Dorset History Centre has a collection relating to the author John Fowles, resident in Lyme Regis, chiefly from his activities in the 1970s to 1990s. One of our volunteers has been looking through the 12 boxes of material that we hold, and will be sharing some of the things he has discovered in a series of blogs.
You are welcome to visit DHC to have a look at some of the Fowles records mentioned, but be aware that they are as yet uncatalogued and largely unsorted. You can also consult many relevant books held in our library: all of Fowles’s published journals and novels, some of his poetry and other publications, a biography, and books by other authors about Fowles and his work.
In the first of a short series of five blogs, this post will introduce you to John Fowles, and begin to look at his interest in Lyme Regis.
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Introduction
Do you remember John Fowles?
The distinguished writer John Robert Fowles (31 March 1926 – 5 November 2005) was born in Essex into a well-to-do middle-class family. But he has much closer associations with Dorset, where he lived for the last forty years of his life. His best-selling novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was set in Lyme Regis, and the award-winning film (with five Oscar nominations) based on the book, memorably alerted the world’s attention to Lyme Regis and the iconic Cobb.1
Fowles stopped publishing major new works during his last twenty years. So by now he may have slipped your memory or even entirely escaped the notice of a later generation. His novels sold exceptionally well in the United States, and most of his papers – manuscripts (published and unpublished), his diaries and much of his correspondence – are held in American universities; he sold them in his lifetime. However the Dorset History Centre is fortunate to hold a John Fowles Collection,2 together with editions of his novels and many of his other publications, and also books about him and his writings.
The documents in the Fowles Collection at the Dorset History Centre do not directly relate to his work as a novelist. Instead they illustrate the extraordinarily wide variety of his other interests related in some way to Lyme or to nearby places. They include cuttings, photocopies, jottings, sketches, transcripts, letters or ephemera, sometimes contemporary but often dating from earlier times. They are items that were sent to, gathered by, or created by him, mostly in the 1980s.
Although Fowles often expressed reservations about the local community – he called them the “Lymites” – and gained a reputation for being something of a recluse, he became increasingly involved in local affairs and local history, until the day arrived in January 1978 when he agreed to become co-curator of the Lyme Regis Museum – the Philpot.3 He became absorbed in all aspects of this role, and was only able finally to relinquish the pressures it imposed on him after suffering a stroke in February 1988.
Most items in our Fowles Collection relate to Lyme and its local concerns. These might be local buildings and their earlier occupants, local families, local trades and occupations, including fossil collecting and maritime activities, or local geology and palaeontology. As well as introducing some of these, this blog will also tell you more about Fowles’s background, and how he came to be living in Lyme Regis, after having worked in, lived in and visited many other places both in the UK and abroad.
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Born in 1926 in Westcliffe-on-Sea, Esssex, he boarded at Bedford School from 1939 to 1944. During the war his parents evacuated to the small village of Ipplepen in Devon, where he spent all his holidays and grew to love the place; he wrote a poem about it in 1962,4 and key passages of his semi-autobiographical 1977 novel Daniel Martin were based on his experiences here. On leaving school he served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, which took him to Edinburgh, Deal in Kent, Portsmouth, Okehampton and Plymouth. Following demobilization he went up to New College Oxford in October 1947, where he read Modern Languages. Here he started to write, but also to travel to other countries.
Dorset and some Lyme families
When John Fowles first took an interest in Dorset is uncertain; the first mention in his Journals of an actual visit is not until the 1960s. Although he kept some kinds of diary from 1941, he claimed to have begun the habit at Oxford, and journals before late 1948 do not survive.6 But his father was an admirer of the work of Thomas Hardy, which had its influence on Fowles, so Dorset would presumably have existed in his mind if only as ‘Hardy country’.7 Two volumes of his Journals have been published and can be consulted in the Dorset History Centre library, but they are only a selection from an estimated total of about two million words. His biographer Eileen Warburton, who knew him personally from 1974, had unfettered access to all of his diaries, published or unpublished.
Fowles started to write while at Oxford. He wrote of “writing fever,”8 and his “Impossible struggle between wanting to write and think, and having to do all this abominably unnecessary philology and other work.”9 But meanwhile travel opened up new places and new faces for him: a month in Aix-en-Provence in April 1948, then August and September at the Catalan village of Collioure.10 Then in the summer of 1949 the Severn Wildfowl Trust selected him for an expedition to Norway, which suited his close identification with the natural world, but was also to provide a dramatic episode in his later novel The Magus.11
Another factor which helped to draw Fowles to the West Country was his ancestry through his father.7 He was also aware that on his mother’s side he had ancestry from Cornwall, to which he felt some attachment, referring to his “Celtic strain.”12 In an interview with Melvyn Bragg in October 1977 he said: “In as much as I feel I have a home province in England, it’s certainly the West of England.”13
So perhaps it is not surprising that this interest in ancestry led him to much research into family history when he lived in Lyme. While curator of the Philpot Museum he undertook to answer personally the many requests for help with such research. In many cases this involved drawing up a pedigree, and there are many examples of rough drafts of these – though it is not always easy to decipher his small and difficult handwriting. Since these were drawn up 30 or 40 years ago the identities of most of his original correspondents are not identifiable in the absence of related correspondence. Some of the individual folders that now hold these contain only a single sheet of paper, other folders considerably more, but here is a first selection from 70 or 80 family notes and/or trees or in the Fowles Collection:
| Alford family14 | Davie family15 |
| Bagster or Baxter family15 | Dollin family15 |
| Boalch family15 | Domett family15 |
| Boswell family15 | Drayton family15 |
| Boteler and Bellingham families15 | Drakes family15 |
| Brooke family15 | Dunn and Sprague families15 |
| Burridge family15 | Edwards family15 |
| Channon and Walker families15 | England family15 |
| Curtis family15 | Ensor family15 |
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If you wish to access the documents in the Fowles Collection please remember that the present listings are only provisional and sometimes random; it still awaits sorting, reorganising and cataloguing. Apart from the Collection this blog has sourced background information from the publications below: using either Fowles’s own words from his Journals, or later communicated by him and his friends to his biographer.
In part two, we will take a look at Fowles’ interest in Mary Anning.
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References:
Charles Drazin (ed.) 2004 John Fowles, The Journals Vols 1 & 2 [“Journals 1”][“Journals 2”]
Eileen Warburton 2004 John Fowles, A Life in Two Worlds [“Warburton”]
1 https://archive-catalogue.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/records/D-DPA/1/LR/338
2 https://archive-catalogue.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/records/D-FWL
3 Warburton pp 385-88
4 Journals 1, 28 Feb 1962
5 Warburton p.31
6 Warburton p.14
7 Journals 1, 25 Sep 1949
8 Journals 1, 3 Apr 1950
9 Warburton pp 54-58
10 Warburton pp 61-62
11 Warburton p 4
12 Journals 2, 23 Feb 1974
13 BBC TV The Lively Arts, 23 Oct 1977
14 D-FWL, Box 10
15 D-FWL, Box 4
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This was a guest blog written by Graham Hoddinott, volunteer at Dorset History Centre. If you would like to contribute a guest blog, please get in touch with us – archives@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk.
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Part 2 of this series is now available to view here.