Heather Tanner
Encyclopedia
Heather Tanner née Heather Muriel Spackman, was a writer and campaigner on issues relating to peace, the environment and social justice. She worked in close collaboration with her husband, Robin Tanner
, at their home in Kington Langley
, Wiltshire
.
, Wiltshire
on 14 July 1903. Her parents were Daisy Goold (1865–1945) and Herbert Spackman (1864–1949), who had three daughters, Sylvia, Heather and Faith (Olive). Herbert Spackman, an accomplished musician and photographer, ran a grocery and drapery store in Corsham High Street. Heather Tanner and her younger sister, Faith Sharp, edited an account of their father’s early life, A Corsham Boyhood: The Diary of Herbert Spackman 1877-1891.
Heather Tanner attended Chippenham Grammar School, where she met her future husband, the etcher and teacher Robin Tanner
. In his autobiography, Double Harness, Robin recounts how, as school prefects he and Heather would smuggle secret messages to each other in the absentee registers for which they were responsible as their relationship blossomed in the early 1920s. Heather achieved a First Class degree at King's College London
, which she left in 1929 to become an English teacher at The Duchess School for Girls, Alnwick Castle
, Northumberland. After a brief geographical separation while Robin studied at Goldsmiths College
, London, Heather and Robin married at Corsham Church, 4 April 1931. Heather wore a dress that Robin had designed at the wedding.
Heather and Robin Tanner moved to Kington Langley
, Wiltshire, after their wedding, the start of a lifelong creative collaboration and residence. In Double Harness, Robin Tanner writes that Heather’s uncle, the architect Vivian Goold, ‘generously offered as a wedding gift to design a house for us and supervise its building if we could find a piece of land we liked’. The result was Old Chapel Field, completed in 1931. The house, which is still standing in the village, is a distinctive blend of arts and crafts and modernist styles, both charming and functional. Inspired by Charles Francis Annesley Voysey, Goold came to regard the house as the finest that he had designed. Heather and Robin had great affection for the ‘Voyseyish’ Old Chapel Field where they were to live for the rest of their lives. The Tanners were thrilled to discover that Francis Kilvert
’s great-grandfather was buried in the graveyard of the Chapel from which their home took its name Old Chapel Field and both Heather and Robin actively supported the Kilvert Society.
Not all was idyllic for the Tanners however. In the of spring 1939 the Tanners took in a young Jewish refugee from Germany called Dietrich Hanff (1920-1992). Shortly after the outbreak of WWII, Hanff was interned and held as an enemy alien at Bury
, Lancashire. Heather campaigned against what she considered his unfair treatment in the press and eventually she was allowed to visit him after his transfer to the Isle of Man
. It was later learned that his parents and brother were deported from their native Stettin (then Germany) to Piaski
, Poland and that the Germans murdered them there in gas chambers. After Hanff finally gained his freedom as the Tanners’ adopted son, ‘Dieti’ was to closely share their interests, to become a teacher and university lecturer and to live at Old Chapel Field for the rest of his life.
Also during the Second World War, Heather suffered serious illness and underwent a hysterectomy in Chippenham Cottage Hospital where she remained from the end of 1940 until March 1941.
After the War Heather worked as an examiner in English for the University of Cambridge and later at the University of London.
Heather Tanner’s moral and spiritual outlook as a Quaker, shared with Robin, was to deeply affect her outlook and support for a range of environmental and social causes. She was an active member of the Chippenham branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(visiting the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp
and attending many Aldermaston marches) and supporter of Friends of the Earth
and Oxfam
.
During the 1980s BBC television producer Margaret Benton made a film called Look Stranger: A Vision of Wiltshire which was released in 1987. This documented and celebrated Heather, Robin and Dieti’s home life, creativity, beliefs and love of the Wiltshire countryside.
Outliving both her husband and Dietrich Hanff, Heather Tanner died at Kington St Michael
on 23 June 1993.
(named after the Borel family who held the estate and manor in Norman times). First published in 1939, the book has been the most widely admired and frequently reprinted fruit of the couple’s creative collaboration. Heather Tanner’s text and Robin Tanner’s etchings and pen drawings distil all that is picturesque in the rural landscape of North-West Wiltshire. Featuring history, culture, crafts and wildlife, Wiltshire Village embraces much of the Tanners’ aesthetic and ethical creed as the celebration of traditional rural crafts and community is underpinned by a rejection of militarism, blood sports and the conservative outlook of feudal England; a creed in keeping with that of their hero William Morris
.
’s 37-volume English Botany (1790-1814) as one of their most treasured possessions. Woodland Plants is an account of local plants’ uses, lore and presence in literature. Robin Tanner was keen to produce the detailed drawings from sketches made in situ, mostly within a few miles of their home such as in the Weavern Valley and at Bird's Marsh and Thickwood. In an epilogue, Heather reflects upon the way that the forty years gestation of the book enabled them to observe and reflect upon the environmental damage that took place during the intervening period, but also, more positively, the emergence of ecological awareness.
.
Robin Tanner
Robin Tanner was an English artist, etcher and printmaker. He followed in the visionary tradition of Samuel Palmer and English neo-romanticism. He lived in London, at Kington Langley, in Wiltshire, and Bath.-Biography:...
, at their home in Kington Langley
Kington Langley
Kington Langley is a village and civil parish about north of Chippenham in Wiltshire, England.-Geography:The parish covers about . The geology is mostly of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. It is on a high water table and the soil is composed of sand with a sub-soil of Oxford Clay. The village...
, Wiltshire
Wiltshire
Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...
.
Biography
Heather Tanner was born as Heather Spackman at ‘Rose Cottage’, Priory Street, CorshamCorsham
Corsham is a historic market town and civil parish in north west Wiltshire, England. It is at the south western extreme of the Cotswolds, just off the A4 which was formerly the main turnpike road from London to Bristol, between Bath and Chippenham ....
, Wiltshire
Wiltshire
Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...
on 14 July 1903. Her parents were Daisy Goold (1865–1945) and Herbert Spackman (1864–1949), who had three daughters, Sylvia, Heather and Faith (Olive). Herbert Spackman, an accomplished musician and photographer, ran a grocery and drapery store in Corsham High Street. Heather Tanner and her younger sister, Faith Sharp, edited an account of their father’s early life, A Corsham Boyhood: The Diary of Herbert Spackman 1877-1891.
Heather Tanner attended Chippenham Grammar School, where she met her future husband, the etcher and teacher Robin Tanner
Robin Tanner
Robin Tanner was an English artist, etcher and printmaker. He followed in the visionary tradition of Samuel Palmer and English neo-romanticism. He lived in London, at Kington Langley, in Wiltshire, and Bath.-Biography:...
. In his autobiography, Double Harness, Robin recounts how, as school prefects he and Heather would smuggle secret messages to each other in the absentee registers for which they were responsible as their relationship blossomed in the early 1920s. Heather achieved a First Class degree at King's College London
King's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...
, which she left in 1929 to become an English teacher at The Duchess School for Girls, Alnwick Castle
Alnwick Castle
Alnwick Castle is a castle and stately home in the town of the same name in the English county of Northumberland. It is the residence of the Duke of Northumberland, built following the Norman conquest, and renovated and remodelled a number of times. It is a Grade I listed building.-History:Alnwick...
, Northumberland. After a brief geographical separation while Robin studied at Goldsmiths College
Goldsmiths College
Goldsmiths, University of London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom which specialises in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It was founded in 1891 as Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute...
, London, Heather and Robin married at Corsham Church, 4 April 1931. Heather wore a dress that Robin had designed at the wedding.
Heather and Robin Tanner moved to Kington Langley
Kington Langley
Kington Langley is a village and civil parish about north of Chippenham in Wiltshire, England.-Geography:The parish covers about . The geology is mostly of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. It is on a high water table and the soil is composed of sand with a sub-soil of Oxford Clay. The village...
, Wiltshire, after their wedding, the start of a lifelong creative collaboration and residence. In Double Harness, Robin Tanner writes that Heather’s uncle, the architect Vivian Goold, ‘generously offered as a wedding gift to design a house for us and supervise its building if we could find a piece of land we liked’. The result was Old Chapel Field, completed in 1931. The house, which is still standing in the village, is a distinctive blend of arts and crafts and modernist styles, both charming and functional. Inspired by Charles Francis Annesley Voysey, Goold came to regard the house as the finest that he had designed. Heather and Robin had great affection for the ‘Voyseyish’ Old Chapel Field where they were to live for the rest of their lives. The Tanners were thrilled to discover that Francis Kilvert
Francis Kilvert
Robert Francis Kilvert , always known as Francis, or Frank, was born at The Rectory, Hardenhuish Lane, near Chippenham, Wiltshire, to the Rev. Robert Kilvert, Rector of Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, and Thermuthis, daughter of Walter Coleman and Thermuthis Ashe...
’s great-grandfather was buried in the graveyard of the Chapel from which their home took its name Old Chapel Field and both Heather and Robin actively supported the Kilvert Society.
Not all was idyllic for the Tanners however. In the of spring 1939 the Tanners took in a young Jewish refugee from Germany called Dietrich Hanff (1920-1992). Shortly after the outbreak of WWII, Hanff was interned and held as an enemy alien at Bury
Bury
Bury is a town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on the River Irwell, east of Bolton, west-southwest of Rochdale, and north-northwest of the city of Manchester...
, Lancashire. Heather campaigned against what she considered his unfair treatment in the press and eventually she was allowed to visit him after his transfer to the Isle of Man
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
. It was later learned that his parents and brother were deported from their native Stettin (then Germany) to Piaski
Piaski
Piaski , formerly Piaski Luterskie, is a town in Poland at the Giełczew river. The town's population is about 2,660 . Administratively it belongs to Powiat of Świdnik of the Lublin Voivodeship. It lies 16 km Southeast of Świdnik.- History :...
, Poland and that the Germans murdered them there in gas chambers. After Hanff finally gained his freedom as the Tanners’ adopted son, ‘Dieti’ was to closely share their interests, to become a teacher and university lecturer and to live at Old Chapel Field for the rest of his life.
Also during the Second World War, Heather suffered serious illness and underwent a hysterectomy in Chippenham Cottage Hospital where she remained from the end of 1940 until March 1941.
After the War Heather worked as an examiner in English for the University of Cambridge and later at the University of London.
Heather Tanner’s moral and spiritual outlook as a Quaker, shared with Robin, was to deeply affect her outlook and support for a range of environmental and social causes. She was an active member of the Chippenham branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is an anti-nuclear organisation that advocates unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom, international nuclear disarmament and tighter international arms regulation through agreements such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty...
(visiting the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp
Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp
Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was a peace camp established to protest at nuclear weapons being sited at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. The camp began in September 1981 after a Welsh group, Women for Life on Earth, arrived at Greenham to protest against the decision of the British...
and attending many Aldermaston marches) and supporter of Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth International is an international network of environmental organizations in 76 countries.FOEI is assisted by a small secretariat which provides support for the network and its agreed major campaigns...
and Oxfam
Oxfam
Oxfam is an international confederation of 15 organizations working in 98 countries worldwide to find lasting solutions to poverty and related injustice around the world. In all Oxfam’s actions, the ultimate goal is to enable people to exercise their rights and manage their own lives...
.
During the 1980s BBC television producer Margaret Benton made a film called Look Stranger: A Vision of Wiltshire which was released in 1987. This documented and celebrated Heather, Robin and Dieti’s home life, creativity, beliefs and love of the Wiltshire countryside.
Outliving both her husband and Dietrich Hanff, Heather Tanner died at Kington St Michael
Kington St Michael
Kington St Michael is a village and civil parish about north of Chippenham in Wiltshire.-Location:Kington St Michael is about south of junction 17 of the M4 motorway and Chippenham and about west of the A350....
on 23 June 1993.
Works
The Tanners created four distinctive books, that Robin illustrated and for which Heather provided the text, collaborating so closely together that Robin wrote that ‘they were essentially the production of two minds working in such close unison that it would be impossible to separate them.’Wiltshire Village
Wiltshire Village is a thinly disguised description of the village life and countryside surrounding the Tanners’ home. The subject of the book Kington Borel takes its name from a compound of their own village, Kington Langley, and the neighbouring parish of Langley BurrellLangley Burrell
Langley Burrell is a village just north of Chippenham, Wiltshire. It is notable in particular as one of the termini of Maud Heath's Causeway and, also for its Early English and Perpendicular church. The Georgian parsonage was for many years the home of the Rev...
(named after the Borel family who held the estate and manor in Norman times). First published in 1939, the book has been the most widely admired and frequently reprinted fruit of the couple’s creative collaboration. Heather Tanner’s text and Robin Tanner’s etchings and pen drawings distil all that is picturesque in the rural landscape of North-West Wiltshire. Featuring history, culture, crafts and wildlife, Wiltshire Village embraces much of the Tanners’ aesthetic and ethical creed as the celebration of traditional rural crafts and community is underpinned by a rejection of militarism, blood sports and the conservative outlook of feudal England; a creed in keeping with that of their hero William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
.
Woodland Plants
In many ways a companion volume for Wiltshire Village, the Tanners similarly started to collate the materials for Woodland Plants during the early years of the Second World War, although the completed project was not published until 1981. It has been suggested that the manuscript was lost under the Tanners’ bed for 17 years. The Tanners were keen amateur botanists and counted their original copy of James SowerbyJames Sowerby
James Sowerby was an English naturalist and illustrator. Contributions to published works, such as A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland or English Botany, include his detailed and appealing plates...
’s 37-volume English Botany (1790-1814) as one of their most treasured possessions. Woodland Plants is an account of local plants’ uses, lore and presence in literature. Robin Tanner was keen to produce the detailed drawings from sketches made in situ, mostly within a few miles of their home such as in the Weavern Valley and at Bird's Marsh and Thickwood. In an epilogue, Heather reflects upon the way that the forty years gestation of the book enabled them to observe and reflect upon the environmental damage that took place during the intervening period, but also, more positively, the emergence of ecological awareness.
A Country Alphabet
The preface to A Country Alphabet indicates that this work was a collaborative project shared between Heather who wrote the text and Robin who designed the letters. ‘As a drawing was finished Heather would contemplate it as she went about the daily chores, now and then scribbling an idea on the nearest piece of paper.’ Their friends the publishers Frances and Nicolas MacDowall at Old Stile Press contributed creatively towards the feel of the book through their experimentation and selection of typefaces, paper and pagination when it was first published as a limited hand-printed edition in 1984. This resulted in an extremely tactile volume both in its content with its sensory celebration of physical things and in A Country Alphabet’s feel and physical appearance as an artefact in its own right. Heather’s characteristic text features her playful love of language and a heady mix of literature and lore.A Country Book of Days
Reawakens the pre-Victorian genre of the book of days with a celebration of rural life and rites through the cycle of the year. Heather Tanner’s twenty-five entries, set out as a commonplace book, are accompanied by Robin Tanner’s woodcuts. Like A Country Alphabet, to which it is in some ways a companion volume, A Country Books of Days was originally published as a hand-printed limited edition in 1986, thus owing much not only to the style of William Morris but also to the early craft of book production exemplified by William BlakeWilliam Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
.