Novelist best known for Watership Down

Born: May 9, 1920;

Died: December 27, 2016

RICHARD Adams, who has died aged 96, was a novelist best known for Watership Down, about a group of rabbits who flee their idyllic warren when it is earmarked for a housing development. The novel is regarded as a modern classic; it has been translated into 18 languages and made into an animated film. Often interpreted as an allegory or parable, Adams always insisted that it was “just a story”.

Adams drew on the rural idyll of his childhood in writing Watership Down. He was born in Newbury, Berkshire, ironically the site of a real life clash 76 years later between road developers and protesters over the destruction of mature woodland.

The youngest of three siblings from a well-to-do middle class home set in three acres, Adams spent hours every day outside. He later recalled how his father, a country doctor, would take him for walks on the River Kennet and expect him to be able to name all the birds and animals they encountered.

Animals were a fascination from an early age. Adams would lose himself in his imagination, inhabiting the worlds of Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh and Doctor Dolittle.

Aged nine, he began attending local Horris Hill prep school before going to boarding school at Bradfield College in Berkshire and then to Worcester College, Oxford, where he read history.

A year after he started at Oxford, in 1939, he was called up. After a number of wartime postings away from the action, in 1943 he started serving with the 1st British Airborne Division. He described the men he served with as “the bravest … who ever lived” and drew upon two in particular, the self-effacing but authoritative Maj John Gifford and the energetic, daring Capt. Paddy Kavanagh, as inspiration for his Watership Down characters Hazel and Bigwig; indeed, the camaraderie between the rabbits (the main characters were all male) echoed his own experience in the army. Adams was at the liberation of Brussels, Copenhagen and Singapore, although he never fired a shot.

Returning to Oxford in 1946, he found that many of his friends had been killed.

The realisation that human beings kill each other, once witnessed up close, he noted, always remains a preoccupation, and this was evident in his writing. Watership Down famously confronted its young readers with pain and tragedy. He admitted that he knew his writing could upset children, but he took the view, as his own parents had done, that readers “like to be upset, excited and bowled over” and that children should not be protected in fiction from all harsh realities.

In 1948, he began a 26-year career as a Whitehall civil servant, rising to assistant secretary in the ministry of housing and local government. A year later, he married Elizabeth Acland, later an authority on English ceramics, and the couple had two daughters.

It was not in fact until Adams reached his 50s that he began writing. His first and most famous novel began as a yarn to entertain his daughters, Juliet and Rosamond, during a long car journey, but then further instalments were added during the school run. The girls urged him to write the story down and eventually he did.

The manuscript was rejected seven times by publishers and literary agents who felt it was too adult for children but not right for adults either.

Then finally, in 1972, a small publisher, Rex Collings, produced a small print run of 2,500. Adams was 52.

Extraordinary acclaim followed – Adams won the Carnegie Medal – and sales reached a million (they have now passed 50 million). Such was the success of Watership Down that it allowed the civil servant to retire.

He went on to write another 20 books, fiction and non-fiction, and was particularly proud of Shardik (1974), his second novel, a dark tale of a society that worship a god-like mystical bear, and The Plague Dogs (1977) about two dogs who escape from a vivisection facility. Some of his later books, aimed at an altogether different audience, were notable for their unabashed sexual content. But he never again experienced the success or acclaim of Watership Down.

After leaving the civil service, Adams spent spells as writer in residence at the University of Florida and at Hollins University, Virginia, and lived for seven years on the Isle of Man, for tax reasons, but then he and Elizabeth moved to Whitchurch in Hampshire (the location of the real-life Watership Down), 10 miles from his birthplace. He aligned himself with animal protection charities, spending a year in 1982 as president of the RSPCA.

Interviewers were often surprised to find that Adams was no shy, retiring amateur naturalist, but chatty, unsentimental and combative, while at the same time given to sudden outbursts of weeping.

He continued to write well into his nineties and dealt with stories about humans more than once, but he was the first to admit that he was at his best writing about animals. As he put it: “I’m a fantasist.”

Earlier this year it was announced that a new animated version of Watership Down was being made by the BBC and Netflix featuring voices by James McAvoy and Ben Kingsley. The story was also famously adapted for the screen in 1978.

Richard Adams is survived by his wife, two daughters, six grandchildren and great-grandchildren. [check]

REBECCA MCQUILLAN