Heather and her younger sister, Faith Sharp, edited an account of their father’s early life, A Corsham Boyhood: The Diary of Herbert Spackman 1877–1891.
In his autobiography, Double Harness, Robin recounts how, as school prefects he and Heather would smuggle secret messages to each other in the absentee registers for which they were responsible as their relationship blossomed in the early 1920s.
[2] Heather achieved a First Class degree at King's College London, which she left in 1929 to become an English teacher at The Duchess School for Girls, Alnwick Castle, Northumberland.
In Double Harness, Robin Tanner writes that Heather’s uncle, the architect Vivian Goold, 'generously offered as a wedding gift to design a house for us and supervise its building if we could find a piece of land we liked'.
[5] After Hanff finally gained his freedom as the Tanners’ adopted son, 'Dieti' was to closely share their interests, to become a teacher and university lecturer and to live at Old Chapel Field for the rest of his life.
She was an active member of the Chippenham branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament[1] (visiting the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and attending many Aldermaston Marches) and supporter of Friends of the Earth and Oxfam.
In many ways a companion volume for Wiltshire Village, the Tanners similarly started to collate the materials for Woodland Plants during the early years of the Second World War, although the completed project was not published until 1981.
[9] The Tanners were keen amateur botanists and counted their original copy of James Sowerby’s 37-volume English Botany (1790–1814) as one of their most treasured possessions.
Robin Tanner was keen to produce the detailed drawings from sketches made in situ, mostly within a few miles of their home such as in the Weavern Valley and at Bird's Marsh and Thickwood.
The preface to A Country Alphabet indicates that this work was a collaborative project shared between Heather who wrote the text and Robin who designed the letters.