WILD PEOPLE: JOHNNY KINGDOM
Powder monkey, poacher, gravedigger: the late Johnny Kingdom’s life was out of the ordinary, even before he became an unlikely TV star
Powder monkey, poacher, gravedigger – this unlikely TV star lived a rural life that was out of the ordinary.
At Barnstaple Market in North Devon, among the stalls selling cakes, cheeses and local vegetables there is a moustached and tattooed man dressed head-to-toe in camouflage, with a hat full of buzzard and pheasant feathers finishing off the look.
He sits in a converted trailer painted green; attached to every available inch of wall space hang photographs of red deer, foxes and wild ponies. Tumbling out of the front are rows of DVDs, with titles including Nature Loving Person,
Badgerwatch and Wild Boar Excitement. People crowd around to listen to extraordinary stories about filming and to buy his wares. For Johnny Kingdom, this was what life was all about. He loved to bring the wildlife of Exmoor to the people of Exmoor and, eventually, far beyond its borders, until his death in autumn 2018.
Born in the village of High Bray on 23 February 1939, Walter John Kingdon (he later changed his name to Kingdom) was the second child in a cottage he shared with five sisters, his mother Joyce and father Walter. He lived a childhood that many of us wish for our children today: cycling down country lanes, watching birds and tickling trout. Schooling was far from his favourite occupation but he stayed until he was 16, while also making a small amount of money catching moles and selling their skins. His father then took him to work in the quarries, where, as a powder monkey, he learned to use dynamite. By night, he was taught the art of poaching salmon. Sometimes he combined the two. An explosion in the river was an incredibly effective way of catching fish, Johnny would reveal later in life. He was one of the last young men to do national service, in 1958–59.
He met Julie Carter when she was 14, and despite some disapproval at first from her family – as Julie says, “he could be a bit of a rogue” – they stayed together, married in 1963 and had two sons, Stuart and Craig.
As his boys were growing up, an accident nearly killed Johnny when a hydraulic arm hit him in the face while working as a lumberjack. Unable to work, he fell into a depression that was only lifted when one of his friends, Roger Gregory, lent him a video camera and suggested he get out on to the moor to film. It was an act of kindness that changed his life.
Captivated by the challenge, he started filming red deer, and didn’t stop. He taught himself to edit films and started selling them at the local market. Along with continuing the family tradition of digging graves, this made him a living.
There was a brush with fame in the 1993 ITV documentary series First
Tuesday, then in 1999, Johnny met TV producer David Parker. His amateur camera style “broke all the rules of programme-making”, according to David, but it didn’t matter because his “authenticity set him apart from the wildlife experts”. For the next 15 years, Johnny went on to make several regional HTV series and then national BBC and ITV series with David and his wife Wendy. Johnny’s on-screen success was put down in part to his determination to get the shots; he would spend hours, days and weeks in pursuit of them. Above all else, though, it was his funny, charming, knowledgeable, honest character that endeared him to the British nation. He had lived an old-fashioned rural life, at times a hard one, and he hid nothing of it. A rare thing today.
The result was a man who personified the landscape in which he was born. Rugged yet gentle, strong yet vulnerable, passionate yet hardened. This is Exmoor, and this was Johnny Kingdom.
“His charming, honest funny character endeared him to the nation”