This year's Ladybird Christmas Quiz

That time of year again?
How did that happen?

Anyway, this year's quiz, in the true spirit of Ladybird, is non-competetive. There are no prizes on offer - except the prize of the warm flush of triumph which accompanies the knowledge that you know your Griffle from your Gruffle - as they say.

12 questions in total. I hope you enjoy it - click the picture below to play it:

Xmas Quiz

Not a blog person? Prefer to print out and read?

If you'd prefer to 'print out' this blog, to read in your own time, click on this link:

A pdf

Toys and Games

I was delighted to be sent this picture this week. Does it jog any memories?

The picture was posed for one of the illustations of classic Ladybird Book 'Toys and Games to Make' (first published in 1966). The child in the picture is the newphew of the artist, Robert Ayton.



Here's the picture he was posing for:



If you look closely in the black and white picture, behind young Rupert you'll see his little sister, Robert's niece. She also posed for this book - a picture of bubble-blowing innocence.


This book has very deep-rooted memories for me. I don't think there was a toy or game in there that we (my brother and I) didn't make, or try to make at some time in the late 1960s/early 70s. Life is full of disappointments; I don't think any of our finished products looked anything like Robert Ayton's enticing illustrations.

You could never be certain whether you were actually hearing your companion's voice via the string/cocoa tin or simply hearing it because he was 8 feet away from you. But I don't remember resenting the book for that.

Happy Birthday Martin Aitchison

Today is Martin Aitchison's 90th birthday. Martin started illustrating for Ladybird in the 1960s and was one of the main illustrators for over 25 years. He is one of only a couple of key players from Ladybird's mega-successful days in the 1960s who is still with us today. Even if his name isn't familar to you, there's a good chance that you'll recognise at least one of the pictures below - and this is just a small sample of around 100 titles that Martin illustrated for Ladybird.

Google doesn't love me

Any day now, Google is going to change the way that it provides search results. I've taken a look at where my websites/blog will be after the changeover - and they go plummeting down the listings for some reason. A search by the term 'ladybird books' prioritises all the commercial sites over the homespun ones like mine, which is a bit sad.

So if you tend to use 'Google' to get to this blog or my www.ladybirdflyawayhome.com site - please take a moment to bookmark me, before I vanish!

Ladybird Books in ITA

I received this message last week:

"I am trying to find a book to buy written in ITA. I learned ITA at school from 1965 to about 1968. I think it must have been pretty new then because when I went up to the junior school, there were only 6 of us who read ITA. They had to split the class and write everthing twice, once in ITA and again in English"

I replied:

Yes, it was a very odd period in British education - a really mad-cap idea that was dominant for several years and then dropped rapidly from favour. Although I was born in 1964 so must be a bit younger than you, I managed to escape ITA, although my cousins (about 6 years younger than me and so learning to read in the early 70s, were taught using ITA and still blame it to this day for their problems with spelling! So that would span about a decade.

If you have no idea what ITA is - and many people look completely blank if I mention it - this picture above should give you an idea.



Ladybird were only following a widespread initiative in issuing books in the ITA alphabet; I remember most children's publishers doing the same.

As I say, I had always thought of ITA as an experiment of the early 1970s and considered that my cousins were 'hit' with ITA as a result of being that bit younger than me. But clearly this correspondent was a little older than me and she was taught to ITA. That must be the case, thinking about it, because I have heard of Ladybird books in ITA with dustwrappers - so earlier than 1965.

So what dictated the decision to adopt ITA? Why did some schools adopt it and others did not over quite a number of years? And why did it sink so quickly and almost without a trace? If anyone knows, do get in touch.

Are Seumus agus Síne middle-class?

Strangely enough, this week I've had two separate questions emailed to me about the Key Word Reader series in Gaelic. The first writer concerned reading schemes in general and asked:

"Janet and John were very English children; they
spoke very proper English, which is fine for teaching English language.
However, the language and the culture are so closely linked that the culture
also ended up being taught. Were there, or are there now any early readers
of this sort for Scottish children, set in Scotland and using the Scots
language, or at least English in a Scots setting?"

I replied:

'The reality of the prose of Peter and Jane or Janet and John is that (apart from being the almost inevitable consequence of trying to build dialogue using - initially - on 12 key words) it is tied up with 1950s/60s notions of education and class - but not really of geography. The fact is that the childhood depiction of these children would have had much more in common with a privately educated middle-class child in Edinburgh than with a working class English child in Bradford or Portsmouth. The 'culture' represented is not Scottish, Welsh or English - but some 1950s concept of what, as you say, was considered 'proper'. Indeed it might suprise you to know that Janet and John who you call "very English children" are in fact American! The books were copyrighted from 1940s American books and simply reprinted in this country'.

Peter and Jane, on the other hand, were 'English', but you only have to read the article by the very English Libby Purves to see how 'posh' reading-scheme children inhabiting their rosy, idealised suburban worlds push all sorts of people's buttons - you certainly don't need to be Scottish to resent them!

Then of course it's easy to measure the Peter and Jane books with a contemporary yardstick (a metre stick?)and to forget their real context. To repeat an excellent observation made by journalist Cressida Connoly, in their time Peter and Jane were actually ...

"...an antidote to the privileged country children of popular literature, such as Swallows and Amazons or the Famous Five. Ladybird children didn't go to boarding school; they went to the local newsagent's on their bicycles. The childhood of Ladybirds was egalitarian and unsnobbish, depicting suburbia as the kind of utopia that town planners always intended it to be."

In an interview shortly before his death, artist Harry Wingfield, speaking of the criticism of the Key Word reading scheme said:

"no kids want to be dustbin kids, you can’t illustrate the dustbin kids all the time....I was illustrating what the average council family would like to be regarded as they were, but of course you can’t illustrate disadvantaged kids all the time, it’s not what your business is doing... you’ve got to sell to the parent, you’re not selling to the five year old or the three year old, you’re selling to the parent or the grandparent, who’s trying to please these children or teach them and that’s the recognised way of doing things. But you’ve got to make them nice to look at".

The second email question I received was a simple request for more information about Peter and Jane in Gaelic - and I wasn't able to be much help. I have a complete set of the Key Word series in Welsh (24 books - I don't think any 'c' books were published) and quite a few swaps. But I have only two books in Gaelic, so I don't think they can have been in print for long.

Besides, it seems to me to be a rather odd thing to do, to devise a whole reading scheme based on meticulous study of the 'key words' used of one particular language - and then to translate it into another completely different language! I wonder how comfortable William Murray was with this?