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The conventional account of Beatrix Potter's life divides into two halves: the author in London who wrote the Peter Rabbit books, and the farmer in the Lake District who bought land and bred Herdwick sheep. The person who made the second half possible — who enabled the transition from one life to the other — is frequently overlooked.
William Heelis was a solicitor in Hawkshead. He handled the conveyancing for Beatrix Potter's first farm purchase in 1905 and continued to manage her increasingly complex land dealings for the next eight years. In October 1913, after a prolonged courtship conducted largely by letter and fiercely opposed by her parents, Beatrix Potter married William Heelis at St Mary Abbots church in London. She was 47.
William Heelis was born in 1871 in Appleby, Westmorland, into a family with deep roots in the Lake District. He trained as a solicitor and practised in Hawkshead — a small market town in the Lake District between Windermere and Coniston — for most of his working life. He was quiet, steady, capable and deeply rooted in the community and landscape that Beatrix Potter had adopted.
He was also a good dancer, a talented fly fisherman and, according to those who knew him, entirely at ease in the rural Lake District society that Beatrix Potter increasingly preferred to the London world of her childhood. He was, in other words, the opposite of Norman Warne — Beatrix's first fiancé, who had died of leukaemia in 1905, six weeks after their engagement.
The opposition of Beatrix Potter's parents to the marriage was substantial and prolonged. Rupert and Helen Potter had specific ideas about appropriate matches for their daughter, and a Westmorland solicitor did not meet their requirements. They eventually conceded. The wedding took place in London, followed by a honeymoon in the Lake District.
Beatrix Potter became Mrs William Heelis on 15 October 1913. She did not, at this point, stop using the name Beatrix Potter professionally — the books and their associated correspondence continued under that name — but she increasingly identified herself as Mrs Heelis in Hawkshead, and she preferred it.
After her marriage, Beatrix largely stopped writing and illustrating the children's books that had made her famous. She had been finding it increasingly difficult to sustain the imaginative effort required — she was not writing for children, she later said, because she knew any children; she was writing for one particular child, Noel Moore (to whom the original Peter Rabbit letter had been addressed), and that relationship had moved on.
She threw herself instead into farming. The Hill Top farm, the surrounding farms she continued to purchase, the Herdwick sheep breeding programme, the work of conservation and land management — these became her main occupation. William handled the legal and business aspects; Beatrix handled the farming. They were a practical partnership as well as a personal one.
William Heelis died in 1945, two years after Beatrix. His own grave is in Hawkshead churchyard.
The market town of Hawkshead, where William Heelis had his practice, is one of the most complete medieval market towns in the Lake District. The main square, the narrow lanes, the whitewashed buildings and the church above the town are essentially unchanged from the period when William Wordsworth attended the grammar school here in the 1780s.
William Heelis's office in Hawkshead is now a National Trust exhibition space — Tabitha Twitchit's Bookshop — displaying rotating selections from her original artwork. It is one of the finest collections of her original book illustrations available for public viewing.
Hawkshead and the William Heelis story are part of the route on our Beatrix Potter Hidden Country and Beatrix Potter Hill Top & Windermere Cruise tours.
Part of our complete guide to Beatrix Potter in the Lake District.