by Linda Lear
Beatrix died later that night at Castle Cottage with her beloved William at her side. Many years earlier she had written about the course of human life as she sorted through old bundles of family letters — records of illness and death. ‘They give a distorted impression,’ she thought. ‘The milestones are all tombstones! But the record of the cheerful jog trot round of life between them is not kept.’ Although she had always been somewhat ambivalent about how she wished to be remembered, Beatrix Potter Heelis had left abundant testament of her unique ‘jog trot’.28
The death notice in the Westmorland Gazette read simply, ‘Heelis. On Wednesday. Dec. 22, 1943 at Castle Cottage, Sawrey, near Ambleside. Helen Beatrix, dearly loved wife of William Heelis, and only daughter of the late Rupert Potter. Cremation private. No mourning, no flowers, and no letters, please.’ Characteristically, she had arranged her departure from this life to be markedly unsentimental and matter of fact. It was her wish so to disappear.
EPILOGUE
Stewardship
The Lake District
William Heelis and Tom Storey scattered Beatrix’s ashes on the intake above Hill Top as she had bidden. In the eighteen months that remained to William, public curiosity about the exact location seems to have made the grieving and ever-protective husband cautious about leaving the slightest clue. He changed the first clause in his own will, which had originally directed Tom to distribute his ashes in the same place, ‘where he and I distributed those of my late wife’, to read only, ‘at the same place where they were distributed’, thereby keeping his participation a secret as well as providing Tom anonymity. Tom Storey kept their secret until 1986 when on his own deathbed he confided it to his son Geoff, who succeeded his Trust tenancy at Hill Top. With Geoff’s unexpected death several years later, the secret has properly passed to the ages. It is enough to know only that Beatrix returned to her beloved hills.1
William was fully occupied for the next year and a half with the settlement and distribution of her estate, which was valued for probate at £211, 636. 4s. 10d., or roughly £7,000,000 today. Beatrix had never underestimated how burdensome his work would be, paying death duties, securing the royalty figures, and obtaining valuations of furnishings, art, land and livestock, as well as keeping the farming accounts. The meticulous William made sure his wife’s wishes were carried out.2
One of his thorniest decisions was whether to take a life interest in the properties Beatrix owned personally or to give them over immediately to the National Trust. For this he sought the advice of his brother George Heelis in Appleby and ultimately concluded to take only a beneficial occupation as ‘Tenant at Will’ at Castle Farm. He carried on with the farming there and at Hill Top, Troutbeck Park and Tilberthwaite until he could be certain the Trust could take over and manage the farms as Beatrix had in her lifetime. Sensitive and sorrowful, William was carefully watched over by Miss Hammond and Miss Mills, who continued to be the sort of scrutinizing gatekeepers Beatrix would have wanted.3
George Walker continued on as Trust tenant at Troutbeck Park, noting that the ‘new boss’ only came up every two weeks at pay day and was ‘a bit harder on money matters’. Walker’s devoted wife Lucy died a little more than a year after Beatrix and rests in a peaceful graveyard at the bottom of the Trout Beck valley. William had simply assumed that Joseph Moscrop would come back for lambing at the Park in the spring of 1944 as he had for nearly twenty years. At Walker’s urging, he belatedly wrote to Joseph in February, ‘I am trying to carry on at the farm as usual but I feel lost without the “Head”.’ When Joseph responded with his terms for that spring, they included his usual request for an increase in wage. William was unaware of the delicate dance with which Joseph and Beatrix customarily did business. Shocked by Moscrop’s request for an increase and clearly hurt by its timing and temerity, William responded too abruptly, ‘the wage you ask is impossible!’ thereby sadly ending the old and valued connection, probably unnecessarily. Tommy Stoddart and his wife remained as Trust tenants at Tilberthwaite, which continued to support both Herdwicks and Galloways.4
The proper disposition of the Crompton family linen from Chorley Hall in which Beatrix and Fanny Cooper had taken such pride was another detail that fell to William, Beatrix had been concerned about it just two days before her death, dictating a letter to Caroline Clark about offering the napkins to the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh. William’s enquiry to Caroline elicited her help and some incisive remarks regarding Beatrix’s relationship with her parents. She told William, ‘I think I knew more of her than almost anyone. She was delicate & her Mother tried to keep her as a semi-invalid far too much.’ A few months later Caroline elaborated, ‘I do not think her mother was much help to her: it was her brother first, then her father whom she cared for. She was the reverse of strong, & then found great happiness in her farm, & got much stronger —… Her father was very proud of her and her books but like many fathers of his time, did not realize that she had the right to her own life.’ Recalling Beatrix’s ‘acute sense of fun’, Caroline confessed, ‘I never knew how much I should miss her.’5
In spite of his wish for ‘no letters’, William was flooded by expressions of condolence, including many from Beatrix’s friends in America. His reply to a letter from Marian Perry, with whom Beatrix had carried on the most frequent and intimate correspondence, was typical of his response to these outpourings. ‘It is sad to think that her last few years were so interfered with by this awful “war”, but she was always cheerful and brave to the end.’
Bertha Mahony Miller faithfully published ‘Wag-by-Wall’ in the twentieth anniversary edition of The Horn Book in May 1944. Later that year, with William’s permission, it appeared in book form, accompanied by small wood engravings, very much in keeping with Sally Benson’s story.6
It was William’s particular wish to see that Hill Top and its contents, as arranged by Beatrix herself or at her direction, be preserved by the Trust as a ‘permanent “memorial” ’ together with all the furniture, pictures, original drawings, and ‘everything she was most interested in…’ William had never seen some of her original drawings until they were taken out of their packages from behind the geyser in the bathroom at Castle Cottage. He stipulated in his own will that the drawings for Beatrix’s books should also ‘if possible remain at Hill Top and be displayed for all’, and so they were for almost forty years. After that they were moved for conservation purposes to a newgallery in Hawkshead created out of William’s former law offices. Ironically, it fell to the National Trust agent Bruce Thompson, who had never been invited to Hill Top during Beatrix’s lifetime, to arrange for the house to be open to the public. And so it remains, drawing millions of pilgrims from all over the world.’7
Beatrix left all of her royalties and copyrights, shares and debentures in Frederick Warne and Company to William during his lifetime and then to Norman Warne’s nephew Frederick Warne Stephens. These were later ceded to the publishing company.
It had always been Beatrix’s intent that her portfolios of fungi watercolour drawings, beautifully tied up with ribbon, be offered to the Armitt Library in Ambleside. These beautifully accurate botanical drawings reveal the evolution of her scientific enquiries. They are still studied today for their scientific content. Typically, Beatrix directed, ‘if they accept drawings I want them to accept books’. Those included Coates’s life of her mentor Charles McIntosh and her treasured Stevenson volumes on fungi classification.8
Rudderless and exhausted, William Heelis entered the Paley Crest Nursing Home in York in April 1945, hoping to recover his strength and eventually return to Sawrey. From there he sent wages to the farm tenants, asked for progress reports, and remained the ever-vigilant manager of his wife’s largesse. He died in early August 1945, barely eighteen months after Beatrix. In that time he had carried out her wishes impeccably, endured the inevitable preparation of a biography, and negotiated her complicated bequest to the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.
9
In February 1944 the National Trust announced the ‘Greatest Ever Lakeland Gift’. The properties given in the Heelis Bequest added over 4,300 acres to the National Trust’s holdings in the Lake District and included forty separate conveyances, and sixty individual properties. There were fifteen farms, scores of cottages, several houses and more than 500 acres of woods. The properties were scattered into all the Lake counties, Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire. With characteristic foresight Beatrix had also provided that £5,000 be put in trust for improving these properties or adding to them. It was part of the insightful stewardship of a practical ‘amateur’ land agent, who knew better than most the high cost of preservation. This bequest was augmented by William’s own gift of farms and property in 1945.10
The National Trust secretary, Donald Mathews, wrote to William immediately on learning of Beatrix’s death. He called her a ‘many-sided genius’ who ‘by her own splendid example… demonstrated her understanding of the problems of preservation in the Lake District and how they were linked to those of successful sheep farming’. Even before knowing all the details of her bequest, Trust officials were aware of its importance to the preservation of the Lake District. Beatrix Heelis had not only bought important farms, scenic lands, forests and houses, but by strategic acquisition she had purchased particularly vulnerable and threatened areas. Remarkably, her purchases ensured that the valley-heads would be protected at both Troutbeck and Eskdale.11
As a farmer and breeder of Herdwick sheep, the primary aim of her stewardship was the preservation of a culture of hill farming and sheep stocks. Her will specifically declared that ‘the landlord’s sheep stocks on my Fell Farms shall continue to be maintained of the pure Herdwick breed’ and that the sheep stocks on Troutbeck farm should consist of 750 ewes, 250 gimmer twinters, and 175 gimmer hogs. William’s will mandated specific numbers of heath-going sheep at Tilberthwaite as well. In addition, Beatrix specifically forbade hunting by otter hounds and harriers on the whole of her Troutbeck property.12
Writing about her gift to the National Trust in March 1944, Bruce Thompson identified the unique character of Beatrix Potter Heelis’s stewardship. ‘No other woman’, he wrote, ‘was so knowledgeable about the local breed and method of farming, both of which are unusual.’ In his view, if the National Trust could continue to maintain her success at both, there could not be a more ‘appropriate memorial to a practical benefactor’. Beatrix understood only too well that ‘times change’, but with her bequest she attempted to ensure that the culture of hill farming and of hefted sheep would ‘as far as possible’ continue. These were the key words in her will and they expressed her pragmatic intention that the National Trust would ‘so far as possible let and manage the same on the same lines as previously let and managed’ during her lifetime. While she understood, as Rawnsley had before her, that the Trust was the ‘only salvation for the Lake District’, she also knew it was a fallible human institution. ‘Things of a passing day’, she once called it. As a far-sighted benefactor, she tried her best to ensure the continuation of a vulnerable landscape and culture. Because of her stewardship, more gifts flowed to the National Trust after the end of the Second World War. In 1951 the perimeters of the Lake District National Park were designated. It was an idea debated since Canon Rawnsley’s time, and one regarded with considerable scepticism by Beatrix. As it happened, all of the Heelises’ bequests were encompassed within it.13
Beatrix’s stipulation that those little grey Herdwicks remain on her fell farms has turned out to be a challenging legacy for tenant hill farmers, who for over half a century have struggled to make a living from their coarse fleeces and only mildly popular meat. Sustainability has been difficult to achieve. Subsidies based on total numbers of livestock and changing agricultural policies have encouraged the keeping of more stock than is environmentally sustainable. Many hill areas have become too heavily grazed, and farmers continue to struggle to retain viable businesses. Balancing the demands of fell farmers, tourists, wildlife and forests has become increasingly difficult, as Beatrix knew it would.
In the spring of 2001 Lakeland sheep, including Herdwicks, were decimated by an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease of unprecedented proportions. Hundreds of farms were affected, vaccination was too slow in coming, and millions of sheep were lost. By then Lakeland had become in many ways an artifact or more appropriately a ‘cultural landscape’, with a unique blend of nature and nurture that required the most imaginative management to flourish in an age of increasing globalization.14
Beatrix’s legacy was severely tested in 2005 when, despite nationwide opposition, High Yewdale, one of Beatrix Heelis’s prized Monk Coniston farms, was broken up by the National Trust on the grounds that it was no longer economically viable under new subsidy rules. The dismemberment of the farm was precipitated by the retirement of the Trust tenant, whose father Beatrix herself had persuaded to come and manage High Yewdale in the 1930s. The farm’s enclosed land was divided among three neighbouring farms, and its prizewinning fell flock of hefted Herdwicks moved to another Trust-owned farm. The decision elicited local outrage. Many complained that the National Trust had violated the terms of Beatrix’s bequest to keep her farms tenanted and managed, ‘so far as is possible’, in the same manner as she had in her lifetime.15
Sadly, High Yewdale’s fate is probably not unique. Such policy threatens the survival of every Trust-owned hill farm in the Lake District and undermines the aspirations of other public-spirited benefactors. Whether or not ‘hill farming faces a rapid and unmanaged collapse’, as one Trust report claimed, it is certain that Beatrix Heelis’s desire to protect and preserve a distinctive culture will continue to be a challenging obligation. But it cannot be debated that the future of public stewardship in the Lake District requires more, rather than less, of the kind of imaginative vision that Beatrix brought to it.16
Beatrix Potter brought nature back into the English imagination with her books and her illustrations. She wrote most of them at a time when nature was viewed as something of little value, when the plunder of nature was more popular than its preservation. After her marriage in 1913 the emphasis of her imaginative work shifted more and more away from literature towards the land and the animals it sustained. Beatrix cared about the old ways, and about what was necessary to live simply in nature.
Imagination is the precursor to policy, the precondition to action. Imagination, like wonder, allows us to value something. Imagination allowed Beatrix Potter to value the natural world and to share the treasures she found in the Lake District and its culture. As a far-sighted businesswoman she understood that their preservation was inherently linked to the success of fell farming.
Beatrix Heelis’s stewardship created a singular moment in the recovery of nature in the twentieth century; a paradigm of environmental awakening. Her brusque exterior notwithstanding, Beatrix did care what others thought of her and how her legacy would be regarded. She had already won a place in the hearts of children nearly the world over. With her early desire to do something useful with her life, she had written books and drawn pictures that will forever conjure nature for millions of big and little children. Through her passionate and imaginative stewardship of the land, she challenged others to think about preservation, not just of a few farms or fells, but of a regional ecology, of a distinct farming culture, and of a particular breed of nimble-footed grey sheep.
Illustrations
1. Beatrix aged about five. A very pretty child, much photographed by her father.
2. The Potter family at Dalguise House, about 1881, their last holiday at the Perthshire house Beatrix once considered ‘home sweet home’.
3. Beatrix at Dalguise House, with her spaniel ‘Spot’.
4. Dalguise House in Perthshire. The country estate where Beatrix spent eleven happy summers is distinguished by its unicorn-topped pillar, a favourite backdrop for Rupert Potter’s photographs.
5. Edmund Potter, FRS, MP (1802–83), Beatrix’s tal
ented entrepreneurial grandfather, photographed by his daughter Lucy about 1859.
6. Jessy Crompton (1801–91), the beautiful Radical who married Edmund Potter in 1829, was idolized by her granddaughter for her character and spirited independence.
7. Beatrix, wearing the velvet ribbon that gave her headaches, and the striped stockings that reminded her of a zebra’s legs, at Dalguise House with her Unitarian friend, the Revd William Gaskell.
8. Beatrix, Bertram and Rupert Potter at Heath Park, Birnam, Perthshire, 1892, perhaps the same holiday on which Bertram first met his future wife, Mary Scott.
9. Beatrix with Xarifa, her pet dormouse, 1885. Beatrix later endorsed this picture ‘Age 19 – much out of health. Hair cut short!’ Xarifa achieved fame later as a leading lady in The Fairy Caravan.
10. Woodmouse (Apodemus sylvaticus), drawn as a Christmas gift in 1886. Beatrix used feathery brush strokes to highlight the texture of the fur. She enjoyed painting mice when she grew tired of painting rabbits.
11. Peter Rabbit, 1898. The real Peter Rabbit was ‘bought at a tender age’ in 1892 and taught to do tricks. When Peter died at the age of nine, Beatrix memorialized him as ‘An affectionate companion and a quiet friend’.
12. Study of Judy the lizard, 1884. Another pet that brought Beatrix a great deal of pleasure and which she painted with skill.
13. Beatrix, her Lake District mentor, Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, and his son, Noel, photographed by Rupert Potter at Lingholm in 1887.
