An Exceptional Woman
One winter evening, probably in 1990, I was evening-class lecturing on local history in Chippenham Library and realised that in my audience (I never thought of them as students) was a small, frail, elderly, bird-like lady. I was surprised and flattered, as I knew who she was - author, teacher, Quaker, pacifist, Greenham Common protester, half of a celebrated creative partnership. She was Heather Tanner, and she is still very much a presence in my memory, and in the countryside around Chippenham, although she died in 1993, thirty years ago. Not long previously I had written to ask permission to publish a piece of her writing in an anthology, and received a gracious reply in her calligraphic handwriting on a card of one of her husband Robin’s etchings. I still have it somewhere. Then in about 2005 I was approached by a friend of Heather’s, art educator Rosemary Devonald, who was compiling a collection of her shorter writings, and we published the best of them in a book, An Exceptional Woman, the following year.
Heather Tanner
Heather Spackman and Robin Tanner fell in love when pupils at Chippenham Grammar School, kept up their romance, and eventuallly married more than a decade later, in 1931. An architect uncle built them a house at Kington Langley, in Arts and Crafts style, as a wedding present (!) and they spent the rest of their lives there, from 1939 with a Jewish German refugee, Dietrich Hanff, whom they rescued, aged 18, from the extermination meted out on his family. Robin was an artist, an etcher of exquisite scenes of the buildings, plants and landscapes of his Wiltshire surroundings. He was also a noted educationalist, for decades a schools inspector. Heather was a tireless campaigner for the countryside and for peace, and a gifted writer, who complemented Robin’s etchings and drawings with incomparable prose. I snapped up recently a pristine original copy of their first book, Wiltshire Village, which was published in 1939 - it is a joy to handle and dip into. (And why she came to my evening class I have no idea - there was nothing I could teach her, and everything she could teach me!) And then in 1981, after more than forty years’ gestation, was published Woodland Plants, their labour of love - for the countryside, but also for each other, a love which seemed to remain as fresh over seven decades as when it began at school.
Heather Tanner etching
Heather and Robin had a view of a world of beauty and harmony, tinged with the realism that it so often was not like that, but also the hope that it could and should be, for everyone. When the news these days is filled with violence, greed, environmental disaster and corrupt politicians, it is a solace to turn to the Tanners’ books and relive their countryside through their eyes. Or if you do not have the books, try the television programme made about them, called ‘Vision of Wiltshire’ and now on YouTube. It will change your outlook on life.
John Chandler ~ 19 Mar 23