Beatrix Potter: artist, storyteller, countrywoman

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 16

Beatrix Potter: artist, storyteller, countrywoman

Rosaleen McCarroll meets the author of a new book on one of Britain’s most enduring children’s writers.

Beatrix Potter proved to be such a fascinating subject for her biographer, Judy Taylor, that what she intended as a pictorial record with rather full captions expanded to a text of 50,000 words.

But “Beatrix Potter, Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman,” which has just been released in New Zealand, is nothing if not pictorial. It has more than 200 photographs, drawings, and book illustrations. Beatrix Potter’s father was a keen photographer, as she later was herself, so all those who touched their lives are wonderfully recorded on celluloid.

And Beatrix’s own drawings, from as early as nine years, have been reproduced in the book, proof of her early and prodigious talent. But when writing her biography, Mrs Taylor — freelance writer and consultant to Penguin on all things Beatrix Potter — started at the latter end of her life with Beatrix Potter, countrywoman.

Locals who remembered her were bemused by all the fuss. Although many of her books were set in the Lake District which she knew and loved as a child, she wrote very little after she went to live

there as a landowner. By then he was in her forties. Although she had been dead for 40 years, it was amazing how well people remembered her, recalled Judy Taylor, during her recent visit to Christchurch. They saw her not as a sensitive artist, but as an arrogant offcomer (newcomer), farmer, and expert in the breeding of Herdwick sheep. She was, in fact, the first woman president of the Herdwick Sheepbreeders’ Association. After Beatrix Potter moved to the Lake District, there were many begging letters from her publisher asking for more books, but she always put her farming interests first.

About this time too, 1911 to 1917, begging letters were coming in the other direction as Beatrix Potter was becoming increasingly worried about her publisher’s finances. Here Judy Taylor takes credit for bringing a family scandal to the light of day.

When she was interviewing Winifred Warne, niece of Miss Potter’s original publisher, Harold Warne, she showed her some letters. Miss Warne remarked . . . “That was the year of the trouble.” But she refused to elabor-

Beatrix Potter makes many references to her little New Zealand fans in her letters and as she answered all her fan mail personally, it seems likely she wrote letters to New Zealand.

Judy Taylor, who is compiling the selected letters of Beatrix Potter, is very keen to hear

from anyone who knows of anyone who corresponded with Miss Potter.

Mrs Taylor may be contacted through Penguin Books, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland. She says she would like photocopies of the letters, and promises to use them only with the owner’s permission.

Judy Taylor then searched Beatrix Potter’s letters of that year for a clue. Eventually she found it . . . “I don’t think Mother ever noticed that horrid report in ‘The Times’.” Then she searched “The Times” around that date. She found a report of the criminal conviction of Beatrix Potter’s publisher, Harold Warne who, on April 17, 1917 was sentenced to 18 months hard labour for £20,000 forgeries.

Harold Warne had inherited the family fishing business in Jersey, and he had let this get into serious financial difficulties. Money intended for publishing was being syphoned off into fishing. No other family members were implicated. Beatrix Potter, who was deeply involved with the family, (she had been engaged to Norman Warne who died shortly before their proposed marriage in 1905) remained loyal.

No mention of this scandal was made in the Margaret Lane biography

published in 1945, but Judy Taylor cannot believe that she did not know about it. Another rich resource open to Mrs Taylor, but not available to previous biographers, was Beatrix Potter’s journal which she kept from the age of 15 to 35. As she wanted to keep her , journal safe from prying eyes, principally her mother’s, she wrote it in code. Beatrix Potter became particularly adept at this and wrote it quite fluently. The journals were saved, but no-one could read them.

Eventually the code was cracked by Leslie Linder, a civil engineer specialising in lifting equipment who, as an adult, became a Beatrix Potter devotee in a big way.

He went to the Lake District and interviewed people who knew the writer and began collecting Beatrix Potter paraphernalia, no matter how trivial . . . shopping lists just fine. When he died he bequeathed over 2000 items of Potter memora-

bilia to the Victoria and Albert Museum. He worked on the journal for 10 years concentrating on dates, trying to decipher place names, or events associated with them. In 1958 he cracked the code which was actually quite a simple letter-for-letter substitution. Judy Taylor is a major beneficiary. Beatrix Potter’s Victorian childhood emerges as lonely, but not unusual for the time. She found a substitute for human companionship in her pets. She drew them incessantly, and some were later immortalised in her books. She and her brother Bertram, also a keen drawer and harbourer of creatures, were also very interested in the anatomy of animals. They skinned dead animals and boiled them until only the bones were left, then they studied the skeletons, drew them and preserved them in their collection. A detailed knowledge of anatomy goes into her apparently simple sketches. Brother and sister had an amazing collection of pets, not excluding bats! Another lucky break for the biographer was the teacher at her village preschool. Judy Taylor read regularly to the children there, but she had to leave to go to the Lake District to begin her BP research. The teacher remarked, “My brother-in-law was a Heelis.” It turned out he was Miss Potter’s husband, Willie Heelis’s, great-nephew. So a whole host of photograph albums and anecdotes fell into her lap. In spite of the constraints of Beatrix’s Victorian background — she was ever at the call of her parents and had to seek their permission to marry at the age of 47 — Miss Potter emerged as a strong, independent woman. She had wideranging interests and was remarkably well informed on many subjects. Mrs Taylor, who is a Beatrix Potter expert from way back, says she has tried to tell the story in Beatrix Potter’s own words.

Although Beatrix Potter is not her life’s work (Judy Taylor has actually written seven children’s

books of her own) she (BP) is very time-consum-ing at present. She is now preparing a Beatrix .Potter exhibition for the National Trust Lake District Appeal, and has a team of four travelling the world selecting the exhibits. She has just completed “That Naughty Rabbit.” This traces the history of Peter Rabbit, particularly from the point of view of

the art, publishing, and printing techniques, from when he first appeared in a letter to a child in 1893’ through to the re-orien-tated originals released in. 1987. She is also working on; the “Letters of Beatrix Potter.” “It was supposed to be the ‘Collected Letters,’ but she wrote so many it will have to be the ‘Selected Letters’.” ’

Did Beatrix Potter write to anyone you know?