Beatrix Potter: The other side of the family with Tim Maggs

Beatrix Potter: The other side of the family & the Helen Leech enigma

Beatrix Potter's life path from birth to liberation & renaissance as Mrs Heelis through marriage in 1913, at the age of forty-seven, was seemingly shaped far more by the pretentious, stifling & controlling nature of her mother than by her father or chauvinistic Victorian society. Yet we know little about her mother, born Helen Leech, her mother's immediate family, or the environment in which she grew up with her five older siblings - which I've astonishingly discovered wasn't as has always been assumed & re-stated down the years, in Beatrix Potter biographies.

We know a fair amount about Beatrix's Unitarian grandfather Edmund Potter, his great wealth & good works, but next to nothing about her other Unitarian grandfather, John Leech, who'd died before she was born - every bit as wealthy, successful & entrepreneurial. We know much about paternal 'Uncle Harry'- eminent chemist Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe & his crucial role in mentoring Beatrix's scientific study of fungi & their spores, but what about her professional entomologist cousin John Leech, three years her senior - a long-standing elected fellow of The Linnean Society, with his Kensington residence just a mile from her parental home? ... And where lurked the dreaded 'It' in the family?

About the speaker
Tim is an electronic engineer by profession, but jumped ships in mid-life to become a Lake District National Park Ranger for the second half of his working life, while his wife Beverley, an early member of the Beatrix Potter Society, was employed by the National Park Authority as a guide, leading walks 'In the footsteps of Beatrix Potter'. On retirement in 2014, having been drip-fed Beatrix Potter over the dinner table for twenty years, Tim joined her as a National Trust volunteer at Beatrix's beloved Hill Top, where they nowadays volunteer together every week.

Tim's insatiable interest is continually motivated by how much is still unknown about this much-loved local icon & national treasure - which doesn't sit comfortably with his engineering principles. In recent years he's been exploiting the explosion of text & document digitalisation, in an attempt to fill in a few of the gaps. Some of this original research has been published by the Beatrix Potter Society.