Last weekend my brother brought his collection of Ladybird books over and we had a family outing with his children to the House of Illustration in Kings Cross to see Ladybird by Design again. His collection of books reflects the enthusiasms of a 1960s boy: cars, hovercraft, rockets and junior science from before the digital age. The Post Office Tower (now the London Telecom Tower), which opened in 1965, was one of the iconic buildings of our childhood, shown dominating the London skyline in this illustration. It remained no more than a tantalising landmark on the horizon, though, as a promised visit to its revolving restaurant as a reward for passing the 11+ exam in the spring of 1971 never happened before the tower closed to visitors following a bomb explosion in October 1971.
The House of Illustration is in the heart of the redevelopment of Kings Cross, a place of suddenly visible transformation from industrial dereliction. It was rewarding to see the original Ladybird drawings again, and to appreciate the craftsmanship of the illustrations as well as their sense of time and place, and the publishing acumen that was responsible for their golden age. It was also surprisingly easy to part the children from their smartphones and i-pads for a session of old-fashioned Ladybird handicrafts involving winding wool round a piece of card.
Some of the random pleasures of looking through the assortment of original books which they also had at the House of Illustration were (1) this picture of an 18C chapel, from the Story of Churches and Cathedrals. It could be an illustration for George Eliot’s Middlemarch except that it’s firmly located in mid-20C Britain by its Harvest Festival poster, the two women in their rainwear and most of all the wood-framed Morris Traveller (first manufactured in 1953) parked outside and brightly reflected in the wet pavement.
and (2) this picture: Johann Sebastian Bach grows up with music from Lives of the Great Composers showing a cherubic infant Johann Sebastian Bach escaping from bath- and bedtime and running downstairs at the sound of music in his family home in 17C Thuringia, a large leap of artistic licence away from the better-known stern adult Haussmann portrait (r) which has recently returned to Leipzig.
A couple of weeks earlier, I’d been to hear Helen Day, who collects Ladybird Books give an excellent talk at the House of Illustration about her love of Ladybird books and their illustrations as a record of the everyday appearance and objects of mid-20C life. Michael Czerwinski and Emily Jost, who both work at the House of Illustration also talked about images that had particular meaning for them. Michael has written a blog post about this. One thing that struck me about both their choices were that neither was the typical sunlit vision of domestic comfort or technical progress that’s associated with Ladybird illustrations. Both had more complex, adult nuances beyond their bright surface. Michael’s chosen image of an empty staircase was a reminder of a real staircase between his parents’ flat and English neighbours upstairs – a literal step in assimilation, something that resonated with me as part of my childhood as well. Emily’s picture of the prince from Sleeping Beauty – quite apart from the sexual symbolism, undiscernible to a child, of the thorns repelling the virgin’s suitor – brought back memories of early visits to the National Gallery and a dread of coming too close to a too-lifelike, too-much bleeding St Sebastian pierced with arrows.
In a previous post I wrote something about the Ladybird depiction of women at work in the 1960s and 1970s. Looking through my brother’s books I was struck by this page in The Story of Newspapers (1969) for the way in which it talks about social status and taste:
“Newspapers for everyone
Each person buys the newspaper most suited to his particular interests. A stockbroker in the City is probably more interested in financial news, and has time to read long articles about it. A train driver may be more interested in sport, and prefer short, lively articles. The paper which suits the stockbroker may not be at all suitable for the train driver.”
This all has something of the air of the third verse of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, written over a century earlier, and which had largely disappeared from school hymn books by the 1970s. The third verse reflected a complacent and immutable view of class and fortune, and ran:
“The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly/And ordered their estate”
But it’s worth remembering that 1969, the year in which The Story of Newspapers was published, was also the year in which the Open University was founded, giving the train driver the opportunity to study economics and read long articles in serious newspapers in a way that would have been quite incredible to the author of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”.
The End of the Beginning
The closing pages of How It Works – The Rocket, also published in 1969, are as good a reflection of Ladybird Books in their time as any. Two neatly turned-out children in homely red and blue jumpers, and their father sitting behind them, without so much as a space suit or oxygen cylinder between them (mother, nowhere to be seen, is perhaps at home washing the dishes or making a cake), gaze at the cratered surface of the moon as it appears to pass close by their rocket craft. “Men may land on the moon by 1970” announces the text. In fact, the first moon walk was in July 1969 and it seems a bit surprising in retrospect that publication of the book anticipated rather than awaited the event.
I remember the excitement of the Moon landing on the Sea of Tranquility and Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” in 1969 very well, and yet it seems like an event in an older, more historic past now. And the charming Ladybird image of coming face-to-face with space as if looking out of the window of a bus on a Bank Holiday outing in the Home Counties belongs entirely in its own mid-century world.
Ladybird by Design is at the House of Illustration 2 Granary Square, London N1C 4BH until 27 September 2015
Nostalgia for the Modern 