What To Look For - In Vain

A few weeks ago, I was searching through my Ladybird Books, looking for a suitable picture to use for the commemoration of the D-Day Landings.  It proved very hard to find anything - and reminded me how very few pictures there are in the vast canon of Ladybird artwork representing either of the Great Wars.

Now this seems rather odd. The brand 'Ladybird' first appeared in, I think, 1915.  The small-sized books were first issued in 1940 - their very size being dictated by war-time paper shortages.  Naturally most of the staff at Wills and Hepworth, including Douglas Keen, served in one capacity or another; artist Martin Aitchison (one of the most prolific illustrators for Ladybird) worked with Barnes Wallis, drawing up plans for the Dambusters bouncing bomb.

I was born in the mid-60s.  When I was little, the war was still a shadowy presence behind everything: television programmes, children's games, songs, films...

The 1960s were a golden age for Ladybird, with vast print runs and a presence in every outlet of  learning and entertainment.  And yet, in Ladybird Books there is hardly any mention of the war.  There is only one picture of Winston Churchill that I can think of (Great Men and Women).  There are none of Hitler.  There's no mention of Anne Frank or the persecution of the Jews. There are occasional pictures of tanks or bombing raids in Aircarft or The Story of the Motor Car.  Arms and Armour devotes pages to axes, bows and muskets and just a couple of pages (and some endpapers) to modern warfare.  For all the battle scenes in the History books, there are no specific World-War battles mentioned that I can find, other than a brief mention of The Battle of Britain.

And despite the inevitable patriotism of many Ladybird series, most of the many opportunities for post-war triumphalism are ignored too.  Why might this be?

The most obvious reason that I can think of is that this reflects an unspoken attitude of the times: look forward to the future or right back to a cosier past.  But let's not dwell on the recent past.

Or was there a deliberate policy to side-step the World Wars?  Was this something Douglas Keen himself dictated?  That this was necessarily unsuitable material for children's publishing seems unlikely if you consider the huge popularity of books such as the Biggles series.

This got me thinking about all the other strange omissions - things I would expect to find recorded in Ladybird Books - but can't.  (I'm talking here about the 'golden-era' - between 1940 - 1980).

So far this list includes:

The Suffragettes - nothing.  Not one mention.
No Amy Johnson (nor Amelia Earhart)
No Einstein
No Jane Seymour nor Catherin Parr
No Margaret Beaufort
No Lady Jane Grey
No Ada Lovelace
No Clive of India

Almost no French Revolution (just Dickens' 'Tale of 2 Cities')

No American Civil War

No picture of Statue of Liberty

No Wordsworth, Keats or Shelley
No Jane Austen
Almost no Bronte sisters (tiny bit in Elizabeth Gaskell)
As mentioned earlier, no Anne Frank or Hitler and only one pic of Churchill
Only a couple of uninspiring pics in 'Story of Science' of Isaac Newton

If anyone can think of a picture of the above that I've overlooked - DO let me know! Any other odd omissions that you've noticed?



 Returning to the World Wars - I did eventually find a picture of the Normandy Landings, but it wasn't easy.  I found a few pictures in the book 'Soldiers' from the Ladybird Leaders series, 1975.  Interestingly, this series of books, one of the last to be produced in the Douglas Keen era, was intended for younger children.  Perhaps a clue to the thinking is summed up on the last page:

"In the past, soldiers fought other soldiers.
In war today, nobody is safe.
Any man, woman or child can be killed, injured or made homeless"

Of course, despite the bright colours and sanitised  Ladybird portrayals of battles in earlier centuries, the reality of is that civilian men, women and children have always suffered in times of warfare.  But the heavy weariness of that  sentence is the closest I can come to an answer.

Things to Make and Do ...

What do you do with a lovely old Ladybird Book that is totally clapped out and unusable?  I mean, scribbles on pages, missing pages ... beyond redemption?

Do you, like me, still find it hard to throw them away?

The charm of old Ladybird Books lies principally in the artwork and if there are still pictures worth saving then save them I try to do.  I'm not the most crafty of folk, but this compulsion is enough to drive me to d... decoupage: cutting out pictures with fine scissors, and making a collage-esque picture with them.

Here are some that I've experimented with:

Looking on the internet, I seem people have toyed with similar ideas.  I love this idea posted on Twitter by @PeterInDevon - something he made for his son's bedroom:

 

But perhaps the cleverest use I've seen so far is this bird box, posted on Twitter by @CraftFinder

Inspiring!

Anybody else have any examples?

Today in Ladybird history ...

Recently I've been having a lot of fun sending daily tweets along the lines of: on this day in history ... I find a historical fact and then illustrate it with a relevant picture from a Ladybird Book.

Here's are a couple of examples:

 

 

The problem is, the sources of historical 'facts' that help me to do this seem rather limited. Given the breadth of depth of the terrain that Ladybird Books covered, there is so much more scope than I can easily produce using this method alone.

The answer then, I thought, is to reverse the process: start with the books and then put together a calendar of events illustrated in Ladybird Books. This approach though, it turns out, also has its problems. Surprisingly, Ladybird Books are rather thin on dates.

Actually, perhaps that's not so surprising. The vim and gusto of writers such as L du Garde Peach always put narrative ahead of objective detail; telling a story way ahead of being objective. And that must be a large part of the reason why the History books were so incredibly successful for so long. They were easy to read and didn't feel like school. Why else would so many of us have chosen to part with our meager pocket money on them when we weren't forced to?

The result? Many an evening is now passed by me in front of the telly with a clutch of old Ladybird Books and access to the internet. I look for interesting events portrayed in Ladybird Books and then try to find a date for them. Last night, for example, I 'battled' my way through the Wars of the Roses, trying to find dates for the most interesting pictures in Warwick the Kingmaker. Little by little I'm trying to build up a calendar - so there's at least one for every day of the year.

 Sad? Perhaps. But I'm learning lots too.

 Frankly, working on this I'm in geeky Ladybird heaven!

Indoor Gardening - June Griffen-King

June Griffen-King only wrote one book for Ladybird, but that one is something of a classic. It was 'Indoor Gardening', published in 1969.

It was one of those books which, in my young eyes, was somehow indicative of how life should be. My half-term holidays should be spent doing elegant arrangements of minature plants within large glass bottles - not watching Scooby Doo and squabbling with my brother.

In a new page in the 'writers and Artists section of my website, I've added an interview with June Griffen-King about her experience working for Ladybird in the late 1960s.

Flight 7

The wonders of photoshop. No, dear Ladybird collector friends, you're quite right. There are only 6 books in the series. My son made it for me as a goodbye present.

Flight 7 - Helen goes to China

On Monday I'm off to China for 3 weeks. I'm leaving husband and son behind and am going with a Chinese friend.


Preparing for the trip, it occurred to me how little there is in all the Ladybird series about China, the most populous country on earth and the longest continuous civilisation. All the colour and drama and legends and heros and folklore.


All the inventions: paper, printing, gun-powder, the compass. The wonderful logographic script. Fine Ladybird fare, you'd have thought.

But all I can find is the curiously remote: Great Civilisations: China, a supporting role in Marco Polo and a couple of pictures of The Great Wall.


Why so little?


Well I suppose the first reason that in the 1960s and 1970s - the 'golden years' of Ladybird, China was still seen as pretty well closed to the outside world. After it's 'century of humiliation' and the internal strife between Republicans, Nationalists and Communists, China turned in on itself - and the rest of the world pretended it didn't exist.

Before that, perhaps the Korean War loomed large enough to make China look like a poor subject for Ladybird. China does at least have a 'Great Civilisations' book - and so fares much better than Japan. Presumably the trauma of the 2nd World War wiped Japan off Ladybird horizens?. But China seems very alien - very very remote from Ladybird Land - despite the Hong Kong connection.

At least Hong Kong gave us a few Ladybird Books in Chinese.

(Sadly these are not so good for my learning of the Chinese language - being written for the Hong Kong market they're written in the 'traditional' script of the islands rather than the 'simplified' script of the mainland. And if you're lucky enough to find one of the books accompanied by an audio cassette - being for the Hong Kong market they are in Cantonese, not Mandarin).

Anyway, I'm off tomorrow. Please wish me, as the Chinese say, favourable winds ...

Mummy through the decades

Recently I've been taking a closer look at how family members are shown across the decades in Ladybird Book. 'Mummy' in the 40s 50s and even 60s is often a very glamorous creature - very slender and with wonderfully coiffered hair and unsuitable clothes for the occasion. Here, on Mother's Day, is a summary: 'Mummy' through the decades in Ladybird Books