Henry williamson fascism

Henry williamson novels
Henry williamson christmas truce
Henry williamson society

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Henry Williamson

English novelist and nature writer

For the Scottish zoologist, see Henry Charles Williamson. For the minister of the Free Church of Scotland, see Henry McIlree Williamson.

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

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HENRY WILLIAM WILLIAMSON was born on 1 December 1895 in S.E. London at 66 Braxfield Rd., Brockley. His father, William Leopold Williamson, was a bank clerk by profession, who married Gertrude Leaver in a secret ceremony in May 1893 at Greenwich Registry Office. To begin with the couple lived apart, until with Gertrude’s first pregnancy they had to admit they were man and wife, and they then moved into lodgings. Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1894, then Henry in 1895, and a third child in 1898.

Soon after, Henry’s father bought 11 (now 21), Eastern Road, Lewisham, next to the area known as Hilly Fields, to which the family moved in about 1900, and where the main part of Henry’s childhood and adolescence was spent. A commemorative plaque was placed on the house under the aegis of the Henry Williamson Society in 1984.

With his two sisters Henry had a respectable lower middle class upbringing. Whilst his father was apparently strict, humourless and out of touch with his son despite his hobbies of kite flying, moth collecting, cycling

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Biography

Henry Williamson is best remembered for his nature books, in particular Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. This is unfortunate for, worthy though these books are, he made a much greater contribution to English literature. His Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight was mentioned in Anthony Burgess’Best 99 novels in English since 1939 though Burgess, with his usual critical inadequacy, says that”no reader who ignores the second half can be wholly blamed.” This is unjust to Williamson, as some of his finest writing occurs in the second half of the Chronicle . What Burgess is referring to are the major weaknesses Williamson had as a human being and which influenced his writing.

His first weakness was support for the Fascists, the British ones at first but also the German ones (he met Hitler). This support, naturally, meant that he was severely criticised in Britain both during and after the war. However, a close reading of his works reveals that Williamson is, as George Painter has rightly pointed out,”the last romantic”, in a tradition, stretch