Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  • 9 •

  ‘The company of gentle sheep, and wild flowers and singing waters’

  Beatrix with shepherd Tom Storey, farm manager at Hill Top, and a prize-winning Herdwick ewe at an agricultural show in the Lake District, c. 1930.

  ‘This looks like the end of the story, but it isn’t’

  The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, 1903

  TIME WOULD PROVE to Beatrix that she had been mistaken, aged fifteen, in her conviction that ‘man may spoil a great deal, but he cannot change the everlasting hills, or the mighty river, whose golden waters still flow on at the same measured pace, mysterious, irresistible’.1

  She had witnessed man’s ‘spoiling’ at Dalguise in 1884, ‘things more dilapidated than ever… deaths and changes, and the curse of drink… heavy on the land’ ; she had seen for herself the impermanence of nature, ‘some saplings grown, others dead. Here and there a familiar branch fallen.’2 Hardwicke Rawnsley, intimately concerned with landscape preservation since the early 1880s, had repeatedly drawn her attention to the impact on the country of irresponsibility and greed. She had made donations to Rawnsley’s appeals on behalf of the National Trust, including, in 1913, the purchase of Queen Adelaide’s Hill, where William IV’s widow had landed on her visit to Windermere in 1840, with unspoiled views over the north end of the lake. Rawnsley had impressed upon Beatrix the need to safeguard communities and ways of life, in some instances by intervention. He influenced her later wish ‘to preserve some portions of wild land unspoilt for the general good’ : ‘the little larch-wood, deliciously cool, and a gentle sound of the stream below’,3 the banks ‘full of wild flowers ; wood sorrel, spotted orchis, dog violets, germander, speedwell, and little blue milkwort’, ‘the little white farm houses and green fields in the dales’.4 At Camfield, at Dalguise and in the Lake District, ‘land unspoilt’ provided the backdrop to Beatrix’s happiest memories.5 For Beatrix, there was an emotional dimension to landscape.

  She played her own part, independent of Rawnsley’s promptings. In 1912, she campaigned vigorously – and successfully – against ‘a beastly fly-swimming spluttering aeroplane careering up & down over Windermere’ and the threat of an aeroplane factory on wooded lakeshore at Cockshutt Point. In a picturesque letter published in Country Life on 13 January, she described its propeller as resembling ‘millions of blue-bottles, plus a steam threshing machine’ ; she wrote letters to The Times. She organised twin petitions, exploiting her multiple identities : under the signature ‘H. B. Potter’ she canvased support nationally, including London publishers ; she signed a version for local circulation ‘H. B. Potter, farmer’.6 Fifteen years later, Cockshutt Point was again under threat – at ‘immenent [sic] risk of disfigurement by extensive building and town extension’.7 The National Trust launched an appeal. In its support, Beatrix did what Fruing Warne could no longer persuade her to and painted fifty rabbit pictures, copied from illustrations to The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She sent them to the Bookshop for Boys and Girls in Boston, Massachusetts. Each raised a guinea towards the appeal.

  She was not an instinctive polemicist. She had achieved success as the creator of children’s books that avoided the overt didacticism of much of her own childhood reading. In a small way she had protested in the past at what she regarded as foolish or iniquitous. Ahead of the 1910 general election, irritated by Peter Rabbit dolls imported from Germany at prices that undercut British manufacturers, she drew and circulated nearly sixty posters in favour of tariff reform, opposing free trade ; she described her fingers as ‘rather stiff’ and ‘tired of drawing’.8 One poster shows a doll in front of a tombstone – ‘Here lies the South London Toy Trade killed by Free Trade with Germany’. The same year, she paid for 2,000 copies of a leaflet protesting at a proposed government horse census. Beatrix suspected horse conscription in the event of war ; she feared the damaging impact on farming of the forcible removal of horse stock.

  She signed ‘The Shortage of Horses’ leaflet ‘North Country Farmer’. Averse to advertisement for her books or publicity for herself, and adept at compartmentalis- ation, she resisted capitalising on her reputation as ‘Beatrix Potter’ to promote her hobbyhorses. For years she juggled the demands of her parents, the ‘little books’ and Hill Top ; afterwards she separated Mrs Heelis’s farming interests from Beatrix Potter’s storytelling. The exception is The Fairy Caravan, written in the late 1920s for publication in the United States. Superficially concerned with a long-haired guinea pig and a magic fairy circus, this longer novel for older children showcases a number of Beatrix’s concerns – protests against tree felling, tarmac roads and the replacement of horses by mechanised transport and machinery : ‘this tarry asphalt like a level river of glass ;… this treacherous granite where we toil and slip and stumble, dragged backward by our loads… Now it’s rattle, rumble, rattle, rattle, shriek, shriek! Gone are the pleasant jog-trot days of peace. They have ruined the smithies and stolen the roads.’9 An encomium on the fragile beauty of the Lakes and the changing face of farming provides the background to this picaresque story that Beatrix worried was too personal ; her pen-and-ink illustrations included views of her farms.

  *

  In a letter written in February 1929 to Alexander McKay, the Philadelphia-based publisher of The Fairy Caravan, Beatrix referred to her ‘picturesque farming’.10 By the end of the year her landholdings exceeded 4,000 acres and included two flocks of Herdwick sheep, divided between low ground and the fells.

  Her engagement with Herdwick sheep was the last of her naturalist’s passions : as obsessive as her earlier absorption in insects, fungi or fossils. No longer able to paint as previously, she captured this love affair in words in The Fairy Caravan, which is partly a story of sheep ; unusually, a sheep features among colour illustrations to The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, undertaken around the same time. But the attraction of Herdwicks to Beatrix was not as copy for her writing or her painting – like the bear she had sketched in the zoo for The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes or the Pomeranians on which she based Duchess. For Beatrix, Herdwicks symbolised a farming tradition and a way of life : she considered them living history. ‘Sheep have been kept in this district from early times,’ she told Henry P. Coolidge, the thirteen-year-old American boy with whom she formed an instant rapport when they met in Near Sawrey in 1927 and to whom she subsequently dedicated The Fairy Caravan. ‘A fragment of woolen [sic] cloth was found in a “barrow” or ancient burial mound with a funeral urn, and bronze implements.’11

  That Beatrix became a leading breeder of Herdwick sheep, the first woman elected president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association and, between 1930 and 1938, winner of every prize for Herdwick ewes at Keswick, Ennerdale, Eskdale and Loweswater shows,12 came about as the result of two purchases : Troutbeck Park Farm with 1,875 acres, bought in 1923 ; and the larger Monk Coniston Farm, covering lengthy stretches of the Coniston and Tilberthwaite valleys, bought in 1929 in part with proceeds from The Fairy Caravan. In each case, Beatrix was drawn to the beauty of the landscape. Its silence and a tangible sense of venerable age appealed to her habit of quiet self-­communing, the part of her that responded to a favourite rhyme : ‘As I walked by myself, And talked by myself, Myself said unto me : Look to thyself, Take care of thyself, For nobody cares for thee.’ Troutbeck Park Farm sits below the Kirkstone Pass, the mountain route that connects the Rothay and Ullswater valleys, in the shadow of a rock-scarred knoll known as Troutbeck Tongue ; its fields stretch across the Tongue itself, to Ill Bell, Thornthwaite and Froswick. Beatrix described Troutbeck Tongue as ‘uncanny ; a place of silence and whispering echoes’. Her restoration of the seventeenth-century farmhouse included a study for herself. She employed a farm manager, Jimmy Hislop, and, for the large flock of Herdwick sheep she meant to rescue from its current ‘rotten’ state, a shepherd, Tom Storey. She lured Storey from a smaller farm nearby by doubling his wages. Five years later, with another pay rise, she moved him to Hill Top.

  Alone she ‘loved to wander on th
e Troutbeck Fell’ : she insisted she was never lonely. ‘There was the company of gentle sheep, and wild flowers and singing waters’, contentedly solitary experiences akin to some of the best moments of family holidays two decades before.13 The country claimed her : open expanses of unspoilt North Country from which, she claimed, she traced her ‘descent,… ­interests and… joy’. Her desire to safeguard its virgin tracts became evangelical ; at a period of agricultural slump and in an area of expanding tourism, Beatrix understood their vulnerability.14 With the ‘little books’ behind her, her focus had shifted. She balanced romance with common sense, and made plans from the outset to ensure the long-term survival of her new farms and age-old farming traditions by bequeathing both to the National Trust, a ‘noble’ institution, in Beatrix’s eyes, associated with Hardwicke Rawnsley despite the day-to-day involvement of ‘some silly mortals’. The Trust, she was convinced, offered the best possibilities of protecting the landscape she loved as working country.15 ‘There are great advantages to farm upon land under the Trust. The Trust, without income tax to pay and without death duties, can afford repairs and be a better landlord and give lasting security to good tenants.’16

  Unlike the purchase of Hill Top or Castle Farm, Beatrix’s large-scale later acquisitions were made with a specific intention of gifting the land to the National Trust after her death, and she altered her will in the immediate aftermath of her purchase of Troutbeck Park Farm in August 1923. Six years later, Beatrix bought Monk Coniston to guarantee its integrity. The £15,000 price tag was too much for the National Trust ; it stretched Beatrix too and was only manageable after she sold the bulk of her investments. As soon as the Trust could raise the necessary funds, she offered it 2,600 acres at the price she had paid ; she then set about fundraising vigorously on the Trust’s behalf. She did not succeed in extracting a contribution from her mother. Beatrix’s purchase of both estates represents an act of philanthropy worthy of her inherited traditions of Unitarianism and Victorian public-mindedness. At Monk Coniston, she also took on unpaid the management of all 3,738 acres, including the Trust’s portion. By the time the Trust replaced Beatrix with a professional land agent in January 1937, Beatrix was months away from her seventy-first birthday. Predictably, this peppery and determined woman was scathing in her assessment of Bruce Thompson, the successor empowered to act with the Trust’s full authority and resources. She referred damningly to Thompson’s ‘blank’ imagination ; she regarded him as ‘supercilious’ and ‘deficient in experience’.17

  From her first interest in Troutbeck Park Farm – alerted by William of developers’ plans to swallow up the rundown acres – such all-consuming undertakings were a tall order for a woman on the brink of her sixties, whose health had been variable throughout her life, especially in the light of her ingrained habits of ‘thoroughness’ and ‘painstaking-ness’. At once and in all weathers she set about familiarising herself with every beck and field of her new possessions ; in 1925, she embarked on a series of weekly letters to the new secretary of the National Trust, Samuel Hamer. Still faithful to her statement of 1892 that ‘the spirit of enquiry leads up a lane which hath no ending’, she revelled in the steepness of her learning curve.18 She ignored warning signs that her health could not sustain such rigours : the colds that confined her to bed, her continual fear of bronchitis, bouts of sciatica, a feeling she likened to cold in her bones ; the weakness of her heart. She had embarked on what she accurately labelled ‘a labour of love… much scraping, and hard work’, the same combination of romantic optimism and sturdy determination that had characterised all her endeavours. Her ‘declining years’, she explained, would be devoted to ‘old oak – and drains – and old roofs – and damp walls – oh the repairs!’19 Although there was nothing disingenuous in her statement to Samuel Hamer in 1929 that she wanted ‘neither praise nor thanks’ for her efforts, her letters indicate her pride in ‘hav[ing] tried to do my humble bit of preservation in this district’.20 Her bequest to the National Trust at her death of more than 4,000 acres, including fifteen farms and an endowment of £5,000, is among the most significant Lake District donations in the Trust’s history.

  *

  Her marriage to William Heelis had brought Beatrix companionship. With age her character betrayed signs of the obstinacy and indomitability which Jessy Potter had attributed to Crompton blood. Beatrix was unapologetic in her bluntness ; she attributed William’s later irritability to growing deafness. But their lives were harmonious, ‘like two horses in front of the same plough… walk[ing] so steadily beside each other’, like Amabella and Mr Tidler in The Tale of the Faithful Dove, ‘a most devoted pair, after the habit of pigeons who marry for love’.21 William’s support buttressed Beatrix against the inevitable losses of passing time : the shock of Bertram’s death, following long-term alcoholism, at the young age of forty-six in 1918 ; the less surprising demise, in May 1920, of Hardwicke Rawnsley ; and, in December 1932, of the ninety-three-year-old Helen Potter. Beatrix was her mother’s principal legatee ; William was entrusted with the task of resolving death duties that exceeded £26,000. Beatrix wrote references for Helen Potter’s servants and herself employed her mother’s chauffeur.

  ‘The stronger minded of the pair’ was Beatrix’s own estimation of her role in her marriage. Less conciliatory than William, decided in her views and confident in her financial independence, with ‘the self-assurance of a person who is aware of the qualities within herself’,22 Beatrix gave the appearance to outsiders of dominating the Heelises’ home life, but she was not a tartar ; she likened herself to ‘a good-tempered witch’.23 ‘I have acquiesced in such slovenly untidiness and unpunctuality’ she wrote of their partnership towards the end of her life.24 Not valuing appearances herself, busy and self-absorbed, Beatrix felt she had unfitted William to remarry after her death. She did not involve herself with his legal practice and, though she was proud to bear his name, she never defined herself principally as the wife of a country solicitor. She took pleasure in William’s folk dancing, which inspired one of her last pieces of writing, ‘The Lonely Hills’, and she embraced his large, sometimes testing family to the extent of nursing his invalid brother Arthur, who lived at Castle Cottage with Beatrix and William from 1922 until his death four years later.

  References to William in Beatrix’s letters are characterised by the same warmth of feeling she reserved for favourite animals : Xarifa the dormouse, Peter and Benjamin, Mrs Tiggy, her black pig Sarah, the pair of Pekingese dogs, Tzusee and Chuleh – ‘spirited and affectionate, and less trouble than terriers’25 – who became the inseparable companions of her old age. Since she was not in the habit of unburdening herself emotionally in her letters, a special tenderness of tone amounted to high tribute.

  Husband and wife spent evenings on the little tarn Beatrix had bought in 1913, William fishing, Beatrix beside him in the wooden boat ; they gardened ; at night Beatrix stoically endured William’s heavy snoring. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, William became the oldest reserve policeman in the area ; Beatrix worried about him driving home late in the dark. Increasingly anxiety coloured her thoughts about William : like Beatrix he was tired and overworked. After a hysterectomy in 1939, Beatrix’s main concern was for her husband : ‘If it was not for poor W I would be indifferent to the result.’26 Her last request, when, in December 1943, she lay dying, was to Hill Top’s farm manager Tom Storey, that he ‘manage the farm for Mr Heelis when she was gone’.27 (She also made arrangements with Storey over the scattering of her ashes close to Hill Top, the exact location to be kept strictly secret.) Beatrix’s anxiety proved well placed. William underwent a sharp decline after her death. He died less than eighteen months later, in August 1945, having occupied much of the intervening period with the ramifications of his late wife’s estate.

  Among William’s tasks at Beatrix’s death was replying to letters of condolence. A significant number came from the small group of American devotees who, beginning in 1921, had written to Beatr
ix and visited her in Near Sawrey. Although Beatrix delightedly described the States as a ‘perfidiously complimentary nation’, theirs were not ordinary fan letters.28 Anne Carroll Moore, Superintendent of Children’s Work at the New York Public Library ; Bertha Mahony, co-founder of the Bookshop for Boys and Girls in Boston and an associated magazine about children’s literature, The Horn Book ; Marian Perry, a wealthy anglophile widow from Philadelphia ; the Philadelphia publisher Alexander McKay of David McKay Co. ; and Gail Templeman Coolidge, whose son Henry P. Coolidge partly inspired The Fairy Caravan, all shared an intense admiration for Beatrix’s ‘little books’. Their separate visits to Near Sawrey during the last two decades of Beatrix’s life rekindled her confidence in her skills as a writer, beginning around the same time her relationship with Fruing Warne cooled. To Gail Templeman Coolidge, Beatrix wrote in December 1929, ‘It has been a great pleasure to receive such kind understanding letters from you and others in America. And it is appreciation that is worth having. I feel that you take me seriously.’29 Half a century earlier, Beatrix had resisted the influence of art teachers Miss Cameron and Mrs A. ; she had withstood the scepticism of William Thiselton-Dyer and the Kew authorities ; she had rebelled against her parents’ dismissal of her stories and stubbornly fought to see the ‘little books’ in print, but no one since Norman had persuaded her of real value in her work. With their straightforward enthusiasm and generous, sincere praise, Beatrix’s American admirers offered her a fillip she had long craved. That there were further Beatrix Potter books after Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes was mostly their doing. Alexander McKay and Bertha Mahony coaxed Beatrix back into print ; Anne Caroll Moore, Marian Perry and Gail Templeman Coolidge convinced her the effort was worth making.