The Tale of Beatrix Potter
- At April 08, 2014
- By Debs Wardle
- In Amazing women
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2
A few years ago, my boyfriend and I went camping just outside Keswick; it was the first time I’d ever been to the Lake District and I loved it. We were very lucky with the weather and our campsite had panoramic views from Skiddaw to Derwentwater and a fair bit more besides. I remember thinking to myself on more than one occasion during that trip how very lucky we were to have such a beautiful place to visit.
As I’m sure most of you know, luck has little do to with it; we largely have one woman to thank for the unspoilt existence of the Lake District: a Mrs Helen B. Heelis, otherwise known as Beatrix Potter. Like many people, my earliest memories of reading involve Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. What I naturally didn’t realise back then was what an incredible lady Beatrix Potter was.
Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866, the eldest child of a wealthy Barrister. She showed early aptitude for painting and had special instruction for most of her teens, often drawing the menagerie of animals she and her younger brother kept in their schoolroom. Her love of the great outdoors was also sparked during childhood on the long holidays her fashionable parents would take each summer, usually to Scotland. When Beatrix was 16, her father decided to take the family (and by that I mean the entire household – the Victorian middle-classes didn’t travel lightly) to Windermere instead. This trip marked the beginning of her relationship with the Lake District and the Potters returned many times over the following years.
Beatrix sketched constantly and found her art very therapeutic; writing in her diary after a particularly bad day that “I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket and the laugh it gave me brought me round”. When she was 24, her younger brother suggested that she sent some of her animal drawings to a greetings card publisher, Hildesheimer & Faulkner, who were so impressed that they sent her £6 and asked for more.
Her artistic attention to detail also led her in botanical directions and her paintings of funghi “were good enough to impress the then director of Kew Gardens, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, even though at the time he was too misogynistic to employ her as a botanical illustrator.”* In spite of this, she went on to study spores at Kew and even wrote a paper ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae by Miss Helen B. Potter’ which was grudgingly presented to the Linnean Society of London in 1897 on her behalf – ladies were not permitted to attend the society’s meetings.
Three years later, Beatrix decided to try her hand at children’s books and wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit based on a letter she had written to a young friend several years previously. She initially struggled to find a publisher but in October 1902, when Beatrix was 36, it was published – all of its first print-run of 8,000 copies having been sold before publication.
Despite her newfound success, Beatrix still struggled for independence; she was a professional woman in her mid-thirties who still had to be accompanied everywhere by a chaperone, including to meetings with her publisher, and whose parents had to “become accustomed to the idea that their daughter was in a position to earn some money of her own.” I don’t know whether it actually happened or not, but I love the scene in Miss Potter where she asks her bank manager whether she might have enough money of her own to buy a house someday; it seems so alien to my 21st century mind that a person in her position wouldn’t know how much she was worth.
Fact or fiction, she had enough money to buy several farms; indeed vast swathes of the Lake District saving it from developers and preserving a way of life that would otherwise have been lost. She was eventually able to move there permanently and married local solicitor William Heelis in 1913 at the age of 47 (in spite of opposition from her parents). Her passion for preserving the countryside extended to animal husbandry and she decided to breed Herdwick sheep, a breed native to the area that had fallen out of fashion, and some years later was elected the first woman president of the Herdwick Sheepbreeders’ Association.
Beatrix Potter left over 4,000 acres to the National Trust on her death in 1943. Not only are her children’s books still read and loved by children the world over, but we have the privilege of being able to admire the views she lovingly captured in her illustrations to this very day.
Hugs and hill-walks,
All quotes and photo credit: Taylor, J. et al, Beatrix Potter 1866-1943 The Artist and her World, Frederick Warne, 1995
Except: *Titchmarsh, A. (2013) ‘The Compelling Tale of Our First Lady of the Lakes’ The Sunday Telegraph, October 20th, pp L7
About Debs
I grew up in North Devon and moved to Oxford after graduating. I went freelance in 2012 and now work from the spare room (my commute is a nightmare). In my spare time I enjoy long walks, honing my culinary skills, drinking copious quantities of tea and writing a rambling blog as my alter-ego, LL Lobster.
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Cat Kelly and Oxford Folk Weekend
- At April 02, 2014
- By Anais Higgins
- In Amazing women, Love Oxford, Music
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I first met Cat through the Oxfolk ceilidhs, which happen in Kennington’s village hall every 2nd Saturday of the month from October to May. I’m a big fan of ceilidhs as there’s always a great community element with dancers of all ages and abilities, skilled dancers and floundering newbies, and a cheap bar with potent cider and ale. Cat is a caller at the ceilidhs – which means she explains the dances and calls out the moves. She basically taught me everything I know in terms of my amateur but enthusiastic ceilidh-dancing prowess.
As well as being a part of Oxfolk, Cat also runs Folk Arts Oxford and initiated Folk Weekend: Oxford. Previously there was an Oxford Folk Festival, which Cat was of course on the committee for. The official festival was cancelled in 2011 but so many people had pencilled the date that a lot of the artists, organisations and Morris sides involved still went ahead and there was a sort of DIY event in place of the actual festival. The following year Cat launched the Folk Weekend – a kind of sprawling not-for-profit community event retaining that grass-roots element from that impromptu weekend of folk fun, and entirely ran by volunteers.
I had a fantastic time at the Folk Weekend last year – I got to rediscover my childhood love of maypole dancing at the Oxford Castle, dream myself into a million and one different Morris sides and be extremely envious of many flowery folky hats, hear some Oxfordshire folk tales being told in the gallery at the Old Fire Station, and of course bask in soothing, fun and energising folk tunes.
I asked Cat to explain what the Folk Weekend means to her, and although it’s called Folk Weekend she doesn’t really think of it as a folk music festival but instead as a community festival, “It’s a showcase and a celebration of all the folk activities that are on going throughout the year in Oxfordshire. It’s a culmination of everything that goes on anyway, and a chance to pile everybody into the same place and say: ‘look what we can do!’”
The festival programmes people from Oxfordshire who are making their way in the folk world alongside successful, award-winning national artists and there’s a lovely egalitarian attitude whether it’s in terms of billing and marketing or backstage riders – no matter who is playing, they all have access to packs of minstrels and a sandwich toaster!
There’s a very lively folk scene in Oxfordshire and it’s a big part of the music that the city and county are producing. So what’s special or unique about folk in Oxford? “There are little pockets of folk activity all over the country, and they’ve all got their own flavours. Oxford is quite eclectic – there’s a lot of folk history around the county so lots of material can be locally sourced and there’s a lot of prestige and history, but then there’s also a young and vibrant side to it. It’s just like the city itself – the old and historic slams right up against the new and the changing, and both coexist alongside each other happily.”
As a fiddle player, Cat has many strings to her bow and her interests have changed over time. However, she’s now combining all her skills and experiences into one main area, “I’ve stumbled into one thing after another but what’s really taken over for me now is music and Special Needs. It’s always been an interest, and I did a project around it for my PCGE, but it’s something I fell into almost by accident, from working on a Sing Up project in Oxfordshire’s Special Needs schools. Because it’s quite a specialist area I got to work with lots of experts in quite particular areas and I learnt so much from them. I then got asked to work on other projects with some of those practitioners and things took off from there. Special Needs music is something I am now really passionate about, and I love that it can really make a difference. It completely redefined what I thought of as music and singing. Singing can be a different experience and mean something else for different people, especially those who don’t have verbal abilities.”
Cat’s inspiration comes from her mum and her granny. Her mum showed her the freelance way in life, and gave her confidence that she could do it herself. Cat’s granny was a force of nature and sounds like quite the character – she joined the WI and was voted chair at her second meeting, she was also chairman of the local district council and the hospital league of friends. She also initiated a community bus service and drove the bus well into her senior years, whilst also cooking and delivering meals on wheels to local elderly people. She was even once invited to the House of Lords but wasn’t bothered to make the journey from Devon – clearly she was to busy for any trips to the big smoke! “I feel really blessed to have had somebody like her in my life, and to have had that example. She was incredible.” Unstoppable is another word that comes to mind, quite like Cat herself.
During our chat we got on to talking about women in leadership roles and the Ban Bossy campaign, “A lot people seem to have the impression of me that I’m sort of bolshie and want to be in charge of everything and I wonder if I was a man if I would instead be seen as determined. Sometimes as a woman people make it into a negative thing and both men and women can feel threatened by a woman with some degree of power. But I really just want to make people happy and organise a big festival for people to enjoy! It’s difficult as a woman to take charge and put yourself out there.”
I also wanted to hear what advice Cat had, as a successful creative and enterprising woman, “The thing that I find really important is staying true to yourself. If you want to go and do something, do it your way. It’s okay if it’s slightly different to somebody else’s way. You’re not ever going to achieve things or be happy if it is not right for you and you’re forcing yourself to be something you’re not.”
Find out more about lovely Cat on her website, and more about Folk Weekend: Oxford on their website
From Oxford with love,
About Anaïs
I’m an arts marketer, reviewer and now Fe-line‘s Oxford corresspondant. I first visited Oxford in the autumn of 2008 and thought I might like to live here one day. Fast forward 5 years and I’m dwelling in East Oxford and obsessed with everything the city has to offer.
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