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

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Kenneth Grahame’s Cornwall

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Representation of Horses in ‘The Wind in the Willows’

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Early Dramatisation of ‘The Wind in the Willows’

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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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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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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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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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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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