Who is william heelis

They selfishly wanted their daughter to remain single. William was a gentleman of meek and discreet manner. After a long and happy marriage and the hard shock of his wife's death he left their home at Castle Cottage, Near Sawrey, Cumbria and spent the brief remainder of his life in a nursing home at York where he died.

He was cremated. He was a solicitor in Hawkshead. More Genealogy Tools. Have you taken a DNA test? If so, login to add it. If not, see our friends at Ancestry DNA. Login to find your connection. Although remembering Beatrix Potter has become a cottage industry, even now there are people whose memories of her are still warm.

The woman to whom they introduced me was as likeable as her achievements were large. One who knew her throughout her life is Harry Becket, whose father was the Potters' coachman.

A fit man of 93, who grew up in the Potter household, he jokes that he first met Beatrix when he was four months old. He later knew her right through her marriage. At his spruce bungalow on the edge of Kendal, Mr Becket talked at length about the family and their isolated, talented girl. Needless to say, she had a good eye. While her parents never gave him anything, Beatrix gave Harry one of her books each Christmas.

He has nine, most of them first editions. He takes them out, handles them tenderly, and reads the inscriptions. There's no doubt about it. This was a real Victorian household, he says. One daughter was expected to stay unmarried and look after her parents. Not every daughter did, of course, but Beatrix Potter remained dutiful. Peter Rabbit, in his blue jacket with gold buttons, did all the disobeying. Her first chance at a life of her own ended in with the sudden death of her fiance - and editor - Norman Warne, from pernicious anaemia.

He was Her parents had been against that marriage and were still disapproving when, eight years later, she told them she wanted to marry William Heelis.

Bertram, her younger brother, came down from his farm in Scotland to plead for his sister with their unyielding parents. Only then, to help her, did Bertram reveal to them that he himself had been married for years. He knows plenty about her husband, who was his great-uncle William.

I'm shown the family album. Here is William with his golf clubs; another shows him playing bowls. He fished and shot and was keen on country dancing. The tiny, chubby spinster had certainly found herself a tall, good-looking and vigorous fellow to wed.

Across country lives a woman who knew Mrs William Heelis well. Like Beatrix Potter, Josephine Banner is an artist and she too has been, and remains, intertwined with the shepherds and their world.

With her late husband, the painter Delmar Banner, she lived on a hill-farm in Westmorland for decades and has known the Herdwick shepherds since well before the last war. She remains a beauty at She was so perceptive; she knew all about me without having to be told anything.

Almost immediately the conjuring up of Mrs Heelis begins. People picked on that as a crude thing, saying 'She stomped about'. But that's not true. She walked, I would say, sensitively. Like somebody who was thinking, rather, while they were walking.

The Banners had been introduced to Mrs Heelis at the Eskdale Show, one of the high points of the Herdwick sheep-breeder's year.

A friend of the farmers. As that she would accept me. Mrs Heelis had no time for the county set, but plenty for the shepherds.

This was not inverted snobbery but fine judgement. He was Yet Beatrix was heartbroken. Her whole world was about to fall apart.

The family invited her to stay at Bedford Square a month after the funeral. Beatrix felt responsible for its upkeep. I was wondering whether Japanese anemones would grow where it is shaded, Millie says you have them in your garden and know their habits. Beatrix clung to the idea that she could have shared her life with Norman and pursued their dream of setting up home at Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey in the Lake District. She bought the 17th-century house and its acre farm that autumn. The Hollywood version of her story sees her swiftly falling in love with William Heelis of Appleby, a local solicitor who helps her purchase nearby land.

Instead of her grief subsiding, it grew more acute. There was a concert going on this afternoon at the pump room, I kept thinking about the book. Anne and Beatrix had longed for men they were told were beneath them. But whereas Anne finally married Captain Wentworth, Beatrix was to remain apart from her love forever. Eight years on, Beatrix was still in love with Norman. When William proposed, she felt she must justify her forthcoming marriage to herself as much as to anyone else.

Norman was a saint if ever man was good, I do not believe he would object, especially as it was my illness and the miserable feeling of loneliness that decided me at last. Beatrix and William married on October 15 But Norman was still in the picture. In November , it slipped off her finger.

I had untied many on the threshing floor in hopes of finding it.