05 Ian Collins on the wonderful life and home of Ronald Blythe

In the garden at Bottengoms, on an early spring morning, biographer and art curator Ian Collins chats about the 100-year-life of Ronnie Blythe. 

We talk about how Ronnie was hyper-local to the landscapes of south Suffolk and north Essex, yet wrote in a way that told of the whole world. His life was hard. He lived in the shadow of the workhouse, and yet he found great contentment. Visitors were always charmed by the magic of his home and garden. Ronnie published most of his book aged over 60, some of the best at over 80. His was a fine life of example. Like most, though, he needed support, and this came from Christine Nash. Says Ian, “She was the sort of person who pushed you off.”

Ian recommends Ronnie’s final book, Next To Nature; and talks of his biography of Ronnie called Blythe Spirit, winner of the New Angle Prize in 2025. 

His recommended action: try not to feel overwhelmed; savour the moment; bring joy. 

For a film short of Ian Collins talking to me at Bottengoms, see https://youtu.be/TYErZWYaCd8.

For more on the Essex Wildlife Trust and Bottengoms, see https://www.essexwt.org.uk/bottengoms 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027. It is called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformative Stories for Climate and Nature Recovery."

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Awesome Collins, Ronley Blythe's former home. Um well, his home, um, and how nice to be talking to Ian Collins, his biographer here. We're sitting in the garden, Ian a little bit like Ronnie would have done.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Sat in his chairs, in his chairs on a lovely sunny day in February, the weather's turned out well for us. Things always turn out well in the story of Ronnie Blythe.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Day too, day two, day two. Um Ian, introduce yourselves as an art critic, curator, author, and biographer of Ronnie, Ronnie Glyde.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Well, I first met him in 1988. I came down the track here uh one August day, and the door here was open, and um there was a typewriter clattering upstairs, and there was a robin hop hopping about in that room. And I'd come to uh Arcerani to write a first book, like hundreds or thousands of people before and after, with some trepidation. Yes, I did I did. Although I'll I'd I I I'll tell you I had another I had a reason to make me more confident, but yes, because I just knew I was asking this great man to um provide a cover for me to my first book because I was nervous of my book, so I wanted to make it uh but my grandfather especially the village of Chelsea we can ask to take it. So I we so we sort of began our we began mid-conversation really, uh as sort of shared a shared background as I thought, and um he did the forward for me and we started on a 35-year friendship, and I would come and stay off of us to stay in the desk room at the end there that Ronnie had stayed in initially when when uh he came to visit the matches until we left him in the 70s and we died. And um yeah, it was opposed to competing charm. Certainly some of it.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Yes, I think that's that's exactly right. Unless we sit here and listen to a skylark singing, the snow drops are out in the gardens, and so there's a little bit of sunshine, the bulbs are coming up, it feels like the end of March rather than February we are now. And there is I always felt as though that there was a um something special about entering the space here.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Definitely true. It's a protected space. I mean, it's this ancient house. Uh the core is 15th century, uh, exterior um about 1600 with a tile Georgian roof originally thatched. But this spot I think has been settled since ancient times because it it's it's a it's in a protected hollow. There's a a spring in the far corner um which feeds the stream, which used to run under the house. So when um it was a sort of Tudor idea of a house with running water, you would just build it over the stream, or medieval over it. And then when the Nashes came in the 40s, they just shifted the stream around the back of the house. Um, but they kept it was the water supply of it. Basically, you would turn on the trap and you get the river, basically. And uh so it's it it it's very basic, very much next to nature, very much in nature. And it's just you feel that you're completely sustained, you the house is sustained in the site, and you are sustained in the site, and it's just everything seems um timeless and and permanent. Yes, and uh it's it's just a very magical place.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

So Ronnie lived to a hundred, so a hundred years.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Um 1923, when he was born at the beginning of that year. 22. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was uh 304 parts per million, kind of just a little bit above pre-industrial level, in other words, completely safe. And it reaches 350 in 1990 when it's when the alarm bells start to go off and is now in the 420s. So he's through his life he saw this kind of remarkable change, and yet he was he was both aware of that, those big changes in the world, but entirely settled in this landscape in his place. And there's something about that relationship with with a real kind of potentiveness and immersion. Um uh, but then not really letting the big world shake you up.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Um is that fair? Yeah, absolutely fair. Um he he operated on so many levels. Uh he was a great time traveller. He tr uh he in his imagination he was he was going all over the place, but he never willingly in his lifetime lived more than 50 miles from his birthplace, and normally uh fewer than 10 uh by choice. And so he was born just over the fields there, um uh into Suffolk uh he came from many generations of farm workers, originally shepherds, uh, lived in the northeast of Suffolk around their life about uh but they just sort of crossed the landscape sometimes hard, and they ended up on the Essex border. And Ronnie was uh the six the the eldest of six surviving children, born into this immense hardship after the First World War, and this brief respite before they went into the really Great Depression, and times were so hard. His mother was actually from London, but a very poor slum tenement uh in Cotton Garden. So they were they were really the poorest of the poor. And they had one book in the house which was the King James Bible, and so Ronnie got his his foundation of faith, his love of poetry, uh from that one book, and then it was library books. And his mother took him to the all the children to the library, and they just were avid readers. They read and read and read. He got nothing out of formal education. The village school then became uh the elementary school in Sudbury. He was kicked out of 14 with no qualifications whatsoever. Never passed an exam anything, and um he just became this autodidact, and the the choices were becoming a uh a porter in the workhouse, which by that point was uh the cottage hospital, or an assistant in a particular general store which sold books. So he got that, so he started his books. There was a hope sales. He wanted to read a read, exactly. And he he he always his his he he was a great reader, great walker, that they were too poor for wheels in his childhood. He only got a bike when he could pay for his wages. So he walked his world as as far as you could walk out back in the day. And so for him, hedge was it had an immensity to it. And and so he always kept that, he always kept that sense of a microscopic place, uh uh and and also an astronomic place. And he he he loved the sky. So he was it was a straight intensity and panoply uh all wrapped up. And and his heart, he his life, although it was hot, it was materially hot. And I don't want to make light of it, because they had it probably we can't conceive them today, but it was just material, and he was very he was protected, he was loved, and he had this amazingly beautiful landscape to wander in. It was uh and this wild profusion before agricultural um uh industrialization, uh mechanized agriculture, and it was it was a paradise, and he thought of it as a paradise.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

So there's something about how um in that description of his early early life, um there there were there were always many paths in front of us, and the the ones that one would predict from somebody leaving school at 14 with no qualifications and coming from real kind of abject poverty and opportunity to come to the to to finish a hundred-year life having written so many books, having observed the world in ways that his audiences and his readers loved and respected and connected with and spoke uh with great authority and welcomed people.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

He knew he'd lived to be a hundred, he always said he would. Yeah, yeah, isn't that amazing? Never drove. Never drove. He was actually got car sick, uh, which may have been psychological. Um but he he he he was a beneficiary of everything he lacked. So not just a car, he never had a washing machine, he never had a computer, mobile phone, he never had a torch because he had wonderful night vision. Uh all the things that we take for granted as being essential to life, he just dispensed with. And which was a and it was partly because he'd been born in literally in the shadow of the workhouse, but also because he just realized he didn't need stuff. You know, and it is very liberating.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Yes, yes, especially as we sit here um uh this morning. There was this tell us a little bit about um how you approached the process of writing the book. Um obviously he approved and agreed with that. He didn't want to write an autobiography, but then again, a lot of his work is autobiographic.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Well, yes, he he he we we think of him as the confessional writer, don't we? And to a great extent he was, but there was a lot he kept hidden. Uh and he even kept some of it hidden from me, although we it it was agreed that fairly early on that I'd write I'd I'd write the autobiography the biography. And um it was it we had this sort of del very very um um intense friendship, um, and he was my mentor uh and and my great great friend, and uh and and we loved each other dearly, but there was all there was an etiquette to our friendship, and he would never ask me to write the biography because that was sort of presumptuous, and I would never ask him if I could, because that was also presumptuous, but we just kind of understood, at some point we understood that it would happen. I was very relieved when he started telling other people that I was doing, well that's okay, then you knew. But I was I took notes from the first day because it was such I knew it was a fascinating story, and and so he did so uh um uh and and he we talked all about the physical society because he was he was gay, so he was criminal till he was 45, which is which um is is a big um uh uh phenomenon in his life, it has to be. Um but what he didn't tell me about was the depth of the poverty. Because a great there was a there was there was a reason for this. He he dis distanced himself from that, he'd changed his voice, he changed his suffered voice, he'd had a sort of cut glass voice that they had in the 50s, uh, which was I think got from the radio, and by the time he came here, he changed his voice again into this smooth, natural, Ronnie voice coming to this house in the 70s, really. And um so it was it so it was this great evolution of um this independent person in this house, um, but it was very hard won, and he wanted he needed this distance to write about everything he knew and to write about it with love, but not to write about it as though it was special pleading for his own story of hardship because he thought he was immensely lucky, as he was, of course, he had a huge good fortune all his life he was a fortunate person, but he wanted to write about the hardship and and and and everything that happened to people from this distance. So he he became a kind of a he was in the world and out of it, so he was a kind of a very sociable hermit here. Uh and it was very delicate uh his voice is very delicate, so the the the the the the the the book on him had to be delicate too. It's full of paradoxes, really. Um he's a complicated person, and I uh and I I don't think any life of a person should claim to have answered every question. There's still there's still an enigma at the heart of things, I think. But he um he was an immensely, immensely lovable person. The kindest, gentlest person, and also the toughest. I think you have to. He had the steel, you know, uh which is is is a very good combination. He can be very uh loving, compassionate, all the uh humane, all the things we want, and also tough.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

I think there's something quite amazing when you look at the list of the books, and perhaps we'll begin with uh with um we can't go through them all. Um exactly. We can we we begin with Aikenfield, not his first book, but the one that uh that hits the heights. Yeah. Um uh I I think it's only a couple of his boy two of his books were published before he was sixty. So it might have been three, I might have miscounted that. But almost all his books were conceived, written, and published between the age of sixty and a hundred. That's it. No, I think that's quite an amazing thing. That people should should think to themselves. There was a time when people felt that if you got in your sixties, your number was up. Yeah, and uh for many working people it was the case. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Um uh but his life was just getting started. He was a slow starter, even more amazingly than you've just put it, all of which, as you say, is what was all correct, even more amazingly, most of his books, and in my view, the best of his books, were published from his 80th year old. So he had this amazing renaissance in his 80s and early 90s. Uh and he he he retired, we retired him just before his 95th birthday. Uh and uh it's it's tremendous that those of us still shy of 80 may not have begun in our lives.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

Marvellous. There's a lovely quote from uh about Pablo Casals, the cellist, uh, is a bit famous, I think, where where somebody sort of sniffily said to him when he was 23, uh 90s great, uh, but Pablo, why do you keep practicing? And he said, because I seem to be better. And there's there's a kind of performative element to that. Life is is not kind of like I've done that minute and it's stopped. There's it's going to respond to your intention and your agency and your wishes. Yeah. Um, of course, restrictions increase as you get very old, yeah. But but he seemed to not be troubled by all of that. That's absolutely true.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

And I think um more than in any life I've ever researched, this house the house is key to the how the life evolved. Because he first came well, he he he walked in this landscape as a kid, so he came up this footpath uh when he was extremely small and went to the churchyard to see um the graves of the Cunston family, uh the churchyard where he's now buried. Um and then he came to this house first of all in 1951 when invited by Christine Asher, painter and wife of the painter, John Asher. And really, when he came here, he found himself. And they never used the phrase, but really they were an adopted family. They adopted they they had they'd lost a son in uh um in in charge in a car accident. Uh and uh they kind of adopted him, yes, particularly Christine was a sort of adopted mother, which was slightly tricky, is his real mother was just across the fields, but Ronnie definitely um defected to the artists. Yes. Uh so he was about 30 then when he first met. Yes, just sorry, yes, um just before that, yes. Um and and so he instantly he was at home here. So he came and um looked after the house when they were away, he helped them because this house is always hard work. Uh it's Ganjugas. It never stops, doesn't it? Yes. Uh and so they'd lots to do. And um so Ronnie looked after the house and then increasingly looked after them. Uh and he came, and particularly when Christine died suddenly, he he moved in for nearly a year to to look after John in his last month. And then um when he was left the house and uh uh and took it over, there was a time where he felt a sort of uh uh overwhelmed by the by the inheritance of uh um he felt like a museum curator, I think. But as that um as he reclaimed, as he claimed the space more, he just absolutely settled in here. And it I think it ch it changed his writing. It became so secure that he could just explore, he was free, he had this amazing freedom here. He could explore language, and and his language became light as air. It was just became it was just uh describe his writing place, Ian.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

So it's it's the the middle window. The middle window, yeah, is his study bedroom, yeah. Yeah, um and he faced inwards.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Well he initially he had he he he he had the view, but uh it was such a distracting view because it was so beautiful that in the end he turned around and face the walls, yes, exactly. And uh yeah um and he and he had a a a very um bad set back of his days. He he he um would uh would um wake up at six, he'd sleep soundly, always, never any issues gonna be wake up at six, come down, make a cup of tea, uh reflect, meditate, read a bit, then uh write all morning in the s uh in the study, and then garden all afternoon. Now Ronnie wasn't really a gardener. He spent 40 years on Well he well he was he was a dutiful he was a dutiful um person and he knew that John had had a very special plant in his garden. It was a great one of the great plants. So he did his best to keep it up, but he didn't have the knowledge or really the already the interest. So gradually the garden became gulf to a sort of a ghost garden, which I thought was wildly attractive. But if Ronnie had had his way, he'd have just let nature take over it. He was a non-interventionist. On the other hand, he was completely unsentimental. So after the great storm, when a lot of stuff was a lot of truth, he didn't care at all because it was a natural thing. He just he enjoyed the the the new perspective. Just what happened. Just what happened. It's just what well that was his whole view of life. This is just what happens. He was he was a stoic. Uh uh and he had philosophy. He had he he he had appreciation and he had philosophy. Uh which um this is what we need. Uh he he he he felt um empowered, really.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Tell us a little bit about then about Aikenfield and uh I mean that that's the book that I guess the majority of people will know about because it has a another life.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Well it outsold and outshorn everything else he ever did, really. Um and this it's a slight mil it's a marvelous millstone, yes. It's uh yes, it's a big looming because it because it blew his cover, because he wanted to be uh the observer watching us, and and and then in a way he was being watched after that, which he didn't like. Yeah. And it's a very complicated book, which is part of his power. Well, even well, for people who don't know, it's a story of a southern British 80s to the 1960s, so through agriculture, depression had too much. Uh so at the time terrible things happening. Um Britain published in 1969, at a point where no one knew, and Ronnie didn't know, that uh more enormous changes were about to happen. And the changes charted in that book, great as they were, are far less great than have happened since 1960. Well, basically most of us have lot have lost our link to the land. It's a great sadness. Uh so it it it has this power period piece, uh, but it has a greater power because it purports to be um it's got quite a complicated structure, it's got a lot of statistics, it's a lot of um statistical underpinning, but basically it's the story, it's 49 story supposed uh personal portraits. It's actually more complicated. Those people existed as presented. The names are all fans in churchyards, uh, and some of them are single portraits, but mm many are amalgams. They're archetypes, archetypes, yeah. And Ronnie came from a his came from a society where it was bad manners to ask a direct question. Well, that's a bit tricky if you're writing if you're writing a book like Akenfield, and you don't ask he sort of sidled up to Intro that you you were supposed to sidle up to Influencer. You wanted you wanted to know everything, but you weren't supposed to ask. Um so um so how he did it is quite a mystery. He I think began with a tape recorder, but ditched that fairly soon. And what he uh the the the the archive, which has just gone to the British Library, um seems to suggest that he kept indexed cards and he kept records of of interviews. It seems that uh he uh he made note he he wrote these up immediately after the interviews. He had a fantastic uh um memory, he had a fantastic ear. And it wasn't just his whole life wasn't just talking, it was listening. He was an amazing listener as well as an observer. So he listened and listened and listened. And that's where he got his all all his information about the world, yes, and and about people. And and and he remembered he he he remembered whole paragraphs uh how people spoke. Uh and so Aikenfield is this great um tapestry. Of all the things he'd ever known. And he said to me that he wanted to write a book as Hardy would have written it. Well, because Hardy was a novelist, not a poet. And so that's what he overlaid the oral history with. It's everything else he ever knew. And I think one of the maybe the greatest revelation of my biography is that the first voice in a supposed someone called Leonard Thompson. He was a farm worker who went off to Kill Italy. And Ronnie's father came back haunted. He had a thwarted life in Ronnie's dad, Gentle George. He hated farm labour. He joined the army in August of 1914, like sending kids to get away from the land. And he was only 16, it was illegal, but blind eyes were turned. And he went off to the front to the Western Front and Gallipoli and then all through the Middle East. And when he came back to beautiful Suffolk in 1919, age 20, when he took one look at and tried to reinlisted and failed his army medical as being unfit for military service because of what had happened to him through the 21 wreck. And he lived this silent life as a farm worker. He escaped from it by becoming a municipal gravedigger in Sub because of all the experience he'd had political buried the body. So in the silent life, but when he was dying of lung cancer, he'd always had a roll-up fag in the corner of his mouth. And when he was dying of lung cancer in his 50s, nursed by Ronnie, the stories all came out. And Ronnie just listened.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

And uh Well, that's pretty amazing because that's also kind of processing something from your father. That's quite complex stereotypes. And he'd had a difficult relationship.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

In later life when he's writing. This is why he needed the distance. It was so intense. He needed the distance to write about it in the way he wanted to.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

So let's let's jump to um in these pods we talk about a heroine or a hero, um, uh recommendation book and a pick or a cultural item. I'm pretty sure I know what your what your hero is going to be. It has to really be.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Well, it has to be Ron Applied, but but I also if I'm allowed one and a half, it would be Christine Nash. Because Christine Nash made Ronnie. Uh and and she um he he said he said she was the sort of person who checked that you wouldn't plunge out of your depth before she pushed you off the diving board at moments when it was absolutely necessary to do so. So she's a kind of trickster, actually.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

In in in a classic trickster in in folk tales and fairy tales and other forms of narrative, it's somebody that makes you do something. It's the it's the fairy godmother that waves a bit of magic. It's the it's the fox in our landscape or the hare on the field over there. That's it. They suddenly make us go, oh, I didn't realise we could do that.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

That's it. So she she she gave she gave him the push and she gave him the confidence. And she found him the house uh on the Suffolk Coast and um in Thorpe Ness next to Auburn, where he just was supposed to write his novel, uh, and off he's off he went um in a snowstorm uh uh in the middle of the fifties. And um because he'd always had this fear of uh at the workhouse, he'd cashed in his pension from the Colchester Library, which I think was 300 quid, which he'd worked out he could live on for a couple of years, and that was put away and he he actually immediately started earning from magazines, magazine articles, and uh and essays and short stories. Uh but he so he never touched that 300 quid. But he because he always thought that the workhouse was coming, he um then accepted a job at the Auburn Festival for um £150 a year, uh as being assistant to Benjamin Brushnett. And although that was taking him away from the novel, it's we should be so grateful he did that because it gave him amazing material. Doors opening, doors opening up. Exactly, exactly, these great connections, but also this wonderful book that he finally wrote uh when he was 19, his youthful memoir called The Time by the Sea, uh, which is one of his great books, I think. Uh so let's come to a book, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Um Ian. So uh your I think it has to be the book. Yes, yeah, well that's why you're here. That's perfect.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

It's actually Ronnie's book. It's our book, yes. So so so this this is a this is the the result of a 35-year conversation, which uh I then carried on after his death by using as many of his his words as possible because they're better than mine. Uh and so we sort of wrote the book together. Um so it's been a wonderful um experience. Uh part of it was written in in Ronnie's um study.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

And uh yeah, yeah, it's it's been a great um we'll put a note in the in the show notes about it so people can follow that up. But yeah, widely available, of course, in all good bookshops and elsewhere. Um uh a book recommendation. Did you want to make a recommendation for listeners and viewers?

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Yes, I I would. Well, uh as as we said, Ronnie wrote so many books. But if people are starting uh to read uh Ronald Blyden, as I recommend everybody to read Ronald Blyden, because he appealed, he it's he's the voice of every man, every woman, and every everyone will appreciate Ronald Bly's books. Uh the one I start with is is actually the last one, uh, which came out for his we brought it out for his hundredth birthday. Uh it's called Next to Nature, Life in the English Countryside, um, published by John Murray. And it's basically a selection of his uh essays, uh his Word from Wellingford essays from the Church Times, which he did from the 70s to his 90s. And it's arranged uh by uh months of the year, and each month is introduced by a different writer, so you get a sort of perspective of what Ronnie's meant to uh other people, and it's just a completely beautiful book, and it's a book you dip into, uh you can read through the year with it, uh, you go back to, and there's always something new. It's amazingly compressed, uh, it's magical.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Yes, it is quite agreeable and gorgeous to finish off his books with that one as well. Yeah, um and one top action for people. What would you say as we sit here in the garden where Ronnie would have sat in one of these chairs? Yes. Um what would you say?

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Well, the act the action is not to feel overwhelmed uh by um by how the world seems to be, also not to feel entitlement, because entitlement is endless and it leads to disgruntlement, but to but to feel appreciation, to savour the moment, savour the life. As Ronnie did, and it's very easy, it's equal, it's easier to say that if you've had a comfortable life. But Ronald Blythe had a very uncomfortable life to begin with, and and actually quite an uncomfortable life in this house, in many ways, most people, many people would think. But he had this joy, joy in let joy in being alive, and I think that's the starting point for actually doing things, bring joy, yeah, yeah. And uh and um and I think we all need to do that more.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

Um fabulous. Ian Collins, thank you very much indeed for joining us on the pod heat camera action. Real pleasure to talk to you. Um I think we could probably talk for about a hundred years perhaps about about the whole of Raleigh's life. So um uh really lovely.