WILDERNESS MAN
Mike Tomkies fled a life of glamour to find solace in the Scottish wilderness, says Roly Smith
Remembering Mike Tomkies, a natural adventurer whose travels took him from the bright lights of Hollywood to the secluded stars of the Highlands.
Aline growled by Anthony Quinn in the 1964 movie Zorba the Greek provided the inspiration that was to change Mike Tomkies’ life.
“A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope – and be free,” says Quinn’s character Zorba.
At the time, Tomkies was a highflying Hollywood reporter interviewing film stars. But he’d always hankered after a life closer to nature. “That line has stayed with me for the rest of my life,” said Tomkies. “I’ve found it a permanent inspiration whenever I’ve had to face a tough decision.”
ROVING REPORTER
In an wildly diverse life, Tomkies left school at 16 to become a lance corporal in the Coldstream Guards. His duties included standing guard outside Buckingham Palace, and a posting to war-torn Palestine. He later became a champion athlete and cyclist, before entering journalism as a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Sussex.
An opportunity to crew a round-theworld boating trip in 1952 proved impossible for young Tomkies to resist. But this “mad adventure” ended in disaster and shipwreck off the Canary Islands, followed by a blistering 400-mile walk from Lisbon to Madrid on the way home. Back in Britain, Tomkies returned to journalism and a career that took him first to Fleet Street and later to Hollywood. By then he’d become, in his words, “arrogant, conceited and totally insufferable”.
Like many writers, Tomkies always felt he had a great novel inside him. So at the age of 38, he escaped the showbiz rat-race to return to the natural world he’d known as a boy growing up in the Sussex countryside, to write that Last Great Novel.
That ‘madness’ took him to the wilds of the rugged Pacific coast of British Columbia, where he built his own log cabin and found work as a logger and fisherman. Whenever short of funds, he returned to the bright lights of Hollywood, befriending stars such as Dean Martin, Steve McQueen and John Wayne, whose biography he wrote.
But the call of the wild would not be denied. Aged 42, Tomkies became “bewitched” by a desire to live a wilderness life in Britain. He found his paradise in a deserted croft – 44 miles from a town and seven miles from any neighbour – on the remote island of Eilean Shona, off Scotland’s west coast.
Here he began writing successful books while making films of golden eagles, pine martens and pursuing his lifelong passion for the elusive Scottish wildcat. He was patron of the Scottish Wildcat Association, and an honorary director of Wildcat Haven, the charity set up to protect its habitat.
ESSENTIAL NATURE
Tomkies’s life in the wild continued in a tiny, ramshackle crofter’s cottage on the shores of Loch Shiel, where he lived in splendid isolation for eight years, his only companion his German shepherd dog Moobli. These wilderness years were recorded in scrupulous honesty A Last Wild Place, Golden Eagle Years and On Wing and Wild Water.
In later life, Tomkies moved south to an Elizabethan farmhouse on the edge of the South Downs near Henfield, West Sussex, where he continued to write and make wildlife films until his death at the age of 88 in October 2016.
Tomkies’ philosophy was perhaps best expressed in his 2001 book Alone in the Wilderness: “Every time I enter one of the last wild places of this earth, I feel I am walking into a vast, hallowed cathedral. I enter timelessness, mystery, the unknown, where one feels nothing has been spoiled since the world began.”
Echoing the words of nature writeir Henry David Thoreau, he added: “In the wilderness lies one of the last and finest sources of spiritual inspiration; for great natural beauty is a powerful creative force for thought.”
“Natural beauty is a powerful creative force”