Sir William Beach Thomas, (22 May 1868 – 12 May 1957) was a British author and journalist known for his work as a war correspondent and his writings about nature and country life.
Thomas was the son of a clergyman in Cambridgeshire. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford, before he embarked on a short-lived career as a schoolmaster. Finding that work unpleasant, he turned his attention to writing articles for newspapers and periodicals and began to write books.
During the early part of the First World War, Thomas defied military authorities to report news stories from the Western Front for his employer, the Daily Mail. As a result, he was briefly arrested before being granted official accreditation as a war correspondent. His reportage for the remainder of the war received national recognition, despite being criticised by some and parodied by soldiers. His book With the British on the Somme (1917) portrayed the English soldier in a very favourable light. Both France and Britain rewarded him with knighthoods after the war, but Thomas regretted some of his wartime output.
Thomas's primary interest as an adult was in rural matters. He was conservative in his views and after the Second World War feared that the Labour government regarded the countryside only from an economic perspective. He was an advocate for the creation of national parks in England and Wales and mourned the decline of traditional village society. He wrote extensively, particularly for The Observer newspaper and The Spectator, a conservative magazine. His book The English Landscape (1938) included selections from his contributions to Country Life magazine.
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Childhood and education
William Beach Thomas was born on 22 May 1868 in Godmanchester, in the county of Huntingdonshire, England. He was the second son of Daniel George Thomas and his wife, Rosa Beart. In 1872, his father was appointed rector of Hamerton and the countryside location of that parish inspired an affection in Beach Thomas which greatly influenced his later observational writings about natural history and rural subjects. Beach Thomas was not a hyphenated double-barrelled name; he used his middle name, Beach, as part of his name as a writer, and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography his name is "Thomas, William Beach".
Thomas attended Shrewsbury School from 1882. He was a keen sportsman there and was appointed huntsman to the Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt, the world's oldest cross-country running club. He continued his interest in sports after earning an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1887 and became a blue, representing the university in various running events over several years. He became president of the Oxford University Athletics Club and played association football, rugby union, and cricket at college level. J. B. Atkins, who competed against him for the University of Cambridge athletics team, said: "With his stately height and gigantic stride, he was magnificent in action; his final effort, always, triumphant, when he saw the goal of all, the tape, waiting for him, was a sight never to be forgotten – though I had a strong reason for regretting it at the time." His exhibition was superseded by a scholarship but he was not academically successful, managing only a third-class degree.
Early career
Athletic prowess and the time spent in achieving it may have contributed to Thomas's poor academic performance, but probably also assisted him in getting his first job. He taught at Bradfield College, a public school, after leaving Oxford in 1891. Although he described teaching as "uncongenial", he subsequently took a similar position at Dulwich College in 1897, where he remained until the following year. Journalism became the object of his interest; he contributed columns for The Globe, The Outlook and The Saturday Review, as well as for many other publications of which he was not a member of staff. He also wrote a book entitled Athletics, published by Ward Lock & Co in 1901, following his contribution of a chapter titled "Athletics and Schools" to the Athletics volume in the Badminton Library series, published by Longman, Green & Co in 1900 and edited by Montague Shearman. He became a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement from its formation in 1902.
The Daily Mail took on Thomas as a writer of material relating to the countryside. Lord Northcliffe, who owned the newspaper, recognised that Thomas needed to live in a rural environment if he was to perform his duties well. This understanding delighted Thomas, because it meant he could limit his visits to London. He moved to the Mimram Valley in Hertfordshire, and thereafter held Northcliffe in high regard. Thomas reported on the 78th meeting of the British Association in Dublin in 1908.
Thomas's From a Hertfordshire Cottage was published in 1908, followed by a three-volume collaboration with A. K. Collett, The English Year (1913–14). He did not entirely abandon his interest in athletics and was one of those in Britain who criticised his country's poor performance in the 1912 Olympic Games. Writing that the Olympics were by then being seen as a measure of "national vitality", he explained We could not run, so it appeared, either long distances or short; we could not jump either broad or high; we could not throw the javelin ... The men accepted defeat as if the Olympic Games were a competition of parlour tricks in a provincial drawing-room.
War correspondent
The Daily Mail sent Thomas to France as a war correspondent during the First World War. Many newspapers were keen to support the war effort and to take advantage of the demand for news from the front. The British military authorities were opposed to the presence of journalists, preferring instead to control the media by issuing official press releases. Lord Kitchener in particular was opposed to their presence, having had bad experiences of journalists during the South African War. He formed a press bureau headed by F. E. Smith, and demanded that all reports be channelled through the bureau, for review by censors; the resulting output was bland and impersonal. The newspapers countered with subterfuge. Thomas was one of several journalists who managed to reach the front lines in Belgium. He was discovered there and imprisoned for some time by the British Army. He described the episode as "the longest walking tour of my life, and the queerest". Even these early unapproved reports, which consisted mostly of human interest stories because there was little opportunity for contact with the British Expeditionary Force, were censored at home owing to a paradox that Thomas described: "the censors would not publish any article if it indicated that the writer had seen what he wrote of. He must write what he thought was true, not what he knew to be true."
When the British government relented in mid-1915, having been warned by Theodore Roosevelt that the reporting limitations were affecting public opinion in the United States, Valentine Williams became the Daily Mail's first accredited war correspondent. No longer in prison, Thomas resumed his war reporting in December of the same year, when Williams enlisted in the Irish Guards. As with the other accredited journalists, Thomas was paid by the War Office rather than by his newspaper, and all the correspondents were assured that they would be able to publish memoirs of their service to offset the differential between an officer's pay and that of a journalist. Thomas filed reports from places such as the Somme in a format matching that of his colleagues, who regularly played down the unpleasant aspects of the conflict, such as the nature of death. His reports were published in the Daily Mirror as well as the Daily Mail.
The soldiers derided the attempts that were made to indoctrinate them, but the British public was more susceptible. Philip Gibbs, a fellow war correspondent, noted that he and his colleagues "identified absolutely with the Armies in the field ... There was no need of censorship in our despatches. We were our own censors." The journalistic support for the cause was appreciated by military commanders such as Douglas Haig, who saw the propaganda generated by the correspondents as an integral part of the Allies' efforts. Haig eventually went so far as to ask Gibbs and Thomas to produce his own weekly news-sheet. Public opinion at home may have been mollified, even uplifted, by the efforts of the correspondents, but the morale of the troops was not, despite the high demand among them for newspapers from home. One soldier, Albert Rochester, was court martialled for attempting to send to the Daily Mail a letter that stated the realities as he saw them and was critical of Thomas's work, noting the "ridiculous reports regarding the love and fellowship existing between officers and men". Thomas himself later regretted his wartime reports from the Somme, saying, "I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written for the good reason that it was untrue ... the vulgarity of enormous headlines and the enormity of one's own name did not lessen the shame."
Later years
After the war, Thomas stayed in Germany until 1919 and returned there in 1923 at the time of the Occupation of the Ruhr. He also undertook a tour of the world for the Daily Mail and The Times in 1922. His main focus returned to his lifelong interest in matters of the countryside, notably in his writings for The Observer from 1923 to 1956. Thomas was also a regular contributor of notes on nature, gardening and country life to The Spectator for almost thirty years, with some short breaks between 1935 and 1941, when H. E. Bates took over responsibility. In 1928 Thomas produced a history of the magazine under the title of The Story of the 'Spectator', in commemoration of its centenary. He wrote many more books and articles in his later years, as well as two autobiographical books: A Traveller in News (1925) and The Way of a Countryman (1944). Fond of peppering quotations throughout his writing, his style was considered to be clear but his hand was poor; a profile of him in The Observer said "perhaps he gave less pleasure to those who had to decipher his handwriting. Rarely has more limpid English been conveyed in a script more obscure."
George Orwell wrote in the Manchester Evening News:
It is uncertain whether the general public would think of Sir William Beach Thomas primarily as a war correspondent or as a naturalist, but he is in no doubt about the matter himself. The world, as he sees it, really centres round the English village, and round the trees and hedges of that village rather than the houses and the people.
Even as traditional English village life was in collapse, Thomas saw the romanticised paternalism and general life of the village as the epitome of English society and equivalent to anything that might be found elsewhere in the world. He said that one of the aspects of village life he admired was that "comparative wealth [there] is admired, not envied". He also viewed the natural world as something to be wondered at rather than scientifically examined. In his last column for The Spectator, written in September 1950, he wrote:
The country scene is a department of art, not of science. The essential is the discovery of beauty, not of knowledge. Science comes second, and a bad second, to art. We do not listen to the nightingale in order to find out whether his song is erotic or polemic. We listen for the pleasure of the mood that the song and the scene engender. Flight matters more than its mechanics. The prime value of knowledge itself is to enlarge the circle of wonder. The chronicler does a better deed if he helps someone to enjoy the country more than if he botanises or ornithologises or entomologises or meteorologises.
Personal life and death
William Beach Thomas married Helen Dorothea Harcourt, a daughter of Augustus George Vernon Harcourt, in April 1900, and with her had three sons and a daughter. Their second son, Michael Beach Thomas, was killed in 1941 while serving as a naval officer during the Second World War. Helen survived her husband, who died on 12 May 1957 at their home, "High Trees", Gustardwood, Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire. He was buried in the village churchyard at St Helen's Church. Among the obituaries of William Beach Thomas were those published in Nature and The Times.
Books
Aside from his journalism, Thomas wrote and contributed to many books, all published in London and some also in New York. These include:
Athletics at School (chapter in Athletics, ed. Montague Shearman, Longmans, Green & Co.: 1898)
Athletics (Ward, Lock & Co.: 1901)
The Road to Manhood (G. Allen: 1904)
On Taking a House (Edward Arnold: 1905)
From a Hertfordshire Cottage (Alston Rivers: 1908)
Preface to C. D. McKay's The French Garden: A Diary and Manual of Intensive Cultivation (Associated Newspapers: 1908, reprinted as The French Garden In England, 1909)
Our Civic Life (Alston Rivers: 1908)
The English Year (three volumes, co-authored with A. K. Collett; T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1913–14); Autumn and Winter; Spring; Summer
With the British on the Somme (Methuen: 1917)
Birds Through The Year (co-authored with A. K. Collett; T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1922)
An Observer's Twelvemonth (Collins: 1923)
A Traveller in News (Chapman and Hall: 1925)
England Becomes Prairie (Ernest Benn: 1927)
The Story of the 'Spectator' (Methuen: 1928)
The Happy Village (Ernest Benn: 1928)