Heather Tanner

Heather Tanner (14 July 1903 – 23 June 1993), née Heather Muriel Spackman, was a writer and campaigner on issues relating to peace, the environment and social justice. She worked in close collaboration with her husband, Robin Tanner, at their home in Kington Langley, Wiltshire.

Heather Tanner was born as Heather Spackman at 'Rose Cottage', Priory Street, Corsham, Wiltshire on 14 July 1903. Her parents were Daisy Goold (1865–1945) and Herbert Spackman (1864–1949), who had three daughters, Sylvia, Heather and Faith (Olive). Herbert Spackman, an accomplished musician and photographer, ran a grocery and drapery store in Corsham High Street. Heather Tanner and her younger sister, Faith Sharp, edited an account of their father’s early life, A Corsham Boyhood: The Diary of Herbert Spackman 1877–1891.

Heather Tanner attended Chippenham Grammar School, where she met her future husband, the etcher and teacher Robin Tanner. In his autobiography, Double Harness, Robin recounts how, as school prefects he and Heather would smuggle secret messages to each other in the absentee registers for which they were responsible as their relationship blossomed in the early 1920s. Heather achieved a First Class degree at King's College London, which she left in 1929 to become an English teacher at The Duchess School for Girls, Alnwick Castle, Northumberland. After a brief geographical separation while Robin studied at Goldsmiths College, London, Heather and Robin married at Corsham Church, 4 April 1931. Heather wore a dress that Robin had designed at the wedding.

Heather and Robin Tanner moved to Kington Langley, Wiltshire, after their wedding, the start of a lifelong creative collaboration and residence. In Double Harness, Robin Tanner writes that Heather’s uncle, the architect Vivian Goold, 'generously offered as a wedding gift to design a house for us and supervise its building if we could find a piece of land we liked'. The result was Old Chapel Field, completed in 1931. The house, which is still standing in the village, is a distinctive blend of arts and crafts and modernist styles, both charming and functional. Inspired by Charles Francis Annesley Voysey, Goold came to regard the house as the finest that he had designed. Heather and Robin had great affection for the 'Voyseyish' Old Chapel Field where they were to live for the rest of their lives. The Tanners were thrilled to discover that Francis Kilvert’s great-grandfather was buried in the graveyard of the Chapel from which their home took its name Old Chapel Field and both Heather and Robin actively supported the Kilvert Society.

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