He was a champion of biodiversity and helped save the adjacent ancient right of way from destruction by a local farmer.

Administrative/Biographical historyRoger Deakin (1943-2006), nature writer, environmentalist and film-maker. He was a regular contributor to the Financial Times , The Independent , Guardian and BBC Wildlife . From 2001 he contributed to the writers' courses at Schumacher College near Dartington. Roger was born in Watford, the son of a railway clerk, and educated at Haberdashers' Aske's school in Hampstead and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English. A period as an advertising copywriter followed and he then spent three years as an English teacher at Diss high school, Norfolk. Deakin married Jenny Hind in 1973 with whom he had a son, Rufus, before the marriage was dissolved in 1982. [1] Deakin died, aged 63, in Mellis, Suffolk. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour only four months previously. At the time of his death he had just completed Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, to be published in 2007. He had travelled in many countries - though particularly in those of the former eastern bloc - investigating the plight of ancient woodlands and forests.Roger was best known as a wild swimmer but he was much more besides. He was an ad man in Swinging Soho who moonlit as an upcycler selling stripped pine furniture to hipsters (including a young Judi Dench) on Portobello Road; he embraced self-sufficiency in Suffolk then became an inspirational English teacher; he was a filmmaker, a musical impresario, and he co-founded Common Ground, a prescient environmental charity which championed “ordinary” nature – verges, hedgerows, orchards. Despite finding the role that best suited his creative mind in his 50s – a writer – he never published another book in his lifetime, succumbing to a brain tumour that quietly grew as he struggled to finish a book about trees, Wildwood, which was published after his death. Rufus (The Reliable USB Formatting Utility, with Source [4]) is a free and open-source portable application for Microsoft Windows that can be used to format and create bootable USB flash drives or Live USBs. So I spliced together many thousand shards of memoir, fact and feeling found in his notebooks, letters, jottings and journalism. Then I juxtaposed his enraptured view of the world with the recollections of his friends. Sometimes there is harmony between them; at other times realities clash violently. What emerges, I hope, is a feel for Roger’s passion and poetry, and an honest, unsparing portrait of a life. Roger and I shared the same sky, we loved the same woods Deakin, an only child, was born in Watford, Hertfordshire. His father was a railway clerk from Walsall in the Midlands, who died when Deakin was 17. Educated at The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an independent school, based at the time in Hampstead in north-west London, followed by Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Deakin read English, under the auspices of writer Kingsley Amis. [1]

At the suggestion of Sue Clifford and Angela King at the arts and environmental organisation, Common Ground, of which he was a founding trustee and passionate advocate, he travelled to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to seek out the origins of the apple. Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese Brazilian, Portuguese Portugal, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese Like many readers, I imagined he would be a dream dinner party guest but, in the end, I never met him – he died, suddenly, aged just 63, in 2006. For years, I enjoyed his writing but also pondered the distinctiveness of his generation and its value – my parents were the same age and, like Roger, had moved at the end of the 60s to seek a new kind of life in the East Anglian countryside. Rufus can also be used to compute the MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 hashes of the currently selected image.In the 13 years since Deakin’s death, devotees have found their way to Walnut Tree Farm, the 16th-century timber-framed house rescued from dereliction by Deakin in 1970. The low building, its spring-fed moat (not as grand as it sounds: as Deakin notes, yeoman farmers in Suffolk followed a Tudor fashion for ornamental moats) and fields totalling 12 acres nourished his soul and his writing. Place and person grew together. Roger Deakin’s Walnut Tree Farm was built in Elizabethan times Roger Deakin (1999). Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain. Chatto and Windus. ISBN 0-7011-6652-5. The couple have just put two of the farm’s old cabins on Airbnb. I suspect they agonised over this move, because they clearly want to honour Deakin’s legacy and retain the spirit of a place that so strongly bears his imprint. But I think it makes sense, given the yearning of Deakin pilgrims, and others who might find joy or inspiration staying in a cabin where he lived and worked. In 1974 he moved to Suffolk, having rebuilt (himself) a ruined 16th Century timber-framed farmhouse, and began teaching English and Drama at Diss Grammar School, Norfolk (1974-78). He also began farming a 12-acre smallholding, chaired the newly-founded East Anglian Arts Trust and co-edited and contributed to the Waveney Clarion community newspaper. Rufus supports a variety of bootable .iso files, including various Linux distributions and Windows installation .iso files, as well as raw disk image files (including compressed ones). If needed, it will install a bootloader such as SYSLINUX or GRUB onto the flash drive to render it bootable. [8] It also allows the installation of MS-DOS or FreeDOS onto a flash drive as well as the creation of Windows To Go bootable media. [9] It supports formatting flash drives using FAT, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, UDF and ReFS filesystems. [10]

During this period he was involved in the creation and promotion of open air community arts events on a medium to large scale and was a contributing editor of the Waveney Clarion (the longest running and largest-circulating of the community newspapers of the 1970s). Laing, Olivia (16 November 2008). "Review: Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin". The Observer– via www.theguardian.com. a b c d e "Archives of environmentalist Roger Deakin given to university". Guardian. 8 May 2010 . Retrieved 19 September 2012. In 1973 he married Jenny Hind. The marriage was dissolved in 1982. He is survived by his son Rufus from that marriage and by his partner Alison Hastie.

Jeff Barrett, ed. (2009). Caught by the River: a collection of words on water. ISBN 978-1-84403-667-7. East Anglia became the locus of his interests and attachments. His moral and political compass points were set - I well imagine - by the cardinal points of Ronald Blythe's Anglicanism and Colin Ward's anarchism. Both lived close by and were good friends, sharing an interest in the life of small things. I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. A boomer, he grew up in a postwar era of optimism and economic prosperity, a working-class scholarship boy at Haberdashers’ Aske’s (“we knew how to use the apostrophe”) who went on to a dreamlike Cambridge of punting and Pimm’s. He became a successful advertising executive, was pursued by any number of girls, then found a ruined farmhouse in Suffolk to which, aged 31, he retired. He then teaches, swims, gets involved in the local “faires”, which are like mini East Anglian Glastonburys, befriends Richard Branson and Andrea Arnold, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. He’s a terrible poet but a beautiful writer of prose, and records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it.

From 1982-1985 RD was a musical advisor to the Aldeburgh Foundation on folk music and jazz, and produced a series of concerts and broadcasts at Snape Maltings by Carole King, the Chieftains, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Loudon Wainwright, Planxty, the Roche Sisters and others, as well as originating and commissioning After Smith's Hotel , a major Arts Council jazz commission, with Mike Westbrook, first performed at Snape Maltings by the Mike Westbrook Orchestra. Roger was one of those rare people whose character and passion is to be found in everything he made, collected, drew or wrote. His notes, written to himself, provide an insight into a beautiful mind and a sweet man. This archive will capture what it was like to be a passionate, engaged, subversive country intellectual living through a time of profound change. It is very appropriate that Roger's papers will remain within his beloved East Anglia. [2] Work [ edit ]

In October 2008 Jon Cook (Dean of Faculty of Arts and Humanities) was approached by Robert MacFarlane (RD's Literary Executor) to discuss the possibility of donating RD's literary papers to the UEA. The collection was gifted to the University by RD's son, Rufus Deakin. The collection was transferred in August 2009 to the UEA, it had until this time been stored in a container at Walnut Tree Farm, and prior to this, in the top floor of the barn at Walnut Tree Farm. Rufus was originally designed [4] as a modern open source replacement for the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool for Windows, [5] which was primarily used to create DOS bootable USB flash drives. In the beginning, I assumed that not having met Roger would bequeath me a crisp, neutral gaze. Later, I craved five minutes in his company. His education taught him how to reason but he chose to live as a romantic – by following his feelings. I wanted to feel that innate sympathy that comes from sharing a space with another living being. At least Roger and I shared the same sky: we loved the same woods, winds and moods. I discovered that he had moved his mum into a cottage in the Suffolk town of Eye in the 1990s, just when my dad moved to another cottage 50 yards away. Roger and I were regular visitors to our parents. Surely we both stood in the queue in Eye greengrocers one Saturday morning. When fans come, they’re often allowed to wander around the farm by its current owners, Jasmin Moss and Titus Rowlandson, who are childhood friends of Deakin’s son, Rufus. For much of their 12-year residency, the couple have lived with the reverberations of their famous predecessor – “Rog” as Titus calls him. It is sometimes thought that those who have a strong attachment to a particular landscape are by definition "parochial". This is far from the truth. Roger's interest in rivers, smallholdings, woodlands and vernacular buildings took him across the world, enabling him to seek out the commonalities of human experience, as well as the cultural and topographical differences.