Kenneth Grahame Society
Riverbank News
Volume 6, Issue 1
Honorary Member - Dr. Peter Green
January 2014
Society Update
Newsletter
of the
Kenneth
Grahame
Society
Inside this issue:
American Notes
2
Kenneth Grahame’s Cornwall
4
Representation of Horses in
‘The Wind in the Willows’
7
Early Dramatisation of ‘The
Wind in the Willows’
14
One of the highlights
of recent months has
been the unsolicited
information and articles which Kenneth
Grahame enthusiasts
have sent us. Two of
these articles appear
in this issue of Riverbank News. Firstly,
there is Jessica
Delves’ essay on the
representation of
horses in The Wind in
the Willows – a fascinating read. This essay is an excellent example of one type of
article we’d like receive and publish in
Riverbank News. Secondly, there is Elizabeth Brock’s account
of a very early stage
performance of The
Wind in the Willows
which predates
Milne’s Toad of Toad
Hall. While we may
question some of the
more speculative details in that account,
we are delighted to
hear such anecdotes,
and would be delighted to hear of, and
share, similar personal accounts of Grahame and his writings.
This issue also con-
tains another of David
J. Holmes’ wonderful
series of “American
Notes” articles, this
time on Paul Bransom,
the first illustrator per
se of The Wind in the
Willows, and a short
presentation of some
Grahame-related holiday accommodation in
Cornwall.
2013 was a good year
for the Kenneth Grahame Society although
it ended a little more
quietly; we never got
quite as well organised
as we’d hoped, and
some things we attempted to organise
were delayed or didn’t
materialise. Unfortunately, we will not be
holding the US AGM in
Texas that we mentioned in the previous
issue of Riverbank
News. The organisational challenge was
becoming too much for
us, and only 1-2 members outside the committee expressed an
interest in the event,
so we shelved it for
now. We may attempt
to revive the idea of a
US AGM another time,
but there are no immediate plans.
We’re delighted that
things are still ticking
over in the Society,
and look forward to
getting more momentum going in 2014. As
always, anyone who
would like to join us
and get involved will
be made very welcome.
It is a challenge to
keep a society dedicated to a quiet literary author flourishing,
but it is a cause well
worth undertaking,
and the enjoyments
and camaraderie we’ve
experienced in the
Kenneth Grahame Society have far surpassed any expectations we had.
We hope to hold another online committee
meeting in a few
weeks’ time, and we
hope to have more
news in the July 2014
issue of Riverbank
News.
Thanks for all your
interest, feedback and
support. It is all appreciated very much.
The Editorial Team
PAGE 2
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V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
American Notes VI : Paul Bransom
Paul Bransom (1885-1979), the
first illustrator of The Wind in
the Willows, was a native of
Washington D.C. where, at an
early age, he began his artistic
life by drawing animals in his
yard and at the National Zoo.
Bransom left school at the age
of 13 or 14 and went to work as
a draftsman in the U.S. Patent
Office. He then became a draftsman with the Southern Railway
Company and the General Electric Company in Schenectady,
New York. At the age of 18 he
moved to New York City, where
he worked for the New York
Evening Journal, contributing
the comic strip, "News from
Bugville," and other cartoons.
While in New York Bransom
spent so much time sketching
from life at the New York Zoological Park that the director offered him a room in the lion
house to use as a studio.
Around 1907 George Horace
Lorimer, editor of the immensely popular Saturday Evening Post, purchased several of
Bransom's drawings for use on
covers of the magazine, thereby
launching his career as a prolific and distinguished wildlife
illustrator. Bransom's illustrations for animal stories began to
appear regularly in American
magazines including The Delineator, Country Gentleman,
An American Boy, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies Home
Journal. He was also in demand as a book illustrator.
Bransom produced a series of
drawings for an edition of Jack
London's The Call of the Wild in
1912 and was soon commissioned by the New York firm of
Charles Scribner's Sons to become the first artist to illustrate
The Wind in the Willows.
In Kenneth Grahame A Biography (Cleveland, 1959) Peter
Green, devotes a considerable
amount of time to discussing
the problems of illustrating The
Wind in the Willows:
mere toad, small t, to be thrown
overboard in disgust.
This fluidity explains why it has
always been so difficult to illustrate The Wind in the Willows
convincingly. . . . [T]he animals
are not conceived in visual terms
-- or rather, they are never the
same for two minutes running:
both their size and their nature
are constantly changing. Grahame himself was well aware of
this problem, and dealt very
prettily with queries about it.
When asked specifically (apropos
the escape on the railway train)
whether Toad was life-size or
train-size, he answered that he
was both and neither: the Toad
was train-size, the train was
Toad-size, and therefore there
could be no illustrations. . . . He
later capitulated, and Mr. E.H.
Shepard came as near as possible to capturing the essence of
Rat, Mole, and Toad; but the
Just as in his earlier books Grahame had achieved a convincing
fluidity of viewpoint, which
shifted without effort from
child to adult, so with The Wind
in the Willows he takes the
process one step further. All the
animal characters veer constantly between human and nonhuman behavior. Rat lives in a
river-bank hole, and also writes
poetry. Mole burrows underground, but is capable of rounding up a horse from the paddock.
As Mr. Guy Pocock intelligently
observed, the book is neither a
pure animal book, nor 'a fairy
tale like Puss in Boots in which an
animal is simply a human being
dressed up; for every now and
then, for all its frank anthropomorphism, the story shows an
extraordinary insight into the feelings and doings of
little wild animals. . .
. Rat is always a rat,
though armed to
the teeth; and Mole
is always a mole
even when he wears
goloshes.' Perhaps
the oddest instance
of this duality is
the moment when
Toad is recognized
for what he is by
the bargewoman: instantly he ceases to
be a humanized animal capable of driving cars or combing
its hair in the midPhoto/Image 3. Shepard’s Toad hall
Illus 1. Paul Bransom in his studio at Canada Lake, N.Y., circa 1915
dle, and becomes a Herbert
E. Lawson Photographer. Paul Bransom Papers, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution.
V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
point remains that the inner eye
sees no incongruity in these
metamorphoses (and in fact
hardly notices them), while visual
representation at once pins down
Grahame's imagination to a single static concept. . . [pp. 284-5]
When the The Wind in the Willows was first published in
1908 it contained only one illustration, a frontispiece by W.
Graham Robertson. Bransom's
fully illustrated edition would
not appear until five years
later, by which time the book
had already become a classic.
Bransom provided 10 paintings
that were reproduced in color
in the book, one as the frontispiece and nine as full-page illustrations throughout the text.
He also furnished the picnic
scene which is reproduced in
sepia tones for the endpapers, a
two-part pen-and-ink vignette
for the title-page, and a
stamped pictorial cover design.
The animals in these wellexecuted works are largely portrayed with fidelity to nature,
but in a very few instances
their "human" sides appear.
Bransom's characters are for
the most part unclothed, except
in the cases of the Seafaring
Rat and the terrified Mole in
the Wild Wood (who is wearing
his famous goloshes). The animals occasionally are seen with
human accoutrements; in one
illustration Ratty carries a bird
cage, and in the final picture in
the book Badger is depicted
with a cudgel in one hand and
a lantern in the other. Similarly, Ratty's home is naturalistic (a true hole in the riverbank), and only Toad's residence shows evidence of human
domesticity and design. Essentially, Bransom seems to have
limited his anthropomorphizing
to those moments when they
are specifically called for by
Grahame.
R I V E R B A NK NE WS
PAGE 3
According to the publisher's file
copy, Bransom's illustrated edition of the book was published in
New York on Oct. 4, 1913. On
the following day, Scribners
published an advertisement in
the New York Times:
KENNETH GRAHAME'S MOST
BEAUTIFUL BOOK
The Wind in the Willows
Illustrated in full colors by Paul
Bransom.
No more difficult work to illustrate could be found than "The
Wind in the Willows," for there
humor, tenderness, satire, romance, whimsicality, and exquisite
lyrical poetry -- if prose can be
that -- are inseparably mixed. But
the little bright eyed mole, the
gray wandering sea rat, the rotund jolly Mr. Toad with his craze
for motoring, and the Great God
Pan, piping at the Gates of Dawn,
are here pictured by Paul Bransom, an artist who, seeing not the
humor nor any other quality alone,
but all the complementary qualities as one, commands the subtle,
graceful skill to blend them into
unity.
[see Annie Gauger's Annotated
Wind in the Willows, p. lxvii]
Methuen published the first
English edition to contain Bransom's illustrations in the same
month. Presumably the book
was made ready in October, as
had been the first edition in
1908, to catch the Christmas
trade.
Annie Gauger discovered a letter in the Scribner Archives at
Princeton University written by
Grahame to his agent, Curtis
Brown, on 17 October 1913 upon
receipt of a copy of the book. In
his letter Grahame replies:
I was much relieved to find no
bowler hats or plaid waistcoats.
And I like the drawings, too, very
Illus 2. Title-page for the first illustrated edition of The
Wind in the Willows.
much. They have charm and dignity and good taste, and I should
think the book will have a satisfactory sale. [p. lxvii]
In another letter of praise,
dated 13 January 1914, Charmian London, the wife of Jack
London, wrote to Bransom himself:
. . . Jack has been called East
suddenly; so I am rushing through
several hundred letters he left
me to answer. I find here THE
WIND IN THE WILLOWS, and
am quite crazy over the wonderful pictures you have done. Jack
will be as crazy, I know; but I'm
taking this opportunity to thank
you, and let you know the book
came all right. . .
Although it seems natural that
one of the leading wildlife illustrators of the day would have
been selected to first illustrate
Grahame's classic, Bransom's depictions also met with some adverse criticism at the time. In
The Studio (Vol. 60, p. 249) a reviewer wrote: "The author tells
the story of some obviously 'fairy
tale' animals, but . . . the artist
seems to us to have entirely
PAGE 4
missed the spirit of this delightful romance."
The Wind in the Willows is now
among the most frequently illustrated children's books of
the 20th Century. Over the
years, as other artists have
produced their versions of the
illustrations, Bransom's drawings have received mixed reviews and are rarely singled
out for praise. In her book, The
Illustrators of The Wind in the
Willows 1908-2008 (Jefferson,
North Carolina, 2009) Carolyn
Hares-Stryker writes:
[T]his is a book that has been illustrated, at last count, by well
over ninety different illustrators. . . . The list of those artists who have contributed their
visions to our greater appreciation of The Wind in the Willows
ranges from the illustrious to
the little known. Of course, the
name that tops most people's
list is Ernest Shepard, whose
immortal version would appear in
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V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
1931. Indisputably, his version
would ever after cause an anxiety
of influence worthy of Harold
Bloom's notion that all who attempt to follow in the wake of
genius must ever acknowledge and
struggle to overcome that genius.
. . . [p. 3]
For better or worse, it fell to
American Paul Bransom to be
the pioneer. All who followed
had the benefit of the successes
or failures of those who came before them. Ernest Shepard additionally had the opportunity to
discuss the illustration of the
book with the author himself.
Certainly, technically, Bransom's paintings are works of art
that reveal his talent as a wildlife illustrator, and, taking into
account the inconsistencies inherent in Grahame's story,
Bransom does manage to subtly
blur the line between nature
and fantasy. In this writer's
opinion, the Bransom illustrations deserve more credit than
they have been given through
Illus 3. Illustration by Paul Bransom for The Wind in the
Willows .
the years. Personally, I agree
with Grahame's own assessment
that Bransom's riverbankers
have "charm and dignity and
good taste."
David J. Holmes
Kenneth Grahame’s Cornwall
A few issues ago, Riverbank
News carried an article
“Kenneth Grahame’s Scotland”, which covered three of
his former residences that
were now offering holiday accommodation. In this current
issue, the focus is on Cornwall.
Grahame didn’t actually live in
Cornwall, but he holidayed
there, was married there,
wrote significant parts of The
Wind in the Willows there, and
several of those places associated with him are now offering
holiday accommodation.
The centre of Grahame’s Cornwall is Fowey. Grahame first
went there in 1899, with his
sister, for a period of convalescence, after a major operation
on his lung. Later that year, he
married Elspeth in St Fimbarrus’s Church in Fowey (much to
the dismay of his sister, Helen).
Then, in 1907, he wrote early
drafts of The Wind in the Willows while on holiday there.
Most of the time he stayed in
the Fowey Hotel, and the
“Willows” drafts were actually
written on Fowey Hotel headed
paper.
town the Sea Rat described in
chapter nine was Fowey. Another claim is that Fowey Hall
was the inspiration for Toad
Hall. That claim is a little dubious, but Fowey Hall will always
have great significance for the
Kenneth Grahame Society because the very first meeting of
the Society was held there in
2008.
Moreover, some of the locations
around Fowey are claimed to be
an inspiration for parts of The
Wind in the Willows. One such
location is the little backwater
and mill between Fowey and
Golant, which may have been
the inspiration for the picnic
scene in chapter one of the
book. There seems to be a
strong possibility too, that the
Two of Grahame’s best friends,
Edward Atkinson and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, lived in or
around Fowey. Peter Green includes a lot of detail about
them in his biography of Grahame, and some claim that
they have offered small elements of inspiration for characters in The Wind in the Willows
– Atkinson, owning around 30
V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
boats but being an indifferent
sailor, resembles that side of
Toad, and Quiller-Couch, being
a leading literary figure,
vaguely maps to Ratty’s literary
interests.
Moving on down the coast from
Fowey, the next location clearly
identified with Kenneth Grahame is Falmouth and, in particular, the Greenbank Hotel.
Grahame stayed in the Greenbank Hotel in 1907 and wrote
further drafts of The Wind in
the Willows, in the form of letters on headed paper from the
hotel to his son Alastair – very
similar to his writing from the
Fowey Hotel.
R I V E R B A NK NE WS
Other locations in Cornwall are
mentioned by the Grahame biographers, but his accommodation at each is more difficult to
determine. Grahame spent the
first days of his honeymoon at
St. Ives, but the details as to
which hotel he and Elspeth
stayed at have not been established. Grahame also visited
The Lizard on several occasions
and, while he and his sister
stayed with a Miss Richardson,
his sister’s friend, there is some
possibility that he stayed at the
Housel Bay Hotel on at least
one occasion too. Incidentally,
his sister, Helen, retired to The
Lizard and is buried in nearby
Ruan Minor.
Atkinson’s House
Self catering cottage in Mixtow.
Address:
Rosebank Cottage, Mixtow, Lanteglos-by-Fowey,
Cornwall . PL23 1NB
Telephone:
01604 494832
Email:
[email protected]
Website:
www.rosebank-holidaycottage.co.uk
Fowey Hotel
4-star hotel in the historic town of Fowey.
Address:
The Fowey Hotel, Esplanade, Fowey, Cornwall PL23 1HX
Telephone:
01726 832551
Email:
[email protected]
Website:
www.thefoweyhotel.co.uk
PAGE 5
Grahame was a keen walker,
and there are various records of
his walking around the coastal
headlands at Fowey and The
Lizard. He even worked with
some of the fishermen at The
Lizard for a few days. Today, it
is very easy to trace Grahame’s
enchantment with the Cornish
coast; walking the same
stretches of South West Coast
Path, visiting the quaint fishing villages and indulging in
Cornish hospitality can be one
of the most enjoyable and relaxing holidays anyone can
have.
Nigel McMorris
PAGE 6
R I V E R B A NK NE WS
Greenbank Hotel
Luxury 4-star hotel in Falmouth.
Address:
The Greenbank Hotel, Harbourside, Falmouth , Cornwall , TR11 2SR
Telephone:
01326 312440
Email:
[email protected]
Website:
www.greenbank-hotel.co.uk
Fowey Hall
4-star luxury family hotel in Fowey.
Address:
Fowey Hall, Hanson Drive , Fowey, Cornwall ,
PL23 1ET
Telephone:
01726 833866
Email:
[email protected]
Website:
www.foweyhallhotel.co.uk
Old Sawmilll
Self catering accommodation in converted sawmill at Golant.
Address:
The Old Sawmills, Golant, Fowey, Cornwall ,
PL23 1LW
Telephone:
01726 833338
Email:
[email protected]
Website:
www.cornwall-online.co.uk/theoldsawmillsfowey
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V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
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PAGE 7
A Horse Amongst Men: Representation of horses in
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame said himself of The Wind in the Willows that it contains ‘no second meaning'.1 Were
this true, the analysis of such minor characters as the horses in the novel could be considered redundant. However, it would appear that since its publication in 1908 scores of critics and readers alike
have read past the anthropomorphic animals – in themselves containing at least two levels of character, being simultaneously human and animal - and found bountiful layers of meaning. One could be forgiven for mistaking it as a simple book, particularly those that have read the editions from which the
chapters ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and ‘Wayfarers All’ have been removed, for it does have
many characteristics of a much simpler story. Firstly it is enjoyable by both children and adults. It
takes a genre recognisable to adults - Edwardian men having manly Edwardian fun – and broadens its
appeal to children through the use of animal characters. If Grahame were to have written the same plot
with human characters the book would certainly not have captured the hearts of younger (or most
probably older) readers as it has. It would be unfair to say that the language is simple but it’s definitely
easy and playful - ‘So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again
and scrabbled and scratched and scraped’.2 The plot (or plots) can be followed by the simplest of children but have been crafted around popular adult pastimes of the era in order to appeal to a broader audience. The combination of river-boating, picnicking, caravanning, motor cars, imprisonment, escape,
police chases, revolution, plotting and battle covers all bases when it comes to mass appeal. But this
leaves us with a jumble of genres which never really seem to tie themselves together satisfactorily.
Which makes me wonder, as a ‘simple story’, is The Wind in the Willows really that enjoyable?
Certainly to a child reader the animal characters, the forbidden Wild Wood and Toad’s adventures,
along with the secret tunnels, battles and moral lessons that go with them, are familiarly entertaining.
But when reading The Wind in the Willows as a child one is vaguely aware of the more adult themes
lurking somewhere in the background - of loss, longing and nostalgia. These add to the uneasy atmosphere of the book which already feels disjointed due to the lack of a central theme. The book seems too
cluttered to be simply ‘enjoyable’, so one could assume it must have some deeper meaning. A. A. Milne
was of a similar belief when he said the book was more ‘a test of character’.3 Scratch at the surface (or
even just blow a little bit) and a world of second meanings is revealed. The book is full of ambiguities
which are never dealt with - the riverbank is both a natural habitat and a civilised suburb, its inhabitants simultaneously human and animal. Behind the carefree characters there is a strict hierarchy involving the anthropomorphic characters but extending also to the non-anthropomorphic humans and
animals. There are passages which exemplify poetic prose and there has obviously been great care
taken over its writing. These ideas all contribute to the conclusion that The Wind in the Willows is in
fact overflowing not only with ‘second meanings’, but with third meanings, with fourth and with fifth…
And so where do horses fit into all this meaning?
You must please remember that a theme, a thesis, a subject, is in most cases little
more than a sort of clothes-line, on which one pegs a string of ideas, questions, allusions, and so on, one’s mental undergarments, of all shapes and sizes, some possibly
fairly new, but most rather old and patched; and they dance and sway in the breeze,
and flap and flutter, or hang limp and lifeless; and some are ordinary enough, and some
are of a rather private and intimate shape, and rather give the owner away, and show
up his or her peculiarities. And owing to the invisible clothes-line they seem to have
some connexion and continuity.
- Kenneth Grahame4
It would seem contrived to try and suggest that the horses featured in The Wind in the Willows are of
some undiscovered special significance and that they ‘flap and flutter’ on the clothes-line which strings
the book together. In fact they more often hang ‘limp and lifeless’ - but they do give their owner away.
There are only really two horses in the book, the ‘old grey horse’ which pulls Toad’s caravan and the
barge-horse. Others are mentioned only in passing: the horses that lived in the city where the Wild
PAGE 8
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V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
Wood stands, grazing horses seen by Toad and those mentioned in the stories of the Sea Rat. The
horses in The Wind in the Willows are conspicuous for the very reason that they are (more or less) what
they appear to be: horses. Amongst the ‘humanimals’ (as I have chosen to refer to the anthropomorphic
animals) they alone act predictably like the animals that they are. They are given neither names (even
a capital ‘H’) nor direct speech and it seems they are only given human qualities (albeit very few) as a
token gesture, because to deprive them of any personality would be to place them lower than the Wild
Wooders or the rabbits in the grand Willows hierarchy - they would be no better than the fish that
swim in the river. It does not appear that Grahame has gone to many lengths to bestow special meaning upon the horses in his novel but he has inadvertently revealed his own subconscious attitude towards the animals through his treatment of them. However, the complexities and ambiguities in the
book complicate the discussion of the role of the two horses in The Wind in the Willows.
It is interesting to compare the representation of horses by Grahame in The Wind in the Willows with
that of Anna Sewell in Black Beauty and Michael Morpurgo in War Horse. They are three writers who
seem to have very similar attitudes towards animals in general, but whose attitudes towards and subsequent literary representations of horses differ distinctly. All three books are set either towards the
end of the 19th century or the beginning of 20th (although it can be argued that the England represented in The Wind in the Willows never really existed). This period was one of great change in Britain
– the expansion of railways and invention of cars and tractors were putting many horses out of work. It
was a time of limbo for the role of horses in Britain, which came to a bloody climax in the First World
War when horseflesh and cavalry charges were met with tanks and machine gun fire.
Grahame’s appreciation of animals seems to be rooted in his walks to school as a child, when he was
free to observe nature around him every day. He obviously held animals in high regard saying that he
‘felt a duty to them as a friend’ and claimed that:
Every animal, by instinct, lives according to his nature. Thereby he lives wisely, and
betters the tradition of man-kind. No animal is ever tempted to deny his nature. No
animal knows how to tell a lie. Every animal is honest. Every animal is true - and is,
therefore, according to his nature, both beautiful and good.5
Oddly, in The Wind in the Willows this respect for animals does not seem to extend to horses, whose
value as characters is mostly overlooked. The quote is surprisingly similar to one from Black Beauty,
spoken by a human character, but which, like many moments in the book can be taken as Sewell directly addressing the reader:
God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves; but he
had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more
prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.6
This idea of animals being morally superior to humans is echoed in the words of Rudi, a young German
soldier fighting in World War One in Morpurgo’s War Horse: ‘Does he not personify all that men try and
never can be? I tell you, my friend, there’s divinity in a horse like this’.7 The sentimentality expressed by
Rudi towards horses is now part of modern British culture, and has its roots in many aspects of our relationship with these animals over recent centuries.8 It is understandable that since the decline of use as a
working animal horses have assumed a ‘glorified pet’ status in Britain - not only are they pets but they
have come to be symbolic of the past and of virtues such as nobility and grace. Certainly horses have more
mystery about them today than they did then, as they no longer play a major role in people’s everyday
lives. They are remembered as faithful creatures without whom cities could not have been built and wars
not waged, and have come to be seen (by Morpurgo at least) as almost equal with humans: ‘I am of the
view that we are on this planet together, that we’re all sentient creatures, that we’re all feeling creatures… It’s not them, and us, we are together.’9 Sewell, although writing over a century before Morpurgo,
shared a similar sentiment with regards to horses and treated them as friends, talking to them as if they
were indeed human.10 Morpurgo and Sewell’s equine narrators are fully fledged characters, granted all
the same narrative abilities as any human (or humanimal) equivalent. Morpurgo uses a horse narrator as
V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
R I V E R B A NK NE WS
PAGE 9
a literary tool to provide a ‘neutral observer’ of ‘universal suffering, not just of that war, but of all wars’.11
Horses are described by Morpurgo almost as an amaranthine observer of humans, as if every horse carries
with them the knowledge of all that has been observed by those before them. A similar idea is suggested
throughout Black Beauty, for example when Beauty’s mother says ‘I am an old horse, and have seen and
heard a great deal… but we are only horses, and don’t know’.12 The horses in both books are innocent victims of the cruelty of humans and their wars. Thus they seem above humans, for they are both wiser and
free from the guilt that burdens humanity.
The ‘old grey horse’
It is striking that a man such as Grahame, who seemed to hold animals in such high regard, has sidelined horses in his novel. In the chapter ‘The Open Road’ Grahame introduces caravanning, a pastime
which had been growing in popularity amongst the wealthier classes since William Gordon Stables
built the first commercial caravan in 1885. ‘The Wanderer’, as it was called, was a single berth caravan
weighing two tons and pulled by two horses. In The Wind in the Willows, three humanimals set out in a
caravan pulled by one ‘old grey horse’ who ‘frankly preferred the paddock’ and was likely not at all fit
enough to pull the heavy caravan. By today’s standards he would have been pulling more than what is
seen as acceptable, and it’s my belief that in reality he would have near enough collapsed of exhaustion
before the happy gang arrived ‘late in the evening’. It is no wonder he ‘took a deal of catching’ from the
paddock and only submitted to pulling the caravan with ‘extreme annoyance’ - he probably feared he’d
be dead by the end of the day.13 Of course these digressions from reality are permitted in The Wind in
the Willows, but it does go to demonstrate Grahame’s lack of detail in this equine character. As the
horses take on none of the fantastical qualities of the humanimals I feel they should be made to adhere
more to reality. Grahame and his humanimals’ attitudes to horses seem typical of those which Sewell
sought to challenge during her life - they are not outwardly cruel to their horse but almost ‘seemed to
think that a horse was something like a steam-engine, only smaller’.14 I think this ‘gives away’ Grahame’s conservatism because despite partaking in ‘Edwardian paganism’ and ‘communing’ with nature,
he still had an indifference for horses - it seems the overly romanticised light in which he saw the animals of the British countryside did not shine on its horses.
The barge-horse
The description of the washerwoman’s barge horse is more accurate than that of the old grey horse and
this is probably due to the fact that they were a more common sight in England during Grahame’s day.
Round a bend in the canal came plodding a solitary horse, stooping forward as if in
anxious thought. From rope traces attached to his collar stretched a long line, taut,
but dipping with his stride, the further part dripping pearly drops.15
He certainly includes finer details that suggest he was better acquainted with barge horses and canals
than caravans, right down to the fact that the traces were made from rope – which are rarely seen on
anything other than barge horses. The description - with the horse stooping forward and the line dipping with his stride - offers an accurate representation of this scene, considering the likely size of the
barge and horse. That the horse is ‘solitary’ is noteworthy as a barge horse would nearly always be led
or driven, but this is explained when the washer woman complains about her husband ‘shirking his
work… though luckily the horse has sense enough to attend to himself’. This is about as close as this
horse will get to having any human characteristics. Although he is also described as ‘stooping as if in
anxious thought’ the horse doesn’t do much thinking for himself and it seems that all the ‘sense’ he has
is to work, which he continues doing without direction. When Toad later tries to sell the horse to the
gipsy he describes him as ‘a blood horse, he is, partly; not the part you see, of course - another part. And
he’s been a prize Hackney, too, in his time...’ - this is typical Toad-fantasy, as the horse would have
been a Vanner type, or what is now known as a Gypsy Cob. These were the only type of horse used to
pull a barge like the washerwoman’s and the fact that ‘the barge-horse was not capable of any very sustained effort’ when galloping also points to this conclusion.16
The price paid for the horse by the gipsy is interesting when viewed in comparison to the prices paid for
Joey in War Horse. In The Wind in the Willows the barge-horse, an apparently well-trained working animal, is bought for six shillings and sixpence, which in itself is significantly more than the gipsy considered
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him to be worth. In War Horse, set only a few years after Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows, Joey is
sold as an unbroke, ‘gangling’ and ‘spindly-looking’ colt for three guineas (63/ or £3.3s), which is seen by
Albert’s father as ‘not bad at all’.17 He is later sold to the army for forty pounds and eventually bought
back for twenty-eight pounds, and my research supports that these are accurate figures.18 It then seems
surprising that the gipsy in The Wind in the Willows is reluctant to part with 6/6 for the barge-horse and
harness, unless within six years the price of horses had inflated a hundredfold, but this is perhaps another
example of Grahame’s lack of attention paid to his equine characters.
Class distinctions amongst horses
All three texts employ some kind of hierarchy amongst animals. In the conservative world of Grahame’s
riverbank this is unsurprising and forms an important part of the anthropomorphic animals’ lives. However their hierarchy extends both below and above them, incorporating the non-anthropomorphic animals
such as the fish that swim in the river, the pigs and cows that end up in their picnic hamper and the human characters. Into this the horses fit uncomfortably low down, perhaps highest of the nonanthropomorphics but still effectively a servant to the humanimals. Written from the more liberal perspectives of Sewell and Morpurgo, Black Beauty and War Horse present hierarchies which mirror the social class systems of the human world. There is a marked difference between the thoroughbred Joey and
draught horse Zoey, as Albert remarks ‘I know with all that thoroughbred in you, you may think it beneath you [to pull a plough], but that’s what you’re going to have to do’.19 Traditionally draught horses
would do menial farm work and thoroughbreds would be reserved for the upper classes to use for sport
and pleasure riding, or at the worst driving. Almost this exact same comparison is made between Beauty
(also a thoroughbred) and some horses in a nearby field: ‘The colts who live here are very good colts, but
they are cart-horse colts, and of course have not learned manners. You have been well-bred and wellborn...’.20 This description allows for the idea that although they try to be ‘very good colts’ they cannot help
being unmannered because they are restricted by the class into which they were born. Although still conservative by today’s standards it is not like the class system presented in The Wind in the Willows which
simply assumes that the riverbankers are inherently ‘good’ and therefore can take the horses as their servants. All three texts demonstrate that even in forward thinking literature hierarchy and social class is
still to some extents endorsed. In Black Beauty, Ginger represents the ‘defeated rebellious horse’21 whose
refusal to submit to the will of men is punished by her early death, whereas Beauty’s more accepting behaviour allows him to end his days happily – and thus the status quo is maintained. After the spectacularly effortless repression of the Wild Wooders’ uprising in The Wind in the Willows the rightful order of
things is restored, and the riverbankers once again return to the comfort of their own social classes: ‘After
this climax, the four animals continued to lead their lives, so rudely broken in upon by civil war, in great
joy and contentment, undisturbed by further risings or invasions.’
Fear of change
For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to
whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the
great haunting memory should spoil all the afterlives of little animals helped out of
difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.22
The idea that everything has its rightful place and that any change to this is somehow wrong or dangerous is a recurring theme in The Wind in the Willows. The horses in many ways support this idea as
they occupy the traditional role of work horses and provide a symbol of the submissive working class in
Grahame’s idyllic English countryside. The novel is dominated by male, middle-class values and the
humanimals remain ‘untroubled by money or guilt or girls’.23 Thus so, the animals feel no guilt in taking horses and using them to their own ends, because their hierarchy is one so rigid that these things
are possible. The horses in The Wind in the Willows represent a submissive working class, unlike the
Wild Wooders who challenge the power of the higher classes. They represent traditional values in the
quiet and peaceful England to which Grahame wished to escape when faced with the rapid industrialisation of the country. Man’s (or humanimal’s) power over beast is evident and although the old grey
horse ‘took a good deal of catching’24 he is ultimately put to work for the pleasure of the humanimals. In
Morpurgo’s novel this master servant relationship is described negatively as modern attitudes have
changed and now call for more respect for horses: ‘Corporal Samuel Perkins was a hard, gritty little
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PAGE 11
man, an ex-jockey whose only pleasure in life seemed to be the power he could exert over a horse. He
was universally feared by all troopers and horses alike.’25 In The Wind in the Willows this relationship
merely reinforces the traditional values that Grahame sought to maintain. Similarly, the humanimals
are described as accepting the ebb and flow of the changing seasons as they prepare to hibernate or migrate in winter, then reawake in spring. The caravan horse, however, has his life imposed upon him by
the humanimals – one moment he is happily free in his paddock and next he is forced to drag the other
characters across the countryside. However, both horses accept their work without much more than a
grumble, and the barge-horse even continues pulling the barge without any guidance from the washerwoman’s husband. Thus in this sense they represent the safe and nostalgic rural England of Grahame’s
imagination.
Forever in the background of The Wind in the Willows is the fear of change, the fear of threat to the
status quo. Grahame’s world is clearly a construct of his imagination and although based on England,
rarely acknowledges the real countryside - one of poor farmers and hard working animals who at the
time were struggling through an agricultural depression. While he mentions the ‘tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden-plot’26 he never mentions those who till and plough the fields or cultivate the garden plots
themselves. His is a countryside void of humans and the realities of life, a safe haven to which he could
escape. The horse-humaninal-human hierarchy is a continuation of the safety and familiarity of an enclosed social space which Grahame wished to inhabit. However, the rise of the motorcar during his lifetime was allowing people more and more to enter Grahame’s beloved private countryside. Also, the London suburbs were creeping ever outwards, as noted by Ratty in the first chapter: ‘The bank is so
crowded nowadays...’.27 Grahame felt alienated in the newly industrialised world and developed a hatred of ‘urban life’ and the ‘harm that the industrial revolution had done to English society’.28 In this
sense the horses represent a traditional, unsentimental and purely functional aspect of the rural past,
but they also in some ways express the fear of change felt by Grahame. Like the horses in War Horse
and Black Beauty they bear witness to riverbank society and provide a more rational and unbiased perspective of it than that of the privileged humanimals. Particularly the caravan-horse is unwilling to
work and has to be ‘caught’ from his paddock with some difficulty, and later is not content to be
‘frightfully left out’ of the humanimals’ merrymaking.29 He seeks to be included in the gang of the middle class riverbankers but ultimately remains excluded because he is of a lower social standing. It is
likely that he would sympathise with Jan Needle’s character Baxter Ferret in his parody novel Wild
Wood who claims ‘while we all work our fingers to the bone… [the humanimals] did very little that wasn’t directly connected with pleasure and leisure’.30 Whilst the horses in The Wind in the Willows undoubtedly contribute to the image of an idyllic and traditional England they are also the only ‘working
class’ characters with whom the humanimals have any meaningful contact. Through the grumblings
and dissatisfaction of the cart-horse Grahame does to some extent acknowledge the inequality between
the characters, but the subject is never really brought to the fore.
Adaptations
This is less the case in A.A. Milne’s stage adaptation entitled Toad of Toad Hall. In this Milne seems more
sympathetic to the caravan horse’s situation and has given him both a name (Alfred) and dialogue. Although he remains subservient to the humanimals he outdoes them in wit, and through the use of irony
and asides Milne creates a comedic character, so that together with Alfred we laugh at the pomposity and
ignorance of the humanimals. This, along with his continually being ignored by the others, is an effective
way to endear Alfred to the audience and creates a character for whom we both sympathise and empathise. It is a not-so-subtle comment on the class system that Alfred tries to appear more intelligent than
the others, demonstrated in his verbose description of the weather ‘my own view – since asked – of the climatic conditions, is that the present anti-cyclonic disturbance in the -’. He does not succeed in being included in the humanimals merriment but instead serves as a satirical observer of their absurd society.
Milne has exaggerated the horse-humanimal relationship touched upon in The Wind in the Willows in order to create comedy. This is created through the juxtaposition of his role as both a horse and a humanlike character – at times he appears more intelligent than the humanimals and at others he is treated
merely as a horse: Toad asks ‘are you going to lead him?’ and later Mole patronises him saying ‘(soothingly
to Alfred) There, there!... There, there!’. Two lines later and he seems to anthropomorphise back into a human, cursing the drivers of the motor-car as ‘road hogs’.31 Later he is completely overlooked during Toad’s
trial, and when he does attempt to enter he is led out immediately, as well as being referred to as ‘it’ by
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V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
the judge.32
The Disney version, which was made in America and takes great liberties with the plot, was made in
1949. The horse (here named Cyril) is made into a working class cockney cab-driver type character, which
serves to mitigate the class divide even further. In just forty years the horse has evolved from a submissive servant to a principal character and ‘loveable commoner’. He still retains some of the characteristics
of Grahame’s character33 - he is initially left out of the riverbankers’ conversation and coughs pointedly to
prompt Toad to introduce him - and even then Ratty and Mole are taken aback by his crassness and working class accent, prompting Cyril to comment ‘Your friends seem to be a bit on the stuffy side’.34 This interplay between the classes continues throughout, with Cyril playing the part of the ne’er-do-well who leads
Toad astray, or at the very least eggs him on. In this adaptation the caravan horse’s reincarnation as a
working-class cockney was built upon the pre-existing relationships in Grahame’s book and exaggerated
to fit with changing perceptions of English social class in America at the time.
Many of the non live-action adaptations (either cartoon or stop-motion) of The Wind in the Willows pay
little attention to the equine characters, or leave them out completely. They are mostly lazy representations with a lack of continuity in the size differences between the humanimals and horses. In the 1987
version by Rankin and Bass they have not bothered to invent a new horse and use the same drawings
for the cart-horse as for the barge-horse.35 In almost all adaptations, including the live-action versions
made in Britain in 1996 and 2006, the horses simply run off at the end of their scenes and are never
seen again, something which the writers have utilised as an easy alternative to wrap up their characters.36 Jones’ 1996 live-action horse is similar to Milne’s Alfred in his ironic interjections during the dialogue between the humanimals. For example when Mole asks Toad what the caravan is, the horse replies ‘very heavy’.37 The 2006 adaptation steers furthest from the original with regards to the horses,
changing the ‘old grey horse’ to a shiny black one and completely replacing the barge-horse with a lone
horse grazing next to a barge (who magically acquires a bridle and saddle between shots).38 It seems
that despite the numerous adaptations of The Wind in the Willows there have been few writers who
have seen potential in the equine characters, with the exception of Milne, Disney and Jones. It seems
unlikely that the creators of The Wind in the Willows adaptations would have thought particularly
deeply about the role of horses in the novel, or how to present them in their versions, particularly considering most (if not all) were produced for a child audience and so contain mostly superficial meaning.
Thus, most are void of the ‘second meaning’ that Grahame claimed his original version was lacking. In
many adaptations the horses never become more of a character than an inanimate object and, in comparison to these, Grahame’s horses are loaded with significance.
Every animal, by instinct, lives according to his nature. Thereby he lives wisely, and
betters the tradition of man-kind. No animal is ever tempted to deny his nature. No
animal knows how to tell a lie. Every animal is honest. Every animal is true - and is,
therefore, according to his nature, both beautiful and good.39
Returning to this quote, Grahame’s horses in The Wind in the Willows seem to have been written by a
different man. Clearly, his horses are not living by their nature. And although the same could be said
for the humanimals, their representation as animals serves a literary purpose, providing them with
qualities which human characters would lack: creating a gap between the human and animal characters ‘can be used to make moral points clearer by analogy, to say strong things with a degree of protection, and to provoke laughter and ridicule.’40 Whether he intended to or not, Grahame has imbued
meaning in his equine characters, giving away his own attitude towards the animals as well as reflecting the wider trends of the time. Horses were such an everyday fixture in Grahame’s life that he perhaps didn’t even think to consider them alongside the animals that inspired the riverbankers. Sewell’s
sentimentality towards horses was unusual at the time and fits better with Morpurgo’s modern perception of horses, now that they are no longer merely a tool for work. Nowadays horses are seen as powerful and noble beasts and would be much higher in any hypothetical animal hierarchy than a rat, a toad
and a mole. It goes to show the extent to which Grahame’s imaginary idyllic England was a distortion
of reality, and into this make-believe society he placed horses merely where he thought they should fit.
Jessica Delves
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PAGE 13
Notes:
1 Peter Green, Kenneth Grahame, 1859–1932: A Study of His Life, Work and Times (London: John Murray, 1959), 259, cited
in Peter Hunt, ‘Introduction’ to The Wind in the Willows 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xxviii.
2 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.
3 Ann Thwaite, A. A. Milne: His Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 225–6 cited in Peter Hunt, ‘Introduction’ to The Wind in
the Willows 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), x.
4 Green, Grahame, 239, cited in Hunt, Introduction, x.
5 Clayton Hamilton, Frater Ave Atque Vale: A Personal Appreciation of the Late Kenneth Grahame (New York: The Bookman,
1933), 74, cited in Jackie Horne and Donna White, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A Children's Classic at
100 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 7.
6 Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (London: Mind Melodies, 2010), 47.
7 Michael Morpurgo, War Horse (London: Egmont, 2010), 112.
8 Annie Gray, No horsemeat please, we're British (London: The Guardian, 2013) Available: http://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2013/feb/08/nohorsemeatpleasebritish. Last accessed 15th Nov 2013.
9 Video. Michael Morpurgo Month (Harper Collins’ Children’s Books, 2013) Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=extaqjWOlfE. Last accessed 6th Dec 2013.
10 Susan Chitty, The Woman Who Wrote Black Beauty (London: Tempus Publishing Ltd, 1971), 108.
11 Picturehouse Cinema, Warhorse Q&A.
12 Sewell, Black Beauty, 6.
13 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 21.
14 Sewell, Black Beauty, 144.
15 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 107.
16 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 109-113.
17 Morpurgo, War Horse, 1.
18 John Howells, Horses in the Boer War, (National Boer War Memorial Association Inc, 2011) Available at: http://
www.bwm.org.au/site/Horses.asp last accessed 7th Dec 2013.
19 Morpurgo, War Horse, 16.
20 Sewell, Black Beauty, 1.
21 Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786-1914 (Surrey: Ashgate Pub Co, 2006), 79.
22 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 77.
23 Fred Inglis, The Promise of Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 122, cited in Catherine Beck, The
Enchanted Garden: A changing image in children's literature (Nottingham, 2002), 112.
24 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 21.
25 Morpurgo, War Horse, 36.
26 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 47.
27 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 9.
28 Carpenter, Secret Gardens, 121, cited in Beck, The Enchanted Garden, 87.
29 Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 21-22.
30 Jan Needle, Wild Wood (London: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1982), 62.
31 A.A. Milne, Toad of Toad Hall (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 31-34.
32 Milne, Toad of Toad Hall, 92.
33 Joel Bocko, The Wind in the Willows Toad Hall (2010) Available: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.it/2010/10/
windinwillowstoadhall.html. Last accessed 19th Nov 13.
34 Walt Disney, motion picture, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (Walt Disney Productions, 1949).
35 Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass, motion picture, The Wind in the Willows (American Broadcasting Company, 1987).
36 Jake Eberts and John Goldstone, motion picture, The Wind in the Willows (Pathé, 1996) and Justin ThomsonGlover and
Patrick Irwin, motion picture, The Wind in the Willows (BBC, 2006).
37 Eberts and Goldstone, The Wind in the Willows.
38 Thomson-Glover and Irwin, The Wind in the Willows.
39 Hamilton, Frater Ave Atque Vale, 74, cited in Horne and White, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, 7.
40 David Whitney, John Foster, and Suzanne Rahn, “Animals in Fiction,” in The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books, ed.
Victor Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32.
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V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
A Pre-Toad of Toad Hall Dramatisation of Kenneth
Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows
I remember that throughout
my childhood, my father would
often mention the above performance. Still only a slip of a
lad of about ten, it had obviously made a deep impression
on him. "It was in 1916," he
said. This date was seared
upon my father's memory. Understandably, for it was also
the year his father had enlisted
into The Royal Flying Corps,
surviving being gassed on the
Western Front at Ypres. And as
the ghastly carnage raged in
France, so apparently had The
Wind in The Willows been
staged in Walton-on-the-Hill’s
drill hall, "For the troops," my
father said.
As the universally accepted
dramatization of The Wind in
The Willows - Toad of Toad
Hall by A. A. Milne - was not
written until 1921 (A. A Milne His Life by Ann Thwaite) how
had this 1916 performance
come about?
Well. What if you're a writer
but with a writer's block? Peter
Green reports in his Kenneth
Grahame biography (Beyond
the Wild Wood) that: "He could
no longer find the heart to
write; the main spring of his
creative mind had failed." This
is borne out by Grahame's Bibliography which states: Early
1916: Preface to The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, immediately followed by
"Ideals" (lecture) The Fortnightly Review, December
1922. Sadly, nothing between
those two dates.
This being the case, would it
not be the most natural thing
in the world to turn to a close
relative, a cousin living in the
next county - Surrey - to your
beloved Berkshire, a cousin close
enough to be best man at your
wedding, and who would, eventually, compose a loving tribute
over your grave, but, most significantly of all, a cousin also a
writer to boot, the author of the
highly successful novel The Prisoner of Zenda? Then would it not
also be natural for this cousin,
called Anthony Hope, probably
already a fan of The Wind in The
Willows, to suggest to the depressed author that he do something positive towards the war
effort, like putting on a dramatised version of his delightful
book for the troops, in the drill
hall which was a couple of hundred yards down Dean's Lane
from where he, Hope, and his
wife lived at Heath Farm? Thus
inspiring Kenneth, if he hadn't
already done so, to write a scenario with a view, perhaps, of
getting it performed in the West
End after the war, as well as an
immediate try-out run on some
of Britain's army personnel.
Whatever the kick-start had
been to produce this performance, there is no doubting that
the end result had enthralled
my father - also the troops, he
said. They especially enjoyed
Mole, performed even then, my
father informed me, by the legendary Richard Goolden. (Where
had Hope or Grahame found
him?) My father also said that
some of the roles were taken on
by Grahame and Hope themselves. Did Grahame, an exceedingly handsome great bear of a
man, play the part of Badger?
Chris Mallet writes, in his authorized life of Hope: “that in
1915 he was threatened with a
nervous breakdown, his zest for
working not returning until
1919.” Was producing and then
acting in a performance of The
Wind in the Willows a kind of
therapeutic exercise for the two
cousins? Mallet also goes on to
describe how Hope longed to be
a professional actor after he left
Marlborough.
But it wouldn't be by special invite from these two impromptu
thespians that my father was
privileged to enjoy their unique
production. This had more to do
with Hope's wife, Lady Hawkins. "She came a lot to Lovelands for afternoon tea," my father said. He meant of course
with his father's employers,
Lovelands. An estate at the
junction of Heath Drive and
Chequers Lane, right at the
other end of the village from
Heath Farm and the drill hall,
was where his father was Head
Gardener (The accommodation,
which came with the job - a job
to which his father would return
after the war - was a sizeable
section in a north-east wing of
the main house.)
Come the end of hostilities, Kenneth Grahame's literary agent,
Curtis Brown, "had tried to interest theatre managers in The
Wind in The Willows." (Peter
Green's Beyond the Wild Wood).
But it seems questionable and
non-constructive comments were
currently rife about the difficulties of transposing the book to
the stage. For example: A A.
Milne judged that: "Kenneth
Grahame did not greatly trouble
to keep all his scenes to scale. It
was as if a rabbit were to be your
guest on Monday evening and to
become by Tuesday morning a
miniature beast, scuttling over
the toe of your boot." (A.A. Milne
- His Life by Ann Thwaite.) An
odd remark indeed considering
the prospective audience would
V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
be totally familiar with the fanciful creations of pantomime
and ballet – especially pantomime. It is amazing that it wasn't suggested that the cast for
The Wind in the Willows should
speak only in grunts, howls and
squeaks and walk about on all
fours.
It was when Grahame's literary
agent had failed to interest theatrical managers, that A. A.
Milne, with his influential clout
at the time as a playwright,
had obviously been asked to
adapt the book. And just as, for
instance the illustrator John
Tenniel had drawn heavily on
Lewis Carroll's own enchanting
designs for his Alice in Wonderland fantasy, could not Milne
have drawn on Grahame's scenario as well as the book for his
dramatization Toad of Toad
Hall? And just as Carroll had
disliked Tenniel’s drawings –
polished style not withstanding, (a fact I remember from a
lecture on book illustration I'd
once attended) surely Grahame's initial private reaction
to Toad of Toad Hall must
have been one of disappointment especially as Milne himself admitted: "I have left out
the best parts of the
book." (Beyond the Wild Wood
by Peter Green.) And surely
Grahame would have agreed
with Peter Green when he went
on to write - also in Beyond the
Wild Wood: "I wish Milne's version had not been so intolerably
mawkish."
Written in 1921 it may have
been, but Toad of Toad Hall was
sat on until 1930, when there
was a West End performance
just two years before Grahame's
death. After so long (having written The Wind in The Willows
around 1908) he must have been
chuffed that it had reached the
Boards at all, even if there might
have existed, somewhere out
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there, a scenario of his own that
he preferred.
On one of her afternoon-tea visits to Lovelands, Lady Hawkins
came armed with a box of nolonger-needed toys - discarded
presumably by her eldest son.
Apparently they were for my
father's younger brother, John,
“It was when our mother was
hospitalized, having a serious
operation," John himself explained to my sister and me
later, when we visited him in
Mytchett, Surrey. "The box was
full of good things," John went
on,"but the most exciting of all
was finding, right at the bottom,
this copy of The Wind in The
Willows”. He flicked open the
said book. It was signed - by the
author no less.
But some time before that intriguing visit to our uncle's, the
late sixties in fact, the newspaper critics were assuring the
great British public that it was
definitely their last chance to
see Richard Goolden in the role
he'd made his very own over the
preceding decades. Despite his
advanced years, they said, he’d
been persuaded to give a final
performance as Mole, in what
was acclaimed as a spectacular
production of Toad of Toad Hall
I phoned my husband working
in Central London. I told him
how much it would amuse me to
take our daughter (age 6) to see
this momentous event and why.
He came home that night with a
couple of matinee stall tickets
for the following week.
On opening the programme I
saw that my old school friend
Peter, had designed the sets.
One does not expect to see the
set designer at a performance,
especially two or three weeks
into the run. But there he was,
looking just the same, standing
in the aisle a few rows down. I
went and spoke to him. He did
PAGE 15
not recognise me. I suppose it
was a heck of a time since we'd
lost contact after college. Toad
was a Christmas treat for his
son, Matthew, he said. All his
young classmates as well I could
see from their prep school uniforms, a whole row of them by
which Peter was standing.
We stood and gossiped during
the short time before the curtain-up. There was so much to
catch up after such a long time.
Subsequently I would regret not
grabbing the opportunity, feeling stupid that I hadn't asked
Peter to introduce me to Richard, I could have then asked
whether he had, actually, been
that 1916 mole, or had it perhaps been another actor with a
similar sound-alike distinctive
voice, causing my father to come
to the wrong conclusion, in the
forties, when he and my siblings
and I had heard him, Richard
Goolden, on the wireless?
He would have loved to have
talked to you Peter said, when I
later told him of my regret. I
could kick myself: what a missed
opportunity!
Elizabeth Brock
Footnote:
The suggestion that a version of
The Wind in the Willows was
written and produced for the
stage in 1916 is interesting and
persuasive. However, though I
cannot categorically dispute its
existence, my own opinion based
upon the facts presented make it
unlikely.
In the third paragraph the author talks about Grahame’s
“writers block” as if it were
PAGE 16
something new. We know that
writing was always an effort for
Grahame. Indeed even in 1898
he wrote “I don’t have any stories at present, wish to goodness I had.”
In the next paragraph the author writes about Grahame’s
supposed depressed state as a
consequence of this “writers
block”. There is no evidence to
suggest that this was so; Grahame chose not to write and
there was no known reason for
him to be depressed in 1916.
In a later paragraph, the author states that Mole, in the
supposed 1916 production, was
played by Richard Goolden.
Goolden was only 21 at the
time and was on active service
in the Royal Medical Corp in
France. Though a member of
the Oxford Literary Society after the war, he did not take up
R I V E R B A NK NE WS
V O LU M E 6 , I S S U E 1
acting professionally until 1924,
and when auditioning for a part
in the 1930 London production
of Toad of Toad Hall tried for
roles as Badger, Ratty and Mole.
Perhaps even more surprising is
the statement that both Kenneth Grahame and Anthony
Hope had roles in the 1916 production. With their fame I am
surprised that there is no reference anywhere at any time to
this.
There seems to be alternative
evidence to the statement by
Milne, that he left out the best
parts of the book, and that Grahame was disappointed with the
play. In fact, Grahame reacted
quite favourably to Milne’s play,
and Milne wrote “the play has
enough of Grahame to appease
his many admirers and just
enough of me to justify my name
on the title page.”
The play - Toad of Toad Hall was first performed at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1929 and
not in London in 1930. Similarly, Goolden reprised the role
of Mole until 1977, and thus his
final appearance was not in the
late 1960’s.
Having said all of this, the article makes for fascinating reading. Even if my arguments do
make it improbable that a production of The Wind in the Willows took place quite as presented, it is not unreasonable
that an amateur enthusiast may
have put on a production simply
for soldiers’ entertainment.
Roger A. Oakes
The committee and roles in the Kenneth Grahame Society,
for the current society year, are:
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Ruth Webb - Treasurer
Dr. Roger A. Oakes - Secretary and Newsletter Editor
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KENNETH GRAHAME SOCIETY
(General Mailing Address)
37 Ashtree Hill
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Northern Ireland
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E-mail: [email protected]
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