Much-loved nature expert Richard Williamson has died

Mr Williamson died at his home on Saturday, May 21 surrounded by his wife Anne and children Brent and Bryony.

Anne paid tribute to the care and skill of the St Wilfrid's end of life team and thanked them for their kind care.

For 57 years, Richard, had been sharing his love of flora and fauna and his favourite walking routes with readers with his first column published on December 4, 1964.Richard, who was born in Devon, moved to Chichester from Norfolk in September 1963 to work as the manager of Kingley Vale Nature Reserve – arriving on his BSA motorbike with a couple of tins of baked beans and £5.While Kingley Vale was his base, his role with The Nature Conservancy saw him work on reserves across the South Downs, including Castle Hill and Lullington Heath in East Sussex, until he retired, aged 60, in 1995.He started his weekly column for the Chichester Observer series and several of its sister titles aged 29 after pitching the idea to then editor Graham Brooks, and only stopped writing in April of this year due to illness.

Details of his funeral are yet to be confirmed.

Richard’s life

Richard Calvert Williamson was born in North Devon on 1 August 1935, the fifth child of author Henry Williamson – Tarka the Otter, Salar the Salmon, The Flax of Dream, the 15- volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight and many other books – but was brought up on the north Norfolk coast on Old Hall Farm at Stiffkey, owned and worked by his father for the duration of the Second World War.

He was educated at St Michael’s College, a Worcestershire choir school, and Blundell’s School, Tiverton, Devon; but not a scholar, his interest from earliest years was that of a lone wanderer watching birds and observing natural history.

After leaving school he joined the RAF and served for five years in radar stations in England, Iraq, Jordan and Cyprus – awarded the General Service Medal during the Suez Crisis –, so gaining valuable experience in life’s rich and wide panorama.

On leaving the RAF he worked in Forestry and on National Trust Nature Reserves in north Norfolk and Suffolk to gain experience to fit him for a career in what was then the Nature Conservancy, later known as English Nature and now Natural England.

His father encouraged him to write, and while writing his first book, The Dawn is my Brother, and working during the day at forestry, Richard wrote a daily wild-life correspondent article from 1957-9 for the Daily Mail. He has also written for many other national newspapers and magazines over the years.

He became warden of the Kingley Vale National Nature Reserve near Chichester, from autumn 1963 until his retirement in 1995, where he carried out continuous long-term weekly monitoring – and continued until 2018 though retired – of breeding birds, butterflies and plants, particularly wild orchid colonies. Thousands of visiting school children have benefitted from his enthusiastic teaching.

He also carried out weekly breeding bird monitoring annually in the woods where he lived and has also done a section for the wildfowl counts in Chichester Harbour over the same period. He was instrumental in gaining special status for Chichester Harbour by preparing a report on its natural history value in the late 1960s.

From 1964 until April 2022 he wrote the weekly wildlife column ‘Nature Trails’ for the Chichester Observer and sister titles plus other features as well, including for some time a ‘Local Character’ article highlighting many important people past and present in the area; an ‘Old Car’ feature in an associated magazine; and ‘Williamson’s Weekly’ in the West Sussex Gazette. His weekly ‘Williamson’s Walk’ feature was also popular with readers.

Over the years he gave hundreds of lectures on various natural history subjects. Richard was a well-known and popular local character whose work is thoroughly enjoyed by southern readers.

He has been president of the Henry Williamson Society since its inauguration in 1980 where he is held in almost as much affection and esteem as his father.

Apart from natural history his main interests – indeed, passions – were classical music, vintage cars and literature, and he had a large and varied library reflecting these, as well as three Alvis TA14 classic cars.

Richard was married in March 1964 to Anne who manages the Henry Williamson Literary Estate and is herself author of two biographical books on Henry Williamson and is responsible for most of the content on the HW Society website www.henrywilliamson.co.uk. They have a son, Brent and a daughter Bryony. Richard and Anne were living in an isolated old gamekeeper’s cottage in the middle of a wood on the estate of the late Edward James, the eccentric millionaire patron of surrealist art, with whom they were friends, in an area which is a nature reserve under the aegis of Sussex Wildlife Trust.

Richard also carried out wild-life monitoring on this reserve and was chairman of its committee.