Henry William Williamson (1 December 1895 – 13 August 1977) was an English writer who wrote novels concerned with wildlife, English social history, ruralism and the First World War. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 for his book Tarka the Otter.
He was born in London, and brought up in a semi-rural area where he developed his love of nature, and nature writing. He fought in the First World War and, having witnessed the Christmas truce and the devastation of trench warfare, he developed first a pacifist ideology, then fascist sympathies. He moved to Devon after the Second World War and took up farming and writing; he wrote many other novels. He married twice. He died in a hospice in Ealing in 1977, and was buried in North Devon.
Early years Henry Williamson was born in Brockley in south-east London to bank clerk William Leopold Williamson (1865–1946) and Gertrude Eliza (1867–1936; née Leaver). In early childhood his family moved to Ladywell, and he received a grammar school education at 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.Deavin, Mark "Henry Williamson: Nature's Visionary" in National Vanguard Magazine, No. 117 (March–April 1997).
First World War
On 22 January 1914, Williamson volunteered as a rifleman with the 5th (City of London) Battalion of the London Regiment, part of the British Army's Territorial Force, and was mobilised when war was declared upon Imperial Germany on 4 August 1914.
In November 1914, he went to France with the London Rifle Brigade's 1st Battalion, entering the Western Front's trenches in the Ypres Salient, where he witnessed the Christmas Truce between British and German troops. In January 1915, he was withdrawn from the winter trenches with trench foot and dysentery and evacuated back to Britain. After his convalescence, he was commissioned 10 April 1915 as a second lieutenant with the 10th (Service) Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment. In May 1915, he was attached for training to the 2/1st Cambridgeshire Regiment at Newmarket. In October 1915, he was transferred to the 25th Middlesex Regiment at Hornchurch. He volunteered to specialise in machine-gun warfare, and in January 1916, joined No. 208 Machine Gun Company of the Machine Gun Corps at Belton Park, Grantham. In May 1916, he entered hospital in London with anaemia, and was granted two months' medical leave. He rejoined No. 208 MGC and in February 1917 departed Britain with it for the Western Front, the unit taking the field with the 62nd (2nd West Riding) Division. Williamson acted as his company's transport officer and, in June 1917, he was gassed while transporting ammunition up to the front line. He was returned to the UK, spending the next few months in military convalescent hospitals. In September 1917, he was attached for garrison duty as the adjutant of the 3rd Bedfordshire Regiment at Felixstowe. Classed B1 by an Army Medical Board, from the effects of the gas, he was judged to be unfit for active service. After a year at Felixstowe, and frustrated at the nature of garrison life, Williamson attempted to get back to front-line action in September 1918 with an application to be transferred to the Royal Air Force, but this was rejected due to his medical classification. He then applied for a transfer to the Indian Army, which was granted, but the war was ending and the order was cancelled. He spent a year afterwards on administrative duties demobilising soldiers from military camps on the south east coast of England, and was himself discharged from the army on 19 September 1919.
Williamson became disgusted with what he considered to be the pointlessness of the war, blaming its causation on greed and bigotry. He became determined that Germany and Britain should never go to war again. Williamson was also powerfully influenced by the camaraderie that he had experienced in the trenches, and what he saw as the bonds of kinship that existed between the ordinary British and German soldiers.
Early writing
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 and this inspired him to begin writing seriously. In 1921, he moved to Georgeham, Devon, initially living in Skirr Cottage there. He married Ida Loetitia Hibbert in 1925; they had six children. One daughter, Margaret, was the first wife of the guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream.
In 1927, Williamson published his most acclaimed book, Tarka the Otter; it won him the Hawthornden Prize in 1928, and made him enough money to pay for the wooden hut near Georgeham, where he wrote many of his later books, often sitting alone there for 15 hours a day. The wooden writing hut was granted Grade II listed status by English Heritage in July 2014 because of its "historical interest"."Tarka the Otter writer's hut granted Grade II status", BBC News, 29 July 2014. Tarka also sparked a friendship with T. E. Lawrence who had similar views about the need for a lasting peace settlement in Europe.Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right, pp. 134–137. Williamson was in the process of attempting to set up a meeting between Lawrence and Adolf Hitler when Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident. Lawrence died in May 1935 shortly after receiving a telegram from Williamson, which has sparked some conspiracy theories. Williamson had developed a profound admiration for Hitler, whom he called "the only true pacificist in Europe", and believed that the key for peace in Europe was giving leadership to the veterans of the Great War. In a letter to the editor of Time and Tide in May 1936, Williamson called Hitler "a very wise and steadfast and truth-perceiving father of his people; a man like T.E. Lawrence, without personal ambitions, a vegetarian, non-smoker, non-drinker, without even a bank-balance". Williamson claimed on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 that Hitler was "actually in tears as he waited in the room", much like Lawrence "when he had to shoot an Arab murderer with his own hands".
He developed the idea that "politicians" and "pettifogging lawyers" were standing in the way of peace, and all that was needed to prevent another world war was to arrange meetings between British and German veterans, who presumably would be able to settle all of the great questions of the day. Williamson wrote: "The German ex-Service man respected the English ex-Service man. The English ex-Service man respected the German ex-Service man, and the German ex-Service men were in power in Germany". He devised the idea of a rally at the Royal Albert Hall in London to be attended by veterans from Britain, France and Germany, where Lawrence would have been the keynote speaker. He rather naively believed that such a rally would create an unstoppable movement for peace in Europe. Williamson had been very influenced by the Christmas truce of 1914, which led him to the idea that the British and German veterans had common values along with the elitist idea that the veterans constituted the natural ruling class of Europe. Like many other veterans, Williamson believed in the "aristocracy of the trenches", believing that the men who fought in the war were an elite, men who were tougher, braver, and hardier than anyone else along with being more honourable and noble. As the leadership of the National Socialist German Worker's Party was almost entirely made up of veterans, he was strongly attracted to Nazism as an example of veterans in power.
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 there.
Politics
In 1935, Williamson visited the National Socialist German Workers Party Congress at Nuremberg and was greatly impressed, particularly with the Hitler Youth movement, which he viewed as having a healthy outlook on life compared with 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."The Norfolk Farm at The Henry Williamson Society Opposed to war and believing that wars were caused by Jewish "usurial moneyed interests",Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, Macmillan, 1981, p. 350. he was attracted to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and joined it in 1937.
Williamson's agricultural and ruralist views were also closely connected with his fascist politics. He became involved in the emerging organic movement largely for political reasons and saw farming as a means of regenerating English society.
Mosley became Hereward Birkin in Williamson's A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (possibly a reference to Hereward the Wake and Freda May Birkin). During the Danzig crisis, Williamson believed if he could end the crisis peacefully by meeting Hitler as he wrote in August 1939: "If I could see him, as a common soldier who had fraternised, on that faraway Christmas Day of 1914, with the men of his Linz battalion under Messines Hill, might I not be able to give him the amity he so desired from England, a country he admired?" Williamson misapprehended, as in fact Hitler was against the Christmas truce at the time and did not take part in it himself.Thomas Vinciguerra (25 December 2005). "The Truce of Christmas, 1914" , The New York Times.
On the day of the British declaration of war in 1939, Williamson suggested to friends that he might fly to Germany to speak with Hitler to persuade him away from war. Following a meeting with Mosley later that day, however, he was dissuaded from his plan.Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 442. In June 1940, Williamson was briefly held under Defence Regulation 18B as a member of the British Union of Fascists.Bolton, K., Henry Williamson at OswaldMosley.com. Williamson was very unpopular during the war for his pro-Nazi views, which made him into an outcast. Visiting London in January 1944, he observed with satisfaction that what he perceived as 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".
Williamson initially retained a close relationship with Mosley in the immediate aftermath of the war, but when he brought Mosley as his guest to the Savage Club, the former BUF leader was asked to leave. Williamson refused Mosley's invitation that he join the newly established Union Movement and indeed, his suggestion to Mosley that Mosley should instead join him in abandoning politics altogether led to the two men falling out.Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, p. 158. Nonetheless, Williamson would write for the Mosleys' theoretical journal The European.Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 493. He also continued to express admiration after the war for aspects of Nazi Germany.Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right, p. 372.
Post-war life and writing
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 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 to 1969 Williamson produced almost one novel a year while contributing regularly to the Sunday Express and The European magazine, edited by Diana Mosley. He also contributed a number of reviews and articles to The Sunday Times.