Gays, Fascists... and Otters

Henry Williamson and Gavin Maxwell both wrote storybooks about otters. Williamson's most famous book was Tarka the Otter and Maxwell's was Ring of Bright Water.

In 1935, Henry Williamson visited the National Socialist Congress at Nuremberg and was greatly impressed, particularly with the Hitler Youth movement, whose healthy outlook on life he compared with the sickly youth of the London slums. He developed a great admiration for Hitler which he never really lost. He subsequently joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1937.

At the start of World War II Williamson was briefly held under Defence Regulation 18B for his well-known political views, but was released after only a weekend in police custody.

Williamson's publisher was a man called Michael Seymour Sewell, usually now known by his religious name Brocard Sewell. Sewell became a Catholic convert in 1931 and a Carmelite friar in 1952. In his subsequent career as editor, publisher, printer and writer, he commemorated and wrote up a number of lesser literary lights, including the gay Catholic paedophile Frederick Rolfe and the pederastic Catholic occultist Montague Summers. He also wrote on distributist figures and the circle of the Catholic paedophile artist Eric Gill. As noted by Oswald Mosley biographer Stephen Dorril, Sewell was himself a member of the Distributist League and the British Union of Fascists. He engaged during the 1960s in a high-profile controversy, speaking out against the Catholic Church's teachings on contraception.

Gavin Maxwell was "privately homosexual" and had affairs with various teenage boys in Morocco and at his seaside cottage on the west coast of Scotland.