PRIMROSES, Cowslips, Pansies and Peas is not, as far as we can tell from the title, a work of Marxist polemic but it was written by one of the founders of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The same man became famous years after his death as a war hero who, having been shot in the head in no-man’s land, was rescued from certain doom by his own wife. (That’s the wife he lived apart from, by the way, so that their respective parents would not find out they were married.)

Yes, you’re right — it might be best to start at the beginning when it comes to the story of Wilfred “Bonzo” Willett (1890-1961).

He was born in Croydon in Surrey, presumably in comfortable circumstances since his wider family owned a well-known building firm and Wilf went on to study as a naturalist at Cambridge University and then as a medical student in London.

It was while at Cambridge (at a May Ball, in fact, in 1913) that he met Eileen Stenhouse. Six months later they were married — but secretly, since both sets of parents disapproved of the romance. They continued to live apart, so as to keep up the pretence, and would meet for conjugal afternoons at anonymous hotels.

Wilf joined the London Rifle Brigade when the world war started in 1914, at which point he and Eileen got married again, this time in church and openly.

It was on December 13 that year that he carried out an action in Ploegsteert, western Wallonia, Belgium, which earned him a mention in despatches for trying, despite his own severe injury, to rescue a wounded soldier who was trapped in no-man’s land.

Completely paralysed down one side of his body, and with his survival uncertain, Wilf lay in a field hospital. Meanwhile, back home, his young bride was worried by the sudden cessation of letters from the front. If Wilf was no longer writing to her it could only be because he was in trouble, so she went to the regimental HQ to get answers. It was then that she learned that her husband was seriously ill in Boulogne.

Convinced that his best chance was to be cared for in London, she set out for France to fetch him back. As you’d imagine, in wartime that wasn’t easy. Eileen had no passport, and the Foreign Office wouldn’t give her one. She did somehow manage to arrive in France, however, and eventually to track down Wilf.

Her next obstacle was convincing the hospital authorities to allow him to be repatriated on the say-so of a 22-year-old civilian woman who had suddenly appeared in their midst under frankly mysterious circumstances. Even having done that, and got him to a convalescent home in London, Eileen’s struggle wasn’t over.

The medics there told her there was nothing they could do for him, so she found a surgeon at the London Hospital, where Wilf had been training before the war, who believed he could remove the fragments of shrapnel from Wilf’s brain. But the army doctors wouldn’t release him, so she had to smuggle him out of the convalescent home in the middle of the night.

The operation at the London hospital probably saved his life, but recovery took several years and he never regained full use of his right hand. That meant his ambition of becoming a surgeon was over.

Wilf’s other great passion was natural history, and so he began a career as a writer of popular books on ornithology and flowers.

Bird-spotting was an enormous hobby in the middle of the 20th century, especially for schoolboys, and anyone following that pursuit would certainly have known the name Wilfred Willett, as he became one of the best-known nature writers and bird authorities in the country.

No-one seems to know how Bonzo (which was his name within the family, according to his daughter) became involved in politics, but when the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1920 he was one of its founding members, and remained in the party for the rest of his life. He wrote a regular Nature Notes column for the Daily Worker, and worked for many years as a pioneering organiser of the farmworkers’ union in Kent.

He was also a church warden and served as secretary of Tonbridge Trades Council, which following his death (just a few weeks after that of his wife) organised a memorial erected to Wilf in the gardens of Tonbridge Castle.

The extraordinary saga of Eileen’s mission to wartime France only became public knowledge when a local school teacher, Jonathan Smith stumbled across the story and wrote a novel Wilfred and Eileen based on it in 1976, which was adapted first for radio and then as a TV miniseries broadcast by BBC in 1981.

The television critic for one major paper thought the plot so absurdly romantic that it obviously couldn’t be true. The Willetts’ daughter gave press interviews to set him straight.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos. 

Wilfred and Eileen by Jonathan Smith was republished by Persephone Books in 2014 and available online and so is Wilfred Willett’s Birds of Britain.