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Catherine Pritchard

I have known Catherine ever since she was a little girl, a contemporary of my daughters at Primary School. Although born in ‘the other place’ (Oxford) the family moved here in 1969 and her mother Brenda was very well known as the village librarian. Her father Ray worked for Vince and Sons of Ely, specialising in mechanical and engineering repairs. Catherine went on to Melbourn Village College and eventually to work at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge where she remained for 2 or 3 years.

She went to Worcester where she once again worked in bookshops – the love of books obviously being a family trait – then moved on to Malvern where she decided to go to Agricultural College in Herefordshire. Having been involved for a number of years in the National Trust Acorn projects working outdoors with special needs or drug rehabilitation people, an opportunity arose for her to take up a place at college. From there it was a natural progression to take employment with the National Trust and she found herself living on Exmoor, hedging and ditching, leading guided walks across the moor and dealing with a pair of heavy horses which were used in extracting timber from the forests. Exmoor is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and on that terrain, a tractor would have been impossible to use besides being environmentally damaging, so the horses are used.

Catherine was living in a NT cottage and regularly saw job opportunities coming up around Britain and one post caught her eye – that of House Steward/Curator at Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s farm near Windermere. Many people applied for that job but Catherine was chosen and she remained there for 27 years.

It was deeply interesting and a tremendous privilege to work with the lovely old furniture and the collections of paintings and ceramics. The little books are so beloved, holding a special place in everyone’s affections and the steady stream of visitors proved to be a constant delight. As well as ordinary visitors like you and me, there were many famous people who made the pilgrimage to Hill Top, various member of the Royal Family, Harry Secombe, Esther Rantzen, Barbara Streisand, Roy Strong and Noel Edmonds to name but a few. Catherine also co-operated in a number of publications – she helped to rewrite NT guide books, worked with Susan Denyer on ‘Hill Top, at home with Beatrix Potter’, with Linda Lear on ‘A Life in Nature’, did various articles for the NT magazine and particularly, recently, helped Lucinda Riley with research for the third book in the Seven Sisters series where she is named in the credits. There were many other publications on which she worked and, furthermore, her cats appeared in print when Amy Feldman wrote ‘Cats of the National Trust’!

Visitors come from all over the globe to recreate the safe world of their childhood – but unsurprisingly the largest group of visitors come from Japan. So many Japanese want to see the home of Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggywinkle that the signposts are even written in Japanese! Catherine learned a little Japanese herself in order to help visitors round the house. Every gender and nationality will pore over the delicate watercolours and Catherine

says that a lot of people were moved to tears remembering their childhood and she was privy to a number of very moving private and personal reminiscences. If it was not a very busy day, she would make a cup of tea and lend a sympathetic ear to the visitor. On one occasion the house was visited by a family of FOUR generations, the visit was to mark the 100th birthday of the great, great grandmother.

Hill Top closed for the winter months and the end of the season was marked by the ‘putting to bed’ of the house. Everything would be cleaned, wrapped and put away – furniture covered and paintings taken down, a ‘good old side up’ in the vernacular! Catherine’s favourite job was to clean and pack away the doll’s house which featured in Two Bad Mice’.

On the subject of curating the contents of the house, Catherine mentioned the number of experts employed by the NT and how much she learned from them. The period during which these properties are closed is a vital time for assessing the condition of the inventoried items in the collection. Catherine had the opportunity of watching these experts at close quarters and went on a number of courses, one in particular sticks in her mind – a conference on DUST. Who would think that dust could be fascinating? Yet in a small house with a large daily footfall dust was a very real threat to some of the artefacts.

Beatrix Potter died just before Christmas 1943, which meant that there were still a number of local people who knew her who were still alive and could give Catherine first hand stories about the charismatic children’s author. I asked her if she had ever felt moved to write a book herself, but she felt sufficient people more qualified than she had already covered the subject. When Beatrix died, she left her estate to the National Trust – her father Rupert Potter had been the first Life Member of the Trust and was a friend of Canon Rawnsley who actually encouraged Beatrix to publish her first book. Beatrix was adamant that the books should be in the small format we all remember with affection – she said you should have “little books for little hands, after all, a little rabbit cannot afford big books”.

The estate included land, farms and cottages and Beatrix specified that there would always be Herdwick sheep grazing on the Fells. Some of the farms and cottages are NT holiday lets or offer bed and breakfast and all her farms are still working entities. The flourishing shop attached to Hill Top is the only NT shop which sells nothing but Peter Rabbit associated merchandise and local produce (no imported Cornish clotted cream fudge or books on Rudyard Kipling) and all the profits from the shop are ploughed back into the Lake District.

I can quite see that living in this enchanted world was a delight, everyone who visited did so with anticipation and left with satisfaction so it was an ideal working environment. However, Catherine was never ‘off duty’, on call seven days a week and after 27 years she reluctantly decided to say goodbye to the miniature world of talking rabbits and naughty mice.

She returned home to Melbourn where at the moment she is living with her father whilst she takes a well-earned rest. She has two deaf border collies which she rescued – a deaf sheep dog is not much use to a farmer trying to round up a flock of sheep if it cannot hear instructions! She has been catching up with old friends and ex colleagues and indulging herself with her hobbies of cross stitch samplers, reading about history, archaeology and also horse riding. Although she has mostly holidayed in Britain recently because of the dogs, she has travelled abroad, her most memorable holidays being in Nepal and Morocco.

In conversation Catherine mentioned that her hero is Eglantine Jebb (her maternal great, great aunt) who founded the Save the Children charity in 1919. In the winter of 1921 Eglantine and her colleagues filled a ship with 600 tons of aid to send to Russia where 300,000 children were saved from certain death. She is very proud of that family connection.

Going back to Catherine’s deaf collies – they respond only to hand and arm signals. So, if you see a young woman out in the countryside waving her arms about, she is not trying to fly – just signalling to her dogs! Mavis Howard

Catherine outside Hill Top house Hill Top House