I'm in the very fortunate position of working from home, with my home office overlooking a natural meadow which, during the summer and early autumn months, is grazed by horses from the local animal sanctuary.
View from my office window!
Wendy Valentine of Hillside Animal Sanctuary has devoted her life to rescuing animals in need but it's probably a little known fact that Anna Sewell, the author of Black Beauty, back in the mid Victorian period was, in her own way, a campaigner for animal welfare and was very much a "local girl".
Black Beauty is of course that wonderful children's story which is an autobiography of a horse and deals with Beauty's mistreatment and cruelty at the hands of man but fortunately it has a happy ending!
Anna was born in Great Yarmouth, a port on the Norfolk coast, into a Quaker family. Soon after she was born the family moved to London and from their travelled around the country but Anna and her brother Philip often came back to Norfolk to visit their grandparents who lived on a farm in the village of Buxton. Here, Anna learned to ride but unfortunately, when she was a teenager, she fell and badly damaged her ankles. Throughout the rest of her life, she became more and more severely crippled and became more and more reliant on horse drawn carriages.
In 1867 the family eventually settled at a house near Norwich - on Spixworth Road, Old Catton (now known as Anna Sewell House) - just a five minute drive from my home.
Anna first mentioned the writing of Black Beauty in a diary entry in November 1871. She recorded that she was writing "the life of a horse" while she was getting dolls and boxes ready for Christmas. Some five years later, in December 1876 she recorded that she was getting on with her "little book - Black Beauty". By this time, Anna was becoming even more severely crippled and spending most of her time confined to the house. She later recorded that, when she was able, she was writing what she hoped would turn out to be a book to encourage "kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses".
Black Beauty was published late in 1877 and Anna lived just long enough to see how successful it was. Unfortunately she died on 25 April 1878 and was buried in the Quaker burial ground at Lamas, not far from her grandparents' home in Buxton. The cemetery has since been built on but her gravestone remains set on a wall nearby as a memorial.
Buxton, Lamas and Catton are all within a stone's throw of my home village of Spixworth and I'm sure, if Anna had still be alive today, she would be delighted to know that Hillside Animal Sanctuary is also located within the same area.
