An afternoon with John Kenney

Artwork from Robin Hood book The Silver Arrow. (Captain Scott is just for scale!)

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Last week I spent an afternoon surrounded by the artwork of the Ladybird artist John Kenney.  I went to The MERL (Museum of English Rural Life) in Reading where the Special Collections are stored.  I've talked about MERL and the Ladybird room before on this blog but this time I went to see some of the original artwork of John Kenney which is not normally on display.

This artwork was on display in the Ladybird room. Not, of course, by John Kenney but by Eric Winter

Eric Winter original artwork

Although the majority of the original Ladybird artwork housed in the Reading University special collection is relatively modern (from the 1980s onwards) there are some wonderful sets, or part-sets, of artwork by some of the best-loved artists stored there.  But space is very limited and so very little is on display at any one time.

Ladybird artist John Kenney died in 1972 so, of course, I never had a chance to meet him.   But I have been friends with his family ever since I appeared on the Antiques Roadshow  many moons ago.  They live in Leicestershire so we don't often get a chance to meet.  But Clare, from the Univeristy of Reading Art Collections, invited the family to Reading to view the Kenney artwork stored there - and I was allowed to tag along.

The cover artwork for Alfred The Great

John Kenney must have illustrated around 30 books for Ladybird and some or all of the artwork from around 17 of these books is kept at Reading.  I myself have the artwork for one further Kenney Ladybird book - but it's a bit of a mystery what happened to the rest.

Cover artwork for Queen Elizabeth and the Tilbury Speech

Clare had been very busy before we arrived, spreading the boxes of artwork out on a large table so we could peruse it in comfort.  Now you may wonder why it is that someone as familiar with the Ladybird illustrations as I am should take so much pleasure in this.

Artwork from The First Queen Elizabeth. (Florence is there just for scale)

But the fact is that the original Ladybird artwork is always a treat to behold; the colours so much more vivid and the artistry so more more apparent.  In the case of the Kenney artwork, the scale of some of the pieces was a revelation.  Kenney mainly earned his crust as a painter of hunting scenes in the Leicestershire area and when he began his first commission for Ladybird (King Alfred the Great) he seems to have taken one of his pre-existing canvases, rotated it from landscape to portrait and made a start.

The book David Livingstone shows the large scale of the artwork

I don't think original Ladybird artwork can ever have been produced on a larger scale.  This picture should give you an idea of the relative size to the completed book.

Cover art for Tootles the Taxi

Tootles the Taxi is one of the best loved of all Ladybird books from the 1950s and 60s.  Again the artwork is by Kenney, who also illustrated some of the original 'Thomas the Tank Engine' Railway series books for the Reverend Awdry.  The similarities to the Railway Series books is clear.  In addition, the story goes that Kenney based his Tootles characters on Dinky toys.

The artist John Kenney's family had previously shown me a charming couple of illustrations that he had Kenney produced as preparation for the Tootles commission.  What made my visit to Reading unique on this occasion was that I was able to see the early preparatory painting alongside the final original artwork.  Fear not: I took a photo so you can see them too.

Tootles the Taxi: the book, the artwork and the prototype

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I learnt about flowers from Ladybird books

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Flowers didn’t feature much in my childhood. Our garden was tiny, my parents both worked and money was rather tight. We lived in a street of terraced houses, surrounded by similar streets – a perfectly pleasant environment in many ways – but floral decoration was sparse.
But that’s not the whole story. Both my parents were teachers and my house was filled with books: many of them Ladybird Books. The imagery of my childhood is a strange collage of reality and book artwork. Even before I could read, I was reading the pictures of the books that surrounded me and these pictures were beautiful. I learnt about flowers from Ladybird Books.

First there were garden flowers.  In my Ladybird Book of Garden Flowers, gardens were a remote and alien place –striking and colourful but as far away from my life as Never Never Land.  The vibrant colours of the plants contrasted with the grey splendour of the buildings in the background.
The sky was often dark and stormy: it was the flowers that brought the optimism to the picture.  Life was calm and stately and ordered.  Nature, with its stormy skies, might threaten change, but as long as the gardener was in charge all would be managed and all would be well.

Three John Leigh-Pemberton illustrations from ‘Garden Flowers

Then there was the Ladybird Book of Wild Flowers and here the scenes were very different.  Human activity was barely visible or was shown in decay: a ruined monastery, a broken bridge.

The flowers were less bright and showy and had to battle harder on the page to gain my attention. The colours were more muted: lots of blues, palest pink with splashes of yellow. I wasn’t sure what I thought of wild flowers.
Both books were produced by Ladybird with the idea that they would be simple field guides, to be used by the curious child for reference and to stimulate their curiosity. On the left-hand side of every page was the name and description of the plants pictured. I’m sure lots of children used them in this way, but I don’t think I ever did. For me, the attraction was pouring over the details in the background. Who was in that carriage, coming up the drive. What was through that arch? Why was the bridge falling down?

‘British Wild Flowers’ illus. Rowland and Edith Hilder

Then there was Indoor Gardening – a whole book dedicated to telling children like me that I too could be a gardener – as long as I had a window sill and an odd collection of containers: glass bottles, chipped pottery or an old teapot.
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‘Indoor Gardening’ illus. BH Robinson

‘Things to Make’, illus. G Robinson

But this looked too much like a school project to me – as did the helpful diagrams in Plants and How they Grow.  I did have a go at making the ‘Minature Garden’ in The Ladybird Book of Things to Make – but like all the projects in that book, when I’d finished it didn’t look anything like the picture.
Finally there was the magic of picking wild flowers. Yes, I know – and you must remember this, children – that we don’t pick wild flowers today. But in 1960s Ladybird Land it was fine to pick wild flowers. Goldilocks was filling her basket with bluebells when she discovered the Three Bears’ House. Little Red Riding Hood gathered an amazingly varied woodland bouquet to take to her grandmother.

‘Little Red Riding Hood’, illus. Eric Winter

‘Goldilocks’, illus. Harry Wingfield

 Picking wildflowers was almost an emblem of childhood and freedom – a prelude to adventure and enjoyed equally by boys and girls. The sky was blue, there were no adults in sight, clothes never got dirty: and we never saw the miserable picked flowers in their vases and jam jars, wilting and withering only hours later.

That just didn’t happen in Ladybird Land.

‘Prayers through the Year’, illus. Clive Uptton. ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, illus. Harry Wingfield

I grew up and Ladybird Books grew up – and, for a time, I fared better than they did.  I had a house with a garden and started to enjoy walks in the country and visits to garden-centres.  Ladybird struggled with ever-increasing competition in the book market and, in the 1980s, swapped expertly-crafted artwork for much cheaper photography.

Looking back, I realise I did everything backwards.  The books I grew up with were intended to help children identify the plants they saw around them.  I don’t remember seeing plants around me when I was growing up, but later found myself identifying well-remembered Ladybird imagery in the landscapes of my adult life.

Perhaps on a walk in the country I’ll turn a corner and be confronted with a scene that transports me straight back to a page in What to Look for in Spring or Wild Flowers.
The pictures came first, and the plants came second.  But one way or another the books of my childhood taught me to enjoy and to appreciate flowers, and in the end I don’t suppose it matters which way round it happens.

(This post was first published on Freddie's Flowers blog)

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So what's the story? The prototype Ladybird book

So many of us will have grown up with Ladybird books at school in the 1960s and 70s that it's hard to remember that they weren't always a fixture on school shelves. The school market certainly wasn't in the minds of the company when the Loughborough printers, called Wills & Hepworth, first began publishing children's books.  The first classic Ladybird books, which came out in the 1940s, were fiction and designed for pre-school children, with rhymes about animals, Nursery Rhymes, ABC picture books and re-tellings of traditional tales such as Dick Whittington.

The large prototype book, with  overlay down over Margaret's illustration. Also the small prototype and the final book

What's more, in the 1940s, publishing children's books was seen as a sideline to the core business of Wills & Hepworth, who focused on local commercial printing, among a diverse range of other activites.  There was even some talk in the late 1940s of ceasing children's book publication altogether, to concentrate on printing for the burgeoning Midlands car business.  Yet within 15 years, everything had changed.  Ladybird was firmly established as one of the biggest players in children's publishing and the books could be found in almost every school and library and a great many homes as well.  So what was it that led to this abrupt change in direction and in fortunes?
On his return to Wills & Hepworth after his war service, employee Douglas Keen was given the minor area of 'Ladybird books' to look after.

Travelling the country as a salesman and speaking to many different wholesale book-buyers, Keen realised there was a gap in the book market for well-made, robust and colourful books in schools.  He felt the Ladybird format could meet this market well and tried to convince the board that they should increase the age-range of publications and focus on non-fiction.  But his ideas  fell on deaf ears.  Children's book publishing was still seen as a sideshow, Keen as enthusiastic but misguided, and the company went on as before.  Keen persisted - motivated not only by his vision and belief in the importance of good educational materials for all, but by the pragmatic requirement to secure and further his career.

 Keen wrote the text, his mother-in-law produced the illustrations and his wife produced the vignettes

He chose a topic that interested him - British Birds - and wrote the sort of book he had in mind, with each page devoted to a different bird.
His mother-in-law, Margaret Jones, was a talented amateur water-colour artist and she created the plates for the facing page.  His wife, also Margaret, shared the artistic talent and she created the small vignettes for the text page using ink and scraper-board.  This book was much larger than a standard-sized Ladybird so a separate version was produced in the the classic small size.

The resulting book was shown to the board - and this time it convinced them.  British Birds and Their Nests was commissioned, written by Vesey-Fitzgerald and illustrated by Allen Seaby.  It was a huge success.  More nature books and non-fiction books swiftly followed.  Ladybird's commercial success began to take off in spectacular fashion.  Quickly other aspects to the business were dropped and Keen's own star also rose sharply.  He was soon appointed to the board and within a short time was responsible for commissioning all titles from then until the sale of the company at his retirement in the mid-1970s.

So an inconspicuous item at first glance - but with quite a story to tell.