to walk out on the Tongue, looking for fossils, sometimes coming just to hear the susurrus of wind, stopping to eat her bread and cheese, taking refuge from the rain in an old barn. She found it ‘uncanny; a place of silences and whispering echoes’. She witnessed her first Coniston fox-hunt at the Park, shortly after buying it, watching in amazement as the hounds bravely spilled down over the crags and fells in pursuit of their quarry. That day she had taken off her shoes and stockings and waded through the beck, the only clean place on the farm, to rejoin the hunt spectators.6

  When Beatrix bought the farm it was under a tenancy agreement to Mrs Leake and her two sons that ran for three more years. The Leakes had allowed the farmland and the pastures to erode and the stream was badly polluted. The lovely white farmhouse and outbuildings were rundown and badly in need of expensive repairs. While William tried rather ineffectively to get the Leakes out of the farm sooner so repairs could be started, Beatrix did as she had at Hill Top, adding land to the perimeters of the farm as buffers against development. Between December 1923 and September 1927 she added seven closes, including several small contiguous farms, spending another £4,000 to insure that her intake fields at the Park were protected. She and William did this gradually, first buying parcels along the road, and then making sure the owners of bordering lands knew that she would buy them out at a fair market price when the current tenants left or died. Her aim was to hold all the land along the road frontages, making any interior property worthless.7

  From the outset, Beatrix planned to bequeath Troutbeck Park Farm to the National Trust at her death. She made out a new will in which she stated her intention. Deeply moved by the mysterious qualities of the place, and so determined to preserve something of that sense of peace into the future, she added a clause to the terms of the bequest, forbidding hunting by otter hounds and harriers anywhere in the Park. However, Beatrix said nothing about her plans to Samuel Hamer, the new secretary of the National Trust. Instead, her first extant letters to Rawnsley’s successor detail her concern about other particularly vulnerable properties in the area: the possible sale of land high in the silent Mickelden Ghyll in Langdale for holiday huts, and the potential sale of the Old Bridge House in Ambleside. She argued astutely that although the structure was architecturally without much distinction, saving it would preserve what little was left of old Ambleside and would endear the Trust to the townspeople. Beatrix was cautiously trying to take Hamer’s measure before she revealed her intended bequest. Hamer’s response to her concerns, now lost, must have met with approval.8

  Beginning early in 1925, there ensued an almost weekly exchange of letters between the two. Early letters to Hamer trace Beatrix’s evolving philosophy of preservation and her sincere desire to educate the new Trust secretary about a variety of threats from development to a unique and fragile environment. ‘I usually know my mind,’ she confided, ‘but I am puzzled. Small purchases are a wasteful way of buying land. Large properties are down in value & unsaleable. What perplexes me is whether it is wisest to pick up little bits, when I have opportunity, or which I can afford; or to wait. With the risk of the place waited for being spoilt in the meantime. Such a little can do it; one red tiled bungalow on a spot like Troutbeck Tongue!’9

  Beatrix had both a vision and specific plans to implement it. It was essential to her long-term goals that the National Trust become a partner at Troutbeck. She told Hamer, ‘It is a dream, — or was — that I wish all that corner of the district were a reservation, running back against the Haweswater land, bounded by the Kirkstone road. The land… is as nearly “plain” = unbeautiful as Lakes land can be, but with judicious planting it could be made interesting… [It] seemed to me to be one of the few corners of the district not exploited; and curiously unspoilt.’ Beatrix knew preserving such a large swathe of land was likely to be impossible, but her scheme encompassed valleys and watersheds, acknowledging that the purchase of one farm he
re and one there could not prevent the damage done by haphazard development.10

  When at last the Leakes were out of Troutbeck, Beatrix decided not to re-let the farm for at least two years because the land and the sheepstock were in such a derelict and unhealthy condition. She wanted a free hand to start over. ‘It is a most lovely place and a fine farm,’ she assured Hamer, ‘but until the mosses & drains are cleared, and the sheepstock is reclaimed by proper management — it is not fit to let.’11

  It was not until June 1926, a month shy of her sixtieth birthday, that Beatrix finally divulged her intention to bequeath Troutbeck Park Farm to the National Trust. ‘From the point of view of the Trust,’ she told Hamer, ‘the desirable prospect would be that I survive to get the farm on a sound basis, and that I find a well chosen tenant… But if I should happen to end while the farm is still in my hands I cannot disguise that I should be leaving a handful for my executors & the Trust to deal with.’ She had rejected the idea of extensive afforestation — in part because government subsidies had been reduced, but mostly because she believed it would ruin the landscape and take away important intake land. But she had already planted five acres of larch for replacing fence posts and had determined that the landlord’s stock of sheep be set at 1,100, ‘all to be pure bred heafed Herdwicks’. Beatrix insisted that there should always be a large landlord stock at Troutbeck as a hedge against a tenant getting into debt and having the heaf stolen or lost. She was naively optimistic about what lay ahead, and it was just as well. ‘I have had a good deal of worry and hard work with the Park,’ she told the secretary, ‘but I have had never for a moment regretted the purchase.’12

  With much of its fell grazing lands at high altitudes, Troutbeck Park was a perfect farm for the Herdwick. But in order to breed healthy lambs, Beatrix first had to solve the problem of wet fields, stream pollution, bad drains and ‘rotten’ sheep. When Beatrix bought Troutbeck, there was a nucleus of some eight hundred ‘landlord’s sheep’ on the farm, pure-bred Herdwick, as well as many cross-bred sheep. But much of the flock were ‘rotten’ with parasitic liver fluke. One shepherd remembered that ‘the lambs were dying like flies’. Liver fluke is a variety of trematode flatworm that thrives in damp fields and standing water — conditions that characterized most of the valley land at the Park. Once it has infected one or two animals, the fluke can run through a whole flock. Cleaning up the pastures of Troutbeck Park proved a long and expensive process.13

  Liver fluke was not the only challenge Beatrix confronted. When she bought the farm foot-and-mouth disease was still affecting the movement of sheep and cattle in the area, and there was a subsequent outbreak of the infection in 1926–7. Nearer to hand, the barns at Troutbeck were infested with rats ‘who came out & fought and ate one another’. Although they were thinned with traps and poison, Beatrix worried that the collie puppies might get into the poison. The ‘yellows’, an acute form of jaundice, was also a recurrent problem, not only for Troutbeck farm dogs, but for dogs all over the Lake District, and it had no cure. A few years later Beatrix discovered that canine distemper was rampant in the derelict dog kennels at the Park. She disinfected them and eventually built a new, larger one. A farm the size of Troutbeck was hard on any working dog, and Beatrix, who was enormously fond of her sheepdogs, did what she could to keep them healthy. On arriving at the farm, her shepherds knew she always went first to check on the dogs.14

  Beatrix also spent time and money cleaning up the dirty seventeenth-century farmhouse. While she was about the repairs, she had a room made up for herself, using it initially as a kind of farm office. Later it became a place she could rest after a long walk on the Tongue, draw and write, as well as review accounts. She furnished it with some favourite pieces and eventually she set up a microscope there where she checked sheep dung for parasites. The farmhouse had no good old oak except a floor, but Beatrix improved things by moving in one of her best sale pieces, a large oak cupboard dated 1667, and a heavy gateleg table. She considered these antique pieces ones ‘belonging to the house’, telling Hamer ‘[i]t would be safe to “let” them with the house, as Lakes housewives are accustomed to the care of old oak furniture’.15

  After talking to many people, Beatrix appointed Jimmy Hislop as her farm manager and moved him and his family into the main Troutbeck farmhouse. Owning both a large fell farm in Troutbeck and a smaller lowland farm in Near Sawrey, Beatrix needed managers at each with skills appropriate to the very different environments and animal herds. At Troutbeck she installed both a farm manager and later a head shepherd. Hill Top required only a farm manager. Sometime after hiring Hislop, she designed a new smaller house for the head shepherd which she had built next to the main house. It mimics in design the details of the main house, including cylindrical chimneys and mullion and transom windows, but has its own garth or paddock around. Inside, Beatrix placed a datestone on the fireplace lintel to commemorate her architectural efforts.16

  Given the precarious conditions of the Troutbeck flock, Beatrix needed to find just the right shepherd — one who was familiar with hefted sheep, and someone who would be careful to keep the sheep stock from being depleted and the heaf lost. After consulting with a number of Herdwick breeders and other farmers, Beatrix asked Tommy to drive her to the Gregg farm at Townend to interview a shepherd there named Tom Storey. The Greggs had been forced to downsize their herd, and Storey was looking for other employment. As the owner of a large high-fell farm, Beatrix now had the opportunity to expand her flock and she wanted to improve her Herdwick breeding stock. She had learned enough about Storey to think that he was the man she needed.17

  Tom Storey always described himself as ‘pigeon-chested’ from a childhood pulmonary illness, but he was physically powerful enough. He was rather short in stature, but ruggedly handsome, with bright blue eyes, dimples in his cheeks and a cleft chin. He had the direct manner of the north-country stockman and spoke his mind without hesitation. He had married in 1922 and lived with his wife and two small children, Geoff and Freda, at High Green Cottages in Troutbeck village. Tom vividly remembered his first encounter with Mrs Heelis when she came to see him at Townend Farm.

  We’d just finished milking and my boss came into the shippon and said, ‘there’s a lady wants to see you.’ ‘Mrs Heelis.’ She was quite smart for her age… For her age she looked, well a bonny looking woman to tell you the truth. That’s what I thought about her. ‘You’re Tom Storey,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I’ve come to see you about working for me. Will you go to Troutbeck Park to be my shepherd?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll go if the money’s right.’

  Beatrix then asked him what his wage was and when he told her, she said she would double it. So Tom Storey went to Troutbeck Park, but continued to live with his young family in the village overlooking the farm.18

  Tom recalled that a new cure for fluke in the form of a capsule had recently become available. He told Beatrix about it and she immediately sent for it. As a naturalist Beatrix had a keen interest in scientific farming, whether it be finding a new castrating knife or a new sheep dip. By 1926 she realized she had little to lose by trying almost any remedy to clear the sheep at Troutbeck. Storey recalled about the same time that a vet in Newcastle developed an injection against the ‘drop’, or grass staggers, a sudden respiratory attack. Tom tried it on one sheep with immediate benefit. Word got around and soon all the sheep breeders were using it. Beatrix’s managers and shepherds always found her interest in science and animal husbandry and her willingness to experiment admirable. It further distinguished her as a woman farmer and sheep breeder. As Storey put it, ‘she was very good at sending for new cures, nothing was too good for the sheep’. Whether the new worming capsule was the agent of success against the liver fluke or not, Storey lambed 1,000 sheep at Troutbeck in the spring of 1927. After that, Beatrix was, as he put it, ‘set up’.19

  The successful lambing at Troutbeck was not all due to Tom Storey, however boldly he might have claimed it. Joseph Moscrop, a shy, unassu
ming, but highly skilled shepherd from the north of Cumberland, near the Scottish border, first came to the Park with his fine dog for lambing in the spring of 1926, working there and at Sawrey. Joseph was then just 40 years old. He was slight of build, but healthy and strong, with an easy athleticism. He was unremarkable in appearance except for a weakness in his left eye. Like many who had lived in the rural countryside from childhood, he was observant of the natural world and comfortable in it. He had been an experienced farm worker before he enlisted in the army. His letters from the Greek front in the First World War to his brother comment perceptively on the birds and vegetation he found interesting.20

  Joseph usually hired out at the spring hiring fairs around Whitsun, either for six months or a year. He had experienced a variety of farming environments by the time he probably answered an advertisement that Beatrix Heelis had placed at one of the fairs. Moscrop had good references, was familiar with different breeds of sheep and cattle, and was aware of how livestock responded to different soils and grasses. Like most shepherds, he lived at the farm that employed him. Although Joseph was shy by nature, he was not at all afraid to speak his mind. He was a meticulous worker, who saw to whatever needed doing. Joseph never married, though Beatrix wondered in 1928 if he might have a love interest. He was, however, a religious man who quoted easily from the Bible and in later life joined the Lord’s Day Observance Society. Perhaps his most distinguishing quality was his deeply positive attitude about life; indeed about whatever it was he was doing. It was his outlook and disposition, as well as his knowledge and love of animals, that drew Beatrix to him.21

  Beatrix was so pleased with Moscrop’s work that she hired him every spring for the next seventeen years. Her terms were always four weeks, with Joseph bringing his own dog, although occasionally he had to use one of hers. And each year, almost as a ritual, the two haggled over wages, with Beatrix usually giving a bit more than she had initially offered; but in hard times Joseph also made adjustments. Their negotiations were important more for the symbolic measure of respect each accorded the other than for the actual sum finally agreed upon.22