| Henry
Williamson |
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| Nationality - English |
Profession - Author |
| Date of birth - 01 Dec 1895
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Date of death - 1977 |
| Place of birth
- Brockley : southeast London |
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Henry Williamson was born in Brockley, southeast London on december 1, 1895.
a child, he had an intense love of nature, spending much time exploring the nearby Kent countryside. He was intent on closely observing things for himself, this faculty remaining with him throughout his life and forming his writing style as the author of his famous and well-loved nature books.
Williamson enlisted in the army on the outbreak of the war, and fought on the Somme and at Passchendale where he was seriously wounded. He was invalided home in 1915, but was back as an officer in France in 1916. He came out of the war as a Captain with a Military Cross. It was his war experiences, together with his love of nature that prompted him to seek out and experience the "life flow" that pervades all existence.
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An enduring experience for Williamson was the Christmas Truce of 1914, when Germans and Englishmen left their trenches to fraternise and play soccer. Men such as Williamson returned from the war far from hating Germans and determined that never again would 'brother Europeans' fight among themselves for the sake of greed and selfishness.
After demobilisation, Williamson returned to his family home and entered employment with the Weekly Dispatch in Fleet Street. He had his first articles published in several major periodicals. In 1919, he read The Story of My Heart by the 19th Century English nature writer Richard Jeffries. This was to have a crucial impact upon Williamson as a revelation that he - the individual self- is more than an isolated echo but a link that stretches without beginning or end in a cosmic flow. It was the sun that represented the symbol of this timelessness and unity. For Williamson this truth - known to all traditionalist civilisations, but smothered in our materialistic society - is that of a mystical union between the eternal sunlight and the earth. The symbol of the ancient sunlight was something 'born within'.
Williamson "came to feel the long life of the earth back in the dimmest past while the sun of the moment was warm on me... This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness. From all the ages my soul desired to take that soul-life which had flowed through them as the sunbeams had continually found on earth".
It was now that he embarked on the first volume, The Beautiful Years, of Flax of Dream. In 1922, Williamson returned to the countryside and rented a cottage that had been built in the days of King John, next to the local church in Georgeham, North Devon. Williamson lived here hermit-like and studied nature in detail, tramping the countryside and sleeping out. The doors and windows of his cottage were always open, and he gathered about him a family of dogs, cats, gulls, buzzards, magpies and an otter cub. The otter, Tarka (meaning little water wanderer), had been rescued by Williamson after a farmer had shot its mother. The otter would walk like a dog alongside Williamson. One day it walked into a rabbit trap, panicked and fled. Williamson spent years looking for Tarka following the rivers Taw and Torridge. He didn't find Tarka, but his intimate contact with nature inspired him to write his most famous nature book Tarka The Otter. Published in 1927, this popular book was an intimate description of the English countryside, and gained Williamson the Hawthorne Prize for Literature in 1928.
In 1925, he married and his first son was born the following year. In 1929, the family moved to Shallowford, Devon, where over the next thirteen years four further children were sired, and more books were published, including Salar the Salmon. From 1937-45 the Williamson family lived at the Old Hall Farm in North Norfolk, where many more books and articles were written, and a sixth child was born.
Williamson attended the 1935 Nuremberg Congress and was impressed by the economic and social achievements of Germany whilst the British continued to languish in poverty and unemployment. He saw a racial community based on the values of land and a revived peasantry, freed from banker's interest, guaranteed from foreclosure, and the pioneering conservation laws and projects. Williamson saw in the faces of the German people expressiveness and confidence that looked as if they were "breathing, extra oxygen" as he put it.
Williamson wrote for Mosley's paper "Action". He called for Anglo-German brotherhood, recognising that Hitler desired nothing more than peace with Britain. He saw that the result of another war would be the bringing of Asiatic Bolshevism to the heart of Europe. He sought to have his friend T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) join with Mosley in a peace campaign. Lawrence was returning from having posted his letter to Williamson agreeing to such a campaign when he had his fatal motorbike accident.
In 1940 around a thousand Englishmen were interned without trial for opposing the war, including Mosley and 800 BUF members. Williamson was among those arrested. Williamson was paroled on condition that he remained silent. With this defeat of Germany Williamson stated that his hopes for a regenerated Europe had been killed.
In 1950, he remarried and sired another son, divorcing in 1968. His "Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight" was written between 1951 and 1969, and was acclaimed as a masterpiece of English literature, despite the efforts of certain interests to obliterate his name. He published his final book The Scandaroon in 1972, the story of a racing pigeon. In 1974, he began working on the script for a film of "Tarka". Unknown to Williamson, filming went ahead despite the failing health that prevented him from completing the task himself.
Henry Willamson died on 13 August 1977 and was buried in North Devon. |
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Henry Williamson
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