By chance, in 1979, when I was wandering round Lakeland for a walking book, I met an old man in the fields beside Hill Top farm standing by a nasty-smelling bonfire. On it he was burning wellington boots.
He said his name was Tom Storey, 82, and it turned out that for 18 years he had been Beatrix Potter’s shepherd and farm bailiff.
He still seemed surprised by the success of her books. “You can read them all in 20 minutes,” he said, turning over the ashes of the wellies. “Yet she made all that money from them. I can’t understand it.”
Beatrix Potter is a phenomenon. No children’s writer has ever got near her in sales and recognition. Apart from her books, which since 1901 have sold about 300m, there’s the merchandising. Some 450 different licensees around the globe have the rights to manufacture Beatrix Potter items, from plates and mugs to blankets and sweets, which annually produce an income of £255m. Will her namesake, Harry Potter, be raking in such sums in 100 years’ time? Unlikely.
BP is now a brand — which will grow even stronger with the release this week of the film Miss Potter starring Renée Zellweger, the publication of a heavyweight new biography by an American academic and the return of the Royal Ballet’s production of Frederick Ashton’s The Tales of Beatrix Potter.
We could be well and truly Pottered. And yet she is such a puzzle. For the last 30 years of her life she hardly did any writing, devoting herself to what had become her big passion — Herdwick sheep. Funny how they don’t feature in the new film. Not very sexy, scraggy old Herdwicks.
She never had children. And there have been one or two elderly women who have alleged she didn’t like them much, as they had been chased away as village children when they bothered her; but of course the stalwarts of the Beatrix Potter Society will have none of that, pointing to all the children she did love.
There have been more than 30 books written about her, big and small, and endless investigations and research by fans and academics; and yet her life was, well, pretty uneventful, not to say boring, apart from one dramatic event, which of course the film is built around.
She hated publicity, shunned interviews and public appearances, so I’m sure she would not be at all keen on this new film as it concentrates on a personal relationship. Yet thanks to the film, the whole world will begin to think they know all about her.
In fact we don’t even know what she sounded like. She died in 1943, late enough to have been recorded — we have recordings of other writers going back to the 19th century — and perhaps even to have appeared on film. In the 1930s many people made home movies.
It’s known she appeared at many Lakeland shows, judging Herdwicks, giving out prizes. I did a book about her a few years ago and while researching I bought four letters she wrote to officials at our local show in Loweswater. I became convinced that at Loweswater, or at other shows, someone in the crowd might well have filmed her. I put letters in all the local newspapers, but so far nobody has come forward.
Frederick Warne, her publisher, has been through the BBC sound archives in case someone captured her, but without success.
HER voice, presumably, was posh: she grew up in Bolton Gardens, Kensington, where she was born in 1866. Both parents came from wealthy Lancashire families but were now part of London’s “new” middle class, cultivated and wealthy, who looked down on people in trade.
Her father Rupert was a barrister who led a leisurely life, going to his club or galleries, meeting his artist friends. He developed a passion for the new hobby of photography, at which he was very good. He took a photograph of Gladstone that was used by his friend Millais, the artist, when painting Gladstone’s portrait.
In the new and well-researched biography Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, Professor Linda Lear has dug out one example of Rupert actually appearing in a case. She tries to suggest, therefore, that he did a lot more barristering than anyone had ever previously thought, but I still believe the traditional view is correct: Rupert was a dilettante barrister.
He did encourage Beatrix’s early attempts at drawing, not just of animals but her immensely detailed and exact fungi paintings, but it was presumed her life would be as the wife of someone suitable, with no career of her own. She was educated by governesses and seemed doomed to sit around year after year, waiting, growing fed-up and frustrated.
At 15 she started to write a secret diary, in code, which she kept up till she was 30. The code was not cracked and the secret journal published until 70 years later, when Leslie Linder did a brilliant bit of detection work. It’s a fascinating document about the daily life of a well-brought-up Victorian girl, but without any real revelations.
My theory about why she went to the trouble of writing it in code is simple: she had no secrets. She had nobody to talk to about herself, except her pet animals, but she didn’t want the banality of her daily life seen by anyone, particularly her mother, whom she never really got on with.
It was through the friendship of a hearty, muscular cleric called Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, whom she and her family met while on their long summer holidays in Lakeland, that she first thought of publishing a little picture book for children.
Rawnsley, alas, doesn’t appear in the film, yet he was such an influential figure. In 1895 he was one of the founders of the National Trust as well as active in many other campaigns and causes, a true visionary and early environmentalist whose own biography is long overdue. His many passions ranged from commemorative bonfires, which he was all for, to saucy seaside postcards, which he was all against.
He’d written many books and suggested to Beatrix that he could use his contacts to fix her up with a publisher to bring out a little book she had written about a rabbit. At least five publishers turned it down, including Frederick Warne & Co. So much for Rawnsley’s contacts.
Instead, she published it herself. In the film there’s a sense that her family was against her books and writings, but without her family money she could never have published that first version of Peter Rabbit.
It came out, with black and white illustrations, at Christmas time 1901. She printed 250 copies, half of which were given to friends and relatives as Christmas presents.
Warne then changed its mind and in 1902 decided to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit, this time in colour, and printed an initial 8,000 copies. Within a year 28,000 copies had been sold. It became a huge success, as so did all her later tales.
In the film she appears surprised by her success, as if innocent and unaware of such things as royalties, but from the beginning she was pushing her own product. She well knew the value of her creations. As early as 1903 she was registering a Peter Rabbit doll at the Patent Office and had hawked it round the big shops such as Harrods. She created Peter Rabbit wallpaper, which was taken by Sanderson.
We tend to think these days that the merchandising of animals began with Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, but little Miss Potter was well ahead of the game.
She fell in love with Norman Warne, her publisher, but ever so slowly. They were never alone with each other, always with a chaperone. Her parents were dead against the relationship, but eventually they agreed to an engagement, as long as it was not made public.
In real life Norman Warne proposed by letter. In the film it takes place, most touchingly, in her bedroom when she and Norman (played by Ewan McGregor) dance to a music box.
The film, on the whole, takes no serious liberties and is true to the story and her character, as we think we know it. Norman died suddenly not long after they were engaged, though she was in Wales at the time, not in Lakeland.
The success of her books enabled her to buy her own holiday home in Lakeland, Hill Top, soon followed by other Lakeland properties, which she insisted on farming in the traditional ways.
She never actually lived in Hill Top full time, though this is now the main centre for BP pilgrims and is beautifully preserved. She moved into nearby Castle Cottage, keeping Hill Top more as a studio cum museum filled with period furniture.
It’s when you go upstairs at Hill Top farm today, passing through the bedrooms full of her stuff, her cups for her prizewinning Herdwicks, the longcase clock she drew in The Tailor of Gloucester, that you come perhaps to the biggest attraction for all Potter lovers — the originals of her books. This is in a special gallery in which all her watercolours are on display. It’s a lovely sight.
In 1913 she married William Heelis, a solicitor who had handled most of her farm purchases. He was five years younger, solid and reliable, with rather big ears. In the film he is made older than Beatrix, to accommodate a childhood meeting, which never happened. From all the evidence, they appeared to have enjoyed a happy and fulfilling marriage.
Her writing career proper came to an end almost as soon as she got married, by which time the bulk of her 23 little books had been written. For the rest her life she devoted herself to her sheep, her farms and her husband, considering herself to be Beatrix Heelis, not Beatrix Potter.
IT could be argued that it was marital happiness that caused her to give up her writing and that her books had been a substitute, an alternative emotional outlet, just as her secret diary had been. But she had also run out of good ideas, judging by her later books, which became pretty thin. And then there was the farming.
The standard biography of Potter by Margaret Lane says her fellow farmers sought her opinion on Herdwicks at sheep fairs and that she was “one of the shrewdest farmers in the Lake Country”.
“Just a fallacy,” Tom Storey, the wellie-burning bailiff, told me. “What could she know about farming, coming out of London? She liked Herdwicks, right enough. She’d look at no other, but she could make mistakes when judging them. I could give you examples, but I don’t like to. It wouldn’t be fair after all these years. I’ll tell you just one.
“At Keswick show one year we’d won everything and she was taking someone round. ‘These are the ewes we won with, aren’t they Storey?’ They weren’t. They were Willy Rigg’s. Ours were in the next pen . . .
“She wasn’t a bad farmer, I’ll say that. We had our flaps. We differed over some things but I didn’t take much notice. I just got on with it. When you’ve gone through it all as a boy, you just carry on.
“I told her many a time that she’d be better off having some cattle instead of all Herdwicks. She was losing money by having just Herdwicks and I once got very worried. ‘Don’t you worry, Storey,’ she told me. ‘It’s only a hobby’.”
Despite her privileged London background, which in Storey’s eyes could never make her a farmer, he said she had a plain voice, not a Kensington one, and she loved to hear the real Westmorland dialect. He was obviously quite proud of her habit of dressing like an old farmhand, not displaying her wealth.
She died in December 1943, aged 77, spending her last nights sitting up in bed interviewing shepherds. She left Storey £400 and instructed that, though the farm was to go to the National Trust, he should take over the tenancy. This he did, farming Hill Top Farm till he retired and handing the tenancy over to his son. He’s eternally grateful for her kindness — though, being a true Lakelander, there was no sloppy sentimentality about his memories of her.
She might well have started out her acquisitions with a business eye but she quickly became enchanted by Lakeland, wanting her land and farms to be kept and preserved for the benefit of the nation as a whole. The 4,000 acres she left to the National Trust was the trust’s biggest and most influential gift, establishing it as a power in Lakeland and the whole country. Would she have left everything instead to her children, if she’d had any? Who knows. As for the copyright of her books and art, that went to Warnes.
On Christmas Day 1943, three days after her death, William Heelis walked into Tom Storey’s kitchen and handed him Beatrix’s ashes.
“He said, ‘Here’s the ashes, you’ll know what to do with them’,” Tom told me. “I’d promised her I’d scatter them. Nobody else was to know the place, not even her husband. We’d discussed it several times. I talked to her the night before she died.
“So I got up from my dinner and went off and scattered them in the place she’d chosen. I’ve never told anybody where the place is. She wasn’t daft. She knew folks would go and look at the place if they knew. I was sorry when she died. She was a good woman. I intend to tell my son the place before I die, so there will always be someone who knows.”
He did tell his son. But the son died suddenly not long ago, and it’s thought now that nobody knows where her ashes are. This will probably not stop pilgrims trying to work out the location, once the latest wave of Pottermania takes hold. BP is already the single biggest attraction in Lakeland, apart of course from the Lakes. There are now more than 16m visits each year by tourists to the Lake District and a great proportion of them flock to Hill Top and the various other Potter-related attractions.
OVER in Japan, there’ll doubtless be increased crowds coming to visit the recently opened Beatrix Potter museum. It’s at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo and was created by a Japanese professor who has been buying first editions, artwork and odd bits of Beatrix memorabilia for some years. He found he had enough money to house them in a proper museum; then it was decided to make it an exact repro of Hill Top farm. Which it is, except it’s twice as big as the real thing.
Today first editions of her books can cost thousands, especially if they are signed — even the later ones, when the first prints were enormous. A first edition of Peter Rabbit, the one privately printed, is of course the rarest. For that you would have to pay at least £50,000.
Sally Floyer, managing director of Frederick Warne for the past 20 years, is naturally thrilled by the film. Floyer had a “consultation role” — one of the reasons that the film makers were not allowed to take liberties. “Although her name is known worldwide, most people don’t actually know who she was,” Floyer said. “This film will make her human, that she was a real person with a real story.”
So why is she so well known, and still so successful? We associate her now with a certain sort of anthropomorphism, but this already existed from Aesop to The Owl and the Pussycat. In the late 19th century there were other successful children’s artists and writers producing similar books in a similar format. Walter Crane had animals dressed in clothes. Randolph Caldecott’s coloured illustrations in his children’s books were no less artistic and exquisite than Potter’ s.
Her stories were not even always all that original. She based The Tailor of Gloucester on an old tale she had been told. One of her most famous images, the squirrels paddling across Derwentwater in Squirrel Nutkin, using their tails as a sail, was almost identical to one that appeared in a children’s book by an American woman.
“I think, first, the secret of her success was entertainment,” said Floyer. “She did all her books purely to amuse and entertain children.”
It’s true that in Victorian times there was a heavy moral undertone to many children’s books. Or they could sometimes be satirical, as Caldecott often was, and therefore aimed partly at adults. Potter was concerned only with appealing directly to children. She had no added agenda. And she wasn’t frightened to frighten them with scary animals such as foxes, or to confuse them with long words, such as soporific.
Her books, on the whole, are not bought by children, which may sound paradoxical considering the millions sold each year. As a child, despite growing up in Cumbria, I was never aware of her books, but then I suspect she has never been as popular in working-class homes as she’s always been with the middle classes.
Thinking back to my own children, I can’t remember them ever requesting a Beatrix Potter for Christmas. But today, if we say “lily-white and clean, oh” they can all remember the words — and the tune. My wife, who happens to be tone deaf, made up her own tune when she was reading aloud to them from Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
“I think that really is the main reason why she has survived,” said Floyer. “Most of her books are read to children by their parents or grandparents. As we get older it’s not just the books themselves we recall but our grandmother reading them to us. The memories are always nice ones — and they stick. In turn, people read them to their own children.”
Penguin, which owns Warne and all the Beatrix Potter rights, bought the company in 1984 for a reported £6m. They’ve probably got their money back one hundredfold by now.
In 2013 it will be 70 years since BP died. In theory her stuff will then be out of copyright, so could anyone then have a go at producing her bestselling books and merchandise?
“Oh, don’t say that,” protested Floyer. “But we have taken precautions. Anyway, whatever happens they couldn’t match our quality. We do have all the originals.”
On the other hand, they have had a good run, making millions out of Miss Potter while keeping true to her spirit and charm, her words and illustrations, and all of course in the best possible taste.
Hunter Davies’s memoir, The Beatles, Football and Me, is published by Headline, £18.99
