The Sunday Post: Land of Hope and Stories
Memories of how the world appeared when our eyes first looked out on it tend to form enduring impressions so that each change to this original template, whether the dress sense of pedestrians, the design of cars or the demolition of a prominent building, is greeted with a subconscious sigh. Often, any significant alteration can reinforce the unspoken opinion that our first sighting of our surroundings was the right one all along; and whilst it could well be an illusion of the ageing process, the never-ending changes eventually take us so far from where we started that those surroundings gradually look no more familiar than the lunar surface. Yes, we have photographs to confirm our memories, but sometimes it is not so much the reality as the idealised portrait of the childhood landscape that can appear more potent.
Nowhere is this more the case than it is with the Ladybird Books. Although there would always be an aunt or granny who would slip one of those 4½-by-7 inch hardbacks into our Christmas stocking, the primary school library was the real repository for the endearing publishing success story that emanated from the unlikely environs of Loughborough in Leicestershire. Ladybird Land was just like real life; it didn’t have the alien American comic-book backdrop of skyscrapers and water towers, but resembled something far more recognisable – streets, shops, people and places that looked much like the ones we could see whenever we stepped outdoors, albeit painted in colours so vivid that they retain a radiance to our adult eyes that faded photos have lost.
Although Willis and Hepworth launched their Ladybird imprint as far back as the First World War, it was the arrival of the classic pocket-sized incarnation during Round Two that introduced British children to a format that would become one of the defining accessories of a post-war childhood. The actual size of the Ladybird book was a canny cost-cutting exercise that enabled each copy to be printed on one huge sheet of paper, something that kept the price at 2/6 (12½ New Pence) for a remarkable thirty years. The ingenious eye-catching design, with text on the left page and colour illustration on the right, made the content as distinctive as the Ladybird logo on the front cover, as did the superlative photographic-like illustrations by unsung artists such as Harry Wingfield and John Berry.
The Ladybird books, which tentatively began with simple children’s stories, grew to encompass such a wide range of subjects that it sometimes seemed a child could receive a better education from them than they could from school. Fiction remained a key element, but non-fiction was included as well. The ‘People at Work’ series focused on so many branches of British industry that only the unemployed and sex-workers were absent; the ‘Key Words Reading Scheme’ series reduced the text to a basic level for beginner readers and featured that whiter-than-white brother and sister double act, Peter and Jane, who made rival siblings Janet and John look like Sid and Nancy; the ‘How it Works’ series gave straightforward explanations for the workings of all modes of transport as well as television and the computer; there were Bible stories, fairy tales, hobbies and pastimes, editions aimed at toddlers, history, natural history, simplified biographies of great artists, scientists and towering historical figures, and enchantingly illustrated portrayals of mundane everyday activities such as going shopping with mum. On and on the list stretched to the point where it began to appear that Ladybird were compiling a panoramic history of life on earth for future archaeologists or intended them to be launched into space as a helpful aid to any aliens contemplating invasion. A staggering twenty million sales a year at their peak had made them omnipotent symbols of the British childhood experience.
However, so fixed were the books in their 1950s roots that some started to look rather quaint by the early 1970s, so the illustrations were slowly altered as the decade progressed to encompass changing fashions. The defiantly Blyton-looking Peter and Jane acquired contemporary touches, such as Jane’s hairstyle and her new penchant for flared trousers; even the Dixon-esque copper stood beside the Police Box was replaced by a modern cop barking into his walkie-talkie. When these redesigned reprints appeared, it was always a coup to come across an older edition and marvel at how antiquated everything and everyone looked, and this has remained part of the Ladybird charm now that the updated images of the later editions appear as illustrative of a vanished Britain as much as their predecessors did in the 70s.
As with so many aspects of British culture, the Ladybird books underwent a radical overhaul in the 1980s. The traditional classic Ladybird design remained, but the company started experimenting with different sizes and branching out into distinctly non-Ladybird areas such as commercial tie-ins with Disney and Hanna-Barbera. Sales steadily declined and the Ladybird book as we all knew and loved it disappeared on the eve of the Millennium as the Loughborough factory that had printed them for over half-a-century finally closed down. It may have been the end of an era as far as contemporary publications were concerned, but the collectible market for the original editions grew as the nostalgia factor was brought to the table and the illustrations became an easy target for post-modern parody.
I bought a batch of Ladybird books from the 60s and 70s around ten years ago and found that what was contained within their pages painted a picture of my childhood with all the unpleasant bits taken out. Perhaps that is crucial to their perennial popularity for big kids of a certain age; they present us with an optimistic and idyllic impression of formative years – a selective-memory world bereft of school bullies, useless parents, uncles with wandering hands, sadistic teachers and miserable old neighbours who wouldn’t give us our ball back when it landed in their garden. It’s the world as we’d like to remember it and it’s the world we wanted to live in when we flicked through those pages as children.
Not for the first time, envy of twenty-first century kids with video games, 24-hour TV and DVDs is consoled by the thought that we had something else they are deprived of in the shape of that funny little book with the insect on the front of it, a benevolent product of an age of publishing that sought to ensnare the next generation of readers in style – something I’m pretty much convinced it managed if my overcrowded bookshelves are anything to go by.
Petunia Winegum
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February 1, 2015 at 10:13 am -
Thanks for that Petunia. As a 1942 child I too remember having one stuffed in my Christmas stocking just up from the orange in the toe and the ubiquitous sugar mouse. It is a shame to read that they died out, but I suppose it was inevitable really, as they could not have survived in this PC age.
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February 1, 2015 at 10:16 am -
Aged Mother believed in Ladybird books the way her Norfolk yeoman forebears believed in the Book Of Common Prayer and 3 field crop rotation. From before our, her Kids, eyes could focus, before we could la-la-la along to the ‘Hamlet’ tune, she read us the entire canon of Ladybird Children’s stories-in-Rhyme. “Lost At The Fair” and “5 Little Kittens Home Alone Do Chainsaws & Sex” etc.
Even to this day she can recite most of them by heart ad nauseam ad infinitum. Can’t recall what she ate yesterday but ‘ fast asleep was Dormouse Cottage , up on lonely silent hill…’
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February 1, 2015 at 10:22 am -
Thanks for this wonderfully evocative piece. Reminds of happy days, far away from today’s sterile, PC, conformist world
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February 1, 2015 at 10:29 am -
I tried teaching my kids to read using the then ‘modern’ Ladybirds or whatever came after them in that format. Constantly I felt reminded of that old joke:
“LOOK PETER LOOK WHAT JANE HAS FOUND”
“PETER LOOK! JANE FOUND A CONDOM ON THE PATIO”
“JANE, WHAT IS A PATIO?”Think I gave up on them when in Series 4 Peter wrestles with Jane’s veganism after her play date with Abdul.
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February 1, 2015 at 10:35 am -
I had a Ladybird book about peoples of the world and there was a page about Kuwait and how they had discovered oil in that country and how now none of the Kuwaitis needed to work and everyhting was free for the people – like schools and Hospitals, because they all had so much money. No wonder Saddam rolled over them all so easily. There was another page about Canada and how the wheat-fields were so big that they reached the horizon – sounded a bit like Norfolk.
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February 1, 2015 at 10:39 am -
“fields were so big that they reached the horizon – sounded a bit like Norfolk.”
Actually Norfolk is known, by the Tourist Board anyways, as “The Big Sky County”…probably because every council house, Assissted Living flat and cow shed has a satellite dish.
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February 1, 2015 at 10:48 am -
Next up, they’ll be marketing Montana Hannah as Normal for Norfolk ….
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February 1, 2015 at 11:17 am -
Unfortunately the only thing “Hannah@Kings Lynn” (16) would be reading to her child (4) would be the labels off White Lightening Cider bottles….slowly
“look mawther look, tha’ has vi’amin in tha’ because i”s made from ac’ual apples”
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February 1, 2015 at 10:44 am -
Offered without comment:
http://420.thrashbarg.net/the_ladybird_book_of_the_policeman_police_at_work_easy_reading.html
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February 1, 2015 at 10:52 am -
The intrinsic decadence of the past…
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February 1, 2015 at 10:55 am -
February 1, 2015 at 3:03 pm -
Loved it.
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February 2, 2015 at 12:02 pm -
Blinding!
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February 1, 2015 at 11:13 am -
Curiously, for a bookish child, I have only rather distant memories of them. Perhaps because whilst in primary school I was trying to get my head round books like The Ipcress File. I was puzzled by some of the more “adult” scenes. What on earth were these people up too? I was quite perplexed.
Nowadays, of course, I would have been all too aware, doubtless having been dosed age 5 with all manner of sexual techniques, and duly tutored in “gay” and transgender issues, probably given an appropriate multicultural spin at the same time.
In a sense, I pity the corpulent, indolent, unhealthy “yoof” of today, with their obsession with staring, bleary eyed, at some ghastly computer game giving them the sugar rush of indolent vicarious pleasure (in the case of many, preferably as late into the night as possible). Not all our yoof are like that, I know, but many are.
When I was young we did things. We “played out”. We rode our bikes. We rode to the sweet shop and ate Love Hearts and Sherbet, but we were never fat. Games of football would break out, always self policed and carefully evened out so that each side had the same chance. If it turned out one side was winning too easily, players would be traded to make it even.
Reading a book was a simple pleasure. Reading anything. I loved my Saturday Comics. As I recall, the Victor for drama and wartime action and Whizzer and Chips for fun and japes – I wasn’t much of a Beano kid, for no reason I can recall.
Happy days. I wish I could revisit them now.-
February 1, 2015 at 11:24 am -
“We rode to the sweet shop and ate Love Hearts and Sherbet, but we were never fat. ”
Au contraire , I was that fat kid in the class. Every Class had one, it was a law I think. Mind you I was lucky, I wasn’t the ‘kid with asthma’ whom , by law, every class had to have too although I did have to wear NHS glasses and spoke RP…but they were optional extras.
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February 1, 2015 at 11:26 am -
That’s actually true. By some law there was always one fat kid, and one with asthma and usually with the said glasses.
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February 2, 2015 at 7:54 am -
I remember the fat kid but not the one with asthma. I thought asthma was a modern invention, caused by central heating or not enough second hand tobacco smoke or something. I suppose it could be that all the asthmatic kids died off before getting to school because Ventolin hadn’t been invented yet.
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February 2, 2015 at 2:22 pm -
I remember the one fat kid too and we were told it was because of his ‘glands’ . Don’t remember any asthma cases though, now every other kid seems to have it.
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February 1, 2015 at 11:30 am -
I recall that our fat boy in the class also had NHS spex (John Lennon style now!). By the time we were 15 or so he had developed into a chunky “Norman Hunter style” left back, whose ferocity towards oncoming opponents was probably partly due to the fact he couldnlt wear his glasses on the field. I was always very cautious if I was making a back-pass to him, especially if the colours of the opposition were vaguely similar to our own. Last time I saw him, he was working for a bank.
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February 1, 2015 at 11:49 am -
That made me smile. You see, when I left school and lost all that weight (aged 14 I had a 44″ waist) I REFUSED to wear my NHS glasses. One evening I was with a group of mates down the ‘rubba’ and playing ‘arrers’ (yes we had all watched far too much ‘Minder’). Some stranger inquired why I walked up to the dartboard after every single throw.
My mates explained: “cos he’s almost blind”, to which the stranger replied “B-b-but he’s WINNING!?!”
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February 1, 2015 at 11:16 am -
I always looked forward to a Rupert book at Christmas. We were read to by Gran from Gullivers Travels. I have a Noddy Book 4 dated from 1951. It is full of deliciously politically incorrect pictures of G******gs. Even clowns seem now to be considered scary. Some kids are frightened of them. Chapter 5 is The G******g Comes. This would probably get your kids taken over by the SS if you read it to them! The goings on in the Dark Wood are rather naughty. It illustrates for me how times have changed so much. We all swear like troupers, and can look like pirates and hookers. Say some a loaded word that was used freely around children 60 odd years ago and you are out on your ear! I wonder what terrible damage it did to children to read these sort of books? A note in the book said it is on Amazon at £30 on 25/9/07.
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February 1, 2015 at 11:39 am -
What I remember is being in something called The Puffin Club. Puffin being the children’s arm of Penguin Publishing, as I recall. You got a bade, and all sorts of stuff including instructions on how to write in secret codes – very important, that. There was a quarterly magazine with all sorts of stuff in it. I think one time there was a huge article on Halloween and the the history of customs and superstitions behind it. That was to stand me in good stead when I got detention when I was 12 after a spot of high jinks. I was instructed to write down everything I knew about Halloween. Well, quite a lot as it turned out…
Yes it was the Puffin books that I chiefly remember. They could be quite dark, like the stuff by Alan Garner. I remember the Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Also a crazy little book called Hobberdy Dik.
I read this week in the Sunday Times of Ofstead inspectors quizing 10 year olds about their understanding of lesbian practices. Childhood should be preserved, not soiled by some political agenda.-
February 1, 2015 at 11:40 am -
Badge. Sorry.
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February 1, 2015 at 12:31 pm -
“quizing 10 year olds about their understanding of lesbian practices”
I too long for a return to the days when http://tinyurl.com/my7bx94 was what was meant by ‘scissors’….
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February 1, 2015 at 1:38 pm -
Thanks for the correction Gildas. I spent some time trying to figure out what a bade might be!
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February 1, 2015 at 1:21 pm -
“That was to stand me in good stead when I got detention when I was 12 after a spot of high jinks. I was instructed to write down everything I knew about Halloween. Well, quite a lot as it turned out…”
But lurking in the wings the protagonists were always one step ahead. As my hand size increased with age, so comfortably able to hold first 2, then 3 and finally 4 biro pens taped together, the better to write out the hundreds of lines imposed by my charming stepfather (after the obligatory clout of course) it never really sunk in that the bastard was increasing the numbers by a factor of 2 to take my cleverness into account.
It was such a pity I wasn’t ever bright enough to work out (until it was much too late) that the four different colours I was so prettily using were giving away more than I intended.
Duh!
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February 1, 2015 at 11:43 am -
“Shopping With M’maa” : “At the tobacconists we buy Daddy tobacco for his pipe. It is very strong tobacco. Remember Peterkins, you may not start smoking until you are a big boy of twelve.”
Actually if memory serves, poor old Daddy got the gender stereo-typically defined gift of a hammer…bet he’d rather had scotch from The Off Licence or a ‘photography’ Magazine from The News Agents, but any man who marries the sort of woman who wore gloves to go shopping , really only has himself to blame.
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February 1, 2015 at 12:13 pm -
Funny that the book I most clearly remember is about the police force, and I well recall the photo of the group of policemen inspecting their truncehons before going on patrol, so quite astonished that this should be the one chosen to be displayed by Mr Galt. On the same tack, I still don’t quite understand how I thought the ‘just William’ and Jennings books so cool when William’s family had a maid and Jennings went to public school. This shouldn’t really have resonated with me in my terraced house in Swansea, but maybe then the envy agenda hadn’t become so vital and we lived in malory not ivory towers….
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February 1, 2015 at 12:16 pm -
You did read Mr Galt’s version, didn’t you?
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February 1, 2015 at 12:33 pm -
Oh yes…not quite like the original but that picture is real enough.
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February 1, 2015 at 3:33 pm -
I adored the Enid Blyton books although they bore no resemblance to my life in a working class area in Glasgow . We just didn’t think like that and loved the stories. I was a avid reader and started on adult books by about 10. Who wants to read misery stories, reading was an escape from our normal lives. Most of all it is the loss of freedom that most of today’s kids will never know. My grandson is not allowed to join the Cubs because of all the hysteria, it’s all very sad.
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February 1, 2015 at 4:00 pm -
As you say Carol, I don’t think the Famous 5 bore much resemblance to any of our childhoods- even those of us who grew up in White Middle Class Southern Home Countieshire (or Norfolk). Pretty sure the ‘5’ were already anachronisms even when the books were first published during WW2.
But there were ‘echoes’ , in my childhood and I’m betting most of our childhoods….just enough echoes to allow us to, again as you say, to ‘escape’.
Carol, that was a jolly clever comment, I think ginger pop and sponge cake all round….and an IronBru and cigarette for George in overcompensation.
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February 1, 2015 at 5:10 pm -
I remember when I read the Famous Five my poor mum had to make me a hard boiled egg with bread and butter and ginger pop. I wanted to be George and have a dog like Timmy. Loved the school stories too and wanted to go to boarding school, I never occurred to any of us that these stories were totally removed from our lives. I did eventually get the dog though.
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February 1, 2015 at 4:02 pm -
“Misery stories”… Quite agree! Fenwick in Newcastle has only a small book department but these days one whole section of it is devoted to “Biography And Tragic Life Stories” – I kid ye not. I’ve never seen the appeal. Books are doors to other worlds – why open one that leads to nothing but sadness? How is that an escape?
This is also why I’ve never felt the urge to follow “Eastenders”. I see no point in investing in a fictional universe where nothing nice happens to anybody, ever.
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February 1, 2015 at 1:32 pm -
“Yes it was the Puffin books that I chiefly remember. They could be quite dark, like the stuff by Alan Garner”
Not sure if it was ‘Puffin’ we had at school but there was a monthly Childrens Book Club. Some of the best and darkest novels I have ever read, then or now. Books which were actually quite adult in their content without being unnecessarily graphic, that tackled some very nasty bits of life and history.
“The Satanic Mill” by Preussler stands out in memory, as does “Smith” by Leon Garfield.
Above all those books spoke to us as if we were heading towards adulthood, not senility. Mind you I still had a copy of “The Odessa File” under my desk most ‘Reading times’.
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February 1, 2015 at 3:26 pm -
I do remember using the Ladybird book How it Works – The Motorcycle as a guide to working on my first bike, a decrepit BSA C15. Rather happily the book had been writted with help from the BSA factory and featured beautiful illustrations with accurate views of the same bike.
They were good enough to enable me to understand what all the bits were inside the engine casing when I started taking it to pieces, and rather more useful than the Haynes manual that I purchased later.
I loved the artwork and it still look in awe at the level of expertise and ability that went into those illustrations. -
February 1, 2015 at 4:51 pm -
I remember my first Ladybird – still have it. “Tootles the Taxi”
My sister got those “Read It Yourself” books they did, but I’m not sure if they were a late 70’s invention or my parents didn’t know about them in the middle of that decade. Or maybe my daily dose of On The Move on BBC TV (as well as Words and Pictures) negated any need for those tools.
By the time I was 8 I had a “reading age” of 16 and was reading a book a week (C.S. Lewis & Dahlov Ipcar spring to mind) so I’d say a grounding of Ladybird & 1970s BBC Television stood me in good stead. -
February 1, 2015 at 8:45 pm -
Aah … nostalgia. It ain’t what it used to be. Or as A E Houseman put it, “What are those blue, remembered hills, what farms, what fields are those?”
(It is the land of lost content, he concluded.)
I’m not that hooked myself although I think my affection for Ford cars has a lot to do with memories of my Dad’s 1948 Ford Pilot, a monster with a V8 engine that is one of my earliest recollections, The car and I were about 4 years old when he bought it.
But nostalgia is always a handy refuge when people feel insecure and there is a lot of insecurity about at the moment. -
February 1, 2015 at 9:29 pm -
I suspect that, buried within the text of Petunia’s collection of classic Ladybird books, you will find the complete UKIP Manifesto for 2015.
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February 1, 2015 at 9:47 pm -
Those were wonderful books. The illustrations were memorable too. Rivers of porridge and Captain Teach with a beard full of firecrackers (two different stories!).
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