Inspiring a love of nature
Due to age and serious illness, esteemed writer and nature expert Richard Williamson has decided to stop his weekly column with the Observer.
For 57 years, Richard, now 86, has been sharing his love of flora and fauna and his favourite walking routes with readers.
His first column was published on December 4, 1964.
Richard, who was born in Devon, moved to Chichester from Norfolk in September 1963 to work as the manager of Kingley Vale nature reserve – arriving, as it goes, on his BSA motorbike with a couple of tins of baked beans and £5.
While Kingley Vale was his base, his role with The Nature Conservancy saw him work on reserves across the South Downs, including Castle Hill and Lullington Heath in East Sussex, until he retired, aged 60, in 1995.
He started his weekly column for the Observer series and several of its sister titles aged 29 after pitching the idea to then editor Graham Brooks.
Speaking in March 2020, as he marked his 55th anniversary as a columnist, he said: “I bought a copy of the local paper and there was no nature column in it.”
Growing up in East Anglia, where the papers had daily and weekly features on countryside matters, it struck him as unusual.
“I thought, ‘That’s odd, there’s got to be, I’m the man to do it,’ as it turned out.”
Richard was paid £2 a week and his first column was on how wonderful Sussex was. Throughout the years, he has written about all aspects of West Sussex wildlife, fused with historical, political and literary musings, and in a poetic and prose style.
In his time as columnist, Richard has only missed three editions of the newspaper – due to printing strikes. That includes writing an article from St Richard’s Hospital, in Chichester, with a broken leg following a car accident in 1980.
He wrote about the birds he could spot from the hospital window, a bluebottle fly flying around inside the ward and a water boatman beetle that went in his glass of water.
Recounting the incident for our ETC magazine’s issue on 100 inspirational people in Sussex in 2019, he said: “The caption on the article when it came out – I wrote it out and it was taken to the newspaper office and they printed it – and the caption on it was a typographical error,” he said.
“It was supposed to be ‘view from a hospital window’ and it came out as ‘view from a hospital widow’.
“That was a bit of a joke. All the doctors had a bit of a laugh about that.”
His goal, he said in 2020, has been to inspire the public with his columns – to love the county, to look after it and to get interested in it.
He credits his interest in nature to his father Henry Williamson, the soldier, naturalist and author who wrote more than 50 books, including Tarka the Otter and Salar The Salmon.
Richard’s first book was published in 1959. It was a memoir of his school days and the five years he spent in the RAF, where he served in Iraq, Cyprus, Malta and Jordan; it was titled The Dawn is My Brother. His sixth work, a book on his top walking routes, titled 52 Favourite West Sussex Walks, was published in 2012.
While the past two years have proved challenging and seen him confined to his home in West Dean wood, where he has lived with wife Anne for the past 47 years, it has been a catalyst for writing.
He has just released his first poetry collection titled Flights of the Mind, a 72-page paperback with 68 poems about the natural world, but with a focus on birds – their myths, lives and characteristics (for more, see left).
Of his new work, he said: “The poems relate to birds but the whole point is making the mythical link between birds and humans, the psychological and philosophical connection to our lives. What people are looking for I think is a revelation about themselves, and the feelings and intuitions we have, and I have tried to give that through the natural world. I would like people to make that jump.”
He says many of the poems just ‘poured out’: “I lie in bed and I have written a poem by the time I get up.
“I remember every detail. It just appears in my mind like a picture.”
1 Words by Rachel O’brien