Alison Uttley (1884-1976) was the author of over 100 childrens’ books and is perhaps best known for her series featuring Little Grey Rabbit, Sam Pig and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog.
But she is also remembered for a pioneering time-shifting novel for older children, A Traveller in Time, which was about the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, thus perhaps forging an unlikely historical link with a future Derbyshire literary giant, Hilary Mantel.
Alice Jane Taylor was born at Castle Top Farm, Cromford, and brought up in a rural environment which would help shape much of later literary work. She was educated at the Lea School in Holloway, an area famous for another Derbyshire great in Florence Nightingale, and later at Lady Manners School, Bakewell, which was then a grammar school. It was here that she developed a love of science and an aptitude for it.
This led to a scholarship to Manchester University to read physics, where she founded a lifetime friendship with Prof Samuel Alexander, an Australian-born philosopher who later became the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college.
In 1906, Uttley became only the second woman ever to become an honours graduate (in physics) of the university, and in 1970, the university awarded Uttley an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in recognition of her literary work. In 2021, 45 years after her death, the university named one of its halls of residence Uttley House in her honour.
Paradoxically, although she believed in fairies and time travel, her training was as a scientist.
While at university, she confided to her diary: ‘I lay awake thinking of scientific work, the urge and thrill of it. The bliss when we calculated the number of atoms in space … yet I might have found it sterile, and my life is human now.’
After leaving university, Uttley trained as a teacher in Cambridge and in 1908 took up a post as a physics teacher at Fulham Secondary School for Girls in West London.
By 1910, she was living at The Old Vicarage in Knutsford, Cheshire, and the following year she married James Arthur Uttley.
The couple produced their only child, John Corin Taylor, in 1914, who later married and became a teacher. Sadly, James Uttley was prone to depression and committed suicide by drowning in the River Mersey in 1930.
From 1924 to 1938, Uttley lived at Downs House, Bowdon, Cheshire, which now has a blue plaque commemorating her residence.
In 1938 she moved to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, where another highly successful children’s author, Enid Blyton was a neighbour.
Whilst it would be natural to conclude that both Uttley and Blyton would share plenty in common, there would certainly be no blossoming friendship.
In fact, Uttley took an immediate dislike to her illustrious neighbour, describing her as ‘The Bylton’ and ‘a boastful, vulgar, curled woman.’
There would be only one recorded meeting between the pair, despite their close proximity to each other at this time.
Uttley recorded in her diary their one and only meeting, which took place in the local fishmonger’s shop.
‘I was watching a woman ogling (the fishmonger), her false teeth, her red lips, her head on one side as she gazed up close – suddenly he turned to me and introduced her, Enid Blyton! The Blyton, photographed and boastful!,’ she recalls.
‘When I asked her which books she wrote, she replied, ‘Look in Smith’s window’ and turned away, and we never spoke again.’
But apparently, Uttley was not the easiest person to get on with herself, as she also quarrelled bitterly with her own best-known illustrator, Margaret Tempest, calling her ‘absolutely awful.’
She wrote of Tempest: ‘She is a humourless bore, seldom does a smile come, her eyes cold and hard.’
She also hated comparisons with fellow best-selling childrens’ author Beatrix Potter, whom she considered was a mere illustrator who wrote words around pictures, whereas she regarded herself as a great storyteller.
Despite her abrasiveness towards others, Uttley nevertheless may have been aware of her awkwardness towards them, showing a degree of self-deprecation in the process.
She wrote in her dairy: ‘I do find life difficult at times… and I behave childishly too, do foolish things, unworthy… I don’t think one can have great imagination and great wisdom. Can one?’ she asked herself.
Uttley claimed she began writing to support herself and her son after she was widowed, but in fact her first book The Squirrel, the Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit was published in 1929, before her husband’s suicide a year later.
Uttley recorded that an inspiration for her writing career was a meeting in 1927 with Prof Alexander at a painting exhibition in Altrincham, when he apparently confused her with another ex-student and asked if she was still writing.
Uttley’s first books were a series of tales about animals, including Little Grey Rabbit, the Little Red Fox, Sam Pig and Hare, based on the animals she observed around her home near Cromford during her earlier Derbyshire days.
She claimed that children loved her characters because she believed in them herself. ‘Mine aren’t made up,’ she confessed in her dairy. ‘They are real … I don’t sit down to write a story, they just come.’
It appears her home county stayed close to her heart during her life, and her childhood Derbyshire memories remained vivid.
Uttley later wrote for older children and adults, particularly focusing on rural subjects, notably in The Country Child (1931), a semi-autobiographical fictionalised account of her childhood experiences at her family’s farm near Cromford.
Originally illustrated by the celebrated painter and woodcut artist Charles Tunnicliffe, in the book Uttley writes about the intense joys and sorrows of life on a small farm; the fun of haymaking, the sadness when favourite animals are slaughtered, and the joy of Christmas celebrations which took place in the farmhouse kitchen.
Although her animal books are considered somewhat out of fashion in today’s world, one of her most popular works remains A Traveller in Time, published in 1939.
Based on the plot led by Anthony Babington of Dethick, quite close to her family home in Derbyshire, this romance mixes dream and historical fact in a story about a 20th century girl who is transported to the 16th century, becoming involved in a plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots from nearby Wingfield Manor, where she was under house arrest.
Later in her life, Uttley settled in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, in a house she named ‘Thackers’ – after the house featured in her A Traveller in Time.
She continued writing into her tenth decade – declaring later in her life: ‘Age does not wither me’ - and at the time of her death at the ripe old age of 91 in 1976, she was still working on the 33rd Little Grey Rabbit book.
Uttley is buried in Holy Trinity Churchyard, Penn, in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, where her gravestone reads simply that she was ‘a spinner of tales.' While life may have taken Uttley away from the county of her birth and upbringing, its clear she never forgot her Derbyshire roots.
Tragically, her beloved son John followed in the footsteps of his father when he killed himself two years later, driving his car over a cliff.
