by Linda Lear
From the outset Beatrix adhered to the line that she would give Thompson information, but that she would not offer advice. In January alone Beatrix sent Thompson four long letters laden with specifics on every conceivable aspect of farm management, including equipment recommendations, preferred sources of materials, lists of tradesmen, together with a commentary on their skills, fees and reliability, a history of various problematic drains and fences, and a half-completed planting key. She belaboured the need to use only round wire, 1 cwt No. 9, to repair any fences near flood water because woven wire netting got clogged with debris. She had chosen tenants, fixed rents, approved and organized repairs, and managed timber cutting. Understandably, after nearly seven years it was difficult for tenants and their families to suddenly look to Thompson as their representative landlord, and invariably lines of authority got twisted. Moreover, Beatrix was accustomed to doing things her way. Now she had to endure the effect of Thompson’s independent decisions. Areas of potential conflict emerged early and centred around repairs to fences, the planting of new trees and the harvesting of timber.39
Throughout 1938 Beatrix’s letters to Thompson show an increasing testiness. Commenting on the management of Yew Tree Farm, she wrote, ‘I have felt it very awkward and indeed quite wrong to offer any advice that might seem interfering with a new agent. We all have to learn by mistakes; I remember making plenty! I thought, since you mention it, that Holme Fell fence was a costly mistake. It is exactly the sort of wild open fell ground that ought and could be left open to the public… I can’t imagine why you fenced it?’ But a week later, she had remembered herself, writing: ‘After further consideration I should like to withdraw any expression of opinion about Yew Tree… I am always glad to give you any information which I can about the Coniston estate or about elementary details of estate repairs; but it is manifestly not fair to either of us for me to interfere by comments that might amount to advice upon any matter.’ But unable to restrain herself, she added, ‘My expression of opinion was not intended to cover problematical useless fences… In future I think I had better confine myself to minding my own business.’40
But barely a month later, Beatrix was horrified to learn that instead of cutting down a single larch tree that had blown over the wall at Tilberthwaite, Thompson had approved the felling of a ‘whole group of magnificent old larches’ at the foot of Tilberthwaite Ghyll and had the further temerity to sell them to a timber merchant she had specifically warned him against. ‘You are right to exercise your judgement in this and other matters; but please be careful that no decisions on any matters are attributed to my suggestions… I begin to think you are rather a dangerous young man to talk to!’41
In May Beatrix was sufficiently frustrated to go over Thompson’s head to Matheson in London. The particular issue was who would pay for new fencing at Holme Ground where she, as Trust tenant, was grazing cattle. It was a muddled jurisdiction, to be sure, but by now her grievances included a multitude of decisions to which she took exception. ‘Mr Thompson’s usual excuse for delaying farm repairs is that the Trust “has no money,” ’ she wrote to Matheson. ‘He said this morning that there was “plenty of money” but that “he did not think the Trust is under obligation to fence land that has not been fenced before.”… Is it the policy of the National Trust to take no interest in its farms? or is it not? I regret heartily that I ever presented Holme Ground to the Trust.’ Clearly upset, she continued, ‘I have asked Mr Thompson 3 times not to buy the “wry-lock” type of netting, but he seems to have no understanding about anything; and he is not learning either… If my cattle hang themselves or get lost you will have to pay for them.’42
Thompson had little choice but to write his own letter of explanation. ‘I am afraid you may be getting an angry letter from Mrs Heelis about a fence at Holme Ground Farm,’ he wrote. Getting to the heart of the difficulty, Thompson acknowledged: ‘Because the National Trust are anxious to do everything to please Mrs Heelis I have given instructions for the work to be done. But Mrs Heelis is evidently very indignant with me because I made the mistake of demurring when the suggestion was first put forward.’ Matheson must have dabbed at his forehead over the entanglement, but he wrote the next day reassuring Mrs Heelis that the ‘National Trust appreciates the importance of good farming’. Beatrix retorted sarcastically, ‘An institution which pays neither income tax nor death duties should be in a position to give a useful lead to less fortunate landowners. As regards advice — a man must have judgement to sift the value of advice and of advisors, otherwise it is like the fable of the old man and his donky [sic]… It is not my affair or wish to interfere with Bruce Thompson; and most emphatically I cannot take any responsibility for anything he may do.’ Thompson’s additional efforts to placate her did little good, as Beatrix wrote to Matheson a week later about another jurisdictional dispute commenting: ‘I am getting very tired of Mr Thompson.’43
Perhaps Thompson did not appreciate how emotionally tied Beatrix was to the Tilberthwaite farms, and specifically to Holme Ground, but even if he had been more sensitive, the farms were under Trust management and he had to push on with thinnings and repairs as he saw fit. He had tried his best to accommodate her views, frequently calling on the Heelises at Castle Cottage on Sunday afternoons. But, to his peril, he had severely underestimated her concern with preserving the pastoral landscape, and how the arrangement of trees figured in that effort.
Thompson was genuinely taken aback when Matheson reported he had received a scorching letter about the cutting of timber at Tilberthwaite Coppice. Beatrix had written, ‘Although it is probably useless I am writing about your agent Mr Bruce Thompson. There is a keen demand for all sorts of wood, and he may do irreparable damage. It is useless for me to talk to him. A man cannot help having been born dull. Thompson is supercilious as well.’44
Thompson’s crime, which Beatrix described as ‘wicked’, was the indiscriminate cutting of scrub wood amongst the rocks in the coppice. ‘An experienced agent with any taste for the picturesque would have decided to thin it in patches, deliberately and cautiously.’ She further complained that Thompson had no taste at all for the preservation of natural beauty. Admittedly there were plenty of coppices of no interest, ‘but the coppices in Tilberthwaite and in Yewdale which clothe the lower slopes of Holme Fell are specially beautiful; glorious in autumn colours, and in winter & spring.’ She itemized Thompson’s further sins, concluding: ‘He seems to have no sense at all. And not capable of learning. Indeed, excusably; because it is impossible to inculcate a pictorial sense of trees arranged in landscape, when imagination is a blank… My husband & I never drive through Coniston without vexation. There is a great quantity of possible hardwood that might be cleared with advantage, but Mr Thompson is too deficient in experience and taste to be trusted to choose it.’45
Beatrix sent a second letter outlining Thompson’s deficiencies to the members of the Estates Committee, not having much confidence in Matheson to rectify matters. Privately, the National Trust Estates Committee, chaired by Professor G. M. Trevelyan, found her letter ‘a rather exaggerated outpouring of an injured lady’s mind’, and thought it unfortunate that Mrs Heelis chose to involve herself in such matters as the artistic arrangement of coppice wood. They advised Thompson to go out of his way to consult the Heelises about all Monk Coniston timber matters, and refer all woodland questions to the Estates Committee so that ‘any criticism they may make will be directed at the Committee rather than at you’.46
Thompson’s letters show that he understood that, while the issue of woodlands and natural beauty was genuinely important to Beatrix, the larger issue was one of whose view of natural beauty would be preserved, and who would control it. He told Matheson, ‘The whole matter is in itself of small importance but it has led to the revival of former grievances. I have always… referred any major woodland problems… to you or Heyder [Trust woodland adviser]. Mrs Heelis does not, however, reckon much of you or Heyder or me: none of us is a patch on
Hamer.’ Without any attempt at self-justification, he continued,
I realise only too keenly how much the Trust wishes to win the approval of Mr & Mrs Heelis and I have this constantly in mind but you probably appreciate that my position isn’t an easy one. When I took over the management of the Monk Coniston Estate it was on the understanding that I should have the Heelises behind me. With certain exceptions Mrs Heelis has generally taken the line that she would give me information but not advice. Advice, of course, is just what I would like to have had.
Thompson wisely cautioned his superiors in London, ‘you must’nt [sic] be surprised if there’s a storm now and then’.47
Beatrix may have been correct that Thompson and the other Trust officials had little sense of the pictorial when it came to thinning trees, and little sense of the picturesque as a value in landscape preservation. Just as she had lectured Delmar Banner to study how trees grew, she was ahead of her time in urging natural beauty as an important value in preserving an historic landscape. The ‘timber question’, as she referred to it, was something that she had thought about, as both an artist and a preservationist. Few administrators at the National Trust understood that such seemingly mundane things as thinning coppice on fell sides were integral to the whole question of what sort of landscape would be preserved. In December 1939 Beatrix wrote to Louie Choyce, ‘I think 1/3 of the trees in this district could be felled with positive advantage to the landscape, provided they were properly selected, and the remaining trees left in suitable groups.’ Beyond such comments, Beatrix seems not to have elaborated further on a subject about which she had very deeply held views.48
But her scornful personal remarks about Bruce Thompson in this controversy reflect poorly on Beatrix. The privileges of age, wealth and patronage had made her careless and inconsiderate of others in the preservation community with whom she needed to cooperate. She had grown intolerant of opinions or methods that differed from her own, and for seven years no one had challenged her. In this case she allowed petty jealousies, mere bagatelles of turf, to get the better of her basic generosity and her profound concern for the future of the Lake District. Had Bruce Thompson been a lesser man, or one who had not shared her ultimate goals, including the preservation of natural beauty, Beatrix’s behaviour could have had disastrous results.
Although Thompson’s appointment as land agent relieved Beatrix of some estate management duties, she was almost immediately saddled with the care of another property closer at hand. Rebekah Owen had become increasingly unhappy living in England and in the summer of 1937 she decided to move to Italy permanently. Beatrix bought Belmount Hall, Owen’s handsome Georgian stone mansion with its twenty-six acres on the outskirts of Hawkshead, in August. Miss Owen made a half-hearted effort to sort and package up her enormous collection of Thomas Hardy’s books and her other valuables for auction at Sotheby’s, but the old woman was hopelessly disorganized, and left in a hurry, leaving bulging albums of Hardy’s correspondence, autographed books and assorted literary detritus locked away in one room of the house.49
Beatrix had done what she could to help Miss Owen sort and sift. ‘Do you remember I told you about some furniture & china at Belmont [sic] Hall?’ Beatrix wrote to Marian Perry, whose visit to Beatrix that summer had brought great pleasure to both old friends. ‘Miss Owen could not make up her mind to sell and disperse it — she went back to Rome in very poor health, and the place remains locked up. Romantic, but damp! She burnt a lot of clothes and things in the yard before leaving.’ Beatrix supervised the shipment of Miss Owen’s books, including the bulk of her Hardy collection, to London where most of it was bought by a professor of American literature for the library of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She took possession of a derelict property with a locked room filled with Miss Owen’s personal possessions. She could do little about these, but with the help of her gardening friends, Miss Hammond and Miss Mills, she began the more enjoyable task of restoring Belmount’s once splendid old walled gardens. It was a preservation effort of a different sort and one she enjoyed. ‘Is chimonanthus fragrans a bush that would grow?’ Beatrix asked of Caroline, who knew more about shrubs than she. ‘I have witch hazel, and shrubby spiraeas, and syringas.’50
But by the autumn of 1938 Beatrix was worn out and apprehensive at the very real possibility of hundreds of evacuees being dispersed into the countryside. ‘The seasons have been all wrong,’ she complained to Anne Carroll Moore, whom she had seen again that August. ‘We did not finish hay till Sept. 19th. There is plenty of it, but not very good. My husband is well — I am not! I have had colds and sciatica and chills one on top of an other.’ She confessed to Marian Perry that in addition to not feeling well, she was depressed by the death of old friends and neighbours.51
Beatrix was sick enough at the end of October to seek medical attention and was quietly referred by the local doctor to Arthur Gemmell, a highly regarded gynaecologist and surgeon in Liverpool. Beatrix entered Liverpool Women’s Hospital on 31 October for surgical repair of what she described to Daisy Hammond as a ‘insignificant [urethral] caruncle.’ She was to have a complete anaesthetic because ‘the place is difficult to get at — right in the opening to the bladder, and… it would be too difficult and painful without complete anaesthetic.’52
The condition, not uncommon in older women, was particularly painful, and the cause of repeated bouts of urinary tract infections and aggravated bleeding. After the surgery and three days in the hospital, Beatrix spent the next ten days recuperating, somewhat unsuccessfully, at Nurse Edwards’s little house in Higher Bebington, Cheshire. She had found the hospital ‘comfortable and interesting, and quite amusing’ but described the setting in Cheshire as ‘noisy without interest… Its sad to see the eating up of fields & trees.’ She put on a more cheerful face for Nancy Nicholson. ‘Your uncle must have written in woe begone style! I abandoned him for eleven days for the first time in more than 25 years!!’ Beatrix looked forward to being back in Sawrey, admitting, ‘I am a country mouse, like Timmy Willy.’53
December found her again unwell and, like everyone else, anxious about England’s military unpreparedness and unhappy that America had not been moved to help. ‘It is fatal to give way to bullies in the first instance,’ she told Bertha Mahony Miller, but even her truculence could not hide her anxiety. ‘The shipyards & docks [of Barrow] are only 15 miles away… Unless America backs us up — we are done.’ Her outlook was made worse by exhaustion and her physical discomfort. ‘Enforced leisure indoors does not reawaken literary inspiration. I’m sorry Miss Mahony!’ Beatrix wrote to her Boston friend. ‘The wells of fancy have run dry! I can think of nothing but forebodings.’54
As Hitler’s troops began meticulously dismembering Czechoslovakia, Beatrix bravely sent Christmas greetings to her American friends. But her efforts at cheer were mostly futile. ‘Things are gloomy here…’ she wrote to Marian Perry. ‘The best hope is that the Germans themselves will become tired of Hitler… No one wants war; but this country has been made a fool of.’ The weather deepened her dismay. ‘We have rain — rain — rain — luckily no snow in the lowlands or we would be deeply buried — never was such a wet year in oldest memory!’ But Beatrix had her own particular antidote to foreboding that surrounded her. As she explained to her cousin Caroline, ‘ “Thank God I have the seeing eye”, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can… walk step by step on the fells and rough lands seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton grass where my old legs will never take me again.’ For now it would suffice.55
20
Challenges
While neville Chamberlain’s government waited to see what Hitler would do next, Beatrix Heelis of Near Sawrey was intently preparing for spring lambing, the return of Joseph and his dog, and the birth of new calves at Troutbeck and Tilberthwaite. She took the rationing of petrol and the other unpredictable shortages in her stride, and focused her energy on her farms and what she could control of the world around her.
The
winter of 1938–9 had been ‘gloomy, in every way’. Both Beatrix and William had influenza. It spread through the farming community and through each household. Beatrix complained to her cousin, ‘I got up the day our maid went to bed; which was some blessing. But I wasted 5 weeks indoors.’ At Troutbeck Park, George Walker’s good dog Matt was nearly dead from pneumonia, and distemper had spread through the kennels. Johne’s disease continued to plague the cattle at the Park, particularly the Galloways. Beatrix knew it was nearly hopeless to try to breed them there, but it was a passion she could not give up. ‘It is the old trouble,’ she told Moscrop, ‘in the soil and pasture. The new heifers are at Coniston. I do not think adult cattle catch the disease.’ She also persisted in using whatever vaccine was available, having observed that vaccinated adult cattle did not seem as vulnerable. In her spring letter to Joseph, she once again insisted he take a cut in wages. ‘You will please come down a pound Joseph — take it or leave it! Not even King Canute could control the tide — or the slump.’1
Meanwhile Beatrix and William, like the other hill farmers, did what they could to prepare for the war that was by now inevitable. Beatrix remembered that in the last war she had missed butter and sugar the most, but it was perplexing to decide what stores to lay in this time. ‘I have laid in a hoard of dog biscuits for our two little dogs,’ she wrote to Marian Perry, who had wisely decided against her usual European holiday. ‘They turn up their snub noses at biscuit, while they can get scraps of meat, or rabbit… One must just rub along and see what comes.’2
