He fought in the First World War and, having witnessed the Christmas truce and the devastation of trench warfare, he developed first a pacifist ideology, then fascist sympathies.

The then semi-rural location provided easy access to the Kent countryside, and he developed a deep love of nature throughout his childhood.

In November 1914, he went to France with the London Rifle Brigade's 1st Battalion, entering the Western Front's trenches in the Ypres Salient, where he witnessed the Christmas Truce between British and German troops.

After a year at Felixstowe, and frustrated at the nature of garrison life, Williamson attempted to get back to front-line action in September 1918 with an application to be transferred to the Royal Air Force, but this was rejected due to his medical classification.

He spent a year afterwards on administrative duties demobilising soldiers from military camps on the south east coast of England, and was discharged from the army himself on 19 September 1919.

Williamson was also powerfully influenced by the camaraderie that he had experienced in the trenches, and what he saw as the bonds of kinship that existed between the ordinary British and German soldiers.

[5] He told of his war experiences in The Wet Flanders Plain (1929), The Patriot's Progress (1930) and in many of his books in the semi-autobiographical 15-book series A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951–1969).

The wooden writing hut was granted Grade II listed status by English Heritage in July 2014 because of its "historical interest".

[12] In a letter to the editor of Time and Tide in May 1936, Williamson called Hitler "a very wise and steadfast and truth-perceiving father of his people; a man like T.E.

[12] Williamson claimed on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 that Hitler was "actually in tears as he waited in the room", much like Lawrence "when he had to shoot an Arab murderer with his own hands".

[11] He developed the idea that "politicians" and "pettifogging lawyers" were standing in the way of peace, and all that was needed to prevent another world war was to arrange meetings between British and German veterans, who presumably would be able to settle all of the great questions of the day.

[14] He devised the idea of a rally at the Royal Albert Hall in London to be attended by veterans from Britain, France and Germany, where Lawrence would have been the keynote speaker.

In 1935, Williamson visited the National Socialist German Workers Party Congress at Nuremberg and was greatly impressed, particularly with the Hitler Youth movement, which he viewed as having a healthy outlook on life compared with the London slums.

[18] Mosley became Hereward Birkin in Williamson's A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (possibly a reference to Hereward the Wake and Freda May Birkin, or possibly a reference to Chattie Wake who married Michel Hewitt Salaman who became master of the Exmoor Hunt 1908-11-see Piers P Read's biography of Alec Guinness).

[22] Visiting London in January 1944, he observed with satisfaction that what he perceived as the ugliness and immorality represented by its financial and banking sector had been "relieved a little by a catharsis of high explosive" and somewhat "purified by fire".

In The Gale of the World, the last book of his Chronicle, published in 1969, Williamson has his main character Phillip Maddison question the moral and legal validity of the Nuremberg Trials.

In 1950, the year his only child by this marriage Harry Williamson was born, he edited a collection of poems and short stories by James Farrar, a promising young poet who had died, at the age of 20, in the Second World War.

From 1951 to 1969 Williamson produced almost one novel a year while contributing regularly to the Sunday Express and The European magazine, edited by Diana Mosley.