Spring Days in Devon, and other Broadcasts

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered today as a ‘nature’ writer, the author of the much-loved classics 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the 'Flax of Dream' tetralogy and his major work, the 15-volume novel sequence 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. What is not so well known is that during the late 1930s he became a broadcaster of some repute on the BBC. 'Spring Days in Devon' collects twenty-two of his talks, broadcast on the wireless between December 1935 (his very first appearance in front of the microphone) and 1954. Subjects include reminiscences from his own inimitable viewpoint of the West Country and its flora and fauna; the significance in his life of the barn owl; four talks on the lives of English animals (otter, badger, stoat and red deer - the last, memorably, given from the studio as if it were a live outside broadcast); and the difficulties encountered on becoming a farmer in Norfolk, following his move there in 1937 to reclaim a derelict farm. As an Afterword, the history of the working relationship between the BBC and Henry Williamson is told in ‘Henry Williamson and the BBC’, by John Gregory.

It is clear from his scripts that Williamson put as much care into the writing of these as he did into his books; they are of a high and immediate quality, and remain immensely readable today. All surviving scripts have been gathered into two volumes and published as 'Spring Days in Devon' and its companion 'Pen and Plough', both now available as e-books.