252 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
prior to her marriage, when Peter was 13, to Edward 
Hilton Young who was to become a cabinet minister 
and later Lord Kennet. 
It was at his stepfather’s Wiltshire cottage, The 
Lacket, in the Kennet Valley village of Lockeridge, 
described by Scott as the ‘one of the most perfect 
thatched cottages I have ever seen’, that the 
teenaged Peter’ recalled painting flowers 
[meticulously] in watercolours as his stepfather, a 
patient bird watcher, read aloud to him each 
evening. 
It nestles amid ancient yews; and across from the 
cottage there is a gentle slope of fields to the West 
Woods. These woods were our particular delight, and 
we had our own names for all the places in them, 
which we marked on our own special six-inch-to-the- 
mile map — Archer’s Dene, Brock Dene, Peached 
valley, Mole Joke. Often we used to walk far over the 
Downs and into Savernake Forest. Always on these 
walks I would collect wild flowers and bring them 
home... Finally I had quite a complete collection of 
small drawings of the common wild flowers that grew 
around The Lacket. I always found being read aloud 
to an excellent stimulus to my drawing. 
Scott had his first drawing published, a privet 
hawk moth, aged just 13. But while Wiltshire 
influenced the young Peter Scott, Venables did not 
move to the Wiltshire-Berkshire borders, and 
finally Upavon in Wiltshire, until later life, despite 
being drawn since 1940 by a fascination for the 
River Kennet. During the war Venables’ skill as an 
artist saw him deployed by several government 
ministries, drawing tanks and aircraft for 
propaganda purposes. In 1946 he joined the Daily 
Miurror in which his famous cartoon strip character 
‘Mr Crabtree’ first appeared, as a gardener, in 1947 
— not long before Venables inevitably suggested 
when winter prevented work in the garden Mr 
Crabtree should go fishing. The daily strips in 
which Mr Crabtree taught his son Peter to fish in all 
conditions were compiled into a book in 1949 that 
was an instant best seller. Informed by some of the 
most glorious watercolours of British freshwater 
fish ever published, post-war generations were 
‘Rudd’ by Bernard Venables watercolour 15 x 12 inches — one of a series of 31 started in 1946 in a return to the colours and 
posture of Victorian natural history prints. 
