Book review: Centenarian Blythe lived a colourful life with rural values at its heart

Author Ian Collins takes a leisurely approach in this beautifully produced book; chapters are short — often only five or six pages, and tightly focused

Ronald Blythe in his study, July 1983. He protested that he was no sociologist. Picture: Jeremy Grayson/Getty 

• Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe 
• Ian Collins 
• John Murray, €30 

Ronald Blythe was born in Acton, a small village in Suffolk in 1922, and lived for a full century, dying in 2023, not far from his birthplace. 

He grew up in poverty and left school at 14, educating himself by reading voraciously, a passion he shared with his mother.

He worked initially in Colchester Library, and in his spare time wrote essays about nature and the English countryside, inspired by his illustrious predecessors, Thomas Hardy, John Clare, and Gilbert White.

Local “Bohemians”, some associated with the Bloomsbury set, many of them gay, who had moved from London to Suffolk for the cheapness of its large rural houses, advised and encouraged the striking young man. 

In his youth Blythe had golden curls, the face of an angel and the body of a faun. 

He wrote about gardens, churches, and above all the natural world, seeking out “the poetry of the ordinary” — a dragonfly’s wings, perhaps, or his inscrutable white cat.

In the 1980s Blythe’s work was discovered by a new generation of “nature writers”, including his friend and neighbour Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, and Robert Macfarlane. 

The BBC referred to him as “this country’s literary custodian of its rural values” when he was a castaway on Desert Island Discs.

Blythe is best known for Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), a first-hand account in interview form of everyday life in a fictional Suffolk village from the 1880s to the late ’60s. 

The poverty, dirt, and discomfort of the rural labouring class shocked readers, while the interviews chronicled the decline of an age-old way of life which all but disappeared over the next 30 years.

The author, Ian Collins, a younger friend and latterly a carer to Blythe, takes a leisurely approach in this beautifully produced book which has notes, bibliography, and an index as well as fascinating photos. Chapters are short — often only five or six pages, and tightly focused.

There is much emphasis on Blythe’s identity as a gay man in an age when gay sex was still illegal, punished by prison and hard labour — see Oscar Wilde. 

In 1954 there were more than 1,000 ‘practising homosexuals’ in jail. It was not until 1967 that homosexual acts were decriminalised in England.

Conscripted into the army at 18, Blythe turned up with a copy of The Waves, Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel, as a refuge. 

Failing to progress as a private soldier, he was sent on an officer’s training course, which he also failed. 

Blythe — which means “gentle or pleasant” — was known among his friends for his gentleness. He literally could not hurt a fly. 

Asked for some positive memory of his army days he reported: “Lots of erotic action and some of the best sex ever with another soldier.”

Blythe seems to have met an extraordinary number of interesting people just by staying still in Suffolk, from Benjamin Britten to EM Forster, Imogen Holst, Patricia Highsmith, and the artist Maggi Hambling. 

His closest friends, the painter John Nash and his wife Christine, bequeathed him their unusual, much-loved home, a Tudor long house, giving him “a fairy tale address”, Bottengoms, Wormingford.

I had always assumed that Akenfield was Blythe’s idea, but in fact it was his publisher who persuaded him to write it, following the success of a book of interviews by a sociologist about a Chinese village. 

Blythe protested that he was no sociologist, but eventually agreed to have a go. Many of the so-called interviews were fictional composites dreamed up by the author, and he was judged by some to have “cheated”. 

But they ring true, being grounded in Blythe’s deep knowledge of rural living, and Akenfield made him a fortune.