The Real Beatrix Potter

by Nadia Cohen

  Beatrix’s passion for conservation was not just restricted to buying great swathes of the countryside. She cared about preserving the regional architecture too, and it broke her heart to see locally crafted furniture discarded when properties were sold or modernised. In a bid to rescue what she could, Beatrix built up an enormous collection of old oak chests and cupboards from the country fairs she loved to visit, and there were soon too many pieces to fit at Castle Farm and Hill Top. To her this heavy carved wooden furniture was an integral part of Lakeland heritage, and it gave Beatrix great satisfaction to buy whatever she could, and later return them to native cottages where they belonged. Many of her properties were rented out fully furnished with exquisite examples of local craftsmanship and carpentry.

  ‘I look wistfully at my fine old furniture,’ she wrote. ‘I have a wonderful old bedstead too heavy to move in a hurry.’

  She explained her fascination in a letter to Miss Mahony in New York, revealing that this latest hobby was on the point of completely replacing writing and drawing:

  I collect any genuine pieces I can get hold of to put back in the farmhouses. It is great shame to take them out of the old farmhouses, for they really don’t look well in a modern room.

  I am ‘written out’ for story books, and my eyes are tired for painting; but I can still take great and useful pleasure in old oak – and drains – and old roofs – and damp walls – oh, the repairs. And the difficulty of reconciling ancient relics with modern sanitation!

  Now she was a landlady Beatrix at least had a justifiable excuse for buying up endless farmhouse cupboards, dressers, wardrobes and stools – since they could be used to sympathetically furnish the cottages she let out. It particularly distressed her when she saw pieces that had been carefully built into the properties ripped out and sold on at auction houses. She saw it as a badge of honour to be able to buy the pieces back and restore them to where they rightly belonged.

  Beatrix took her job as landlady extremely seriously, and was canny enough to realise the importance of finding the right tenants who would care for her properties almost as well as she would if she lived there herself. Ensuring the farms were maintained properly was crucial to Beatrix and not something she was prepared to leave to chance. She made sure she got to know tenants well before she agreed to provide them with new homes, and was proud of being a shrewd judge of character. She understood what farmers and their families needed, and sympathised with their daily problems and difficulties. Beatrix made sure she was closely involved with every aspect of the rentals, right down to choosing the furnishings, supplying the firewood and even providing tin baths to the more impoverished families who may not have otherwise been able to bathe their children. She did, however, insist that none of her tenants should be allowed to build indoor lavatories or have wireless masts because they would ruin the traditional look of the farmhouses.

  Beatrix was always generous towards people who worked hard for her, and inspired great loyalty from those families she helped. Beatrix wrote to the wife of Tommy Stoddart, who worked as farm manager at Tiberthwaite Farm, saying: ‘You will notice there is no child’s cot nor child’s chair and no bath. I have an old bath that I was bathed in would you like it?’

  Beatrix also used her position of influence in the community to champion important causes and to fight to protect the underdog whenever she felt they were being treated unfairly. She realised that speaking or writing on behalf of her less influential tenants would give them a greater chance of success.

  To her mind, being a successful landlord meant doing her best to solve her tenants’ problems in the most practical ways she could think of. When the wife of the farmer running Yew Tree Farm, which she had bought in 1930, confided that they needed to bring in additional income, Beatrix helped the woman achieve her dream of opening her own tearoom in the parlour to serve passing hikers. She even donated some of her own furniture, ornaments and paintings and when the area was flooded with visitors that summer, the tearoom became a great success and Beatrix was delighted. The 500-acre farm, still owned by the National Trust, operates as a successful bed and breakfast today because the land is considered too harsh even to graze Herdwick sheep. Former tenant Caroline Watson explained: ‘It’s very beautiful, but it is very hard. You have to work with what you’ve got.’

  Getting to know the farmers’ wives made Beatrix aware of the problems caused by the crippling lack of healthcare in rural communities. Being unable to easily access hospitals or doctors’ clinics was having a devastating impact on her friends, neighbours and crucially the tenants on her farms. The poor sanitation in these remote farmhouses was a major issue that gave Beatrix cause for serious concern. She was often startled by the low standards of hygiene in the properties she managed, and had great sympathy for the hardworking women who struggled constantly to keep their homes clean.

  Life on the farms was harsh and took its toll physically, and it was often difficult for women to get access to medicine or the healthcare they needed, especially during pregnancy and childbirth. Villagers would have to travel for miles to see a doctor, and Beatrix was horrified when she heard of local women dying in childbirth. Low wages and no public transport offering efficient means of travelling into town centres made it almost impossible.

  Beatrix decided that this was another practical problem she wanted to tackle, since she felt sure she had the means to find an appropriate solution which would benefit the entire community. She realised she was probably the only person who was in a position to help, and set up a committee to investigate the possibility of hiring a district nurse who could travel around the area visiting families at home on their farms. District nurses were not easy to come by however, as the hours were long and they needed funds to pay for the upkeep on a reliable car. Beatrix felt it was an essential expense, and an extremely worthwhile use of her money, and after the war she set up a Hawkshead and District branch of the Nursing Association. Of course it was an act of charity which vastly improved the lives of all her tenants, but it should also be noted that Beatrix was an exceptionally shrewd businesswoman and under her watchful eye, with the boost of improved healthcare, the farmers, and in turn her farms, thrived.

  Historian Liz Hunter McFarlane explained:

  It seemed like an amazing thing to do to help the community, but of course it was not entirely altruistic, if her tenants were sick it would impact on the productivity of the farms. It served Beatrix to give them access to health care.

  To her tenants and employees she was known simply as Mrs Heelis, a notoriously tough boss who could also be exceptionally generous when she thought it was appropriate, and that is why she set up the first District Nurse in the area with her first car, so she could quickly and easily visit her farmers when they got sick.

  Beatrix explained how she felt it was her duty to care for her tenants: ‘I think the little white farm houses and green fields in the dales are part of the character of the Lake District and I take such a pessimistic view of the future of our local farming – unless under a good landlord,’ she wrote.

  Being so notoriously outspoken meant that Beatrix would often find herself violently disagreeing with the other members of the local Nursing Association, but since she had swiftly appointed herself as treasurer she could keep a tight control on all aspects of the meetings and could oversee the committee’s spending plans herself. Any objections to her scheme were quickly overcome and by October 1919 their application to the District Nursing Association had been approved, and Nurse Filkin became the first nurse to cover the area around Hawkshead. Like Beatrix, she was a strong and feisty woman with a no-nonsense approach to her work, and the two women liked each other immediately. Beatrix directed her around the area, explaining where exactly she was most needed and when.

  Beatrix wrote later: ‘This one is most excellent nurse, but rather peppery and a sharp tongue. She will take any saying from me; but apparently she answers back Miss Peacock and the doctor.’

  As we
ll as raising enough money to pay the nurses’ salary, Beatrix also provided a cottage for her to live in, as well as her own car, clearly understanding this would be the best way to ensure she could make her rounds regardless of the often unforgiving Lakeland weather.

  Beatrix had assumed that everybody would greet this great leap forward in healthcare progress, which would allow a salaried nurse to make regular home visits to even the most remote villages, with gratitude and delight. But she was staggered to discover there was loud and widespread opposition to the scheme. Beatrix understood that locals were often suspicious of outsiders trying to gain access to their homes and their children, but she insisted that the nurse was there to help them all, and she had only their best interests at heart. For the first time ever many of the farmers’ wives had the benefit of being able to call upon a qualified nurse when they gave birth, drastically reducing the risks to mothers and babies.

  Beatrix wrote about the nursing dispute saying: ‘I might have told them that a big strong young married woman died of pneumonia three years ago near the back of Tilberthwaite. The neighbours still say regretfully, “She was thrown away…we did not know what to do for her”’.

  Eventually Beatrix managed to crush the opposition. She made a formidable opponent at the best of times, and she simply was not prepared to back down on this one. She felt sure that people would see sense in the end, and was quite brusque in the way she dismissed arguments against the nurse. Beatrix may have upset many people along the way, but she believed in the greater good and insisted that her ends justified the means.

  One observer of the dispute later recalled how Beatrix could reduce her opponents to tears with her ‘Scathing remarks on their slack ways. She was much loved – also much disliked – but never ignored.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Beatrix treasured tranquillity above anything else, and having enjoyed the peace and prosperity throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the looming prospect of the country facing another war in her lifetime saddened her enormously. Her health was failing and when news of conflict spreading across Europe reached the Lakes, it left her feeling despondent and quite depressed. Beatrix wrote to a neighbour:

  I am so glad I was feeling particularly well last week, and have seen the snowdrops again. If it were not for W.H., I could be indifferent to the result. It is such a wonderfully easy going under; and in some way preferable to a long invalidism. Moreover the whole world seems to be rushing to Armageddon.

  But not even Hitler can damage the fells.

  Fortunately William was too old to be conscripted to join the army when war was declared in 1939 and was able to stay at home with Beatrix, but he did work as a special constable and put in extra hours at his law office to keep the company running despite being drastically short staffed as most young men had been called up.

  Beatrix had never had many female friends, most of her relationships with other women tended to be working ones, so being left in the company of the wives of her farmers and shepherds was not an easy experience for her. She usually found men more straightforward to deal with, but the women left to run the farms quickly learnt to admire her practical abilities and strong work ethic, and treated her as an equal. Beatrix was tough and worked harder than all the other women, despite being older than most of them.

  But when young women, known as Land Girls, were sent to help out on the farms from surrounding towns and villages, Beatrix was far from impressed by the work-shy attitudes of this newly formed female work force which was foisted upon her. Beatrix was 76 years old by then and wrote: ‘The high fell farms are not very suitable for land girls. Dear me! It makes me wish I were thirty years younger – I cared nothing for snow and ice.’

  She did maintain a friendship with one of the Land Girls who was sent to help, a woman called Louie Choyce, who wrote home to her mother describing her hosts: ‘Mrs Heelis I like very much. She is quite out of the common, short, blue-eyed, fresh-coloured face, frizzy hair brushed tightly back, dresses in a tweed skirt pinned at the back with a safety pin. Mr Heelis is a quiet man, very kind. They believe together in the simple life.’

  The Lake District was largely considered a safe haven from air raids, and was fortunate enough to escape much of the heavy enemy bombing. Although many of the men would never return home to the farms from the frontlines, it remained largely unharmed throughout the war years. As a result the Lakes became a popular place to send evacuees from northern cities including Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle. But even the most remote communities were not completely immune from the threats, and Beatrix was distressed when bombers destined for one of the surrounding cities would occasionally burn out and come down over their farmland, destroying fields, crops and cattle. From the relative safety of their cosy hearth, Beatrix and William were horrified to see the distant skies burning red with fires night after night, a stark reminder that they were not all that far from the threat of the German invasion.

  She wrote once: ‘I shall always remember seeing tracer shells like rockets beyond the Langdale Pikes in a frosty night. But for the knowledge of its cruelty and suffering, a raid at a distance is beautiful, with searchlights and flares.’

  Beatrix was equally appalled when she discovered that Britain’s first seaplane was to be tested on Lake Windermere, shattering the peace for miles around. When the string bag aircraft called Waterbird arrived for trials, Beatrix led the storm of protest.

  ‘Those who want noise go to Blackpool,’ she wrote furiously to the Admiralty and War Office.

  To fly across and over a district is one thing; to fly locally and continually up and down a confined valley is quite another. The noise of the present machine can be heard from end to end of the lake, and it requires a speed of 35 miles per hour to enable it to rise from the water.

  If there are five machines next summer, as threatened, the noise and danger will be intolerable.

  She and a group of local ramblers, school teachers and recuperating individuals were invited to the aviation ground at Hendon in north London to assess the noise, but it did nothing to reassure Beatrix. On the contrary, she continued the fight when she returned to Hill Top: ‘I think I may speak as a seasoned judge of noise; I am accustomed to sleep soundly, with an open window, fronting a constant service of motor omnibuses. I consider the Hendon noise nothing ‘out of the way’ but the Windermere noise is intolerable.’

  She lost the campaign, largely due to influential opponents including the Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself. A hundred years later the stutter and growl of the Waterbird was heard in the Lakes again when a replica of the plane was built by a former RAF pilot who took it for a commemorative flight along Windermere in 2011. It was a one-off celebration, but Beatrix would not have liked it. As she wrote following the trip she made to Hendon, supported by the Bradford Co-operative Holiday Association: ‘The majority of the Lancashire artisan excursionists and lodgers are perfectly alive to the quiet beauty of the Lakes. They are not principally work people; the Lake District is a resort for people who cannot manage to go to Switzerland.’

  The war years were a time for the community to band together. Everyone was struggling to come to terms with the heavy military losses, and the harvests were ruined by particularly harsh weather. With so many farmhands and labourers once again killed on the allied battlefields, Beatrix and William kept the farms running as best they could, adjusting to the changes and shortages they faced with typical practicality and stoicism. Beatrix still had plenty of stamina left in her and she put it to good use to help in the fields and farmyards as best she could.

  As a special constable William, too old to fight, was appointed to Lancashire’s War Agricultural Committee: ‘Going round farms, surveying for next season’s ploughing – an invidious job amongst neighbours,’ she explained to a concerned American correspondent who feared for her safety:

  One thing is certain, I shall not run far. I will retire into the nearest wood – the cellar of course for bombs; but it is one
in a million risk. If there is an invasion, I am afraid villages near the landings will be burned.

  Nevertheless I went to a sale at Coniston the other day and bought three chests and a coffin stool. Two of my chests are thin and long, like deed boxes. They might come in convenient in the wood for holding things, dry and solid.

  Beatrix was busier than many women of her age might have liked, but she could not be persuaded to slow down or rest. She felt she had no choice since she was clearly needed on the farms more than ever now: ‘I am incredibly well and can do a bit of weeding when it is not too hot,’ she wrote to her cousin. ‘Thank you for the kind enquiry – I bide some killing!’

  However, it was not long before even she had to admit that all the extra physical work was taking its toll: ‘I enjoyed a bit of field labour yesterday, picking up turfs in the oat field, but had pains and stitches and aches afterwards – too old!’

  She no longer had help in the house, but cheerfully hauled in pig legs to salt so they would survive the food rationing coming their way. All her farms were virtually self-sufficient, so food was never really in short supply even during the darkest days of rationing; it was plain and simple fare – something which had never bothered Beatrix anyway.

  She was not a particularly adventurous cook, although she shared with William an interest in preserving their favourite recipes which had been handed down to them both over several generations. Together the couple compiled a book of recipes, which was never published, including sponge cake, roast turkey and curry, and updated it together regularly. The handwritten book, which Beatrix had begun to collate on her own as far back as 1851, was only unearthed 161 years later among a hidden treasure trove of her belongings which were sold at an auction in Shropshire in 2012. It was believed that a private collector bought the book at a sale in 1954 and decided to sell it on at an auction of enthusiasts.