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RICHARD CALVERT WILLIAMSON

 

AN ILLUSTRATED PROFILE OF THE SOCIETY'S LATE PRESIDENT

 

 

 

 

Richard Calvert Williamson was president of the Henry Williamson Society from its inauguration in 1980 to his death on 21 May 2022 after a long illness bravely borne. He always took an active part in Society affairs and meetings, giving talks and writing the occasional article – and loved meeting members at the various rendezvous. Indeed, he is held by them in almost as much affection and esteem as his father.

 

 

Richard and Anne Williamson, Robert Williamson and Tony Evans – not forgetting Tony's border collie Maggie (Henry Williamson Society Autumn Meeting, Shallowford, 2007)

 

 

Richard at Shallowford, holding a copy of The Children of Shallowford (Henry Williamson Society Autumn Meeting, 2015)

 

 

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Richard was born in Barnstaple, North Devon on 1 August 1935, the fifth child of Henry and his wife Loetitia. The family were then living at Shallowford, on the Fortescue Estate at Filleigh, situated on the edge of Exmoor. In The Children of Shallowford (1939) Richard features as the baby missing after a thunderstorm, who is found in the Deer Park sitting next to a fallen tree struck by lightning, playing with the daffodils.

 

The year following Richard’s birth HW bought Old Hall Farm in Stiffkey in North Norfolk (see The Story of a Norfolk Farm), so Richard spent his youngest years, the duration of the Second World War, on the north Norfolk coast. That his interest in nature was already present is shown by various anecdotes related by his father in newspaper articles written at the time and in the later volumes of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, where he is Phillip Maddison’s son Jonny. Richard imbibed the natural life of the farm and the coastal marshes, encouraged by his father and also by the ornithologist Richard Richardson, whom he first met when aged eight.

 

 

Richard with his brother Robert outside the Old Hall, Stiffkey

On the marshes at Stiffkey, the children identified by HW

 

 

Richard’s first schooling was in the village school at Stiffkey, and for a short while at Botesdale, where the family moved at the end of the war, with the subsequent divorce of his parents. In 1950 mother and family moved to a small cottage on the outskirts of Bungay on the River Waveney. Richard revelled in being able to roam the marshes and explore the river in a canvas canoe. His main education was at St Michael’s College (a Worcestershire choir school), and then Blundell’s School, Tiverton, Devon.

 

 

 

 

However, Richard was not a scholar, his interest from earliest years being that of a lone wanderer watching birds and observing natural history. He wrote the story of his quite idyllic time at Blundell’s in his first book The Dawn is My Brother (1959). This includes the cameo of his rescue and taming of a fox cub.

 

 

At the Field, Ox's Cross

 

 

After leaving school Richard joined the RAF and served for five years in radar stations in England, Iraq, Jordan and Cyprus during the extremely dangerous Suez crisis (being awarded the General Service Medal), so gaining valuable experience in life’s rich and wide panorama.

 

 

First posting abroad . . .		and, somewhere in Jordan, receiving his home draft

 

 

On leaving the RAF he worked in Forestry and on National Trust Nature Reserves in north Norfolk and Suffolk to gain experience to fit him for a career in what was then the Nature Conservancy (later English Nature, now Natural England).

 

His father encouraged Richard to write, and so while still in the RAF he began his first book, The Dawn is My Brother (Faber & Faber, 1959); it was reprinted as an e-book, newly illustrated with 29 photographs from the author’s own collection, by the Henry Williamson Society in 2015. The book was runner-up for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1959, and was considered an antidote to the then popular vogue of ‘kitchen-sink’ genre. It is a charmingly innocent story of his young life.

 

 

Faber & Faber, 1959		New illustrated e-book edition, HWS, 2015

 

 

At this time, after a hard day’s work cutting down or planting hundreds of trees, and cycling several miles to and from work, Richard also wrote a daily ‘wild-life correspondent’ article during 1957‒59 for the Daily Mail. He contributed to many other national newspapers and magazines over the years.

 

In September 1963 his perseverance in following his intention to join the Nature Conservancy paid off and he became warden of the Kingley Vale National Nature Reserve near Chichester, Sussex, famous for its ancient grove of yew trees; he remained in this post until his retirement in 1995, where he carried out continuous long-term weekly monitoring of breeding birds, butterflies and plants, particularly wild orchid colonies (and continued to do so, even though retired, until 2018). During his years as warden he hosted many hundreds of school parties, many from inner-city London, and inspired them with his enthusiasm and knowledge of every aspect of natural history.

 

He wrote two books based on his experiences at Kingley Vale:

 

Capreol: The Story of a Roebuck (Macdonald, 1973; reprinted as e-book by the Henry Williamson Society, 2015): a novel about the life and adventures of a roebuck, situated on the South Downs and the nature reserve where he worked – akin in spirit to his father’s Tarka the Otter, and ending inevitably in the death of Capreol.

 

The Great Yew Forest (Macmillan, 1978): the story of his work in Kingley Vale National Nature Reserve (at the time it was on best-seller lists for the top twenty books of the month). This book includes records of the monitoring of plants, birds and butterflies. As more than 40 years has now passed since it first appeared, Richard is in the process of rewriting and updating all the information and including many new stories of natural adventures.

 

 

Macdonald, 1973 New e-book edition, HWS, 2015		Macmillan, 1978

 

 

Richard also carried out weekly breeding bird monitoring annually in the woods where he lives, and was one of the volunteers for the wildfowl counts in Chichester Harbour over the same period. He was instrumental too in gaining special status for Chichester Harbour by preparing the first report on its natural history value in the late 1960s.

 

In March 1964 Richard married Anne Brighton (who has managed the Henry Williamson Literary Estate since the author’s death; is author of two biographical books on Henry Williamson, many articles and the text for ‘A Life’s Work’ on this website; and for several years was editor of the Society’s Journal). They have a son, Brent (b. 1965, ballet dancer, lives in Portugal, and has 2 children), and a daughter, Bryony (b. 1966, drama and English teacher, has 1 son).

 

Richard and Anne lived in an isolated old gamekeeper’s cottage in the middle of a coppice wood on the estate of the late Edward James (an eccentric millionaire patron of surrealist art, with whom they were friends), in an area which is a nature reserve under the aegis of Sussex Wildlife Trust. The wood includes an extensive wild daffodil colony. Richard also carried out wild-life monitoring on this reserve and was chairman of its committee.

 

From 1964 to very shortly before his death he wrote the weekly wildlife column ‘Nature Trails’ for the Chichester Observer (and sister titles), together with other features, including for some time a ‘Local Character’ article highlighting many important people past and present in the area; an ‘Old Car’ feature in an associated magazine; and ‘Williamson’s Weekly’ in the West Sussex Gazette. His weekly ‘Williamson’s Walk’ feature was always popular. Richard was a well-known and popular local character whose work was thoroughly enjoyed by southern readers. Three books reflect this part of his life:

 

Nature Trails (Yew Tree Publishing, 1995): a compilation of a small selection of his weekly newspaper articles, illustrated by local artist John Davis.

 

 

 

 

52 Favourite West Sussex Walks (Summersdale, 2012): drawn from his weekly walking column with a wealth of natural history detail and illustrated with his own quirkily decorated hand-drawn maps.

 

The Birdwatcher’s Year (Summersdale, 2013): a handbook full of facts, tips, and folk-lore for each month of the year.

 

 

 

 

After his retirement from the Civil Service Richard had more time to concentrate on writing and completed several books (to date unpublished), including the story of his service in Cyprus – Posted to Cyprus – at the time of the Suez Crisis. His story relates the rather extraordinary facts of the national situation surrounding the flare-up through a humorous and rueful view of a group of young airmen, including himself, aged just 21 and lovesick for the girl who jilted him the day before he embarked.

 

Also finished, and now published by the Society, is another story of a grand – and even dangerous – adventure in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan in 1972 where (on special leave) he was sent by the BBC to garner information and write a synopsis for a proposed film on that magnificent creature, the snow leopard. Caught high in the Pamir mountains in the huge snowfall of early winter, he was lucky to get out alive. An internal coup the next year followed by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan meant that the proposed film was never made. A Shadow in the Clouds was published in May 2023 (paperback, 273pp, £6.50), and is available through the Society's Online Bookshop.

 

 

In search of the snow leopard – Afghanistan, 1972 The author mounted on his yak in the Sargass Pass

 

 

 

 

 

With Love from Russia, also as yet unpublished, is the story of a brent goose that becomes the go-between for an unhappy and rather frightened Russian girl living and working on the isolated northern island of Kolguev and an unhappily married pilot living on the South Coast near Chichester. The girl takes a brent goose egg and hatches it out. When the time comes for it to migrate to England she fixes a message to its leg in a vain hope that someone will see and understand. In Chichester Harbour the bird gets injured and rescued by a friend of the pilot, who does understand the message and so arranges to visit the island. He finds the girl, who by then is in the middle of a dangerous situation. After a seemingly unsolvable crisis, the story has a happy ending.

 

In the months before his death Richard started to write poetry and amassed a rather splendid collection of poems, published in February 2022, called Flights of the Mind (Yew Tree Publishing, paperback, 72 pages, illustrated by John Davis, £3.00). The 68 poems contained in the book form an anthology of his musings about nature – dormouse, butterfly, clouds – but chiefly about birds: their lives, habits, and myths.

 

 

 

 

Apart from natural history and writing, his main interests – indeed, passions – were classical music (particularly Beethoven), vintage cars, trains and planes, all things antique and historical – and literature, and he had a large and varied library reflecting these, all housed in an amazingly full and untidy ‘study’, as well as three Alvis TA14 classic cars (coupe, station wagon, and saloon) and an old BSA motorcycle, housed in equally full and untidy sheds. Richard liked to multi-task!

 

 

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One of the poems from Flights of the Mind:

 

 

REDWINGS

 

What made those whispers,

Those shadows of sound,

As a young moon floated

Through mountains of cloud?

 

At last I could see them,

Like motes in the eye,

Or Mallory on Everest

Climbing too high.

 

The song was of redwings

From forests far north

Singing of summer

And the soughing of trees.

 

Yet suddenly, snow,

And the crossing of seas,

Dropping to shore-drift

Exhausted on tide-line,

 

Huddled on pebbles

Almost dying of cold.

Journeying onward

As of time old.

 

 

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Anne presenting Richard with the Clarke Memorial Award for services to the Henry Williamson Society, Autumn 2019

 

 

 

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