User:Jon Reeds/Walter Wilkinson

Walter Wilkinson

Walter Wilkinson was an English travel writer and puppeteer who wrote a series of eight highly successful books about travels with his puppet show in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

Travel writings
Wilkinson's first book The Peep Show was published in 1927 to critical acclaim and went through at least five reprints over the next 20 years. It tells of the author's to reinvent and reinvigorate the traditional Punch & Judy show with a new cast of characters and plots, how he created the new puppets and the travelling show. The intention, he said, was to wander about the country exhibiting the show in villages and in the market places of country towns, and to camp in his little tent like a gypsy on commons, in woods or meadows, or by the roadside as occasion offered. It was a formula that was to serve him well thanks to his ability to record his adventures in a light-hearted style, making series points about the society he observed leavened with self-deprecatory humour.

The Peep Show recorded his journey afoot with his puppet show through Gloucestershire, Somerset and north Devon. It soon attracted a faithful readership and went through many reprints. The novelist D.H. Lawrence said that "To me, a book like The Peep Show reveals England better than 20 novels by clever young ladies and gentlemen". The Times Literary Supplement said that "... if Mr Wilkinson handles his puppets as deftly as he handles his pen, we shall tramp a good many miles to see them", the Liverpool Post called it "as merry an artistic vagabondage as any ever set down in print" while The Daily Herald said it was "a classic of the open road".

Today we might call Wilkinson an environmentalist or conservationist for he deftly used his light, satirical style to deprecate the changes that the motor car and urban sprawl were wreaking on the countryside between the wars. His second book Vagabonds and Puppets was published in 1930 and recounted his trip from Letchworth down to Wooton Basset and then southwards from Bath through Wiltshire and Hampshire. Towards the end, "September rains and occasional frosts" had made a "light-weight camp and one pair of sodden shoes seem a very inadequate protection" and his finances having improved from 20/- to £20 over the summer, he resolved to spend the winter in London. But an invitation to visit Switzerland sent him hurrying off there to a pension halfway up Mount Pelerin. There, he wrote to the canton requesting permission to bring his show to Switzerland. The response was a letter ordering him to leave the canton within three weeks. Further lobbying allowed him to stay, but not to perform and he returned to England to pass the winter on the south coast