Beatrix Potter: At Home in the Lake District

Name: Beatrix Potter: At Home in the Lake District
Author: Susan Denyer
ISBN: 0711214344

by Susan Denyer

I realized that we needed a book that concentrated a bit more on the on the later part of her life. There’s quite a lot of detailed work available about her farming interests and the sheep and everything, which I didn’t think was suitable for our purposes, and Linda Lear’s book covers this very well. But a positive about Susan Denyer’s book is that Denyer herself worked for the National Trust for a long time and is very knowledgeable about the topography and culture of the Lake District as well as its agriculture. There’s an element of all those in this book. But, basically, it’s also an introduction to the Lake District on a more superficial level, and to Beatrix Potter’s involvement there, and it is beautifully illustrated, with some stunning photography. For many years the Potters went to Scotland for their summer holidays. But in 1882 the house they took in Perthshire, Dalguise, was no longer available. Beatrix was 16 and they rented Wray Castle, a house in the Lake District. That was the family’s first Lake District holiday, which they all enjoyed, and thereafter they tended to spend their holidays there, either around Derwentwater or Windermere. “She felt herself to be a northerner—something she probably embroidered a little bit” I think there are two reasons for Beatrix Potter’s interest in the area. One is the fact that she spent happy holidays there and thought the landscape was very beautiful. But also, although she was born in London, she hated it and it made her ill. Her family had originally come from the north and, as she grew older, she put more emphasis on her northern roots. They became more and more important to her. Perhaps they also helped her to explain why she never really settled in London or in London society. She felt herself to be a northerner—something she probably embroidered a little bit. After she had been living in the Lake District for 20 years and had already bought quite a lot of land and farms, a particular estate, called Monk Coniston, came up for sale, and included a small farm that had once belonged to her great-grandfather on her father’s mother’s side, Abraham Crompton. He had been a wealthy merchant in Lancashire and had bought Holme Ground as a holiday house several generations previously. It was no longer in the family and Potter liked the idea of buying it back. Denyer’s book describes Potter’s holidays, her growing love for the area, her first purchases, including Hill Top Farm, and her other farms in the Windermere area. Also her interest in farming practices—in sheep, in learning to understand the cycle of the farming year and the different ways of dealing with the land. All that became a great passion for her and she sought advice from local people and built up a reputation as a respected breeder of sheep. It’s a fascinating end to a life that started so differently. She almost reinvented herself, really, as a respected farmer and sheep breeder and there’s a strong element of conservation and stewardship there, as well, which Linda Lear’s biography discusses clearly. Potter was introduced to the National Trust right at its very inception because her father was one of its first members. As a family, they knew Hardwicke Rawnsley, who was one of the three founders of the National Trust. They met him in the Lake District in 1882 and he was a great influence on Potter, teaching her a lot about Lake District traditions and history, and how to read the landscape and to appreciate its local character. So that was ingrained in her from a very young age. As she got older and became a landowner herself, she became aware of the threat to the Lake District from development, from holiday chalets and houses in particular, and from the expansion of the railway and roads. She also saw a threat from the Forestry Commission, who would plant up great swathes of hillside with conifers. So, there was a double threat; the development threat tended to be in the valleys and on the low-lying land around the railways and the roads, and the forestry threat was more widespread on the hills. “She ended up owning more than 4,000 acres, with something like 15 different farms.” So a strong motivation for buying land in the beginning was to protect it from development. There’s one particular estate she bought, Troutbeck Park, which is in a beautiful valley with the fells going up around it and behind it. There was prime development land in the bottom of the valley because it was easily accessible from both Windermere and Ambleside and from the railway, which already came to Windermere. She was desperate to stop the valley being built over and developed, so she bought it, which she was lucky enough to be able to do. There’s an interesting contradiction here, and I’m not sure that it’s been fully researched yet, which is that Potter understood that the Lake District needed visitors and tourists and so on, and she understood that the National Trust had a role to play in that as well, but she also understood that you couldn’t just have development willy-nilly. I suspect she was a bit ‘not-in-my-backyard’ to a certain extent, but she didn’t actually stop people going onto her land. She complained about coach tours and people who didn’t understand about shutting gates and so on, but she wasn’t against them completely. I suppose it’s the same contradiction that continues today between landowners and farmers and members of the public. The Lake District is very accessible, particularly from Liverpool and Manchester, and there was a great move, which was partly tied up with the National Trust, to make green spaces available for the factory workers, who needed somewhere they could go for a day trip or for a holiday, and to encourage them go there. But, although Potter started out wanting to preserve the Lake District, she actually found the whole business of farming and landowning and so on interesting. And, as with everything else she had done in her life in its various stages, she wanted to know about it—to learn about it, and to be productive and useful and good at it. So, she taught herself as much as she could about breeding sheep (Herdwicks in particular) or cattle and grazing, and she was fairly modern in some ways, getting rid of diseases and so on and following new agricultural practices. (She allowed electricity in farm buildings, though not in her own house!) She was also very astute at picking the best people to come and work for her and she had no qualms about poaching the good shepherd from a neighbouring farm if he was the person to improve her sheep flock. And, if she could pay him a slightly better wage and offer him a slightly nicer house and perhaps offer his wife some work, then all was fair in love and war, as it were. Her Lake District bequest to the National Trust is mostly preserved as she wanted, in that her farms are still farmed, with a stock of Herdwick sheep where appropriate, and Hill Top house is still a place to visit exactly as it was when she left it. However, there have been some changes and one or two of the farms have had to be merged lately. Every time this happens there is a row between those who think that her will should be observed exactly and those who think that the National Trust must be free to make changes, given the current economic and farming climates. I would say that her legacy is doing pretty well and that, were she to come back now, she would recognize most of it. But there have had to be changes because the National Trust has to make money and be solvent, like the rest of us. So I’m not in the camp that thinks it’s wrong for them to make any changes at all, and I think the public has to trust them to make changes as near as possible to those that Potter would have understood herself. If I have any quibble with the National Trust and what it does with her legacy, I would say it’s more to do with—commercialisation is the wrong word—a bit of dumbing down and a tendency to market her as a bit twee, which she wasn’t at all. That was one thing she wasn’t. But, on the whole, I would say they’ve done a pretty good job in very difficult circumstances. None—that role falls either to her publishers, Frederick Warne, or to the National Trust. The Beatrix Potter Society is a registered charity and an appreciation society, a literary society. It was founded by people who were already involved in her legacy, working with the Potter collections left to the V&A. Increasingly, people would ask whether there was a Beatrix Potter Society and so, eventually, one was founded in 1980. The Society holds conferences and meetings, but it is also a forum for sharing information about Beatrix Potter, researching into her life and work and publishing its findings. It also produces a Journal and Newsletter three times a year and has an e-newsletter, a website and active social media platforms. Times are tricky now because people can find information about Beatrix Potter on the internet without having to join the Society. So it has fewer members, which means less income and it is short of volunteers. Those who used to have time to volunteer are few and far between now and it is difficult to find people prepared to do this in quite the same way as before. And, of course, a number of the older, long-standing members are not particularly keen on the internet and some of them don’t even have access to it. The move for a lot of similar societies—and in life in general—is online. But if you’re in your 80s or 90s online is not necessarily an option that is open to you. So there’s a permanent tension between going online to save money and reduce costs and to reach a new audience, and worrying about depriving some members of access to material by doing that. So far the balancing act is working and, thanks to its hardworking Committee, the Society has done well to reach its fortieth year, despite pandemic restrictions. It has members all over the world, from the UK and America to Japan and Australia, and it’s a great source of joy and interest to a lot of people, as well as a valuable resource for anyone interested in Beatrix Potter.

Recommended by

Libby Joy

"I realized that we needed a book that concentrated a bit more on the on the later part of her life. There’s quite a lot of detailed work available about her farming interests and the sheep and everything, which I didn’t think was suitable for our purposes, and Linda Lear’s book covers this very well. But a positive about Susan Denyer’s book is that Denyer herself worked for the National Trust for a long time and is very knowledgeable about the topography and culture of the Lake District as well as its agriculture. There’s an element of all those in this book. But, basically, it’s also an introduction to the Lake District on a more superficial level, and to Beatrix Potter’s involvement there, and it is beautifully illustrated, with some stunning photography. For many years the Potters went to Scotland for their summer holidays. But in 1882 the house they took in Perthshire, Dalguise, was no longer available. Beatrix was 16 and they rented Wray Castle, a house in the Lake District. That was the family’s first Lake District holiday, which they all enjoyed, and thereafter they tended to spend their holidays there, either around Derwentwater or Windermere. “She felt herself to be a northerner—something she probably embroidered a little bit” I think there are two reasons for Beatrix Potter’s interest in the area. One is the fact that she spent happy holidays there and thought the landscape was very beautiful. But also, although she was born in London, she hated it and it made her ill. Her family had originally come from the north and, as she grew older, she put more emphasis on her northern roots. They became more and more important to her. Perhaps they also helped her to explain why she never really settled in London or in London society. She felt herself to be a northerner—something she probably embroidered a little bit. After she had been living in the Lake District for 20 years and had already bought quite a lot of land and farms, a particular estate, called Monk Coniston, came up for sale, and included a small farm that had once belonged to her great-grandfather on her father’s mother’s side, Abraham Crompton. He had been a wealthy merchant in Lancashire and had bought Holme Ground as a holiday house several generations previously. It was no longer in the family and Potter liked the idea of buying it back. Denyer’s book describes Potter’s holidays, her growing love for the area, her first purchases, including Hill Top Farm, and her other farms in the Windermere area. Also her interest in farming practices—in sheep, in learning to understand the cycle of the farming year and the different ways of dealing with the land. All that became a great passion for her and she sought advice from local people and built up a reputation as a respected breeder of sheep. It’s a fascinating end to a life that started so differently. She almost reinvented herself, really, as a respected farmer and sheep breeder and there’s a strong element of conservation and stewardship there, as well, which Linda Lear’s biography discusses clearly. Potter was introduced to the National Trust right at its very inception because her father was one of its first members. As a family, they knew Hardwicke Rawnsley, who was one of the three founders of the National Trust. They met him in the Lake District in 1882 and he was a great influence on Potter, teaching her a lot about Lake District traditions and history, and how to read the landscape and to appreciate its local character. So that was ingrained in her from a very young age. As she got older and became a landowner herself, she became aware of the threat to the Lake District from development, from holiday chalets and houses in particular, and from the expansion of the railway and roads. She also saw a threat from the Forestry Commission, who would plant up great swathes of hillside with conifers. So, there was a double threat; the development threat tended to be in the valleys and on the low-lying land around the railways and the roads, and the forestry threat was more widespread on the hills. “She ended up owning more than 4,000 acres, with something like 15 different farms.” So a strong motivation for buying land in the beginning was to protect it from development. There’s one particular estate she bought, Troutbeck Park, which is in a beautiful valley with the fells going up around it and behind it. There was prime development land in the bottom of the valley because it was easily accessible from both Windermere and Ambleside and from the railway, which already came to Windermere. She was desperate to stop the valley being built over and developed, so she bought it, which she was lucky enough to be able to do. There’s an interesting contradiction here, and I’m not sure that it’s been fully researched yet, which is that Potter understood that the Lake District needed visitors and tourists and so on, and she understood that the National Trust had a role to play in that as well, but she also understood that you couldn’t just have development willy-nilly. I suspect she was a bit ‘not-in-my-backyard’ to a certain extent, but she didn’t actually stop people going onto her land. She complained about coach tours and people who didn’t understand about shutting gates and so on, but she wasn’t against them completely. I suppose it’s the same contradiction that continues today between landowners and farmers and members of the public. The Lake District is very accessible, particularly from Liverpool and Manchester, and there was a great move, which was partly tied up with the National Trust, to make green spaces available for the factory workers, who needed somewhere they could go for a day trip or for a holiday, and to encourage them go there. But, although Potter started out wanting to preserve the Lake District, she actually found the whole business of farming and landowning and so on interesting. And, as with everything else she had done in her life in its various stages, she wanted to know about it—to learn about it, and to be productive and useful and good at it. So, she taught herself as much as she could about breeding sheep (Herdwicks in particular) or cattle and grazing, and she was fairly modern in some ways, getting rid of diseases and so on and following new agricultural practices. (She allowed electricity in farm buildings, though not in her own house!) She was also very astute at picking the best people to come and work for her and she had no qualms about poaching the good shepherd from a neighbouring farm if he was the person to improve her sheep flock. And, if she could pay him a slightly better wage and offer him a slightly nicer house and perhaps offer his wife some work, then all was fair in love and war, as it were. Her Lake District bequest to the National Trust is mostly preserved as she wanted, in that her farms are still farmed, with a stock of Herdwick sheep where appropriate, and Hill Top house is still a place to visit exactly as it was when she left it. However, there have been some changes and one or two of the farms have had to be merged lately. Every time this happens there is a row between those who think that her will should be observed exactly and those who think that the National Trust must be free to make changes, given the current economic and farming climates. I would say that her legacy is doing pretty well and that, were she to come back now, she would recognize most of it. But there have had to be changes because the National Trust has to make money and be solvent, like the rest of us. So I’m not in the camp that thinks it’s wrong for them to make any changes at all, and I think the public has to trust them to make changes as near as possible to those that Potter would have understood herself. If I have any quibble with the National Trust and what it does with her legacy, I would say it’s more to do with—commercialisation is the wrong word—a bit of dumbing down and a tendency to market her as a bit twee, which she wasn’t at all. That was one thing she wasn’t. But, on the whole, I would say they’ve done a pretty good job in very difficult circumstances. None—that role falls either to her publishers, Frederick Warne, or to the National Trust. The Beatrix Potter Society is a registered charity and an appreciation society, a literary society. It was founded by people who were already involved in her legacy, working with the Potter collections left to the V&A. Increasingly, people would ask whether there was a Beatrix Potter Society and so, eventually, one was founded in 1980. The Society holds conferences and meetings, but it is also a forum for sharing information about Beatrix Potter, researching into her life and work and publishing its findings. It also produces a Journal and Newsletter three times a year and has an e-newsletter, a website and active social media platforms. Times are tricky now because people can find information about Beatrix Potter on the internet without having to join the Society. So it has fewer members, which means less income and it is short of volunteers. Those who used to have time to volunteer are few and far between now and it is difficult to find people prepared to do this in quite the same way as before. And, of course, a number of the older, long-standing members are not particularly keen on the internet and some of them don’t even have access to it. The move for a lot of similar societies—and in life in general—is online. But if you’re in your 80s or 90s online is not necessarily an option that is open to you. So there’s a permanent tension between going online to save money and reduce costs and to reach a new audience, and worrying about depriving some members of access to material by doing that. So far the balancing act is working and, thanks to its hardworking Committee, the Society has done well to reach its fortieth year, despite pandemic restrictions. It has members all over the world, from the UK and America to Japan and Australia, and it’s a great source of joy and interest to a lot of people, as well as a valuable resource for anyone interested in Beatrix Potter."

Beatrix Potter · fivebooks.com