WJ Burley

A biographical note

The island of Godrevy in West Cornwall is a place of great beauty. A lighthouse perched above sheer cliffs, and in the sky above, score upon score of seabirds wheeling and crying over the waves and the turf. Viewed in the cold, wet winds of winter, or at midsummer, when the sun sprinkles gems of light over the tops of the waves, it is a quintessential Cornish visual experience . an image captured forever through the viewfinders of countless holiday cameras.

To see it at its best, you need to stand on Godrevy Point, or above the foaming Atlantic where the seals play and the cormorants fish at Navax Point. On a summer afternoon, with the sails of the yachts gleaming in the bay beyond and the scent of thyme in the air, it is difficult to imagine anywhere in the British Isles closer to heaven. Then in the evening, when the light is dimming below the Penwith hills, it is easy to believe that this is one of those headlands that Guinevere's father saw when

After the sunset, down the coast he heard
Strange music, and he paused and turning - there
All down the lonely coast of Lyonesse,
Each with a beacon star upon his head,
And with a wild sea-light about his feet,
He saw them - headland after headland flame
Far into the rich heart of the west.

From virtually any point of the compass, Godrevy is unsurpassingly beautiful. Virginia Woolf studied it from the west, across the waters of St Ives Bay, and hurried to her pen, her mind consumed with the lighthouse. The image fed a powerful creative imagination which produced one of the great works of twentieth century English literature. In other people the response is more prosaic, but no less profound. This is a place of potent, magical beauty.

There is, however, a flaw. Had Virginia Woolf seen the island, not from across the bay but from fifty feet above it, she would have been confronted by a more complex reality of Cornwall. On Gwithian beach, just south of Godrevy Point, a river spills into the sea. This is the Red River, and never was a river better named. It rises on the moors south of Camborne and Redruth, and as it weaves its way to the ocean it collects the accumulated spoil and detritus of man's industrial activities, from the waste left by the tin streamers who worked in this valley before the birth of Christ, to the pollutants ejected at the end of the twentieth century by the last working tin mine in Cornwall For hundreds of years, the beach at Gwithian and the sea of St Ives Bay were stained a deep ochre by the dissolved metals of the Red River as it emerged from the hinterland and deposited its unwholesome cargo onto the sands..

Other serpents, too, exist in this garden of Eden. The sand dunes south of Godrevy have been colonised by ugly bungalows and holiday chalets, and electricity pylons march across the sands. A mile or two further round the bay is the town of Hayle, founded on the smelting of copper and the importation of coal. It is not a pretty sight.

Hayle is an easy place to dislike. No tourist in his right mind would stop here any longer than it takes to fill the car with petrol or the children with Burger Kings. Virginia Woolf surely must have hated it. Daphne du Maurier would probably have refused to acknowledge its existence. And yet, it is real . This is the real Cornwall. You cannot have Godrevy without Hayle.

One writer, perhaps the only popular writer ever to paint a picture of this drab, dismal, town, knew this; not only did he know it, but he embraced it, and rejoiced in it.

Few people are attracted to the little town at first acquaintance. Sprawled along the margins of a muddy estuary with sand dunes to the north and east and the honey-pot of St Ives over the river to the west, Hayle is for most people a place on the way to a chalet or caravan park, or to the great stretch of sand on the east side of the bay. But [he] found attractions which were easily overlooked; the Copperhouse Arms, a pub where neither the bar nor the beer had been plasticized by a brewery; a café where the locals gathered to eat bacon and egg at all times of day; a multiplicity of little shops instead of chain stores - and friendly natives.

These words, typical of the author's determination to paint a picture of Cornwall with its warts and all, were written by William John Burley. Burley knew Hayle and the Red River well. He knew, too, the other corners of Cornwall where the beautiful lives in close proximity to the barren and the grotesque.

Born within sight and sound of the cranes and dockyard whistles of Falmouth, John Burley spent his formative years absobing the industrial reality of Cornwall. When he left school, it was for a job in the local gasworks where he learnt his business in the smoke and fumes of the coke burners. In his early thirties, he came with his young family to the stink of Tuckingmill, in the valley of the Red River. There, in the thumping heartland of Cornish mining and manufacturing, he ran the energy company which supplied some of the greatest names in the West with the means to keep their businesses alive and prosperous. From the windows of his family home, he could see the winding gear of South Crofty spinning the cages up and down the shafts, taking the miners to the tin lodes which made Cornwall famous around the world. He could see the arsenic chimneys and, of course, the gasworks. The stench of industry was all around him - in his eyes, his ears, his mouth.

This might seem sterile soil in which to nurture the finer points of a mind preoccupied with commerce. But on the banks of this river, John Burley underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis. Inspired by the charismatic teaching of the great Cornish scholar Frank Turk, he threw off the restraints of a salaried existence and unleashed a formidable intellect. Leaving his wife and young children behind, he caught the train to Oxford and, with just a mature student scholarship to support him, he became an undergraduate at Balliol College, studying zoology. His family stayed behind, living largely on rabbits and stews, eaten by candlelight. During the vacations from Oxford, John Burley and his sons Alan and Nigel foraged along the banks of the Red River, collecting and recording the plants and animals which made it their home. He was particularly fascinated by the diptera - the two-winged flies which were later to become his speciality. After three years of study, Burley graduated with honours.

It was the end of a remarkable interlude in an otherwise mundane working life. He returned home to normality, and took up a career in education. For the thirteen years following the abrupt and unlikely interruption of Oxford, he maintained the staid life of a schoolteacher. The unexpected, the unpredictable, were things of the past. He lived in a bungalow on the coast of North Cornwall, and commuted to his school in a Ford Cortina. By day he taught biology, inspiring several generations of children with a love for natural history. At night, just like teachers everywhere, he sat at his desk and marked exercise books. A comfortable, humdrum, warm existence, built around weekly routines and monthly pay cheques.

It could have gone on like this, as it does for most people, until the presentations and pension books of retirement day. But suddenly, in his fifty second year, John Burley reinvented himself again. Fearing for the privations of old age, he decided to take matters in hand.

He could have set himself up, as many teachers do, as a private tutor - a conventional, Ford Cortina kind of option. But just as he had done once before, John Burley went for the unexpected. Sitting himself behind a typewriter, he issued instructions to his wife and family that he was not, on any account, to be disturbed. And he began to write .

"All schools are something like the one in this book, but none that I know has a poison pen writer or a murderer on the staff, nor anybody likely to indulge in these diversions. My teaching collegues have been, generally, pleasant and patient people ."

The resulting 120,000-odd words, concerning mayhem and murder at the Huntley-May Grammar School, was sent to the veteran publisher of detective fiction, Victor Gollancz, in London.

A first novel by a writer in his fifties might have been thought to have had only one destination - the wastepaper basket. But Gollancz, a shrewd and experienced professional, saw something in this effort. Instead of dispatching the manuscript back to Cornwall with a polite rejection slip, he bought the book and published it. Many people of his aquaintance might have doubted the wisdom of his decision, but twenty eight years and twenty three novels later, the instincts of Victor Gollancz proved themselves to be unerring, and in spectacular fashion.

On a Sunday evening in the summer of 1994, just under eleven million people tuned in to watch the first episode of a new police drama series, based on Burley's fictional detective, Chief Superintendent Charles Wyliffe, on Britain's Independent Television network. Even making allowances for the hyperbolic and imprecise nature of measuring television audiences, this was a remarkable figure. Nearly one fifth of the entire population of the United Kingdom was settling down, during what is acknowledged to be television's slackest season of July and August, to watch a new show . one in every six men, women and children in the land, choosing this untried, untested programme as their Sunday evening entertainment.

Wycliffe, the detective created solely as a means of providing a retired teacher and his wife with a few additional creature comforts in their old age was now responsible for the employment of dozens of actors, producers, directors, camera operators, film editors and all the other assorted individuals constituting a television production unit; helping a national broadcasting concern to dominate the ratings (and thus earn itself very large amounts of money from organisations anxious to advertise their goods and services during the commercial breaks in programming); and, not least of all these feats, providing wholesome entertainment to a sizeable portion of the population of Britain. By any standards, this was a remarkable creative achievement.

The Wycliffe series ran to thirty six regular, one-hour, programmes, and two special episodes. They were shown on the ITV network, and then later on satellite broadcasting outlets. The publishers were naturally quick to take advantage of this television success story. The Wycliffe titles were republished in softback editions, with still photographs from the TV production used as front covers. Every railway station bookstall, every airport, stocked them. They sold in their thousands. Two omnibus hardback volumes, each decorated with photographs of the actor who played the part of Wycliffe, were produced. "Now, for the first time in my life, I no longer have to worry about money," said the author in 1995.

He continued to write new Wycliffe stories, although by now the television programmes were based on the work of the ITV scriptwriters, and owed nothing, in terms of plot, to their originator. Three new novels were published in the five years between 1995 and 2000, with print runs which would have been unthinkable the previous decade. The last of these novels, Wycliffe and the Guild of Nine, was published without a reference to the television series, either photographic or otherwise. Burley's publishers clearly thought Wycliffe popular enough to secure sales without exploiting the now somewhat dated TV connection.

And then, suddenly . nothing. Fans of Wycliffe, eagerly awaiting the next book, found the weeks becoming months, and the months becoming years. An email to Burley's publishers, sent to try to elicit information about the delay, prompted the following response: "I believe W J Burley died not long ago, so we won't be getting any more new books."

Further inquiries met with similar equivocation. Nobody seemed to be entirely sure if John Burley, the man who, less than ten years before had seen his creation draw one fifth of the population to their television sets on a summer Sunday night, was dead or alive. If he was alive, why was there no new Wycliffe novel for his fans? If he was dead, why had no obituary notice appeared in the newspapers? Why did his publisher seem to be only half-certain of his fate? It was a puzzle that might have exercised the mind of the Chief Superintendent himself: Wycliffe and the case of the Vanishing Author.

Taken from Wycliffe and the Vanishing Author: a biography of WJ Burley, a work in progresss by Andrew Darling.

Previous Next