[2] Educated at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, Whitlock had planned to attend university to study history but family circumstances during the Great Depression thwarted any such hopes and he followed his father into farming.
Whitlock's collection of correspondence, diaries and papers is housed at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Chippenham.
As a broadcaster, Whitlock was best known for Cowleaze Farm which was part of the long-running Children's Hour radio series slot on the BBC Home Service.
[10] From 1947 to 1949 Whitlock presented a series on the Third Programme and Home Service, titled Bird Song of the Month,[11] a forerunner of Tweet of the Day.
These programmes and other one-off talks and features presented by Whitlock were produced in Bristol by the founder of the BBC Natural History Unit, Desmond Hawkins.
and Round Britain Quiz on the radio (1954–5 and 1957),[12] and television's Ask Me Another (1958–60), as well as the early regional TV magazine programme Westward Ho!
[14] All the income Whitlock earned from writing was ploughed into the farm yet the overdraft grew and, when his father died in 1963, he left nothing.
For instance, in 1950, he presented a series of five weekly programmes on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), titled The Changing Forest.
[17] As two-thirds of Britain's woodlands had been felled to meet the war effort, Whitlock examined the work of the Forestry Commission and its aim to bring five million acres (approx.
Whitlock was a founder trustee and honorary warden of the Bentley Wood Charitable Trust near West Dean, Wiltshire, a nature reserve which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
[20] His wartime experience of bringing marginal land into cultivation was to stand him in good stead when advising peasant farmers,[21] reclaiming land in Benin and the Gambia, while his dowsing skills secured a reliable water supply to a tribe in northern Ghana.