Remembering Peter Hesp

As we began thinking about some other stories we could put up here on my site my friend and colleague Richard Austin - the famous press photographer - sent me this image of my dear old dad.

Needless to say, I could write a book about the man most of the world knew as Peter Hesp, but for time being will repeat a press article I penned 13 years ago…

“If you’ve got one of the most interesting jobs in the world, what on earth do you do when you retire? Journalists in particular often face this conundrum because they spend their lives in the thick of things minding everyone else’s business and generally reporting on stories that are interesting enough to make headlines.

As roving writer, the distant retirement question is one that often haunts me, but perhaps I ought to be looking no further than the example set by my own journalist father. 

Peter Hesp was a well-known journalist working in the West Country for the best part of 40 years – he used to write columns just like mine and generally paint word-pictures of the goings on of the day for his readers.

Now he paints pictures in soft pastel. 

This weekend the 78 year old will be staging his 15th consecutive annual exhibition since he retired from the wordy world of newspapers. It may seem a little nepotistic of me to be writing about him, but seeing he pinches the odd Hesp’s Hike photograph from me we thought we’d give him a plug.

“For 40 years I was writing feature articles trying to please the readers by taking them on imaginary walks on Exmoor,” my father told me. “Then they were wrapping their fish and chips in my words, which was always a little disheartening. Now I’m doing the same thing in visual terms, but at least the paintings last much longer.”

Peter specialises in West Country subjects like the rolling moors high above his Selworthy home in the Exmoor National Park. He also loves to paint the coastal scenes he comes across on his regular visits to Cornwall and South Devon.  

“When I was a junior reporter in Hull, the women’s page editor was married to the principle of the local college of art and she showed him some of my sketches,” recalls Peter. “He liked them and gave me permission to go into the life class whenever I wanted without actually having to join the college - so whenever I had a spare moment I went in and did some sketching. 

“Then I was on a paper in Birmingham and I occasionally did the line drawings for the children’s page so that the kids could colour them in. When I came to the West Country after working in London I started illustrating some of my feature articles with pen and ink drawings, and they seemed to go down well.”

So Hesp-senior never had any doubts over how he’d spend his retirement. “I always work in soft pastels,” he told me as he prepared to mount the annual exhibition at Allerford Village Hall. “I love oils but they take too long by the time you’ve mixed them and left them to dry. If you do that you can’t keep the price down to match the market we have here in the Wes Country – but by working in soft pastels I can work faster and therefore keep the price within the range of a regional market.”