The Real Beatrix Potter

by Nadia Cohen

  Auctioneer Richard Westwood-Brookes said:

  These form an intriguing insight into the daily life of one of the world’s most loved children’s authors. They came from the personal effects of her husband and we understand that the photograph of him as a young man as part of a typical Lakeland shooting party has not been seen before.

  As far as the recipes are concerned, they are clearly the family recipes that had been handed down throughout the generations of William Heelis’s family. They therefore came with him into the home he set up with Beatrix Potter.

  It is an intriguing thought that she might well have used this very book to make gingerbread and marmalade and a whole host of other items for the family larder. Various members of the Heelis family have clearly compiled the books over the years, but some sections do seem to be in a hand, which resembles that of Beatrix Potter herself. While we cannot conclusively prove this, further research may prove that these humble books have a considerable literary significance.

  When coal shortages came into force, farming communities simply burnt wood instead, and Beatrix’s fondness for wearing layers of thick wool and tweed protected her against the cold. She had always been very good at making do with what they had, but when the third bleak winter of the war dragged on into 1942 they were forced to eat one of their pet rabbits for Christmas dinner, since wild rabbits were disappearing fast too. With no end to the conflict in sight, and the weather harsh and bitter, Beatrix was tired and worn down. That would be her last Christmas, since 1943 was a particularly arduous year for her, but she battled on as long as she could.

  Retirement was still absolutely out of the question of course, and even after she was confined to her bed when a bad cold developed into yet another debilitating bout of bronchitis, Beatrix was sitting up in her woollen nightgown, still issuing orders to ensure the smooth running of her farms and flocks, and still using whatever strength she had left to write streams of letters:

  Everyone is getting tired. Wm. is so tired and getting deafer. But he does not feel he can retire from the office. I have managed all right as regards farming – sitting up in bed in a nightcap, interviewing shepherds! I wish I had not broken down just now.

  I hope to do a bit more active work yet – and anyhow I have survived to see Hitler beaten past hope of recovery.

  In 2018 a collection of five letters Beatrix penned during the height of the Second World War were sold at an auction. They reflect her fury as a harassed and careworn livestock farmer, left irritated by civil servants from the Ministry of Agriculture dictating unreasonable quotas.

  At the time Beatrix and most of the neighbouring farmers were being forced to turn swathes of their land over to arable farming for the Government’s ‘Dig For Victory’ campaign. In her handwritten letters to agriculturalist Professor James Hanley, Beatrix expressed her doubts and frustration at what the agricultural officials were asking of her at this stage of the conflict between July 1942 and March 1943.

  For years her farms had concentrated predominantly on cattle, sheep, pigs, ducks and turkeys as the landscape was unsuited to arable farming. During both World Wars however, Beatrix was given quotas by the Ministry of Agriculture to produce small amounts of oats, turnips and beets, and like many other farmers in the area she bemoaned the quotas, which distracted from her main business: ‘The hens are about to be killed as they are due to lay again. We are governed by idiots,’ she wrote.

  She had never liked being told what to do, and now Beatrix was furious at having to permit government regulations to stand in the way of her growing enterprises. Farming was starting to become more mechanised, and with the arrival of new machinery there was less need for manual labour and she was able to cut costs and boost profits further, which in turn meant she was able to increase her landholdings. Suddenly switching to arable farming threatened to derail her expansion plans.

  In one letter sent in September 1942 Beatrix discussed with Professor Hanley a ‘deplorable’ potato season and the strict conditions of farming in the war. She also grumbled about a reseeding experiment she had been instructed to try which she thought was: ‘A complete gamble; waste of seed, time and labour.’

  In her late seventies she did not fear approaching the end of her life but she worried about what would be left of her land after the war: ‘This war, and famine, it is not going over quickly – can it be good policy to exhaust even an acre of soil? What’s the old saying? “Earth honest, what you give it – it will repay”?’

  In another slightly more amenable letter, Beatrix gave Professor Hanley directions to her remote farmhouse with an offer of lunch of ‘mostly lettuces’, from her vegetable patch so he could see for himself the effect the directives were having on her productivity. She wrote: ‘If you succeed in reaching here, I shall be pleased to offer such eating as available, mainly lettuces!’

  The letters, along with Hanley’s typed responses, were put up for auction by one of Professor Hanley’s relatives after they had been discovered by auctioneers who had been called to their house in Wiltshire to remove antiques and works of art. They sparked fervent bidding and a British buyer paid a hammer price of £10,000, with extra fees taking the overall figure to £12,400.

  Joseph Trinder, of Dawsons auctioneers in Berkshire said:

  Much of Beatrix Potter correspondence relates to her books but what we had here were letters about her travails and frustrations of growing crops for the war effort.

  Certainly her primary enjoyment came from the land and farming and conservation. We don’t know nearly so much about this second chapter of her life but the letters give a sense of her passion. It was an exciting discovery as such an important discovery is rarely offered for sale. We are delighted with the sale result.

  As the war dragged on with no end in sight, the outlook seemed dire to Beatrix. She seemed to know that she would not survive another winter, and so with her usual sense of practicality she started to put her affairs in order, and in drawing up the details of her will nothing was left to chance. Her house and farm servants would all be left money, her beloved flocks of Herdwick sheep would be kept by the National Trust on their native land, and ‘Hunting by otter hounds and harriers shall be forbidden and prohibited over the whole of my Troutbeck property.’ The walled garden and wood she owned at Belmount Hall would be protected as a bird sanctuary, and William would inherit the copyright to all her books. Upon William’s death it would be transferred to Norman’s favourite nephew at Warnes.

  She had far less emotional attachment to her literary legacy than to Hill Top, which had been such a significant symbol of her first taste of freedom. Beatrix had bought many more properties since then, but Hill Top was the first and remained her favourite. She moved back into the house when she thought she was dying.

  Beatrix could not stand the idea of someone else moving in and making alterations to the house after she had gone, and so she expressly stipulated that it must never be lived in by anyone else. Instead, it would be kept intact as a museum, immaculately preserved as a pristine example of Lakeland life at the time of her death to raise further funds for the National Trust. She did, however, stipulate that there would always be a tenant farmer living next door, just as there had been when she arrived more than forty years earlier.

  Beatrix also insisted that every item inside the house should remain exactly as she left it, with all her furniture, belongings and valuables arranged in the rooms, just as they always had been when she lived there. Her china was displayed precisely as she liked it in the cupboards, and she wanted her candlesticks and Bible, the papers and drawings on her writing desk and even the books to stay exactly where she left them.

  She put more time and effort into the precise arrangements of the house than anything else in her will. She had a clear vision of it being open to future generations of the public for years to come. Many people made the pilgrimage to Sawrey to peer over her fence and peek through the windows while she was alive, and so she felt she owed it to the
people who had loved her books to allow them the opportunity to see just how she had lived after she had gone.

  ‘Hill Top is to be presented to my visitors,’ she stated in her will, and her wish was granted. It has been visited by tens of thousands of people every year since she died.

  Liz Hunter McFarlane explained:

  In her carefully drawn up will Beatrix stipulated that her beloved home Hill Top be kept exactly as she left it and it must always open to the public as a classic example of rural life and classic Lakeland architecture at that time.

  She did not want it rented out to tenants because she understood that her name had the ability to raise a vast fortune for the cause which was closest to her heart – preserving the Lake District.

  Robert McCracken Peck wrote in Antiques Magazine in 1996: ‘To the 80,000 visitors who traipse through the tiny cottage annually, Hill Top represents a nostalgic return to the comforting childhood world of Jemima Puddle-Duck, Squirrel Nutkin and the many other animals whose adventurous lives filled the pages of Potter’s books.’

  John Moffat, general manager for the National Trust’s Beatrix Potter places, added: ‘Beatrix Potter left the National Trust a large legacy and caring for her home, Hill Top, her personal possessions, original artwork and letters plays a role in preserving the cultural heritage of the Lake District.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Once her affairs had been put in order, and her will carefully drawn up exactly as she wanted, in November 1943 Beatrix wrote her final letter to her beloved cousin, Caroline Clark. Seventy-seven years old and propped up in bed at Hill Top with a crippling bout of pneumonia and fatal heart disease, it would have been an ideal opportunity for reflecting nostalgically on her long and varied career. Beatrix had achieved so much to be proud of: her hundreds of landscape watercolors, her respected mycology research, and her twenty-four best-selling children’s books, many of which, including The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, were already considered nursery classics around the world.

  None of that mattered to Beatrix in the final few days of her life, and in the letter she did not mention any of those achievements. Instead, she reminisced about a very different project, a longer, more unusual and more secretive piece of writing than anything published in her lifetime – her coded journal.

  ‘When I was young I already had the itch to write, without having any material to write about,’ she explained to Caroline. ‘I used to write long-winded descriptions, hymns (!) and records of conversations in a kind of cipher shorthand.’

  When Beatrix had originally written page after page of her private thoughts in her childhood diaries, which she guarded fiercely from prying eyes, she had never imagined they would be read by an audience of more than one. Decades later, Beatrix knew only too well that a great many other people besides her overly inquisitive mother were extremely interested in learning her private thoughts. Unfortunately so many years had passed since Beatrix devised her unique code that she was unable to provide anyone with their translation. She could scarcely comprehend them herself when she revisited them on her deathbed. ‘They were exasperating and absurd compositions,’ she wrote to Caroline. ‘I am now unable to read them even with a magnifying glass.’

  As far as we know, that letter to Caroline was the only time she ever mentioned what may well be considered among her greatest literary creations: her unique collection of private journals written over a period of fifteen years in her tiny, barely legible handwriting. In these diaries Beatrix poured her heart out in a way she would have never dared to do out loud at the time. It was made abundantly clear to her as a child that nobody was interested in hearing her views, and so she retreated to her bedroom to vent all her innermost thoughts on a vast range of subjects. She had plenty to say about art and literature, science and nature, politics and society, and of course her own private hopes and frustrations.

  ‘It fulfilled a need not only to express herself, but to have something over which she, who was powerless in every other way, exercised absolute control,’ wrote Linda Lear in her 2008 biography, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. Lear added: ‘It seems reasonable to conclude that her code writing was at least initially devised against the possibility that her mother might read it.’

  Its eventual publication many years after her death has cemented Beatrix’s reputation as a forward-thinking feminist and passionate environmental campaigner whose message of conservation has endured through the ages. And were it not for the tireless efforts of one particularly dedicated fan, we may never have known these other hidden sides that shaped the young Beatrix. When Stephanie Duke, a distant relation, came across what she described as ‘a large bundle of loose sheets and exercise books written in cipher-writing’ in Beatrix’s former family home in 1952, she was not quite sure what to make of the peculiar discovery, and did not know whether the notes had any significance at all.

  Duke showed the pages to Leslie Linder, a lifelong Potter aficionado who, along with his sister Enid, has spent years buying up original copies of Beatrix’s work at estate sales and auctions.

  ‘The love of Potter’s work triggered the desire to know more about the lady who created it,’ said Andrew Wiltshire, the author of Linder’s biography, Beatrix Potter’s Secret Code-Breaker.

  The Linders had also begun collecting other items to do with Beatrix, not just her books but also works of art, letters and rough drafts of stories. When Duke approached Leslie about the sheaf of strangely inscrutable papers, he jumped at the chance to take a look. ‘He was the kind of man who would say “Yes please!”’ Wiltshire said. ‘He wouldn’t need to be asked twice.’

  As it turned out, Beatrix’s childhood code was inordinately complicated to crack, and it would be years before anyone could work out what she had written.

  Wiltshire explained: ‘It was a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher code,’ in which each letter of the alphabet was replaced by a symbol. But there were plenty of other problems for the code breakers, chiefly how fluent Beatrix had become in her private language, she had taught herself to write the code so quickly that each page looked like an indecipherable maze of scribbles.’

  It did not help matters that Beatrix’s handwriting could be absolutely miniscule – at times she could somehow manage to squeeze thousands of tiny words onto one single page. On top of these difficulties, when Beatrix turned twenty she decided to destroy many of her earliest, and probably clearest journals after rereading them: ‘It is rather appalling to find one was such a goose only three years since,’ she said at the time.

  Beatrix was evidently not a terribly organised child, as her priority when it came to journal entries appeared to have been very much quantity over quality. She did not have unlimited access to supplies of notebooks, and so when she ran out of space to write Beatrix would scrawl over whatever scraps of paper she could find. When she got particularly desperate she even ripped out entire pages of French textbooks and stuck her own reviews of museum and art exhibitions over the top. She also occasionally deployed time-saving shorthand devices such as using numbers to form parts of words such as ‘4get’ or ‘2gether’.

  Deciphering the pages seemed a daunting task and over the next five years Linder would periodically pull out the pile of pages, stare at them for a while and then file them away without making much progress. ‘By Easter 1958, I was beginning to think somewhat sadly that these code-written sheets would remain a mystery forever,’ he remembered later.

  But Linder decided to give himself one final crack at solving the puzzles over the bank holiday weekend, and pulled out a random sheet from the stack he had pored over so many times in the past. This time he noticed something he actually recognised at last. Near the bottom of the page were the Roman numerals XVI, and the year 1793. He consulted a dictionary of dates in a bid to discover key events that may have occurred that year. The search was initially fruitless, but a children’s encyclopedia revealed: ‘Louis XVI, French King; born Versailles 1754; guillotin
ed Paris 1793. Here at last was a possible clue!’ he wrote.

  The numbers helped Linder figure out a nearby word: ‘execution’, which at least gave him Beatrix’s secret symbols for eight letters of the alphabet, including four vowels. Linder then found an earlier sheet of Beatrix’s jottings, which was written relatively clearly, and he was soon able to reveal dozens of other small clues. Recalling the momentous breakthrough, Linder wrote: ‘By midnight on that memorable Easter Monday practically the whole of Beatrix Potter’s code-alphabet had been solved.’

  He discovered, of course, that her diaries were full of hints at her future as an artist and writer. ‘I can’t settle to anything but my painting, I lost my patience over everything else,’ she wrote at the end of one particularly agitated page. Many of the detailed entries closed with the name of a book she had recently finished reading, or contained one of her famously detailed and occasionally brutal art reviews.

  It would be another four years before Linder was able to fully unravel the shapes of all her words using the secret alphabet to read Beatrix’s thoughts and observations exactly right. He could not confidently rely solely on the code, as he feared it could still be riddled with inaccuracies. He meticulously fact checked with a botanist if Beatrix mentioned a plant she had seen, and he would trace her routes on a map if she mentioned making a particular journey. Sometimes Linder even travelled to the location himself, and following in Beatrix’s footsteps he would even research the archives of museums and art galleries to unearth old exhibition catalogues: ‘He had the time to just look at the pages, and wonder, “What on earth does this scribble mean?”’ Wiltshire added.

  Luckily Linder was a very wealthy man who employed a team of fulltime servants who helped him devote endless long hours to the Potter project as he worked through the piles of notes, page by page, revealing a unique insight to the inner workings of Beatrix’s brain that nobody had glimpsed before. Over the years Linder realised he probably knew Beatrix better than anyone else ever had during her lifetime, and he was utterly charmed by her: ‘It appears that even her closest friends knew nothing of this code-writing,’ he wrote. ‘She never spoke of it. It was strange how one forgot about Beatrix Potter the author of the Peter Rabbit books and became conscious of a charming person called Miss Potter.’