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82 The Economist September 22nd 2018
THE hints were all around Johnny King-
dom, if he gave it thought. Whenever
he dug a grave, there was always a robin
about. When he took a break, laying down
his spade, pick and shovel, he liked to
watch the ivy-clad churchyard walls
where the blackbirds nested and where
snails tookshelter in the heat of the day. He
even got grudgingly fond of the old cock
pheasant who kept jumping in his graves
and, if he hid behind the headstones,
would perch on the edge as if to say,
“Where’re you to then?”
Truth to say he was watching wildlife
long before a friend put an 8mm video-
camera into his hand and encouraged him
to use it, after a tree-felling accident in 1971
that nearly did for him and left his mind in
pieces for some time. His home-made na-
ture films brought him fame all over the
country and led to several series on TV, as
well as books, but he remained theman he
always had been, whose chief enjoyment
(once he was past the girl-chasing-motor-
bike-crashing-cider-soaking years) was to
stay in one place, andwatch.
His place was Exmoor, a land of rolling
heather hills and steep coombes in north
Devon. The sweetest place on Earth. The
water was like gin there; in spring the
woods were white with snowdrops, then
yellow with wild daffodils. You wouldn’t
have a prettier scene. Except for National
Service in Hong Kong, he never left it. He
was born, the only boy in a family of five
girls, in High Bray, and moved about 11
miles to live in Bishop’s Nympton, in a
council house. There he starred in the darts
and football teams and was a fixture at the
Bish Mill pub over the hill. If his wife Julie
made him take holidays he spent them
wishing he was home, with a lovely slice
of bread and syrup and themoor outside.
As forwatching, hewas a past master at
that, patiently observing and easing him-
self closer and closer to a creature. From
boyhood he had learned how to creep up
onwildlife, mostly to catch it for the family
table. He knew how to tickle trout, slowly
stroking their cold smooth bellies and
sides before hooking a finger under a gill to
pull them in; he could camouflage himself
under trees, waiting to spear salmon with
his dung pick, or creep to kill a deer. So he
could also lie on his belly for four hours
with freezing feet to film fox cubs, or stoats
playing. Hewould crawl forward, a fair old
crawl at times, making sure he was down-
wind and that nothing, whether his chub-
by cheeks or his lens rim, was shining up to
give himaway. At some point hemight just
cast in (fishing parlance), to see if he could
pick up something. Then he shot, not with
a bullet, hauling the bloodied bodies
home in the van, but by tagging a button to
set the tape going: his favourite red deer,
such beautiful fine beasts, coming out of a
wooded cleave through the mist, or a rare
mistle thrush pitching on rowan berries
right in his front garden.
He kept trying to get closer. When he
was not gravedigging (sometimes strip-
ping off to reveal his tattoos), hewas usual-
ly in green camouflage, with only his cam-
eras, bigger and heavier over the years,
giving him away. Even the feathers in his
hat, buzzard’s and pheasant’s, served a
purpose to lose him in the heather. He
once got three feet away from an adder in
the brambles, which yawned its pink
mouth fit to swallowhim.
SouthMolton on Thursdays
Several hides were built, most of them on
his very own 52-acre woodland patch of
Exmoor. One was made from a fallen-
down pylon, 29 feet high; from this he
filmed badgers running along an assault
course he had built for them or eating Ju-
lie’s badger cake, made of peanuts, Sugar
Puffs and fat. Another hide, with arm-
chairs in it (where he once served cream
tea) was especially for watching nesting
boxes via a computer. Here he broke his re-
cord for birds in a box, 18wrens all piling in.
Yet another hide, made of wooden boxes
yoked on his shoulders with a camouflage
tent on top, wasmeant to float; from this he
filmed 50 dunlin just beside him, out on
the estuary, until the blasted thing sank.
All thismade great TV , when his Devon
burr and twinkling smile were added to
the scenery and the animals. If he could
have filmed the legendary Beast of Ex-
moor, which Julie had seen and he had cer-
tainly heard, it would have been even bet-
ter. But it seemed a funny sort of fame.
Everything startedverysuddenly,whenhe
appeared in a programme called “The Se-
cret of Happiness” in 1993, and his home-
made DVDs flew out in hundreds from his
front room; and then it passed over until
the next spurt, in 2006-15. In the interval he
went onwith life as usual, selling his DVDs
at local markets (especially at South Mol-
ton on Thursdays), showing them in vil-
lage halls, and digging graves.
He had other jobs, including setting ex-
plosive charges in quarries and helping on
farms, but gravedigging was something
both his father and grandfather had done.
As a small boy he went along to light their
night work with a tilley lamp, shivering at
ghost stories and terrified by the skull his
father thrust up once on his fork. It got to
him sometimes; he had buried friends,
and his parents. But he learned to look
death square in the eye. Under the church
tower at Bishop’sNympton in 2006, where
the ground was always hard, he had dug a
last grave, his own, filling inwith soft earth
tomake a nice easy job. 7
Creeping closer
JohnnyKingdom, gravedigger, poacher andwildlife photographer, died on
September 6th, aged 79
Obituary Johnny Kingdom