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?

Lucy Mangan's Guardian Article

In this weekend's Guardian, Lucy Mangan writes a short piece that reveals the soul of a Ladybird Book lover.

If you missed the article, you'll find it here:

I know, I know - it sounds like a case of typical Ladybird stereotyping, but the description of the books she remembers fondly, as opposed to those remembered by 'Tory Boy' fit the usual pattern. In my experience, the men who visit my website are looking for the History, Achievement, Science or Nature books. The women are looking for the fiction they fondly remember, preferably involving pretty princesses and nice ball gowns. I know, I know! But that's how it seems to BE.

Perhaps the time has come to put 'stereotype' to the test. I know from my stats counter that a lot of people read this blog; but the Ladybird Book lover is a timid creature who prefers to lurk in the background rather than leave comments. But this is your chance to vote on this frankly crucial issue. Rest assured that your response is anonymous.

If you are male, vote here:


If you are female, vote here:



Unless you are male or female, I'm afraid I have no poll for you; this is Ladybird land, afterall.

The value of old Ladybird Books

I don't know if more people are interested in old Ladybird Books, but more people seem to be interested in them as money making collectables.

Although I've been getting fewer enquiries about buying books recently, I have had many more enquiries from people wanting to sell them. Perhaps this is a sign of (relatively) hard times, or perhaps programmes like the recent edition of 'Flog It!' and the interview with Kathie Layfield have led people to believe that even fairly modern books such as the Read it Yourself series 777 are valuable to collectors.

Of course, from the 1960s onwards, Ladybird was very well established as a publisher of children's books - and these books were to be found in every school, Sunday School and many homes around the country. They were published in vast numbers, so with very few exceptions, (such as the elusive 'Indira Ghandi', 'Discovering Alton Towers' or some of the original 606d series) books published after the 1960s are not hard to track down and the words 'First Edition' printed in a laminated 1980s book are meaningless in terms of value.

But it's very nice to see that the genuinely scarce titles from the 1940s and 1950s can still command a high price on eBay. Of course, it would be less 'nice to see' this price if I hadn't completed my own collection years ago. But for you determined collectors without lots of money to throw at the really rare books you lack - it's not getting easier, so I salute you.

Ignore me

I'm just playing around with a new 'slideshow-maker' I've found:

Ladybird Life - in video

I've just come across the wonderful archive clip. I think it was made by Harvard University to 'represent' English life in 1949.

But isn't it quintessentially Ladybird? How many different classic Ladybird books can you see echoed in this clip? Going to School, Uncle Mac, Tootles the Taxi, Helping at Home and even the 1960s version of Peter and Jane ...



Enjoy!

A bit late ...

... as a result of the summer holidays, but here's the link to the great feature on the BBC's episode of 'Flog it!' from Loughborough with a lovely little feature on Ladybird Books and interview with the lovely Kathie Layfield.

From Writer to Artist - part 2

Back in June I mentioned having a couple of letters from L du Garde Peach, writer of the History series, written in the early 1970s to his illustrator, John Kenney.

By popular demand - both of you :) - here are more details.

First the background.
A year or two ago, someone contacted me who was a close family friend of artist John Kenney (best known for illustrating some of the original Thomas the Tank Engine books, Tootles the Taxi and the History books of series 561) . This person asked my advice about some books that he owned. Having given this advice as best I could, I asked if he could provide more information about Kenney so that I could make a biography for my website. He agreed, we met up and the page was written. A year or two pass.

I understand Kenney's wife died quite recently and when the house was being cleared, this friend saw the letters and wondered if they would be of interest to me. Very kindly he sent them to me.

I was not exaggerating when I said that L du G's prose is complex and whimsical. Here's a taster of an opening paragraph:

Dear John

It is exactly - or as that gentle voice (not the one which breathed o'er Eden) out of the vague unknown would say "at the third stroke it will be twenty-three days, six hours, and thirty seconds precisely" since I received your letter of June 15th from the hand of the most, if not the only reliable link in the postal chain, Clarry the Post: the weather being fine, the wind NW, the barometer steady and the temperature 53 F. The note in my diary - apart from the meteorrol - damn it! - meteroloical details above, states that I was working on the "Ladybird" book about that dull and distressingly pious old party Elizabeth Fry".

L du G goes on to say that he had also just finished with "Henry II and that turbulent priest with whom you will no doubt deal from your angle in due course" and reminds him that Henry was reputed to be very tall. In fact, Kenney was to illustrate neither Henry II nor Elizabeth Fry - he died the following year, at the age of 61).

His thoughts ramble in similarly entertaining but tortuous prose for some paragraphs before coming to the apparent main reason for writing "to congratulate you on the much over-due upsurge in the American market for the works of the English painter, John Kenney". This leads him to fret about the "commercial exploiters of the work of needy painters" and to marvel at what a bargain is to be had by those who can get such wonderful pieces of art for just 15p - then the cost of a Ladybird Book.

He then talks about The Pilgrim Fathers, which Kenney appears to have been in the process of illustrating:

"you are quite right about the "Thanksgiving" picture - though what anyone now living in the USA has to give thanks for, is one of those sixty-four thousand dollar questions to which - as far as I know - there is no convincing answer. And I applaud your reason - or was it a sub-reason - that the early pilgrims praying in the fields might have looked like "The Angelus"."

He discusses a future meeting to discuss matters 'over the table'- although I'm not sure which table this would be as I understand that he was not one of the group of writers/illustrators who would plan their work at the house of Douglas Keen). Towards the end of the letter he compares himself to Shakespeare's Lear - and the end of the letter is a very dense stream on consciousness that takes him from Lear's daughers to Cassandra and Clytaemnestra to the "dozens of young men" who were currently installing heaters in his house!

The second letter, written two months later, is shorter and deals with his concern at hearing that Kenney was ill. He again expresses his dislike of Elizabeth Fry - his chief grievance being, apparently that she was "not one of your more luscious glamour girls ever" and concern that "The Pilgrim Mothers" would be little better!