Our sacred south

Class, place, humanity, and wild nature

This is a story of three women, Mary Butts, Mary Bonham-Christie, and Helen Brotherton. Each of them was influential in celebrating the environment in which I spent my childhood, and where I now live again - the area in and around Poole Harbour, on the south coast of England. Springwatch, the wildlife programme that is being shown on BBC TV over the next three weeks, is being broadcast from the harbour’s south shore. That the range of species featured in the programme has been able to thrive so close to a conurbation is in no small part thanks to the advocacy of these three women over the past century.

Mary Butts (1890 - 1937)

My fascination with Mary Butts began in my childhood. Her memoir, The Crystal Cabinet (1937), was one of the few books in my family home, and I read and reread it many times. Much of it I didn’t understand. It was full of classical references that meant little to me.  This could easily have put me off. But it described a childhood lived in a large house within a mile of where, half a century later, I was growing up. I was fascinated that the author could identify a quality in her house’s surrounds which I recognised, despite changes that were already apparent in her childhood and which she deplored.

“One way or another I was seized of those places, the process in which one comes to possess utterly one part of the earth. Possesses and is possessed.”

Hers was a privileged background, about which she had mixed feelings. One of the rooms housed a collection of William Blake’s paintings (many of them now in Tate Britain). She didn’t particularly like the paintings, but she was influenced by Blake’s mystical thinking - the Crystal Cabinet of her memoir’s title is the title of one of Blake’s poems. It describes a mental space that one can live inside and outside of , aware of different levels of reality at the same time, or of the same place at different times.

Her descriptions of the objects that filled her family’s house passed me by. It was her experience of nature that affected me, particularly the same south-westerly storms from across the harbour that I experienced each Autumn, decades later.

“I could not think of it as anything but a live thing, as visible as it had seemed to Wordsworth … It was in my home, roaring and straining and making the great boughs creak, which was the tree speaking, being made able to speak by the storm … I knelt, going with it, trying to get inside it, and looked down to the left, on to the banks of the rising pine wood I have since suspected to be part of an earth-work made by man  … All but the thickest trunks were swaying a little. All that was long and light tore about in ecstasy  … There was a little bush, doing a dance by itself, like a live child. Not the careful dances you had to learn, but skip and bounce as you like, and the dancing mistress did not.”

She worried that humans’ direct experience of the wild would be taken away from them by changes such as those that would soon incorporate the whole of her (our) side of the harbour into a conurbation - “where the first victim was the land itself, the lamb of the green earth, its throat arched to the knife.”  She had faith, though, that nature would win back in the end. “Even under Fleet Street the Fleet is running yet,” she noted. “And the earth is strong.”

“Half of Poole Harbour is still one of the most beautiful places in the world. When the filth, the tram-lines and villas that pass for civilisation in this ‘lost and imbecile century’ have rotted away, the whole of it will again be one of the most beautiful places in the world …  Place I shall never see again, that I can never bear to see. Now they have violated it, now that its body has been put to the uses men from cities do to such places as these. In the fields are little houses, and beside each another little box for the car to live in at night. The cars that allow those people to run about the earth, and wherever they go to impoverish it. Driving out and abusing and exploiting something they do not own; that, unconsciously, they resent - and might do well to fear. For when Nature ceases to be the mother, the all-nourisher, you are left either without her, or with those aspects of her which are hostile to men who have not made their submission.” 

The Butts family background was landed gentry. Mary’s distaste for “the roughest of men” who worked in the nearby clay-pits and pottery, and her despair at what she called “the Tide” of suburban development, reeked of resentment that their privileged lifestyle was under threat. Alongside the class snobbery and entitlement, though, was an insistence that humans are part of nature, and a hope that humanity might one day become more capable of living in harmony with the wild. She believed that “Man has a right to find desirable places and live in them; but not to destroy them in the process; showing himself no more than a nursery brat, destroying more than his toys.”  The gendered language may be deliberate - in her novels, it is often men who are doing the destroying, and women the protecting. Whoever the culprit, she was in no doubt that nature deserves more respect than it is given.

The last verses of Mary Butts’ poem Corfe (1932)  demonstrated an environmental militancy, delivered with a staccato rhythm:

Make many slugs where the stranger goes

Better than barbed wire the briar rose;

Swarm on the down-tops the flint-men’s hosts

Taboo the barrows, encourage ghosts.

Arm the rabbits with tigers’ teeth

Serpents shoot from the soil beneath

By pain in belly and foot and mouth

Keep them out of our sacred south.

“Our sacred south” was Mary’s beloved Purbeck Hills, the other side of Poole Harbour from her home. It’s not clear whether “our” referred to her landed class, or to something far more profound. Who was “the stranger” to be kept out - an incomer? a resident? a visitor? a soldier? ( a tank firing range had recently been established in Purbeck). It could have been any or all of them. Half a century later, there would be a new and even more disruptive intruder - oil giant BP, drilling Western Europe’s  largest onshore oilfield on the land stretching down from the Purbeck Hills to Poole Harbour, and even on one of the smaller islands in the harbour itself.

What Mary’s Corfe poem expressed most clearly was her conviction that if humans, of whatever class, continue to pursue their domination of nature, a time will come when nature fights back. 

Mary Bonham-Christie (1865 - 1961)

In 1927, Mary Butts was writing Armed with Madness, the best-known of her novels. It was set in the Purbeck Hills, but written in France, where she had embarked on a polyamorous, bisexual, and opium-fuelled lifestyle. 

That year  Brownsea Island, the largest of Poole Harbour’s five islands, was bought by Mary Bonham-Christie. There are a couple of brief references to Brownsea in The Crystal Cabinet  - “Across the Harbour, like a child in its womb lay Brownsea island with its high bank of woods; and behind Brownsea, the green body of the Purbeck Hills, like a naked god laid down asleep.”  And “A bank of dark woods, two miles long, and at the Harbour mouth where the great tides pulled in and out, through a neck of water no man, it was said, had ever swum across, stood its little Italianate pink village, and its castle, the first place to make castles real. It was a magic place to go to.  Also a curse hung about it: no-one who owned it lived to enjoy it long.” Until Mary Bonham-Christie, who lived there for 34 years, one might add. Perhaps the curse was only on those owners who would despoil it.

When Mary Butts was in her teens, Brownsea was owned by a wealthy socialite, Charles van Raalte, who, with his wife Florence, invited equally wealthy guests, including royalty, to shooting parties on the island. I’m pretty sure Mary Butts was never invited - she would have mentioned it if she had been. And I suspect that, exiled in France in 1927, she would have known nothing of Mary Bonham-Christie and her purchase. But she would have appreciated the older Mary’s determination to turn the island into a habitat for wildlife, not humans.

Mary Bonham-Christie advocated, and practised, what we now call rewilding. The idea of shooting birds for pleasure was total anathema to her. On one of her first visits to the island, before its sale was finalised, she noticed that one of the tenants kept a caged bird. She was outraged, and said she would not allow any birds to be caged or any birds or animals to be killed. Not long after acquiring ownership, she gave almost all the tenants notice to quit. This was partly because she did not need staff to look after guests, and partly because she wanted to live alone with minimal support, and to return as much of the island as possible back to wild nature. She denied any ‘right to roam’ for humans on ‘her’ island, erecting ‘No Landing Allowed’ signs on the beaches, and employing as an enforcer someone who Dorset Life magazine described in 2016 as “a Scandinavian lady muscular enough to throw any intruders off the island.”

The new owner lived simply in one room, in the castle that had been established by Henry VIII to guard the entrance to the harbour. Local gossip had it that she would go for a walk at night, by candlelight, and talk to the animals that had been left by the previous owner, animals that she would not sell or have put down.

Candle in hand she walks through the night

‘Til the dawn’s early light

Alone not lonely

She opens the cage  to free the bird in flight

Protect and guard their rights

Standing sentinel

A million miles across the water

Return to wild a different time

A world apart

(Sammy Hurden, A World Apart, 2020)

Mary Bonham-Christie’s  rewilding strategy was not without problems. Rhododendrons that had been introduced to support van Raalte’s pheasant shoots began to take over, crowding out the trees and associated wildlife. The paths that crossed the island became impassable. But she remained faithful to her animal welfare principles until the end. Once, when she fell while ascending the castle’s staircase and broke an arm, she refused a painkilling injection because it would have been tested on animals.

At the age of 95, Mary Bonham-Christie was persuaded that she could no longer cope on her own, and that she should go into a nursing home on the mainland.  She died within hours of leaving her island.

Helen Brotherton (1914-2009)

Mary Bonham-Carter had indicated that when she died she wanted the island to be preserved as a wildlife sanctuary. Her grandson, who inherited the island, wanted to respect her wishes, but would not have been able to retain ownership and afford the Death Duties. Numerous developers made offers, including one who proposed establishing what would have been the largest yacht marina in Europe.

A local campaign to thwart would-be developers was set up by Helen Brotherton, who, like Mary Bonham-Christie, was a local ‘character’ (she had been a keen cricketer, rally driver, and yachtswoman, as well as a naturalist, ornithologist, and founder of the Dorset Naturalists’ Trust). She was familiar with Brownsea, as a frequent trespasser. Her energetic campaigning resulted in the Treasury receiving the island in lieu of death duties, and giving it to the National Trust. She went on to raise the money the National Trust needed as an endowment to fund its takeover, and spearheaded a settlement under which the John Lewis retail organisation would restore the castle as a holiday home for its Partners, the Dorset Naturalists Trust (now the Dorset Wildlife Trust) would manage a wildlife sanctuary,, and the National Trust would manage the rest of the island. 

The island became slightly less wild, though more biodiverse, than it had been in Mary Bonham-Christie’s time. The end result combined public access with nature recovery. It’s a compromise that, Helen Brotherton suggested, would ultimately maximise the benefits for wildlife. “If people get pleasure out of wildlife,’ she stressed, “they are going to be more careful looking after it.”

The compromise is one that Angela, my late wife, greatly appreciated. When she had recovered sufficiently from severe ME to be able to go on short walks again, we would often cross over to spend time on Brownsea. Watching the avocets and terns on the lagoon, connecting with the trees, or noticing the red squirrels leaping from branch to  branch - they all contributed significantly to her healing. 

I met ’Miss Brotherton’ once, shortly before she died. Together with other Dorset Wildlife Trust volunteers, I had been invited to a coffee morning in her house on the shore of Poole Harbour, a house which looked out over the harbour to the island she had saved from developers. Sitting in a chair just inside her front door, she made a point of speaking with each of us individually. Her garden, as one would expect, was a haven for wildlife.

*****

After Helen Brotherton died, her 1930s house was demolished, and most of her garden’s shrubs and plants were dumped with the rubble and taken away in skips. In their place there is now a mansion, four storeys high and with a much enlarged footprint, The diminished ‘garden’ is now largely paved.

The house that Mary Butts grew up in has survived, though much altered and divided in two. Most of Its grounds have been built over, but the “rising pine wood” that she loved has survived. It is now a public open space,  called Blake Hill.