A PIONEERING Advertiser journalist will become the latest Swindonian to be honoured with a blue heritage plaque.

Victorian writer Richard Jefferies' commemorative plaque will be fixed to the wall of his childhood home, now a museum, in June.

Dr Mike Pringle, director of the Richard Jefferies Museum, welcomed the news: “It’s really fantastic. The blue plaque scheme has been around for a while and I think right from the start it was sort of known Richard Jefferies was on the list.”

Born in 1848, Richard Jefferies’ grew up in a farming family. His father worked the land around what is now Coate Water country park.

Jefferies he left school at 15, helped out on the family farm and spent much of his time wandering about Swindon. One gamekeeper with whom Jefferies had struck up a friendship was told by his employer: “Young Jefferies is not the sort of fellow you want hanging about in your covers.”

With a talent for making a nuisance of himself, it was perhaps little wonder that the young Jefferies took up news reporting.

He joined the staff of the North Wiltshire Herald in 1866, working also for the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard before finally joining the Swindon Evening Advertiser after becoming friends with the paper’s founding editor, William Morris.

As he developed his skill for writing, Jefferies' interest turned from churning out news copy to more creative writing.

He penned a history of the Goddard family, who then owned grand pile The Lawns – since destroyed – in Old Town.

By 1874, he was writing a series of articles on farming for the London presses. And he wrote a novel, The Scarlet Shawl, which failed to wow the critics when it was published later that year.

By the end of the decade, he had moved to Surbiton with his wife Jessie and young son Harold. It was there that Jefferies enjoyed his more significant literary success.

A series of books focussed on the life of Bevis, a child growing up on a small farm near a lake. The parallels to Coate were clear. Young Bevis’ talent is the ability to talk to animals and birds.

Jefferies died in 1888, having battled tuberculosis at the start of the decade.

Now, he is remembered as a nature writer of some note. Dr Pringle, director of the museum founded in his memory, suggested Jefferies had referenced the dangers of things like climate change: “He’s our warning from history. He was saying 150-years-ago that this is what was going to happen if we’re not careful.

“At the same time, he was pressing the positive parts of nature – the fact we can’t live without it.”

The plaque to Jefferies will be the ninth installed around Swindon. Others mark the birthplace of Hollywood beauty Diana Dors and the foundation of the GWR Medical Fund. The Richard Jefferies plaque will be unveiled on Sunday, June 2, at 3pm.