Ronald Lampitt: The Ladybird artist as social historian

This illustration, A Farm in February, is not from a Ladybird book, but it is by a Ladybird artist, Ronald Lampitt.

And if you're tempted to dismiss it as an exercise in nostalgia for that reason, you should read an article by Adam Chapman:

Lampitt has captured a time of change. The Labour government’s 1947 Agriculture Act secured prices and hastened investment and development and here we can see the tangible results in affordable technology. This farm is perhaps the result they imagined. 

That’s most obvious in the juxtaposition of bright red tractors - the nearer pulling a disc harrow, breaking up the heavy Kentish clay, the further ploughing. The Second Word War brought American tractors to the British countryside in huge numbers (the same ‘Lend Lease’ programme supplied tanks and planes in their thousands). 

Chapman also says:

Even the animals signify the time. The black and white cows that most urban dwellers think of as normal (on milk bottles and children's books) are Holstein Freisians, another post-war introduction. These were the tools by which farmers boosted milk production, but they displaced native breeds like the Dairy Shorthorn and native, dual purpose (milk and meat) breeds.

And he concludes:

Ronald Lampitt saw all this and recorded it for Treasure Magazine. It can be dated, just by what it shows, to a February day in the late 50s [the picture was published in 1963 but may have been produced a few years earlier] but the details it includes show the past and present of this small farm and hints at its future.

The biography of Ronald Lampitt on the Ladybird Fly Away Home site reveals that he illustrated nine books for them. Among them were Understanding Maps, which I had as a boy, and a pair on what to look for inside and outside a church.

I was touched to find these two when I cleared my mother's house and have kept them.

John Grindrod: The Ladybird Book of Postwar Rebuilding

It's remarkable how many people have the wrong idea about Ladybird Books, dismissing them as nostalgic, conservative and twee. 

Someone who very much does get Ladybird is John Grindrod:

Since I first wrote about the Ladybird books obsession with modernism (article here) I've become increasingly fascinated by the role they played in fostering a spirit of excitement in Britain's postwar schemes to modernise. 

Picking up copies in second hand bookshops I've started to see a much more concerted effort to portray a positive image of the rebuilding of Britain in these books than even I'd given them credit for. 

With their warm and sensible illustrations and no-nonsense prose, Ladybird has an incredible knack of bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the fairy-tale and the starkly realistic, taking the fear out of everything and showing a unified, positive and optimistic vision of life. 

And so this selection of images portrays a top ten in that mould: The Ladybird Book of Postwar Rebuilding.

And at the top of this post you will find one of those ten images.

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Lynton Crosby's divisive approach to politics has wedged the Conservative party into a corner from which they cannot escape, says Adam Bienkov.

Nearly three thousand prisoners are still serving indeterminate IPP - imprisonment for public protection - sentences, which are a relic of New Labour's authoritarianism. Alice Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, explained the need for reform on the eve of an important vote in the Lords. In the event, peers agreed to the government amendments she supported.

Carol Nicholson discusses Richard Rorty's views on patriotism and how they mesh with his wider philosophy: "National pride, he argues, is analogous to self-respect and is as necessary for self-improvement. Both self-respect and patriotism are virtues found in an Aristotelian Golden Mean between the vices of excess and deficiency. Just as too much self-respect results in arrogance, and too little can lead to moral cowardice, an excess of patriotism can produce imperialism and bellicosity, and a lack of patriotism prohibits imaginative and effective political debate and deliberation about national policy."

Helen Day is interviewed about Ladybird Books: "The rarest book of all is thought to be an edition of How it Works: The Computer which was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence in the 1970s.  This book is believed to be the standard 1971 Ladybird book by this name, but with plain covers, intended to spare the blushes of the staff who might feel uncomfortable being seen reading a children’s book. But it is unlikely that one of these books will ever come to light as they were all believed to have been decommissioned and destroyed after a few years."

“I can't imagine Rock Guitar without Pete Townshend ... My playing owes so much to him. I'm not talking about the blues-influenced playing which also underpinned the evolution of 70s and 80s rock music - Townshend brought to the scene a blistering clang of super-amplified but not over-saturated chords - razor-edged monoliths crashing angrily through our brains, biting rhythmic hammer blows which would change the likes of me forever." Brian May on rock's debt to the Who guitarist.

Tim Rolls remembers the night Chelsea won their first European trophy - the Cup Winners' Cup in 1971: "[Hugh ]McIlvanney closed his article with a pithy observation. 'Chelsea reminded us in Athens that the highest rewards can still be won by flair and grace and boldness.' Indeed. Of the fourteen players who played a part in one or both games, seven (Bonetti, Boyle, Harris, Hollins, Hudson, Osgood and Houseman) had all come through the club’s junior system, a wonderful achievement."

The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists exhibition comes to St Albans

On Friday the exhibition The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists opened at St Albans Museum and Gallery. It runs until 8 September.

The venue's billing says:

Uncover the story of the talented artists who illustrated Ladybird books for more than 30 years. This colourful, family-friendly exhibition includes rare books, original artwork and artefacts, and reveals how illustrators played such an enormous role in Ladybird’s extraordinary success. 

Tracing the interconnected work of these artists, the company’s story is recounted over Ladybird’s ‘golden years’ – 1940 to 1975. Visually rich and varied, the exhibition will evoke many memories of childhood.

This exhibition has been touring the country for a few years now, and I saw it when it came to Leicester. I can thoroughly recommend it. I came away impressed by the sheer quality of the illustrations that Ladybird Books laid before children by commissioning leading commercial artists.

Those who dismiss Ladybird as purveyors of nostalgia are mistaken. Many of their books were about technology, social progress and the future. In fact Ladybird has a good claim to to be the most progressive children's publisher in those post-war decades.

Their history books were written by a Liberal, L, du Garde Peach, whom some at the BBC (he was a pioneer of radio drama) suspected of Bolshevism.

And I learnt to read with Ladybird's Key Words reading scheme ('Peter and Jane') in a new town in the 1960s. The world of those books was the world I saw around me.

Turning Over the Pebbles: Another Mike Brearley index

They don't just have the Hallaton Helmet in Harborough Museum. Among many other things, there's a nice little exhibition about Ladybird Books and the world of work.

And in the library I found a copy of Turning Over the Pebbles, Mike Brearley's latest book, which I need to read for a thing.

A Mike Brearley book, of course, means another post here about its index. Because Brearley's habit of discussing his careers as a philosophy lecturer and psychoanalyst alongside his cricket career leads to some striking juxtapositions in the index.

There's less cricket in Turning Over the Pebbles than in previous books, but its index still still has its moments...

• Bede, Venerable
  Bedser, Eric
  
  
• counter-transference
  Cowdrey, Colin
  
  
• Fletcher, Keith
  free association
  
  
• Hendrick, Mike
  Heraclitus
  
  
• Hume, David
  Hutton, Len
  
  
• Locke, John
  Long, Arnold
  
  
• pleasing others
  Pocock. Pat
  
  
• Ramsey, Frank
  Randall, Derek
  
  
• Snow, C.P.
  Snow, John
  
  
• Trueman, Fred
  Trump, Donald
  

In praise of Ladybird Modernism and classless aspiration

I think it was those parodies from a few years back - some of them published by Penguin, who would once have looked down their beak at the idea - that cemented a false idea of Ladybird Books in the public mind.

The truth is rather different:

Since I first wrote about the Ladybird books obsession with modernism (article here) I've become increasingly fascinated by the role they played in fostering a spirit of excitement in Britain's postwar schemes to modernise. Picking up copies in second hand bookshops I've started to see a much more concerted effort to portray a positive image of the rebuilding of Britain in these books than even I'd given them credit for. 

With their warm and sensible illustrations and no-nonsense prose, Ladybird has an incredible knack of bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the fairy-tale and the starkly realistic, taking the fear out of everything and showing a unified, positive and optimistic vision of life. 

That's John Grindrod writing on his imagined Ladybird Book of Post-War Rebuilding. He presents much the same material in the video above.

Before I moved to Leicestershire at the age of 13, I lived in the new town of Hemel Hempstead. In many ways it was, for the reasons Grindrod gives, like living in a Ladybird Book.

I am tempted to use the term 'Ladybird Modernism' for the sort of humane, pre-Brutalist variety of modernism that flourished for some 25 years from the end of the war. Examples of this include Hertfordshire's postwar primary schools, Coventry Cathedral and the University of York's original campus.

Another criticism of Ladybird, and of their Key Words reading scheme in particular, is that they presented a middle-class lifestyle as the ideal to aspired to.

It may be here that the Key Words scheme was unfortunate in being launched in 1964. Because from my observation of crowd photographs, 1965 was the year everything changed in Britain.

Take the crowds thronging the platforms of obscure railway stations after on railway enthusiasts' excursions. Before the change, the men were in sports jackets and flannels, and the boys were in short trousers. Then suddenly everything changed and everyone was wearing jeans and anoraks.

So it was that Ladybird felt it necessary to commission new illustrations for the Key Words books. The 1964 Peter was dressed as the young Prince Charles had been: the 1970 version got to wear jeans and had longer hair and a cheeky grin.

And there is a danger in dismissing these books as designed to make the working class aspire to a middle-class lifestyle. Because any group taken up by the left is in danger of losing agency as part of the bargain.

Where is the evidence that working-class aspirations are different from those of the working class? Aren't a bigger house and a garden things that everyone would like to be able to afford? Or do they really crave a larger bath to keep their coal in?

The social position of Ladybird is well described in a brochure created to accompany an exhibition of  Ladybird illustrations by Harry Wingfield held at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, from 1 February 2002, which was shortly before Wingfield died:

They were aimed at the (predominantly white) families who were moving from the back-to-back terrace housing of their childhood to the newly built, green-field council and private estates of the 60s and 70s. 

Peter and Jane and their family supplied aspirational role models, intended to represent happiness and family unity, as well as teaching children how to read.

The brochure 

Follow that link to admire Wingfield's work and see what Ladybird gained by commissioning leading commercial artists to produce illustrations. His alarm clock is a work of art.

Looking at the Ladybird website, it appears that the Key Words books are now illustrated with cheap cartoons. Can't we do better for out children today than that?

A podcast on Ladybird Books and L. du Garde Peach

We should soon have the answer to the question of who murdered the Princes in the Tower. 

A YouTube channel says it will be posting the Second Verdict programme from 1976 in which Barlow and Watt from Softly, Softly investigate the mystery.

Let's see Richard III go head to head with Barlow in the interview room and see if he still looks so innocent.

In the mean time, we can listen to an episode of The History of England podcast which looks at Ladybird Books and in particular at their books on British history and the author of many of them, L. du Garde Peach.

Peach who, besides the many accomplishments outlined here, was a Liberal parliamentary candidate - he fought Derby at the 1929 general election - emerges as an attractive figure.

Ladybird Books remembered in Loughborough

Between 1915 and 1973, Ladybird Books' printing plant was at Angel Yard in the centre of Loughborough. 

The small format for which the firm became famous was developed there during the second world war because of the difficulty in obtaining paper.

In 1973 they moved to larger premises elsewhere in the town and the Angel Yard area was redeveloped.

Today the firm is remembered there by a plaque and by a sculpture of a child reading a book in the nearby Carillon Shopping Centre.

The sculpture was designed and created by Loughborough University Fine Art student Paula Riley and put in place to celebrate the centenary of Ladybird Books in 2015.

Riley, who goes by her artist name Priley Riley, said:

“I’m absolutely delighted that I was chosen to design and create the sculpture, I have wanted to be an artist ever since I was a child so this is an absolute dream come true.”

Jonathan Lemalu and Winchester Cathedral Choir: Three Kings from Persian Lands Afar

This is a 19th-century German carol by the composer Peter Cornelius. It became increasingly popular in Britain as the 20th century progressed.

It was the only slightly unusual track on the album of carols that the family owned when I was a child, and it reminds me of a late winter afternoon at Hemel Hempstead School where, aged 12, I was taking part in a play with songs, put on by pupils from the first two years. As we left the rehearsal, somewhere else in the building the school choir was practising this piece.

Our play, incidentally, was The Charcoal-Burners' Son, a sort of spoof fairy tale. It was written by L. Du Garde Peach, who once fought Derby for the Liberal Party and wrote most of the Ladybird history books.

In defence of Peter, Jane and Ladybird's history books

As a video recently posted here went a long way to demonstrate, Ladybird Books were about the most progressive post-war publishers of children's books.

Yet misapprehensions about their publications abound. The other day someone on Twitter was convinced that Peter and Jane exclaimed "I say!" to one another.

The illustrator of these books, Harry Wingfield, explained their social position to the Guardian in 2002 when he was 91:

Wingfield is dismissive of claims in another national newspaper that the model for the real-life Jane has been unearthed in Shrewsbury. There was no real-life Jane. Or Peter, for that matter. Their images were forged from any number of photographs of local children, some taken on the new council estates that were springing up in the late 50s and early 60s.

"They were the sons and daughters of respectable workers," he says, "and they were well dressed. You didn't want dustbin kids. But they weren't as middle-class as everyone made out."

My mother taught me to read from these books before I went to school. We were living in a new town, Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, at the time, and nothing about them felt alien to me.

Ladybird's Adventures from History series is also controversial. Otto English, with his repeated use of the term "Ladybird libertarians" seems to blame it for Brexit. But Ladybird's market was local authority primary schools, not the prep schools that the proponents of leaving the European Union attended.

And L du Garde Peach, the man who wrote the bulk of that series, was no Tory, if only because he fought Derby for the Liberal Party at the 1929 general election.

David Perkins writes of him in History Today:

There was more to Peach than a mere producer of patriotic homilies. As a radio dramatist, he did not shy away from controversial issues, including war, the arms race, and pacificism: Patriotism Ltd (1937) was subject to BBC internal censorship and pulled from the air, a decision that was reported around the world; Night Sky (1937) sought to bring home the realities of modern warfare. Peach also wrote a play about the First World War with no men in the cast: Home Fires (1930). 

He became known, too, for hard-hitting radio dramas: Bread (1932) was a family farming saga of poverty and emigration from the agricultural depression of the 1840s to the Great Depression. Three Soldiers (1933) highlighted the predicament of ex-soldiers from the Great War who had been thrown on the dole. 

Several of Peach’s radio plays touched on racial issues. His stance on the subject was more nuanced than that of many contemporaries and his attitudes ahead of his time. In Ingredient X (1929) he wrote about the corporate exploitation of Africa, spurring a journalist to complain that the play was ‘Bolshevist in tendency’. 

In John Hawkins – Slaver (1933) Peach adapted Hakluyt’s 16th-century account of the notable voyages and made a point of showing how Hawkins – like other Elizabethan explorers – made profits from slave trading to secure the monarch’s support. In The Cohort Marches: An Episode of the Roman Occupation (1937), Peach recast contemporary issues of colonialism in the context of Roman Britain. 

You can watch a lecture on L. du Garde Peach by Perkins in the video above.

Ladybird Books and Constructing the Future Past of Modern Britain

I have an affection for Ladybird Books, not least because my mother taught me to read with their Key Words scheme before I went to school.

So when those books are misunderstood, as they often are today, I want to defend them.

In particular, Ladybird did not depict a twee middle-class neverland. They were far more interested in technological progress and the promise of the future.

Yesterday I found a YouTube recording of a symposium that makes this point for me.

Ladybird Books and Constructing the Future Past of Modern Britain was held at Conway Hall in October 2016. It was chaired by Samira Ahmed.

As the billing says:

Never mind the fairy stories, the much loved Ladybird Books of the 1950s to 1980s reflect much about post war aspirations and reality in new architecture, urban planning, social attitudes and the world of work.

In this lovingly illustrated evening, social and architectural historian and lover of postwar modernism John Grindrod (author of Concretopia) talks us through the dreams and the reality portrayed in the books over the decades. 

Social and cultural historian Helen Day documents the changing attitudes to gender race and class and Tim Dunn, transport historian, enthusiast and model village expert will discuss the social and design history revealed in the books From People At Work and Our Land In the Making and How It Works…to the changing reality around Peter and Jane.

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The Police Bill is not just about curtailing the right to protest, writes Brian Paddick: "The new legislation allows the Home Secretary to force local authorities and other public bodies to hand over sensitive, personal information to the police."

Henry Redhead Yorke, who was MP for York between 1841 and 1848, was the son of a West Indian creole of African/British descent, whose mother was a manumitted slave from Barbuda. Amanda Goodrich discovers a previously unidentified non-white MP.

David Perkins reveals the surprising radicalism of Lawrence du Garde Peach, who wrote most of the books in Ladybird's Adventures from History series.

James Wright explores the popularity of local legends about secret passages.

"The Montreux Casino fire is one of the most mythologised moments in the history of rock. Taking place on the shoreline of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, the fire would end up inspiring one of rock’s best-known tracks and become cemented in the genre’s history forevermore." Mick McStarkey on Frank Zappa, Deep Purple and the genesis of Smoke on the Water.

At the end of a world tour in 1973, a Santos side featuring the world’s greatest player came to London, where they chose a sleepy suburban town for their training base. Dominic Bliss uncovers the story of Pelé in Tolworth.

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"Most of us know precisely what is wrong with Tickbox - that most of these measures or targets either miss the point or get finessed by managers. Those who can’t see it tend to be the elite forces who run the world - and who believe what they are told by the frontline." David Boyle has a new book out on tick-box culture - or 'Tickbox'.

High-tech smart cities promise efficiency by monitoring everything. But, asks Amy Fleming, would cities be better if we ditched the data?

Shoshana Zuboff explains how we are all controlled by surveillance capitalism.

"The most dramatic moment came on May 17, 1972, when ten thousand school children went on strike. Central London came to a standstill as police struggled to contain crowds marching through the streets with banners reading 'No to the Cane'." Owen Emmerson on school strikes against corporal punishment.

"Terry was warm, generous and sociable. Always interested in meeting new people and sharing his enthusiasm with them. I’ve made many good friends through Terry and their messages and memories, coming in over the last few days, all conjure up a vision of a good man." Michael Palin remembers his friend Terry Jones.

Helen Day pays tribute to the Ladybird Books illustrator John Berry.

Two Leicester exhibitions: Ladybird Books and the Imperial Typewriters strike

I braved the rain and went into Leicester today to visit two exhibitions.

The first was The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists at the museum and art gallery on New Walk.

On the walls was some of the original artwork from the Keywords books with which my mother taught me to read before I went to school.

They first came out in 1964, so they must have been the latest thing when she bought them.

And I learnt that most Ladybird history books were a collaboration between sometime Liberal candidate L. Du Garde Peach and the Leicestershire illustrator John Kenney.

A plaque in the latter's honour was recently put up in Kibworth, though a letterhead in the exhibition has him living in Smeeton Westerby.

On to the Newarke Houses museum and the exhibition remembering the Imperial Typewriters Strike of 1974.

It began when an Asian worker at one of the company's Leicester factories was mistakenly given the pay packet of a white friend and discovered she was being paid more.

A BBC News report says the Transport and General Workers Union refused to support the Asian strikers because its local negotiator believed they had "not followed the proper disputes procedure" and "have no legitimate grievances".

The strikers stayed out for 14 weeks, but a shutdown of the factory by its American owners ended the strike. A year later they closed the factory and a few years after that manual typewriters were museum pieces.

This exhibition is well put together, with lots of video interviews with people involved. It's themes of race and gender and white resentment resonate today.

And you can still find Imperial Typewriters' main factory on East Park Road.

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Populists like to blame elites, but from Israel to Britain to the United States their crusade against hardworking civil servants is undermining the foundations of democracy, argues Shalom Lipner.

A creeping trend of anti-immigrant educational material is worming its way into the curriculum, portraying EU migrants as outsiders and criminals, says Tanja Bueltmann,

Gary Younge is right to be critical of Liam Neeson: "Neeson is angry and upset and decides to invest his rage in the collective punishment of a group of people based on the colour of their skin. It is perhaps now clearer to some why the early 21st century needed a movement called Black Lives Matter."

Simon Sherry and Martin M. Smith discuss what they learnt from their study of perfectionism: "This epidemic of perfectionism in modern western societies is a serious, even deadly, problem. Perfectionism is robustly linked in the research to anxiety, stress, depression, eating disorders and suicide."

Writing for the Conservative site Bright Blue, Tom Chapman defends the 1998 Human Right Act,

Tom Holland on what he learnt from Ladybird Books and L. du Garde Peach.

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Brexiteers who look to Donald Trump for help will be disappointed. Dana Allin explains why.

Oliver Stanton has some sensible ideas from improving the Liberal Democrats' online presence.

"A shorter overall running time and a focus on producing even smaller bits of content risks robbing viewers of some of the current programme’s interrogative depth. Save for the various Sunday shows British TV is not running over with dedicated political interview programming, and [Andrew] Neil is one of the best in the business." Henry Hill is rightly critical of the BBC's decision to scrap the Daily Politics and Sunday Politics.

Neal Ascherson contributes a characteristically brilliant review of Katherine Verdery account of her time in Ceauşescu’s Romania: "The crowning mercy of human relations is that we don’t know what other people are really thinking about us. They – those others – decide what redacted selection we are offered. But to read one’s police file is – suddenly – to have the curtain pulled open. The self you think you know becomes a mask, concealing a devious somebody else whose relationships are mere espionage fakes."

Helen Day introduces a Canterbury exhibition of the other work of the artists who illustrated Ladybird Books. We get to meet the real Peter and Jane too.

Have a look round Shrewsbury's last watchtower with Chris Schurke. I want to live there.

Don't blame Ladybird Books for the rise of Daniel Hannan

Otto English is someone I retweet a lot and I was pleased when he started a blog this autumn at Pin Prick.

But I have to take issue with his latest post, the wonderfully titled Ladybird Libertarians: Dan Hannan, Paddington and the pernicious impact of 1970s children’s literature on Brexit thinking.

I am the last one to say that the books people read as children have nothing to so with their later political views - after all, I am always banging on about Malcolm Saville here.

But the attempt to pin the blame for Daniel Hannan on Ladybird Books seems to be wrong for a number of reasons.

For instance the timing does not work. Daniel Hannan was born in Peru in 1971 and packed off to an English prep school at the age of eight. (Remember, when the Conservatives tell you that they are the party of the family that they have always been ruthless about depriving their children of family life if they think it will bring social or educational advantages.)

This mean he arrived at St Custard's or wherever it was just as Ladybird's heyday coming to an end.

As Anna Moore once wrote in the Guardian:

The iconic Ladybird world we remember probably stretched from the 50s through to the 70s. By the 80s, when Britain was changing and Ladybird wasn’t changing at the same pace, there was a feeling that those books were naive and a bit naff.

This seems exactly right to me: by the 1980s children's books were expected to be about "issues", not the simple enjoyment of the world around us that Ladybird offered.

But would you have found Ladybird books in a prep school in any year? I suspect their market was state primary schools and the children who went to them.

The children in the Peter and Jane books from which my mother taught me to read before I went to school (yes, I have reasons to be grateful to Ladybird) may look well scrubbed to modern eyes, but that does not put them into the prep-school-attending classes.

In an earlier Guardian article Chris Arnot talked to Harry Wingfield, who illustrated those books:

There was no real-life Jane. Or Peter, for that matter. Their images were forged from any number of photographs of local children, some taken on the new council estates that were springing up in the late 50s and early 60s.

"They were the sons and daughters of respectable workers," he says, "and they were well dressed. You didn't want dustbin kids. But they weren't as middle-class as everyone made out."

But the most serious thing the Pin Point gets wrong is the nature of Ladybird Books. I cannot think of a more progressive children's published in their era.

Yes, there were the books about the Kings and Queens that Otto objects too, but as he recognises there was also a series called 'People at Work.

And it you still think of Ladybird as twee, have a look at this Dirty Modern Scoundrel post on Ladybird Books and Modernism.

Even Peter and Jane moved with the times. In the books from which I learnt to read in the early 1960s, Peter resembled the young Prince Charles. By 1970 he had been redrawn with long hair and a cheeky grin and got to wear long trousers.

There are other children's books you can blame for the Brexit cast of mind - see my own exposé of Enid Blyton's proto fascism on the Guardian website - but Ladybird Books are innocent (in more than one sense of the word).

Gallery devoted to Ladybird Books illustrations opens in Reading

Good news from Maev Kennedy in the Guardian. A permanent gallery devoted the illustration from the Ladybird chiildren's books has opened at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading:

The Reading gallery has scores of titles shelved chronologically from 1961’s Learning to Read Numbers, to current titles such as Climate Change by HRH The Prince of Wales, whose 50 pages are credited with two more co-authors and eight peer reviewers. 

Prince Charles’s book is one of three new “expert” titles, for which the first new artwork in 40 years was commissioned. Before that illustrations were endlessly recycled and updated where necessary: an early space exploration image was overpainted to show that the Eagle had landed in 1969, and the curators found a new head had been glued on top of one image of Jane. 

Baxter wonders if modern viewers will be charmed or chagrined by the Ladybird worldview. “Will they just feel nostalgia,” he said, “or perhaps worry about this very simplistic, sanitised view of the world we were presented with, and passed on to our own children?”

Both Guy Baxter, the archivist at Reading, and Kennedy seems occupied by the idea that the Ladybird books were a little twee.

I disagree.

Call Malcolm Clark from the New Statesman:

Those wide expanses of seashore and countryside on Planet Ladybird are seen as totally safe. There are no overprotective parents, no teachers dreading accidents or subsequent inquests, no lawyers waiting to sue when Peter stumbles during a jump over a stile. Nor are there any dirty white vans prowling along B-roads on the off chance. 

Public space was not thought to be dangerous then, and this is not just nostalgic idealisation. I grew up in a small town in the early 1970s. The vast public park really did have attendants. It also happened to have well-tended flowerbeds and a boating pond. These days, you have to train your dog to tiptoe over the syringes. The war memorial is covered in graffiti and there isn't a police station for ten miles. If you sent Peter and Jane there to fly a kite, you'd kit them out in bulletproof vests first. 

In fact, the entire old Ladybird project had an indefinable public-spiritedness about it. This partly reflected a strain in British culture that went all the way back to Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and the Victorian reference libraries. The quest for knowledge was seen as an uncomplicated and enjoyable pursuit, one in which young citizens should be encouraged to share. 

So once you had learnt to read, you could move on to a panoply of different subjects, each featured in its own dedicated little tome, from the lives of biographical figures, such as Captain Scott or Robert the Bruce, to significant moments in history, such as the civil war. You could learn about "wind and flight", or even Australasian mammals.

Ladybird would even teach you to read. The illustration above comes from Our Friends, books 6A in the imprint's Key Words Reading Scheme.

That was the series of book I learnt to read with before I went to school. And it was strictly look and say - none of your synthetic phonics nonsense.

Peter and Jane 52 years on

52 years after they posed for this picture, the models for this 'Peter and Jane' picture today recreated the scene for me 😄 pic.twitter.com/f6HQtzYTmN

— Helen Day (@LBFlyawayhome) November 15, 2016

As someone who learnt to read with the Ladybird key words scheme before he started school, I found this tweet rather wonderful.

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Adam Bienkov on the threat to Jeremy Corbyn from Labour's left.

The Troubled Families programme was bound to fail and ministers knew it, says Jonathan Portes. "The programme’s evaluation ... is the perfect case study of how the manipulation of statistics by politicians and civil servants led directly to bad policy and to the wasting of hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money."

The National Union of Journalists explains why Newsquest staff have gone on strike.

"The image of the architect presented by Ladybird is beautiful, warm and unintimidating and the flat-roofed house on his graph paper is thoroughly modern." Nick Campbell attended an event this week on 'Ladybird Books and Constructing the Future Past of Modern Britain'.

Allison McNearney examines the unsolved theft of Ireland's Crown Jewels in 1907.

"Nobody intended for the planet to be swarmed with house cats either. In many ways, their online dominance is an extension of their earthly conquests." Abigail Tucker explains why cats have taken over the internet.