Flora Thompson
Thompson, Flora Jane (1876-1947), writer, was born in Juniper
Hill, a hamlet in north-east Oxfordshire, 5 December 1876, the
eldest child in the family of four daughters and two sons of
Albert Timms, a stonemason, originally from Buckingham, and his
wife Emma, a nursemaid, daughter of John Dibber from Stoke Lyne,
an 'eggler', who took his pony and cart around local farms,
collecting eggs and selling them in the market town.
Her favourite brother Edwin, born in 1879, was to die in 1916
during the battle of the Somme. After elementary education
at the village school in Cottisford she became, at the age of
fourteen, an unofficial post-office counter clerk in the
Oxfordshire village of Fringford. Until her marriage in
1903 she worked in post offices in Buckinghamshire, Essex, and
Hampshire.
In 1911 she won a magazine essay competition and went on to
write short stories, newspaper articles, and during the 1920s two
long series of articles for the Catholic Fireside magazine.
In alternate months she wrote nature articles and literary pieces.
She was a dedicated if self-taught naturalist. An anthology
of her nature articles called The
Peverel Papers was published in 1986. The literary articles
were the result of her home study of literature-she had grown up
during the establishment of the free library system in Britain,
which she used extensively to supplement her elementary education.
Her first published book was Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921), a
volume of poems which she was persuaded to submit for publication
by her friend and literary mentor Dr Ronald Campbell Macfie.
In 1938 she sent essays on her country childhood to the Oxford
University Press. These were published as Lark Rise (1939),
the story of the Oxfordshire hamlet where she was born. Over to
Candleford (1941) was followed by Candleford Green (1943). These
popular books were issued as the trilogy, Lark Rise to Candleford
(1945), with a perceptive introduction by H. J. Massingham [q.v.]
Flora Thompson was a reserved woman of little confidence who
was astonished when reviewers praised her work and Sir Arthur
Bryant [q.v.] rated her books as high as Cranford. The
books, which have become classics of country writing, evoke the
vigorous life of a hamlet, a village, and a country town in the
England of the 1880s. They are social history but also the
lightly disguised story of Flora Thompson's youth. Her last
book, Still Glides the Stream, was published posthumously in 1948.
In 1903 she married John William Thompson, a post-office clerk and telegraphist from the Isle of Wight, son of Henry Thompson, formerly a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy. They had two sons and one daughter. In 1941 her much-loved younger son Peter was lost at sea when the ship on which he served was torpedoed in mid-Atlantic; she never recovered from this loss. She died 21 May 1947 in Brixham, Devon.
[Margaret Lane, Flora Thompson, 1976; Gillian Lindsay, Flora
Thompson: the Story of the Lark Rise Writer, 1990.]
Supplied by John Owen Smith
wordsmith@headley1.demon.co.uk
http://www.headley1.demon.co.uk/flora/
[information on Flora Thompson]