The Ladybird Books Story: The Bugs That Got Britain Reading Timeshift

Ladybird books were once as much a part of childhood as lace-up shoes

and warm school milk.

To open a familiar one is to go straight back in time.

I'm going to spoil the ending for you.

These colourful little hardbacks were full of information on

myriad marvellous subjects.

They made the natural world fascinating.

To me, as a child, knowing that this was out there with

a scowl on its face like that was tremendously exciting.

They made fairytales enchanting.

"Snow-White and Rose-Red kept their mother's cottage

"so clean and tidy, it was a pleasure to go into it."

Immediately, you're there in this perfect little world.

And they made history dramatic.

This is the first time I've held this book for 52 years,

and it really began a lifelong passion that I have for Nelson.

The vintage years for Ladybirds were between the 1950s and

the 1970s when they offered up the world of knowledge to

children in a very particular way.

One of the things that is so good about Ladybird is, actually,

there's a huge amount of detailed factual content,

and it was very carefully researched.

What they illustrated was a time when there was

a great deal of optimism through science,

and it filtered all the way down to wanting to tell children about it.

These early Ladybirds are also time capsules that shed light on

what Britain used to be like and how we used to think.

All growth is good, building motorways is good.

To aspire was a good thing.

That was the consciousness that presides in the Ladybird universe.

This felt like a very safe world,

like the sort of world...how the world ought to be.

For three generations,

millions of Ladybirds multiplied on the nation's bookshelves,

and the story of how that happened and the creative force behind

them is described in this interesting documentary.

HE LAUGHS

That's wonderful. If only more blurbs were like that.

Necessity is often the mother of invention, and the iconic shape

of a Ladybird book was invented to get round wartime paper rationing.

The company behind the idea were not even publishers.

Wills & Hepworth were a Midlands printing firm casting around

for a means to keep their presses rolling.

Their foray into children's books was made possible by the discovery

of an ingenious way to beat the paper shortages.

And Helen here is going to show you what they did.

Somebody had hit upon the idea which is that you can actually take

one sheet of paper. With just a couple of cuts and

some clever folding,

you can turn it into a book. I'll show you how big it is.

It's printed on both sides. 52 pages. Very, very clever.

That make, do and mend approach gave us the now familiar Ladybird book -

seven inches high by four and three quarter wide, 52 pages long

with text on the left-hand page and pictures on the right.

They sold initially for two shillings and sixpence.

"Yes! Away the Bunnies started. Bunnikin, of course, was last.

"Fluff called, 'Bunnikin! Don't dawdle!'

"'Well,' he said, 'you go too fast.'"

The early books were charming but hard to actually read.

Wills & Hepworth had

no feel for children's books beyond coloured pictures.

I think it's clear that Wills & Hepworth didn't really see the value

of what they were doing, they didn't see this as their core business.

But one of their employers saw more potential in the book.

His name was Douglas Keen.

Keen was a salesman with the company and, after the war,

he set about convincing his bosses to take a different tack.

Keen thought Ladybirds would be better as educational books.

Post-war Britain was a society changing fast.

Why not use the Ladybird format to make books to inform children

about the world and what was in it?

Keen could see the kind of book he had in mind, so he went home,

sat at his kitchen table and made a prototype.

This telephone directory-sized object is the prototype that

my father made himself to try and convince the Board of Directors

that an educational book about birds would be a good seller.

He chose birds for the first book cos that was the thing

he loved most and the thing he was most interested in and was

most knowledgeable about.

I think my mother did some of the little sort of line drawings

as well as illustrations, and he worked out a text.

As well as his wife,

Keen also enlisted the help of his mother-in-law - a gifted

amateur artist who did the colour paintings of birds.

This massive prototype became a mock-up of how the book would

actually look when it was published.

Again, a little watercolour painting by my grandmother and some

cutting and sticking that he did,

typing little bits out himself, cutting other bits out from

books and making an actual size mock-up of how the book would look.

Keen stuck to the existing Ladybird format of picture on one side

and text on the other. The difference was in the content.

He now took his sample books and showed them to the board at

Wills & Hepworth.

Once he'd produced this and shown it to the directors,

they then realised that this would work.

They hadn't been able to imagine it before but,

once they could see this in front of them,

they realised that this could become a commercial possibility.

In 1953, the first edition of the British book of Birds And

Their Nests rolled off the printing presses.

To create it, Keen employed both a famous naturalist and

a wildlife artist. Their names were a big selling point.

This is the first book of British Birds,

and I think it's a lovely, lovely bird book because the illustrations,

which were done by a notable artist, Seaby,

are exquisitely produced.

Bullfinch - oh, look at that. What a fantastic bird.

And there is its egg. And they're there in the snow.

It's kind of looking out of the back of its eye like a cat when

it thinks you're about to do something nasty to it!

And this is... Yes, all these pictures are incredibly evocative.

And, of course,

they are all absolutely classic English garden birds.

So there was...

You could look up from the book and see them flickering around in

the garden.

Keen's instinct that a bird book might be popular proved right.

It tapped into a vogue for bird-watching that the BBC

also picked up on.

-ARCHIVE:

-Bird speeds are usually grossly exaggerated.

But you can take this, I think,

as a safe general rule, and that is that the bigger the bird,

the faster it flies normally,

and the smaller the bird, the faster it seems to fly.

Now, young twitchers could buy an affordable hardback pocket guide

with unusually generous colour illustrations and bite-sized

bird effects.

"The bullfinch is one of our most beautiful birds.

"The nest is made of twigs lined with hair and is just a shallow cup.

"Starlings are very clever at imitating the songs of other birds."

Starling's singing away, and there's its blue egg.

And I'd already found half of one of those on the lawn in my garden.

So I was really pleased to be able to say,

that egg that I found is a starling egg.

So this book was having a practical use immediately.

Douglas Keen was one of Wills & Hepworth's top salesmen -

debonair, hard-working and smart.

But now, he had a product he really wanted to sell.

He loaded up the company car and set about marketing it with gusto.

In order to help promote the books in the bookshops,

he would actually make or get made cut-out models of some of

the animals, and then those would be used in the bookshop windows.

He was very good on the sort of presentation,

the retail psychology side of it of what would draw people's eyes.

For the bird book,

he did a mock-up with little stuffed birds and real branches.

That was the sort of thing he did.

And he would get the showcases made by a local carpenter.

He would get a local sign writer to paint them.

It stopped people in their tracks as they walked by the bookshop window

and the children would see this big attractive display

and say, "Look, Mum, can I have that book?"

And the manager would feel that he'd had something done specially

for him and, therefore, put extra effort into making a good display of

books inside the shop and to getting the assistants to sell the books.

Keen's creative salesmanship paid off.

Very quickly, the books sold out and were soon followed by

bird books II and III.

Very quickly, letters came into Wills & Hepworth from

happy bookshop owners.

"For the attention of Mr Keen.

"As a matter of interest, we thought you would like to know that,

"since displaying the special set of Ladybird British Birds And

"Their Nests, we have sold over 300 copies of this book."

"We are swamped with orders - an increase of 40%."

"Dear Sir, I feel sure you will be interested to know that, during the

"last 24 days, we have sold upwards of 700 of your Ladybird series..."

"I thought you would be interested to hear the results achieved at

"the branches where the special displays of Ladybird books

"have been featured. Bridgend, 513, Llanelli..."

"We have now reached well over the 1,000 sales mark of the

"Ladybird bird book.

"We are very pleased with these results."

One letter in particular convinced Keen

he was on the right track with factual books for children.

It was from a primary school adviser called John Gagg.

Gagg claimed schools were in desperate need of well-written

educational material and thought the Ladybird formula might be

the answer.

"Teachers are almost vainly seeking easy reference books of many

"kinds," wrote Gagg.

"With British Birds, you have now rung the bell,

"but we want lots more."

Keen already had ideas lined up for more books and the success of

British Birds meant the Board of Directors were open to his

suggestions.

In 1956, Ladybird launched a new history series. It was a smart move.

The subject was part of the school curriculum and potential for

titles was almost endless.

It will probably surprise you but,

of all of the Ladybird books that I had,

probably my favourite wasn't any of the wildlife titles.

It was this book here, which is the story of Henry V.

Here's the map, shows the route from Southampton,

which is where I lived and where I was born and grew up.

So this had that immediate context.

Over they go, into France, and there was the siege here, and they go on

this long march and they end up here at the muddy field in Agincourt.

The history series was very timely. Britain had just come through a war.

Children were aware of the role heroism,

leadership and sacrifice had played.

To write the series,

Douglas Keen needed someone who could handle such big themes for

children, and he found him in the children's department at the BBC.

-ARCHIVE:

-England expects two words which, down the years,

have shaped the course of history, two words which, in our

country's need, have never failed to find an echo in our English hearts.

There is no order of a tyrant king to a slave people.

These are freedom's words addressed to free men,

theirs to withhold or give. England expects.

That speech was written by Lawrence du Garde Peach.

A dramatist rather than a historian, du Garde Peach was not

an obvious choice, but he was, as it turned out, an inspired one.

"This is the story of one of the greatest and bravest sailors England has ever known."

Well, you see, how could that not go straight into your heart like an arrow?

The second paragraph says, "His many adventures,

"from his first boyhood voyage to the last great victory at Trafalgar,

"are described in this interesting book."

HE LAUGHS

The history books are almost literally everything you

really need to know about British and Scottish history. Um...

In tiny little book form.

The Story Of The First Queen Elizabeth in that.

It's just amazing.

Du Garde Peach's take on history was that it was an awfully big

adventure, full of interesting and colourful characters you

could relate to.

L du Garde Peach, I think, is a fantastic writer because he brings

a sort of immediacy and cheeriness to the way that he conveys history.

It makes it very easy to understand,

and it's quite personality-based, which I really love.

One of my favourites is The Story Of Charles II,

which is quite partial, and it says...one of the pages says,

"King Charles was dark and good-looking.

"What was much more important, he was a very friendly man.

"But perhaps what made him most popular was that he was gay.

"That is why King Charles II was known as the Merry Monarch."

Fantastic. That's L du Garde Peach for you.

I think this is a really amazing scene.

This is the scene of the young Oliver Cromwell as a boy,

and he meets the future King Charles I,

who's of course just kind of a young prince at that age.

And there's a big tussle and guess who wins?

Well, of course it's Oliver!

But the visual quality of this - the bright blue of Charles' costume,

Oliver's more sort of sober brown,

which is sending a message in itself that Charles is maybe a bit vain and

flamboyant, whereas Oliver is the kind of more morally serious one.

It's just brilliant, I think, visually.

So the combination of these vivid,

vivid bright pictures and then this informative, detailed,

factual text telling a powerful story,

often with very powerfully sort of emotionally and morally

charged messages - I think it's just a brilliant combination.

It was as if you made friends with whoever it was.

So, you would read this book,

and you would really see things from Oliver Cromwell's point of view,

but then you would read Charles II, and then you would see it

from Charles II's point of view, and then so on and so forth.

The illustrations were by commercial artist John Kenney.

Kenney was wonderful at faces

and could depict muskets, ships and costumes with accuracy.

But he also understood drama,

and could stir children's hearts with his paintbrush.

I mean, look at this.

This is an illustration of "the hail of arrows".

It's a very rich picture.

I mean, it's horrific.

These are people being slaughtered

in the most savage and incomprehensible way,

but the illustration itself is just...amazing.

Look at the horses with their mouths open, and people flailing about.

I would look at this and I would imagine the horror,

as a child, of being in amongst this turmoil of extreme violence.

So, it appealed to me.

Perhaps I didn't want to say that. But it did! It did!

In this picture, Warwick has been summoned to a meeting,

a sort of peacemaking meeting at Coventry,

but he gets a sort of uneasy feeling,

and then, this horseman gallops up,

they're only just a few hundred yards from Coventry

and he gallops up and he says,

"Look, it's a trap, they're coming to get you."

And, as Ladybird describes it,

the men-at-arms were already visible,

coming towards Warwick, and he turns his horse and gallops away.

So, it was just incredibly exciting as a child.

The death. Well, death is always interesting.

You see him on death, having just been shot...

..by the person high up in the...

..in the sort of crossbeams of the...

..French ship.

The Adventures From History series

inspired three generations to love history,

and went on to sell 13 million copies.

The books were emotional and partisan and made no bones about it.

It really interests me now, as a professional historian.

We have to ask, "Does history really matter

"if there isn't any kind of human or moral dimension to it?"

And, all right, I can now see, which I didn't at the time,

that Ladybird were telling one version of a story,

and there were lots of other versions

which you could quite reasonably tell, as well,

but I think the thing I loved, and even now I really like,

is that they put their cards on the table

and they tried to sort of show the human side of it.

This is a book which weighs...

2oz or something,

but it comes with an amazing sort of gravity of its own.

And it's not just the object, of course,

as I'm sitting holding it now, I can see the room in which I read it,

which was my bedroom that I shared with my brother.

I can see my mum who died young...

um...just sort of moving around in the room.

I can see the pictures on the wall,

and these are the kind of things which...

Well, it's a world, and very, very powerful.

With both the Bird and History titles proving lucrative,

Douglas Keen was given free rein

to explore other educational ideas for Ladybirds.

Looking for gaps in the market,

Keen found himself drawn to the area of preschool learning.

-REPORTER:

-'In this programme,

'we're seeing how a child's early language development

'develops in communication with its mother in the home.'

The one about the three pigs, how does that record go?

The one with the Big Bad Wolf?

Yes, it's the story of the Big Bad Wolf...

The 1950s was seeing a growth in interest

in how very young children learned to read.

Research was showing that if mothers engaged their infants

with learning at home, it had a marked effect

on how well children did when they went to school.

Douglas Keen, with two daughters of his own,

knew how big a part home could play.

My father was aware that before children even get to school,

what they've learned from their mother,

and from reading with their mother, was going to be very important,

and that what is most important is the attitude to reading.

That a child who goes to school already enthusiastic about books,

if not necessarily able to read, is at a huge advantage.

Keen hired an early learning expert named Margaret Gagg,

wife of the letter-writing John,

to write a series of books for preschool children.

In case you were wondering,

the letters after her name don't stand for "National Farmers' Union".

They stand for "National Froebel Union" -

Froebel being the German educationalist

who invented kindergarten.

"Here is the fish shop..."

Gagg used words which young readers would've found familiar

and the illustrations were bright and involving.

These books looked simple, but a lot of thought went into their design.

As a teacher now, when I look at the words,

what I really appreciate is the font.

It's really unusual to have such an accessible font,

for example, to make the letter A look like the sort of an A

that a child could recognise.

They cut off the top of a D.

It was attention to detail like that

which made it very, very easy on the eye.

Shopping With Mother was illustrated by graphic designer Harry Wingfield.

He lived in suburbia with his wife and two small children,

and it was his everyday world that came through in his pictures.

That was very new, because in the '50s and '60s,

a lot of the suburbs were built

and a lot of the people lived in suburbia,

which had hitherto not been a world

which was depicted at all in anything, really.

You know, kitchen-sink drama of the '50s and so on

was considered really weird, because it was an ordinary working world.

"We are going shopping."

Oh! What shop is this?

The toy shop!

The toy shop.

Aw, look at that little bunny.

For children, it was like looking in a mirror.

Shopping With Mother was my trip with my mother to the shops.

No question. I recognise the shops.

I recognise the people in them.

Every shop that they go to, I think,

"Oh, yeah, that's like Mr So-and-so on the village green."

There was a row, a parade of shops along one side of the heath,

and they all looked exactly like this.

There wasn't a chemist there, but the grocer looked exactly the same.

I mean, it might as well be me, really,

looking in through this shop window. He even looks a bit like me.

I had a school blazer like that

with stuff around the edges,

and I do remember girls with those little coats.

The fashion is absolutely spot-on.

These pencil-like slim models

wearing this sort of suit with the nipped-in waist,

and those mushroom-like hats sitting on the top of their heads -

those are so familiar. She is Little Miss Average.

Harry Wingfield used popular '50s icons as source material.

The effect this had was curious.

It made his Ladybird books look exactly like real life,

but with extra gloss.

-SHE SIGHS

-Ladybird Land...

It's a place we all wanted to be, really.

The sun shines,

everything works.

Everything is kind of in Technicolor.

It's like watching a... watching a film.

People are decent to each other,

and you know where you are,

and nothing can harm children.

The postman smiles.

The policeman smiles,

adults are there to help children orient

and find their way around the world.

Ladybird books in general began to accentuate the positive

and eliminate the negative. Everything in their world was good.

If roads are built, it will be great. There will be more prosperity

and then more people will be able to work,

building nuclear power stations and running shops.

And that's good. It's pre-consumerism.

So, the idea that all of this is going to gobble up the planet

and kill everybody could not be further away

from the consciousness that presides in the Ladybird universe.

The Learning To Read series was another huge success.

In 1958, Douglas Keen was promoted.

He became creative director,

and he based himself at home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Here, he held his editorial meetings with the experts

he needed for each book.

My father felt a big degree of personal responsibility

for accuracy and authenticity in the books.

One of the reasons he was always very, very determined

to get the best possible expert on any subject

was so that he knew, then, that he could rely on the information there.

Facts were important,

but it was the artwork that was captivating children.

More and more, Keen relied on illustrators

who could make information exciting.

He was very clever in finding artists

who were really good at getting their detail right.

The detail had to be spot-on, with the clothing,

of background buildings and so on.

And the pictures had to be really interesting compositions -

absolutely packed full of stuff happening.

As each new series of books went ahead,

so new artists turned up at the Stratford house.

For the People At Work series, Keen brought in John Berry,

a former war artist with a very photographic eye.

John Berry was exceptionally good at working very accurately.

So, if there was any technical books,

my father would ask John Berry to do the illustrations,

because he knew that he loved

working with that detail of accuracy.

I remember John Berry as being one of the most exciting of the artists.

He was quite an exuberant Cockney.

He stayed overnight on several occasions.

My sister remembers taking him a cup of tea one morning

and seeing him sitting up in bed bare-chested and smoking.

And I think this image has stayed with her!

Douglas Keen's younger daughter Caroline

was photographed by the illustrator Harry Wingfield

who used her as the model for Magnets, Bulbs And Batteries

and The Lord's Prayer.

The Lord's Prayer came first,

I was about nine or ten

when Harry Wingfield came down and photographed me for that one,

and then that followed on with the Science series.

A number of illustrators came from the Eagle comic,

including the brilliant creator of the Dan Dare strip, Frank Hampson,

who brought a rather sinister frisson

to the Ladybird Books Of Nursery Rhymes.

Frank Hampson saw things from the most peculiar angles.

So, you'll have pictures of the three blind mice,

and you're looking from the floor up at the mice.

You know, Doctor Foster,

terrifying character floundering in your eye line to the water.

One of the most prestigious artists Keen employed

was Charles F Tunnicliffe, a Royal Academician

who was invited, in the late 1950s,

to create a series of books about the countryside.

I was surprised...

..to see Charles Tunnicliffe in a Ladybird book,

because I always knew him as a wildlife artist.

And it was one of the first times that I realised that serious artists

also were illustrators.

What I liked about these was that the scenes were very real.

And within the Ladybird book, given what it needed to achieve,

which was to have a diversity. I mean, look at this one here.

You've got a couple of tree species, you've got beech and oak.

You've got some ferns.

You've got at least three or four species of fungi.

You've got some pheasants on the fence.

This isn't something that's been done casually in five minutes.

Tunnicliffe has put as much effort into this illustration

as he did any of his greater works.

This one here is one of my favourites.

It's from What To Look For In Winter and it shows a seed drill.

But the thing that I absolutely love about it

is the perspective that Tunnicliffe has adopted.

And I think it's just stunningly original because it's seen

from the wood pigeons' perspective.

Tunnicliffe's illustrations for the What To Look For series

were not simple representations of the countryside.

They were painted with a much more knowing eye.

The '50s and '60s were a period of rural upheaval.

They marked the changeover from the old agricultural ways to the new.

-REPORTER:

-'Each field is tested daily,

'the crops' tenderness is scientifically measured

'and the peas are gathered at the moment of maximum sweetness.

'So, automation extends to the farm

'and it's your dinner table that benefits.'

These sweeping changes were a much-debated topic.

Modernisers argued that factory farming was the future.

Traditionalists lamented the passing of the old ways.

Tunnicliffe's illustrations told children that both could coexist.

The question of where mechanisation fits into rural life,

and whether, actually, it's a natural part of rural life

or whether it's some kind of alien, urban intrusion into rural life

is a really hot issue at this time.

One of the things which the What To Look For books were trying to do

was to suggest that nature and farming went hand-in-hand together.

So, it seems to me the seed drill

harmonises perfectly with the rural scene.

It's these soft, muted blue and grey colours. The brown of the fields,

look at the brown of the man bending over the seed drill.

So, it's a vision of perfect harmony, and in many ways,

I think that was actually really quite innovative,

because it's not just taking a nostalgic view of the countryside,

but trying to come to terms with the real facts of change

in the countryside.

This is really all about justifying the ways of modern farming

to Ladybird readers.

What To Look For In Winter

was followed by What To Look For In Spring, Summer and Autumn.

Each book, a seasonal snapshot of small facts.

Spring is when deer have their young.

Autumn is when whooper swans migrate.

"The lake is partly frozen.

"Where the water has been kept in motion

"by the swimming movements of the ducks,

"ice has not been able to form,

"and so they have made for themselves pools

"in which they can dive to look for things to eat.

"Standing on the ice are mallards - both drakes and ducks.

"In the pool near, are widgeon,

"and in the distance, tufted duck.

"These birds move about in flocks in winter,

"from one pond or lake to another,

"and often, the flocks mingle."

Published in the heyday of primary school nature corners

and weekend family rambles,

these books were all part

of helping children stay in touch with the land.

I saw a TV programme once

where children thought milk came from milkmen.

They didn't know it came from cows.

So, there was probably an earnest feeling,

on the part of Ladybird - who, at heart, are educators,

as well as storytellers -

to show children what the countryside is like.

And Tunnicliffe...

was a perfect choice for that,

because Tunnicliffe understood the countryside.

He was a country man.

He was a country man at heart.

As more and more titles were devised,

more top-flight illustrators

lent their creativity to the Ladybird brand.

Martin Aitchison was a master of character,

Ronald Lampitt had an eye for landscape and maps,

Frank Humphris could capture every detail of the Wild West,

and Robert Ayton and G Robinson

made children just love making things.

Douglas Keen now found himself at the heart of factual publishing

at a very exciting time.

So much was being built and invented and discovered

that books explaining what was going on were in demand

by children fascinated by the promise of the future.

Not that everyone thought that this was a good thing...

Good evening.

Christmas, you may have heard, is coming.

And probably some millions of dads and mums and uncles and aunts

all over the country are now thinking about children's books.

But out of the thousands of books laid before us

for children at Christmas time,

do we really know any more what the modern child wants to read?

Are the old classics, Treasure Island and Kidnapped

and Little Women and Black Beauty and so on still favourites?

Douglas Keen had his own response to that.

In 1964, he launched a fiction series

featuring old European fairytales.

They were retold in classic Ladybird style.

"Once upon a time", well, that's always a good way to begin.

"There was a little girl called Cinderella. Her mother was dead,

"and she lived with her father and her two elders."

I mean, that's absolutely it. Bang, bang, bang.

"When the dwarf caught sight of Snow-White and Rose-Red,

"he shouted, 'You ugly creatures!

"'Why do you stand there staring instead of trying to help me?'"

And he is horrible, by the way. He is just horrible.

He used to scare me.

"Cinderella's elder sisters were beautiful and fair of face but,

"because they were bad-tempered and unkind,

"their faces grew to look ugly."

An Orwellian perception,

as it turns out.

The Well-Loved Tales series

is a bit of a phenomenon, honestly, I think.

Adored, strangely adored by...

sort of two or three generations of people who grew up with them.

My daughter, when she was tiny, had this edition,

which ended up like lots of her Ladybird books,

with the spine dropped off,

and the pages became a bit dirty

and there was often cornflakes and things stuck in there.

But this is just evidence of a child loving a book,

having it, using it. It was just a wonderful toy.

"The ugly sisters made Cinderella do all the work in the house.

"She carried coal for the fire, cooked the meals,

"washed the dishes, scrubbed and mended the clothes,

"swept the floor and dusted the furniture.

"She worked from morning till night, without stopping."

To write the books,

Keen hired an educationalist called Vera Southgate.

Her task was to render each fairy tale down to 26 small pages.

What's important to a child is not quite what's important to an adult.

You know, major plot points,

you have to reach all those milestones,

but you also have to say things like,

"Snow-White and Rose-Red kept their mother's cottage

"so clean and tidy that it was a pleasure to go into it."

And immediately, you're there in this perfect little world,

and that's very important

for the interruption of the advent of evil into it.

It's such an art, keeping the right level of detail

without sort of clogging up the train of thought or the narrative.

And staying within your 56 or whatever page...boundaries...

I shouldn't open these books, while I'm talking,

because I lose the thread because I start reading!

The series was shared between two illustrators,

Eric Winter and Robert Lumley.

They stuck to the Ladybird formula

of the picture helping the words along for young readers.

I was talking to somebody recently who was being very snippy

about the illustrations, and I think lots of people are snippy

who didn't grow up with the pictures.

Saying that they're too graphic, they're too visual,

they leave nothing for the imagination.

Realistic illustration is good for very young children,

because they are not good at interpreting pictures.

But for pictures to look as if they're like photographs -

real people - a child immediately homes in on that

and can understand and read the illustrations perfectly clearly.

I can just remember looking at

a picture of Cinderella weeping into her handkerchief

and thinking this was just such a beautiful picture,

and I remember asking my mum,

"Why is the Mona Lisa a famous picture and not this picture?

"Why do people queue to see the Mona Lisa

"and nobody queues to see that? Why?"

The '60s was a period of wild innovation in book illustration.

Artists like Brian Wildsmith, Ralph Steadman and Quentin Blake

became known for their unique styles.

But I don't think that you could look at one of these and say,

"Oh, there is a...

"Hmm... Eric Winter..."

in the way Wildsmith or people like Ralph Steadman.

At Ladybird, all illustrators and authors

were entirely at the service of the brand.

And the thing I've only just noticed about all these Ladybird books -

with the Well-Loved Tales, especially -

is that they don't have any author on the outside.

And I think they were...

Yeah, they were all retold

by Vera Southgate - MA BCom - on the inside.

I presume... Again, it's the branding,

it's THIS that you're looking for,

and this bit is the bit you trust, and...and want to find.

The Well-Loved Tales added to the growing library of Ladybirds.

Every week, tens of thousands of them flew into the bookshops

and then out again almost as quickly.

Ladybirds were sold, not just in bookshops,

they were sold in corner stores, chemists...

Places where people went to do other things.

So, a kid would have their pocket money,

or they would be there with their mother or father or their granny,

and they'd pick up a Ladybird book.

It would be something that a lot of people did once a week.

After all this time, a Ladybird book still cost

just two shillings and sixpence.

It was important because two and six was a single coin,

and it was what a lot of children got for their pocket money.

I did, at that time.

With the price so low,

the way publishers Wills & Hepworth made money

was by sheer volume of sales.

There are about 700 of them or so,

so there were an awful lot to choose from.

And people collected series.

Once you got one, you got another one,

and then you put them together on shelf,

and I'm OCD, and probably always have been,

so then it meant having another one, and another one, and another one.

Then you had your wildlife section,

then you had your history section,

and then you had your science section -

weather, and other stuff like that, you know?

And then, there were a few oddities - Underwater Exploration,

and The Seashore which fitted in.

And I liked having a whole stack of MY books together.

Producing such a wide array of titles was a lot of work.

With so many books to proofread and check for error,

Douglas Keen once again roped his family in to help.

My mother used to proof-check books, and I used to, as well.

Right from the original stage when you'd have the first...the text,

just sort of type-written out on big A4 sheets,

and then you'd have the pack of drawings

that would come through from the artists.

And we'd go through and I'd be looking at the texts,

looking at the illustrations,

making sure that they all tallied.

And...

Yeah, I'm sure it was very good for my reading!

SHE LAUGHS

For anyone who loved and worked with books as the Keens did,

illiteracy was an unimaginable handicap.

But then, as now, some children found reading extremely difficult.

Mother thought I'd just be able to sit down and start to read,

just like that, without any trouble at all,

but it came as a big surprise to me when I found I couldn't.

Research was highlighting that 10% of children

were failing to read by the time they left primary school -

a matter of concern for all involved.

I've been studying this over the past six years,

and I find, quite conclusively,

that children who are very backward at the age of seven

remain backward throughout their school life,

no matter what is done about it.

The determination to help

what were then known as "backward" or "remedial" children

was such that there was no shortage of learning schemes.

Hopes were high for one new concept

called the Initial Teaching Alphabet or ITA.

Yesterday, in the House Of Commons,

the Minister Of Education Sir Edward Boyle, gave ministerial approval

to an experiment that, in the years to come,

could well affect the life of every child in the country -

the use of a new alphabet.

Now then, I'm going to try some harder words now,

let's see if you can get these.

What about that one?

ALL: Nymph.

-Nymph.

-Nymph.

Nymph. That's right.

And this one?

ALL: Soldier.

Ladybird printed some of their books using ITA,

though not with any great conviction, nor in any great number,

and they did not sell well.

ITA was just one of many fashionable theories being tried out.

Each class I went to seemed to have a different idea

of teaching me to read than the other

and I kept on getting mixed up.

They were all very helpful,

but they just had these different ideas of how to teach to read.

A man called William Murray was also looking for a clear way forward.

Murray was headmaster of a remedial school in Cheltenham

working with young delinquents -

nearly all of whom had literacy problems.

He was at the sharp end,

because he was teaching young men who had failed.

And you had to find ways of getting through to these young people,

and then, what should they be learning, then?

What are the most used words?

William Murray and his colleague, Joe McNally,

found that, in the English language, there are...

-CHILD:

-..400,000 words...

..but most of us use only...

-CHILD:

-..20,000 words...

..in everyday speech, and of these, just...

-CHILD:

-..300 words...

..are the most common.

But the killer finding of their research

was that you could narrow down the amount of words needed

to begin to read to just 12.

-CHILD:

-Only 12?!

Yes, 12 key words make up 25% of a child's vocabulary,

which was a breakthrough piece of research.

And soon after this, at an education conference,

William Murray met Douglas Keen.

My father learned about the Key Words concept from William Murray,

and was very attracted to that idea because it had an aura of...

A scientific basis for something

which could become a commercial reality.

After much discussion, Keen and Murray came up with an agreement.

From 1964, Wills & Hepworth would roll out 36 titles -

three for each of the 12 stages of the Key Word Reading Scheme.

A huge commitment.

It was such a risk

because of having to publish so many titles all in one go

and take a leap of faith that this was going to be a scheme

that teachers were going to say, "Yes, this is the right one."

This was the way to teach children.

Another issue was that 12 words don't make a story.

So, the scheme was made workable

through the idea of a domestic setting.

Two children, Peter and Jane,

and their faithful red setter, Pat the dog,

led the familiar Ladybird lifestyle,

a glorious version of normality.

It was Harry Wingfield who first painted the world of Peter and Jane,

and then other Ladybird illustrators,

chiefly Martin Aitchison,

were brought in to help with the workload.

There is no artist like Martin Aitchison, I think,

for being a chameleon.

And those first pictures of Wingfield,

Martin then took up the baton and...

..you know, even if you're very accustomed

to looking at the artwork, he did a very, very good job.

In the early books, the pictures worked harder than the words,

but the main thing was they worked.

You read the pictures just like you read the words.

Peter. Peter.

The child will know that's Peter.

Now you know the principle,

so now you know that's Jane,

so now you know what Jane looks like, the word looks like.

And that very simple basis, I suppose,

is the basis of all reading,

recognising a word and understanding what it stands for.

Here is Peter and here is Jane.

Peter is here and Jane is here.

It was tremendously successful.

I grew up learning to read with Peter and Jane.

Everybody my age did.

For decades, Peter and Jane were synonymous with learning to read.

-What...

-Yes.

-..will...

-Mmm.

..you...do,

-read or...

-Yes.

..draw?

Well, the reaction was enormous

because the books were selling so quickly

and it was taken on in schools but also it was very,

very popular with parents.

It was very accessible and within no time at all, well,

fairly quickly, we were talking about millions of books being sold,

rather than tens of thousands of books being sold.

I think people actually undervalue the role they played in the

literacy of that era.

How fundamentally they were wrapped up with concepts about

learning to read.

Peter and Jane were more successful

than Douglas Keen could have dreamt.

Ladybird's yearly turnover leapt from £1 million to five million.

By the late '60s,

over half the primary schools in Britain were using them to

teach literacy and the scheme was launched in other languages.

The whole Peter and Jane series was produced in Welsh

and then in Irish and in Gaelic.

And a range of titles whose content could translate to other cultures

were published abroad as well.

All sorts of languages were produced.

They were sold in Afrikaans, there was Maltese, there was Serbian.

At home, the brand was now part of the culture.

Everyone knew the books and what they stood for.

Ah, Betty, this flying book has got all the pilots' language in it.

Negative, positive, affirmative. I'm going to learn all this.

In Parliament, Mr James Plaskitt MP taunted

a member of the opposition, saying, "I can conclude only that

"he's misread his Ladybird book of economics."

Here, here.

Apocryphal stories began to circulate about the use of

Ladybirds in the grown-up world.

I know for a fact that people who, in their professional lives, have

used Ladybird books to learn how to do things, computing for example.

The hovercraft is used by technicians on the hovercrafts now.

The Understanding Maps book was indeed used by the Army in

the Falklands War for teaching map reading to soldiers.

Even the police were rumoured to have taught cadets car maintenance

with a Ladybird book.

In 1971, Wills & Hepworth changed its name to Ladybird Books Ltd

and two years later, when sales reached 20 million books a year,

Keen and the other directors sold the company.

My father didn't want to leave it until he was 65.

He wanted to retire a little bit before then,

simply because he wanted to have time to do some of the things

that he was so interested in doing.

With Keen gone, what would happen to the brand that had been

so much his personal vision?

The answer was not long in coming.

Once Long & Pearson took over,

there was an initiative to use different typefaces,

to use more cartoon-like forms of illustration, to use sitography.

They became much more uniform.

They sort of lost that individuality that the artists could bring them

and they became just very sort of quotidian objects.

They just looked like anything. They looked like a catalogue.

They looked like a leaflet you could pick up in a bank.

They didn't look like a lovely magical world any longer.

At the same time, the Ladybird generations were growing up,

their old books being given or thrown away.

Once cherished, these were now looking rather tired and old hat

and the new owners of Ladybird thought that too.

In the early '80s,

they gave the Adventures From History series a modern makeover.

Pictures such as these have shaped the first images of history

for 13 million young people.

Alas, the vagaries of fashion are finally catching up with

L. Du Garde Peach and Ladybird are rewriting their history books.

These trenchant views are obviously thought too strong for today's youth

and his purple prose has been doctored to produce a blander,

more balanced view.

Peach on George I -

"He was a very stupid man and, as he never

"took the trouble to speak English, he was unpopular with everyone.

"As a king, he was completely unimportant."

Of the revised Peach -

"George I could speak no English and never bothered to learn

"and so his place at meetings of government ministers was

"taken over by a chief or prime minister."

Do you like Peach as a historian?

Yes, I have my doubts as to whether one ought to rate him as

a historian as such, or whether one perhaps ought to look upon him

as being a publicist.

But, for what he was doing, I think there's a lot to admire in the man.

What do you think he was doing?

What were these 13 million copies achieving?

Selling history.

So would your advice be to the publishers and to those who

think that Peach may be a little bit ripe here and there?

I think I would keep Peach because what the man was doing

successfully with 13-and-a-half million sales, was arousing

interest and that is something which I think must be kept.

By the 1990s, boxes of Ladybirds could be spotted in charity shops

and boot sales.

You could pick up a second hand copy for next to nothing,

which is when people started to collect them.

When my son was about a year old,

someone gave me a battered old bin bag full of books that they

were going to chuck out and in there were some falling apart

editions of I think Shopping With Mother and a Talk About book.

And I got them out and looked through them

and my son noticed the pictures and responded to them in a way

that he hadn't really responded to books before.

It was something about the artwork was different and my brain started

buzzing and I started thinking of more books and you read them

and you realise they're a series and you realise they're numbered and

you think there must be more books in the series and so it all began.

In my case it was fuelled by having children and wanting to

recreate that safety and security of the world in the books for

their childhoods and I felt that, by having lots of Ladybird books,

it gave me a very good reference point to try and be like

a mum in a Ladybird book.

In fact, my children used to resent it and come home from school,

if I was making scones, they'd go, "Oh, you're being Ladybird again!"

cos they just wanted to watch telly or get on the computer.

They didn't want to do baking and that kind of thing,

so that is what impelled my own collecting and I think it's

interesting why different people collect different things,

what they want, what they're trying to find.

What I particularly love about collecting older Ladybird books

is seeing the way that they've been used.

Seeing the fact that they've been given as

a school prize for something or, you know,

given to somebody from Auntie whoever with the date

as a birthday present.

It really gives them a history and shows how much they were loved.

Many collectors are interested in rarity value, the books that

did not sell well so were not printed in any great numbers.

These can now fetch upwards of £2,000 each.

But, for another kind of Ladybird fan, the value is not about money.

The illustrations, once so faithfully done,

have become precious pieces of social history.

Tunnicliffe's pictures here which are of the countryside

are full of birds.

There's a picture I'm looking at now of a pond in winter,

which is meant to show bulrushes and reeds and elm trees.

Where are they now?

And a flock of about 30 coot floating around on this pond.

You'd have to go a long way to find as many as 30 coot, so this is

a picture of a world in important respects, in terms of the numbers

of birds in it and of the trees we see in it, can not be seen any more.

Look at this. The partridge.

Now, when this book was first written and printed and sold

and went into the hands of budding naturalists,

this bird was very common all over the UK.

Sadly, it's very, very uncommon now.

A lot of the jobs that are shown, like the pottery makers are gone.

They depict an obsolete sector of the working world.

There's one, In A Big Store, and it's a sort of old-fashioned big

department store that's shown and it has an entire sewing department.

It has a picture of lots of women on sewing machines saying,

"When people buy things in a big store,

"they sometimes want to have things altered because they don't fit,

"so the items are sent up to the sewing room to be changed for

"each individual customer."

Of course, that's completely...

I don't think any child now would have a clue that that had

ever been a possibility, so they're interesting from that kind of

social history perspective too now.

The Ladybird books are very much of a kind of time.

Modern agriculture has developed completely out of scale with

the traditional countryside,

so this was a kind of precious moment perhaps, a moment of balance,

when mechanisation and the traditional countryside did seem

compatible and that's, in many ways, I think much less clear-cut,

much less certain now.

Everyone who had Ladybirds as a child tells the same story.

They read their favourite book so often,

they became part of their DNA.

When I look in this book now,

which I recently retrieved from my father's attic, it says,

"To Christopher, love your Gran and Grandad."

I can recall implicitly ALL of the drawings and if you were to

sit me down with a biro and say, "Go on, then,

"outline where the animals are and vaguely what they were doing,"

I think I'd probably score about 70%.

It's very hard to recreate what it feels like to be a child, but

if anything can, it's opening up a Ladybird book that I knew well as

a child and it bypasses everything that comes between it.

Suddenly, I don't feel, I just sense the feelings I felt when,

as a six-year-old, I stared at that Ladybird book picture.

I can't imagine what the child would be like to whom these didn't

instantly appeal,

who didn't manage to find a favourite somewhere along the way.

And when you meet something like that in your childhood,

they become part of some of your most formative experiences.

What we take in as children, by and large, almost without exception,

is what we remember best because, like creatures, we are imprinted by

these things at a more fundamental level than is simply possible

in our later lives.

So, whether we like it or not,

and actually in this case we like it a lot,

there is a bedrock which has, in our minds, in our hearts,

which has footprints on it

and these footprints are the footprints of Ladybirds.