Henry Williamson - Biography

Biography

Henry Williamson was born in Brockley, southeast London, and attended Colfe's School. The then semi-rural location provided easy access to the Kent countryside, and he developed a deep love of nature throughout his childhood.

In January 1914 he enlisted in the London Rifle Brigade and, after World War I was declared, he was mobilised on 5 August. He was commissioned into the Machine Gun Corps, was promoted Lieutenant and, from 1917, was attached to the Bedfordshire Regiment. The Christmas truce of 1914 affected him greatly. He became disgusted with the pointlessness of the war and was angry at the greed and bigotry he saw as causing it. He became determined that Germany and Britain should never go to war again.

He told of his war experiences in The Wet Flanders Plain (1929), The Patriot's Progress (1930) and in many of his books in the semi-autobiographical 15-book series A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951-1969).

After the war, he read Richard Jefferies' book The Story of My Heart. This inspired him to begin writing seriously. In 1921, he moved to Georgeham, Devon, living in a small cottage. He married Ida Loetitia Hibbert in 1925. Together they had six children.

In 1927 Williamson published his most acclaimed book, Tarka the Otter. The book won the Hawthornden Prize. It also sparked a long-running friendship with T. E. Lawrence.

In 1935, Henry Williamson visited the National Socialist Congress at Nuremberg and was greatly impressed, particularly with the Hitler Youth movement, whose healthy outlook on life he compared with the sickly youth of the London slums. He had a "well-known belief that Hitler was essentially a good man who wanted only to build a new and better Germany." He subsequently joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1937.

In 1936 he bought a farm in Stiffkey, Norfolk. The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941) is his account of his first years of farming here.

At the start of World War II Williamson was briefly held under Defence Regulation 18B for his political views, but was released after only a weekend in police custody. Visiting London in January 1944, he observed with satisfaction that the ugliness and immorality represented by its financial and banking sector had been "relieved a little by a catharsis of high explosive" and somewhat "purified by fire." And, "in The Gale of the World, the last book of his Chronicle, published in 1969, Williamson has his main character Phillip Maddison question the moral and legal validity of the Nuremberg Trials".

After the war the family left the farm. In 1946 Williamson went to live alone at Ox's Cross, Georgeham in North Devon, where he built a small house in which to write. In 1947 Henry and Loetitia divorced. Williamson fell in love with a young teacher, Christine Duffield and they were married in 1949. He began to write his series of fifteen novels collectively known as A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In 1950, the year his only child by this marriage Harry Williamson was born, he edited a collection of poems and short stories by James Farrar, a promising young poet who had died, at the age of 20, in the Second World War. From 1951-1969 Williamson produced almost one novel a year, while contributing regularly to the Sunday Express and The European, a magazine edited by Diana Mosley. This put great strain on his marriage and, in 1968, he and his wife were divorced after years of separation.

In 1974 he began working on a script for a film treatment of Tarka the Otter. but it was not regarded as suitable to film, being 400,000 words long. Filming went on, unknown to him, and the film, narrated by Peter Ustinov, was released in 1979. On his eightieth birthday he hoped for some honour from the British government. After a general anaesthetic for a minor operation, his health failed catastrophically. One day he was walking and chopping wood, the next day he was unrecognisable and had forgotten who his family were. Suffering from senile dementia, he died on the very day the death of Tarka was being filmed, and was buried in the churchyard of Georgeham. The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980.