Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  12. BPH to Ivy Steel, 17 July 1942, DIDJ; Girl Guide Log Book, 5 August 1940; Skylark Guide Log Book, 5–6, August 1940, Girlguiding, Cumbria South Archives, CRO/B: Judy Taylor, interview with Miss Joy Brownlow, 3 July 1985, quoted in ASC, 202.

  13. Windermere, Ambleside, Hawkshead Guide Log Book, 28 July 1943, Cumbria South Archives, CRO/B.

  14. BPH to Joy Brownlow, 30 July, 13 August 1943, Girlguiding, Cumbria South Archives, CRO/C; BPH to Arthur Stephens, 30 July 1943, FWA.

  15. BPH to MFHP, 18 November 1942; BPH to GPC, 19 November 1942, BPA.

  16. BPH to BMM, 18 August 1943, BPA; BPH to JM, April 1943, ML; BPH to C. S. Forrester, 25 January, 11 March 1943, BPS. In April Beatrix purchased The Lodge, a house, cottage and various outbuildings in Hawkshead and an adjoining field known as ‘Ewan Meadow’, from William Heelis and John Heelis. In November she bought Low and High Loanthwaite Farms, and additional land, about eighty acres, near Hawkshead, and in December she contracted for the purchase of Tower Bank House, with all outbuildings, parrocks and intakes, nearly fifty acres, in Sawrey. That conveyance was made posthumously on 5 April 1944. Heelis Schedule of Conveyances, BPS.

  17. BPH to Charlie Cooper, 18 August 1943, NT.

  18. BPH to JM, 12 March 1943, ML. GW to JM, 15 January 1943, Walker Letters, BPS. Lucy Walker died of cancer in June 1944.

  19. Beatrix was elected president for 1944, but did not live to take office. She had often been in the ‘chair’ at various local meetings. R. H. Lamb’s history (1936) makes no mention of Mrs Heelis, or her contributions to Herdwick breeding. For other reasons Lamb also ignores Rawnsley’s role in preserving the breed as well as his son Noel’s early organizational efforts. BPH to BMM, 18 August 1943, BPA; BPH to JM, April 1943, ML. Bob Orrell, ‘A Breed Apart’, Cumbria Magazine, 55/6 (September 2005), 30.

  20. BPH to ELC, 26 May, 29 June, 16 August 1943, ELCL; BPH to NNH, 2 February 1943, BPS.

  21. BPH to Ivy Steel, 2 September 1943, DIDJ; BPH to Tommy Stoddart, 6 September, 4 October, and two undated, 1943, PC; BPH to George Wilson, 13 October 1943, Letters, 460.

  22. BPH to BMM, 5 November 1943, BPA.

  23. BPH to Celia Edwards, 10 November 1943, PC.

  24. BPH to MFHP, 13 November 1943; BPH to ACM, 30 November 1943, BPA; BPH to GW, 20, 26 November 1943, BPS.

  25. BPH to ELC, 30 November 1943, ELCL. Beatrix gave the archaeological drawings of the Roman and post-Roman objects found in the Bucklesbury excavations to the Armitt Trust Library in 1935 after consulting with Herbert Bell and touring the Roman camp at Borrans Field. Beatrix Potter Collection, LDM@TA. Jay, The Armitt Story, Ambleside (1998), 42–3.

  26. BPH to CC, 15 November 1943, NT.

  27. BPH to JM, 13 December 1943, ML. Tom Storey, ‘Recollections’, NT: Storey died in March 1986 at the age of 90.

  28. BPH to FC, 27 December 1924, NT. Certificate of death, Helen Beatrix Heelis, 22 December 1943; cause of death is given as ‘acute bronchitis, myocarditis, and carcinoma of the uterus’. It was signed by Dr A. Brownlee.

  Epilogue: Stewardship

  1. ‘Register of Cremations Carried out by Corporation of Blackpool at the Crematorium at Carleton’, William Heelis and a required witness, Jos. Walker, JP, signed the register as applicants for cremation which was carried out on 24 December 1943. The ashes were delivered to William Heelis, but there is an obvious error in the date on the Register as it reads 21 December 1943. It is possible that the ashes could have been delivered on the 24th but not likely, as it was Chrismas Eve. Liz Bienias, Cameteries & Crematorium Officer at Carleton, suspects the correct date is closer to 27 December. Will of William Heelis, undated holograph draft, sent to George Heelis, (c. 1944); probated 8 November 1945, Principal Probate Registry. William’s gross estate was revised at £91,684. 14s. 6d.; BPS. Joan Duke, ‘Tom Storey’, BPSN, 21 (June 1986), 1.

  2. Will of Helen Beatrix Heelis, 2 March 1944, Principal Probate Registry. She had signed the will, dictated to William, on 31 March 1939.

  3. William Heelis to George Heelis, 3 January 1944, BPS; William Heelis to DMM, 10 January 1944, NT. Enid Bassom, ‘The National Trust and Beatrix Potter’, BPSN, 59 (January 1996), 7.

  4. Lucy May Walker, funeral notice, 3 January 1945, CRO/C. GW to JM, 16 November 1944, ML; William Heelis to JM, February 1944, ML.

  5. William Heelis to Dr Cooper, 23 February 1944, NT; CC to William Heelis, 6 January, 18 March 1944, CCP.

  6. William Heelis to MFHP, 3 April 1944, BPA. Beatrix Potter, ‘Wag-by-Wall’, The Horn Book (May–June 1944); contract for US copyright, 28 August 1944, BPS.

  7. B. L. Thompson, ‘Recollections of Beatrix Potter’, n.d. (c. 1952), CRO/ K. The NT tries to limit visitors to 80,000 per year. Liz Hunter to the author, 19 September 2004.

  8. Holograph notes dictated by BPH, Instructions for Disposition of Personal Property, BPS.

  9. William Heelis to GW, 27 May 1945, BPS.

  10. ‘Mrs Heelis’ Bequest to the National Trust, Greatest Ever Lakeland Gift’, The News, 19 February 1944, FWA. Will of Helen Beatrix Heelis.

  11. DMM to William Heelis, 23 December 1944, NT.

  12. Will of Helen Beatrix Heelis; will of William Heelis.

  13. B. L. Thompson, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Gift to the Public’, Country Life (3 March 1944), 370–71. BPH to SHH, 30 December 1930: H. B. Heelis, ‘ “The Lake District as a National Park”, or a “National Park in the Lake District?” ’, letter to The Times (?), 17 December 1938, BPS.

  14. Sir Martin Holdgate, ‘The Ecology of Lakeland, Past, Present and Future’, Cumbrian Wildlife (August 2001), 10–13.

  15. Terry Fletcher, ‘Furore at NT over Farm Break-up’, Cumbria Magazine, 55/8 (November 2005), 22–5.

  16. ‘Hill Farming is Facing Collapse, Warns Trust’, Westmorland Gazette (8 July 2005), 3. Bob Orrell, ‘Rocket Goes up’, Cumbria Magazine, 55/9 (December 2005), 33.

  Acknowledgements

  Beatrix Potter was first of all an artist and writer of place who found her personal and intellectual freedom in nature. She later became a conservationist in an effort to preserve the landscape that had inspired her art. Her generosity left an indelible imprint on that part of the English countryside known as the Lake District. This biography was undertaken as an exploration of the life and times of a woman who is a household name on several continents, but whose personal life and significant scientific and environmental accomplishments remain largely unknown. Her life was not without tragedy, but she was one of those rare individuals who is given a real third act. Beatrix Potter made the most of this gift, and it is this coda that I have found the most revealing of her essential nature. Potter was a woman of her time, yet she produced art and story that are timeless. She was emotionally resilient, capable of reinventing herself, and saved from the ordinary by her creative genius. Ultimately, her early longing for useful work and her later passion for preservation give definition to her life’s course.

  My research has taken me to many of those places which were imprinted upon her inner eye, shared in her art and left to us by her stewardship. I have followed her from London to Hertfordshire, to the coastal towns of the south, to Scotland, Wales, to the Greater Manchester area, and finally to the Lake District. It has been my good fortune to find many of the houses in which she spent time and to wander about the countryside that so delighted her and which she immortalized in her work. I am grateful to all those who have accompanied me in one way or another on this journey.

  I have consulted numerous archives, libraries and collections. I wish to thank Joyce Irene Whalley, former Curator of the Linder Bequest, and Emma Laws, Frederick Warne Curator of Children’s Literature, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Eileen Cox of the Dunkeld Cathedral Archives; Jane Anderson, Blair Castle Archives, Pitlochry; John Hodgson, John Rylands University Library, Manchester; David Taylor and Richard Bond, Manchester Central Library; Guy F. Holborn, Librarian of Lincoln’s Inn; Sarah Dodgson, Keeper, Archives, Books and Collections, Athenaeum; Simon Blundell, Librarian, Reform C
lub; Enid Bassom, former co-editor of the Beatrix Potter Society Newsletter; Michael Harvey, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television; Peter Buxton, photographer, Birnam; Margaret Mardall and Ann Wheeler, Charterhouse School; Robin Darwall-Smith, Archivist, Magdalen College, Oxford; Cecily Green and Helen Jones, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; Isabelle Hernandez and Hazel Cook, Kensington Library, Local Studies; Louise Todd and Linda Bowen, National Trust, London and Grasmere; Susan Benson, Girlguiding Archivist, Cumbria South Archives, Cumbria Record Office, Barrow-in-Furness; Susan Dench and David Bowcock, Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle; Richard Hall and Kath Strickland, Cumbria Record Office, Kendal; Geoff Brown, Secretary, Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association; Terry Fletcher, Editor, Cumbria Magazine; Anna Lou Ashby, Inge Dupont and McKenna Lebens, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Sybille A. Jagusch, Children’s Library Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Lolly Robinson, The Horn Book, Boston, Massachusetts; Diane Williams and Cathy Farrington, Milton Academy, Milton, Massachusetts; Dan Haacker, Milton Public Library; Staff of Miller Library, Colby College, Waterville, Maine.

  The following curators and archivists facilitated lengthy research visits with expert assistance: Ivy Trent, Librarian, Cotsen Children’s Library, formerly in Los Angeles; Anne Stevenson Hobbs, formerly Frederick Warne Curator of Children’s Literature, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Karen Lightner, formerly Beatrix Potter Curator, Rare Book Librarian, Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Liz Hunter McFarlane, House & Collections Manager, and Hazel Gatford, former Collections Assistant, Hawkshead & Beatrix Potter Property, National Trust; Susan Payne, Robin Rodger and Michael Taylor of Perth Museum and Art Gallery; Linda Powell, Michelle Kelly, Beth Gabb, Ian Rollins, Barbara Crossley and Tanya Flower of the Armitt Trust Library of the Lakes Discovery Museum @ The Armitt, Ambleside.

  Many individual scholars and experts granted interviews and shared material that influenced my thinking about Potter’s life and work. I wish to thank Brigadier John Heelis, Brian Alderson, Reita Wilson, Peter Hollindale, Selwyn Goodacre, Laura Stevenson, Kara Sewall, Pam Lancaster, Dudley Chignall, Carol Halebian, Nonya Stevens Wright, Anthony H. Gaddum, Herbert G. Sokinger, Judge George N. Hurd, Jeannette Peverly, Nancy Dean Kingman, Helen Twombly Watkins, Jessie Kenyon, Helen Jackson, Geoff Brown, Christine Clough of The Friends of Gorse Hall, Jack Bredbury and Ken Howard of Stalybridge Unitarian Church, Glynis Reeve Greenman, David Duncan, Joy Sharp, Yumiko Mitsudo, Elaine R. Jacobsen, Marc Samuels Lasner, Margaret Stetz, Justin Schiller, Greg Gilbert, and Lord Rochdale of the Lingholm Private Trust Ltd.

  The following individuals aided my understanding of the Lake District and of Beatrix Potter’s life there: Joan Duke, Eileen Jay, the late Elizabeth Battrick, Beverly Maggs, Willow Taylor, Jenny Cutcliffe, Louise Taylor Smith, John Birkett, Jean and Dan Birkett, Glenn and Dorothy Wilkinson, W. R. Mitchell, Christopher Hanson-Smith, John A. Nettleton, Gilbert Tyson and Gordon Tyson. Special thanks go to John R. Cawood, Esq., whose understanding of land records and the history of property conveyancing in the Lake District guided me through the maze of land purchases, legal terms, and local traditions. His knowledge and generous advice have been essential.

  These scientists and historians guided me through the minefields of specialization: the late Mary Noble and Roy Watling, Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh, in mycology; David Allen, Wellcome Trust for History of Medicine, University College London; Brian Gardiner, Linnean Society. Marc Rothenberg, the late Patricia Gossell and Paula DePriest of the Smithsonian Institution, and Sandra Herbert, my colleague at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, all contributed to my understanding of the historic protocols and proceedings of the Linnean Society and of nineteenth-century botanical practices. For sharing their expertise in medicine and gynaecological practice, I am indebted to the kindness of these physicians: Anne Colville, John Nunn and Harold Francis. Eddie McDonough of Astley Tyldesly generously shared his extraordinary knowledge of animal husbandry, fell sheep and the history of country life.

  I am grateful to Roger Cutcliffe, formerly head of the biological section of the Process Investigation Department of Glaxo’s penicillin factory in Ulverston, and former Beatrix Potter Society Chairman, for his expertise on penicillin and the history of its discovery, and to discussions about Potter’s research with the late Mary Noble and with Kevin Brown, Trust Archivist & Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum Curator, St Mary’s Hospital, London.

  Frederick Warne, Beatrix Potter’s publisher, and the Beatrix Potter Society opened their unrivalled collections to me and gave me permission to quote from their materials. Heartfelt thanks go to Warne publisher Sally Floyer, to Diana Syrat and Ronnie Fairweather who have generously supported this project. Former Collections Manager Elizabeth Booth first acquainted me with Warne’s remarkable collections of images, manuscripts and art. Sara Glenn, her successor, has guided me through those collections online. The Beatrix Potter Society has furthered research about the life and work of Beatrix Potter for more than a quarter of a century. Their publications, conferences, tours and archives have been essential. Individual Society members on several continents contributed to my understanding. Many contributed their expertise unasked, and sent me down roads I would never have thought to take. Special thanks to Jane Crowell Morse, honorary vice president and Potter scholar, who accompanied me to my first Beatrix Potter Society Conference in Ambleside, and introduced me to the Society and to her many friends in the Lake District; to Jenny Akester, membership secretary, conference organizer and tour guide, for her personal research on my behalf and her support in all aspects of this work. Betsy Bray, US East Coast representative, played a pivotal role at the outset and helped me navigate an unfamiliar network. Susan Wittig Albert joined me in the hunt for evidence when she began her own acclaimed mystery series, The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter. Her friendship has been an unexpected gift of this adventure.

  The Washington Biography Group, its members and its esteemed leader Marc Pachter, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, again challenged my thinking about Potter’s life for eight long years. Our discussions always provided fresh insights and renewed spirits. Cynthia Cannell, my literary agent, patiently and calmly nurtured me and piloted this project from the beginning. Her advice and caring have been unfailingly generous. Margaret Bluman, my editor at Allen Lane, Penguin, has given real joy to these years of labour and shepherded this manuscript with confidence, humour and vision. My enthusiastic editor at St Martin’s Press, Michael Flamini, provided energy and perspective at just the right time.

  This manuscript has been read in whole and in part by Judy Taylor Hough, R. K. Webb, Cynthia Vartan, Libby Joy, Susan Albert, Roy Watling, John Cawood, Jane Morse, Michele Pacifico, Pam Blevins and Karen Shaffer. Michele Pacifico organized and maintained the research archive, prepared the bibliography, and kept me from losing things. Shep Bostin, Michael Weeks and John Emrich saved me from technological failure. Libby Joy, my research associate in London, has given me the benefit of her immense knowledge of Potter, has kept this biography on course, researched, questioned and edited, all the while enduring my steep learning curve with grace and forbearance. R. K. Webb, distinguished professor in English history, colleague and friend, has guided my understanding of Potter’s life within the larger context of English social and intellectual history. Without his critical reading this work would have been impoverished. Finally, Judy Taylor Hough, MBE, Beatrix Potter scholar, Beatrix Potter Society chair, author and editor, opened her collection of unpublished materials to me, and thereby made this new biography possible. In every way, she is the ‘without whom’ of this effort. In the process she has also become my friend, but she bears no responsibility whatsoever for my errors of fact or interpretation, and certainly none for my invariable mispronunciation of her favourite names and places.

  My husband, John W. Nickum, Jr., my esteemed literary escort and my life partner, has patiently endured all the deprivations and defer
red dreams that befall the spouse of an obsessive biographer. It was he who first suggested that I write this life. He knows my gratitude and has my heart.

  L. L.

  Bethesda, Maryland

  September 2006

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