Williamson, Henry

(British, 1895–1977)

Born and educated in south London, Henry Williamson joined the army during the First World War, an experience vividly described in his novel A Patriot's Progress (1930), in which a City clerk named John Bullock suffers the hardships of trench warfare. Williamson's hatred of war led to him supporting Oswald Mosley and Hitler in the 1930s, for which he was interned at the outbreak of the Second World War. Williamson remains best known for Tarka the Otter (1927), a minutely observed and unsentimental account of an otter family in the Devon countryside, and Salar the Salmon (1935) which is in a similar vein. Williamson's later output is dominated by a series of fifteen semi-autobiographical novels under the collective title A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951–69), which trace the life of a writer, Phillip Maddison, from the 1890s to the early 1950s.

Richard Adams, Anthony Powell, Erich Maria Remarque  WB