Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  17. BPH to DB, 8, 14 September 1936, V & A. Lewis, Josefina de Vasconcellos, 53–64.

  18. Ibid. 69–71. BPH to DB, 23 September, 11, 13 October 1936, V & A. The Banners subsequently rented Heathwaite Farm. In 1939 they finally were able to buy an old Cumbrian farmhouse called The Bield in Little Langdale, where Beatrix visited them. It was a perfect spot with a spectacular view of Little Langdale Tarn, Pike of Blisco, and the high fells.

  19. Elizabeth Battrick, transcript, ‘Recollections of Josefina de Vasconcellos,’ 4 April 1990, Ambleside, NT. Hereafter cited as JDV, ‘Recollections’. Lewis, Josefina de Vasconcellos, 9, 42–65. There are many, sometimes conflicting, versions of this initial meeting because Josefina was interviewed so many times that story has become part of the mythology of both women.

  20. JDV, ‘Recollections’. Delmar Banner’s portrait of Beatrix Potter, painted in 1938, shows her in similar apparel, though the tweed coat she was wearing in 1936 was probably made of coarser Herdwick wool than the lovat coat he painted. Delmar Banner, ‘Memories of Beatrix Potter’ (1946). BPH to DB and ‘Pig-wig’ Banner, 1 December 1936, V & A.

  21. Banner, ‘Memories’, in Taylor, ‘So I Shall Tell You a Story…’, 40.

  22. BPH to DB, 7 October 1937, V & A.

  23. Ibid.; BPH to JDV, 28 February 1938, V & A. Lewis, Josefina de Vasconcellos, 81. Banner’s portrait hung at Hill Top until after William Heelis’s death in 1945. In 1948 Banner presented it to the National Portrait Gallery, London.

  24. Lewis’s biography details the isolation of Josefina’s married life and the triumphs of her artistic one. JDV, ‘Posted at Sawrey’. W. R. Mitchell, ‘Encounters with Beatrix Potter’, Cumbria Magazine (June 1986), 161–4, and Beatrix Potter: Her Life in the Lake District (1998), 94–7.

  25. BPH to ELC, 31 January 1937, ELCL.

  26. BPH to ELC, 31 January, 22 April 1937, ELCL; BPH to NNH, 5 March, 4 April, 19 May 1937, V & A.

  27. BPH to JM, 25 February 1937, ML.

  28. Galloways are polled, meaning hornless, but were not always so. Beatrix commented on hornless cattle in Scotland in the 1880s. Patricia Pruitt, ‘Galloway Cattle’, Breeds of Livestock (1997).

  29. BPH to CC, 15 February 1937, NT; BPH to JM, 25 February 1937, ML. Moscrop’s brother Richard raised cattle and Beatrix frequently asked Joseph to consult with him about prices at the big Scottish fair at Road Head, or at dispersal sales where she sometimes bought cattle.

  30. Annual valuation of farming stock, implements, etc. at Hill Top, Troutbeck Park Farm, Tilberthwaite Farm for 1937, 1939, BPS.

  31. BPH to JM, 10 February, 2, 20 March 1938, ML; C. S. Forrester to BPH, 15 April 1938, PC.

  32. John Hammond, Jr., I. L. Mason and T. J. Robinson, Hammond’s Farm Animals (1940, 1971), 79–90.

  33. BPH to DMM, 22 April 1936, Letters, 377.

  34. Thompson was born 24 February 1907 in Bowness and died at Troutbeck at the age of 70 on 10 March 1977; obituary, Westmorland Gazette, 18 March 1977. Bruce L. Thompson, National Trust Properties in the Lake District (c. 1933). Thompson was appointed land agent in 1936 but did not take over Monk Coniston until January 1937. Letters, 316n. Interview with Eileen Jay, historian, trustee, and past president of the Armitt Trust Library, Rogerground, Hawkshead, November 2001 and following.

  35. Eileen Jay to the author, 25 November 2001. The Rigg family had made a fortune when the railways reached Windermere, and in the coach trade that followed. In 1939 Thompson was named honorary librarian of the Armitt. Thompson was active in the Troutbeck parish and, after 1936 frequently worshipped at the simple Jesus church in Troutbeck Valley where Beatrix sometimes attended.

  36. BPH to Bruce Logan, 14 October 1924, 4 October 1935, PC. Storey, ‘Recollections’. Papers of Bruce Logan Thompson, CRO/K: Eileen Jay, The Armitt Story, Ambleside (1998), 59–62. Thompson also served as president of the Fell Pony Society after the Second World War. After Thompson retired as land agent, about 1946, he published the first history of the National Trust in the Lake District, a distinguished work of local history and culture that still remains authoritative. A later anthology, The Prose of Lakeland (1954), published by Warne’s, follows the style of Rawnsley’s collections of Lakeland writers and writing. Included in Thompson’s volume is a selection from Potter’s The Fairy Caravan, a work which he admired for its depiction of the local countryside and on which he left extensive notes.

  37. BPH to DMM, 22 April 1936, Letters, 377.

  38. Ibid. The Trust’s portion included Low Hallgarth Farm, Yew Tree Farm, with part of High Yewdale Farm, land on Holme Fell, Tarn Hows, including Rose Castle Cottage and High and Low Tilberthwaite and Holme Ground farms, which Beatrix had rented back from the Trust in 1934 and managed as one property. After 1937 she was merely another Trust tenant — a status that was not well suited to her style or temperament.

  The following Coniston farms are those BPH continued to own and manage herself: High and Low Yewdale, including grazing rights on Coniston Fell and a flock of 378 sheep, Far End Farm, High Park Farm, Stang End Farm, including cottages and woodlands, and High and Low Oxenfell Farm, its woodlands and cottages.

  39. BPH to BLT, 8 May, 26 June, 20, 22 July 1937, NT; BLT to DMM, 31 October 1939, NT; BPH to BLT, 4, 13, 14, 28 January 1937, NT.

  40. BPH to BLT, 11, 17 January 1938, NT.

  41. BPH to BLT, 2 February 1938, NT.

  42. BPH to DMM, 9 May 1938, NT.

  43. BPH to DMM, 3, 9, 11, 18 May 1938, NT; DMM to BPH, 20 May 1938, NT.

  44. BPH to DMM, 17 October 1939, NT.

  45. BPH to BLT, 2 October 1939; BPH to DMM, 17, 21 October 1939, NT. Beatrix corrected Matheson, telling him she did not say ‘Thompson was unsatisfactory as the Trust’s representative,’ only that ‘he shows no judgement in dealing with trees and woods at Coniston’.

  46. Her letters to the Estates Committee are not extant, nor is Matheson’s first letter to Thompson, warning that fresh trouble was brewing at Monk Coniston; Letters, 410n.

  47. DMM to BLT, 30 October 1939; DMM to BPH, 30 October 1939; BLT to DMM, 31 October 1939, NT.

  48. BPH to ELC, 9 December 1939, ELCL.

  49. Schedule of Heelis Properties, 1943. ‘Dwelling house and premises known as Belmount Hall with woods and fields near Hawkshead’, 28 August 1937, BPS. BPH to CC, 18 March 1939, Letters, 396–7. Carl Weber, Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square (1952), 241.

  50. BPH to MFHP, 14 December 1937, BPA; BPH to CC, 18 March 1939, Letters, 396.

  51. BPH to MFHP, 4 October 1938; BPH to ACM, 17 November 1938, BPA.

  52. BPH to DH, November 1938, V & A.

  53. BPH to DH, 31 October, 7 November 1938, V & A; BPH to June Steel, 26 November 1938, DIDJ; BPH to ACM, 17 November 1938, BPA; BPH to NNH, 30 November 1938, V & A. A caruncle is caused by the prolapse of the epithelial lining of the urethra through the external urethral opening. The tissues heap up and bleed severely. The condition was treated by surgical excision and cautery, but the results of such procedures were rarely satisfactory. Ann Coleville to the author, 11 January 2002.

  54. BPH to BMM, 11 December 1938, BPA.

  55. BPH to MFHP, 13 December 1938, BPA; BPH to CC, 15 February 1937, Letters, 384–5.

  20 Challenges

  1. BPH to CC, 18 March 1939, Letters, 396–7; BPH to JM, 23 January 1939, ML.

  2. BPH to MFHP, 3 July, 24 August 1939, BPA.

  3. BPH to NNH, 15 April, 6 December 1931, BPS.

  4. BPH to NNH, 26 February 1933, BPS; BPH to DH, February 1939, Letters, 395; BPH to Hettie Douglas, 31 March 1939, Letters, 402. TMH, 38–9.

  5. BPH to JM, 24 March 1939, ML; BPH to Nora Burt, 29 March 1939, NT; BPH to MFHP, 30 March 1939, BPA.

  6. Handwritten will of Beatrix Heelis, together with handwritten list of legacies, 31 March 1939, BPS. BPH to Nora Burt, 29 March 1939, NT; BPH to DMM, 31 March 1939; DMM to BLT, 3 April 1939; William Heelis to BLT, 4 April 1939, NT; BPH to ACM, 13 April 1939, BPA.

  7. BPH to DH and Cecily Mills, 30 March 1939, Letters, 3
98–9.

  8. BPH to MFHP, 30 March 1939, BPA.

  9. BPH to ACM, 30 March 1939, BPA.

  10. BPH to DH, 16? April 1939, Letters, 403; BPH to ACM, 13 April 1939, BPA; Arthur Alexander Gemmell (1892–1960), the son of a prominent Liverpool gynaecologist, had a distinguished career. His progression up the professional ranks was unusually rapid, and it is likely that his surgical experience in gynaecology was somewhat limited because of it. He was considered a superb clinician and prospered, becoming President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (1952–5) and was knighted in 1955. He performed a subtotal, rather than a complete, hysterectomy in 1939, leaving the cervix intact, which then could develop cancer. The fact that he used a mid-line abdominal incision, which was common practice, rather than a Pfannenstiel’s or transverse incision, meant there was a greater risk of the incision bursting, which unfortunately was exactly what happened. Ann Coleville, John F. Nunn and Dr Harold Francis, once Gemmell’s colleague at Liverpool, contributed to my understanding of the medical science and procedures used in 1939. The interpretation of the material they have shared is my own.

  11. BPH to CC, 5 June 1939, NT.

  12. BPH to MFHP, 3 July 1939, BPA; Lucy Walker to JM, 21 July 1939, BPS.

  13. BPH to MFHP, 3 July 1939, BPA; BPH to ELC, 19 July 1939, ELCL; BPH to Cecily Mills, July 1939; BPH to Nora Burt, 28 July 1939, NT.

  14. BPH to ELC, 10 May 1939, ELCL; BPH to DH, 7 November 1938, V & A.

  15. BPH to ELC, 10 May 1939, ELCL; BPH to Nora Burt, 28 July 1939, NT.

  16. BPH to ELC, 10 May 1939, ELCL.

  17. BPH to ELC, 9 December 1939, ELCL; BPH to Ivy Steel, 11 October 1939, DIDJ.

  18. BPH to ELC, 9 December 1939, ELCL. BPH to June Steel, 11 October 1939, DIDJ; BPH to Mrs Charles Hopkinson, 3 November 1939, BPA. At the end of August women and children were evacuated from London, and were sent to ‘safe’ communities away from the large cities. Evacuees could be from the next town, or from many miles away. Homeowners with extra rooms in their houses or extra buildings could be ordered to take them in.

  19. Ibid.; BPH to GN, 20 December 1939, V & A; BPH to Nora Burt, 4 January 1940, NT; BPH to JM, 9 January 1940, ML.

  20. BPH to ACM, 25 May 1940, BPA. The Hyde Parkers included two adults, two children and a nanny. Beatrix’s first mention of their residence at Hill Top is June 1940.

  21. Ulla Hyde Parker, Cousin Beatie: A Memory of Beatrix Potter (1981), 34–8. ASC, 193–4. The Hyde Parkers occupied Hill Top until May 1941 when they were able to move back to Suffolk. Melford Hall, however, remained an army bivouac, and was badly damaged by military occupation as well as by fire in 1942. Ulla Hyde Parker’s reminiscences contain a number of arresting personal insights, but are factually inaccurate. BPH to MFHP, 29 June, 14 August 1940, BPA.

  22. BPH to ACM, 25 May 1940, BPA.

  23. BPH to Stephanie and Ken Duke, 28 May 1940, PC; BPH to Betty Stevens, 25 May 1940, BPA.

  24. BPH to ACM, 5, 25 June 1940; BPH to MFHP, 13, 29 June 1940, BPA.

  25. BPH to MFHP, 11 July 1940, 24 July 1940, BPA.

  26. BPH to MFHP, 24 July 1940, BPA.

  27. BPH to MFHP, 13 June 1940; BPH to BMM, 30 July 1940, BPA.

  28. BPH to BMM, 13 December 1934, BPA. Quoted in Judy Taylor, So I Shall Tell You a Story…: Encounters with Beatrix Potter (1993), 32.

  29. BPH to MFHP, 13 December 1933, 4 February 1935, BPA. Graham Greene, ‘Beatrix Potter: A Critical Estimate’, London Mercury (1933), reprinted in Sheila Egoff et al., Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature (1980), 265 and in Taylor, ‘So I Shall Tell’, 24–32. When this essay was reprinted in his Collected Essays in 1969 Greene revealed that Beatrix had written an ‘acid letter’ in which she had ‘denied any emotional disturbance’ at the time; Taylor, 32. Beatrix’s letter to Greene, if extant, has never been published. Grinstein, The Remarkable Beatrix Potter (1995), 197–206, explores Potter’s feelings of aggression in Mr Tod along the same psychoanalytical lines.

  30. BPH to BMM, 13 December 1934, 30 July 1940, BPA. Nancy Dean was BMM’s step-granddaughter, and she remembers how she loved hearing the ‘Caravan’ stories read aloud to her; interview with Nancy Dean Kingman, 5 November 2005.

  31. BPH to Nancy Dean, 30 July 1940, BPA. This letter and BP’s revised biographical statement are also published as part of Miller’s Horn Book article.

  32. BPH to BMM, 11 October, 25 November 1940, BPA; Bertha Mahony Miller, ‘Beatrix Potter and Her Nursery Classics’, The Horn Book (May 1941), 230–38.

  33. BPH to BMM, 25 November 1940, Letters, 422–3. In this recollection she claimed not to know how she chose the name ‘McGregor’.

  34. BPH to BMM, 30 July 1940; 24 November 1941, BPA. HWBP, 328n.

  35. Sally Benson was a composite of several old countrywomen Beatrix had known and admired. She had heard their stories through the district nurse who called on them in their infirm years.

  36. BPH to BMM, 25 November 1940; BPA. Beatrix Potter, ‘Wag-by-Wa”, in HWBP, 332–5. Potter gives the title as ‘Wag-by-the-Wall’ in a letter to BMM, 28 August 1943. The MS version, the only one remaining out of private hands, has few changes from Linder’s version. Horn Book Records, Simmons College Archive.

  37. BPH to NNH, 8 August 1940, PC; BPH to MFHP, 14 August 1940, BPA.

  38. BPH to Betty Stevens, 19 September 1940, BPA; BPH to BMM, BPA, 213. Bolton Gardens was destroyed on 10 October 1940. It is now, quite fittingly, the site of the Bousfield Primary School. ASC, 212.

  39. BPH to JM, 5 December 1940, ML.

  40. BPH to MFHP, 24 December 1940. BPA; BPH to JM, 18 January 1941, ML.

  41. BPH to Ivy Steel, 16 November 1940, DIDJ; BPH to BMM, 24 November 1941, BPA.

  42. BPH to NNH, 15 February 1941, V & A; BPH to Arthur Stephens, 23 February, 19 April 1941, Letters, 424, 427.

  43. BPH to ELC, 8 May 1941, ELCL. Choyce was still at Hill Top for Christmas 1942, but gone by late spring 1943. She worked washing dishes for the evacuees. BPH to NNH, 1 November 1941, V & A.

  44. BPH to JM, 18 January, 21, 23, 24, 27 June 1941, ML.

  45. BPH to Ivy Steel, 16 November 1940, 12 November 1941, 23 March 1941, DIDJ.

  46. The USA declared war on Japan on 8 December and against Germany and Italy on 11 December 1941. BPH to BMM, 28 December 1941, BPA; BPH to Ivy Steel, 12 November 1941, DIDJ.

  47. BPH to BMM, 24 November 1941, BPA; Bertha E. Mahony, ‘Beatrix Potter in Letters’, The Horn Book (May 1944), 223.

  48. BPH to BMM, 17, 18 February 1942, BPA. The stories as originally sent included characters from The Fairy Caravan who have a tea party at High Buildings, which Beatrix cut out of the final version of ‘Wag-by-the-Wall’.

  49. Ibid.; BPH to BMM, 19 March 1942, BPA.

  50. BPH to GPC, 12 February 1942, BPA; BPH to BMM, 18 June 1942, BPA.

  21 Reflections

  1. BPH to ACM, 31 January 1942, BPA; BPH to GC, 12 February 1942, BPA; BPH to CJW, 16 September, 2 November, 3 December 1940; 6 July, 23 September 1941; 21 March 1942, Colby College Archives. The last extant letter to Weber was written on 20 May 1942 and contains lengthy quotations from Hardy’s letters. Shipments were completed in 1946 by the executors of the Heelis estate.

  2. BPH to J. K. Stone, 19 August 1939, 5 June 1940, Letters, 406, 416. Stone wrote about his visit to Sawrey in an article, ‘The Immortal world of Jemima Puddle-duck’, Christchurch Star (n.d. 1969).

  3. ASC, 199–201. BPH to Reginald Hart, 24 October 1942, Letters, 452–3; BPH to Ivy Steel, 3 January 1942, DIDJ; BPH to Hettie Douglas, 14 January 1942, Letters, 435; BPH to Reginald Hart, 16 November 1942, PC. Taylor, ‘Alison Hart’, LTC, 226–7. BPH to BMM, 18, 23, 28 August 1943, BPA. For Christmas 1942, Beatrix sent Alison a story called ‘The Chinese Umbrella’ about her pekes, Miss Choyce and her lost umbrella with a duck’s head handle. She made a slightly different version as a present for Miss Choyce. See LTC for both versions.

  4. BPH to Samuel Cunningham, TBP (rev. 1985), 138.

  5. Ibid.
150, 154, 157, 163. Cunningham died on 23 August 1946.

  6. BPH to Arthur Stephens, 14 May 1942, Letters, 445.

  7. BPH to BMM, 23 March 1942, BPA, letter published in ‘The Hunt Breakfast’ section of The Horn Book (May–June 1942), 130.

  8. Beatrix Potter, ‘The Lonely Hills’, The Horn Book (May–June 1942) 153–6. ‘The Lonely Hills’ was part of the first manuscript booklet that comprised a longer version of ‘Wag-by-Wall’ and ‘The Solitary Mouse’, probably written about 1929, but it could also have come from an earlier copybook as a suppressed chapter of The Fairy Caravan. HWBP, 310, 319–21. BPH to BMM, 17 February 1942, 6 April 1942, BPA.

  9. BPH to BMM, 13 July 1942, BPA.

  10. ‘So penicillium has arrived …’ is a sheet torn from a notebook and found in one of Beatrix’s sketchbooks after her death. In 1944 William Heelis gave it to Margaret Lane, who gave it and the 1875 sketchbook to Leslie Linder. It is now part of the Linder Bequest, V & A. The late Dr Mary Noble transcribed Beatrix’s handwritten note, and made interlinear comments on the probable mould species she referred to. There are at least five watercolour drawings of fungi in which Beatrix notes the presence of penicillium in the collection at LDM@TA, including her 1896 drawing of the Witches’ butter, Tremella intumescens, at Woodcote.

  11. Penicillin’s antibacterial properties were noted by John Burdon-Sanderson and John Tyndall, and in the 1880s by Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister. Its bacterial antagonism was undoubtedly of great interest to Beatrix and Henry Roscoe. Penicillin’s modern application was discovered in 1928 by Dr Alexander Fleming at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Fleming published his findings in an article in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, 10 (1929), 226–36. His discovery was not sufficiently pursued or widely publicized. In 1939 Dr Howard Florey began intensive research at Oxford University. It is unlikely that Beatrix knew anything about Fleming’s early article. Her note more likely dates to 1942–3, when she undoubtedly read a leader in The Times (27 August 1942) which drew attention to the new drug, and followed the subsequent dispute over whether Fleming or Florey should be given credit for its discovery. Her reference to ‘forty years earlier’ would be to 1902–3 when she was still doing mycological research. I am grateful to Dr Kevin Brown, Trust Archivist & Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum Curator, St Mary’s NHS Trust, London, for his help in dating this fragment. Ronald Hare, The Birth of Penicillin (1970), 105–69; Council of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, Antibiotics (1952), 1–5.