Return to the Farm, Ronald Lampitt

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A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 1: Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest’ by Richard Bowood, 1966. The Story of the Ladybird Artists 1940-75, can be seen at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury until 23 September 2018, and is open Tue-Sun. Admission is free What to Look for Inside a Church by P. J. Hunt. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1972. it.Ronald Lampitt was one of the 30 illustrators involved in the creation of the book. He, like the others, was a humble ‘commercial illustrator’, as they A weekly magazine, each John Bull cover illustration took several weeks to complete and provided a steady income stream at a time where commercial illustration was more perilous employment than most. However, Lampitt enjoyed other successful relationships with other companies, including for Medici cards, Readers Digest, Look and Learn magazine and the Whitbread calendar.

That’s certainly how it was for me. I was born in 1964, the same year that Ladybird books started to publish its most popular fairy-tale books and the ‘Peter and Jane’ reading series books, so their imagery coloured my world.

Many of these books were in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Henry James Deverson (Lampitt was married to Deverson’s sister, Mona). The two men collaborated on a number of children’s books, including The Map that Came to Life (1948, Oxford University Press), The Open Road (1962) and The Story of Bread (1964, Puffin Books). But for now this mixed farm has modernised but not changed completely. While horses no longer speed the plough they are still present, an integral part of farming life. This means that the farmer would have grown oats for their feed and maintained stables.

Pulling out a couple of battered old copies, I showed them to my baby son. Instantly I noticed that his engagement with the imagery of these vintage Ladybirds was on a different level. On one of our recent visits to a local secondhand bookshop, my wife came across a copy of The Map That Came to Life, a book she read avidly when she was a child. Written by H. J. Deverson and illustrated by Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life was first published in 1948, and was much reprinted. It describes how two children (and a dog) go on a walk across the English countryside with an Ordnance Survey map to guide them. Much of what they find on the way is marked on the map, whose symbols for roads, railways, telephone boxes, tumuli, and so on and on, turn to reality along the way. The reader, meanwhile, learns how to read a map, and how maps have much to teach us about the world around us.How can we tell? The boundaries in this landscape are straight. A surveyor’s pen drew them and his chains and lines made them a physical reality. The hedges are mostly of single species – hawthorn waiting for its May blossom – interspersed with trees. These are elms.

For years information on this has been very fragmented. Serious records of children’s illustrators of the 20th century have tended to overlook the Ladybird artists. His friend and brother-in-law Harry Deverson was a well-connected Fleet Street journalist and helped Lampitt to find work with various publications including 'Illustrated' and the popular weekly magazine 'John Bull'. [1] Together they also produced two books: 'The Map that Came to Life' (1948) and 'The Open Road' (1962), written to introduce children to map-reading and the pleasures of exploring the countryside. Lampitt was particularly skilled at producing illustrations of large topographical areas and his first commission for Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books) was 'Understanding Maps'. He went on to illustrate a total of 9 Ladybird books until the sale of Wills & Hepworth, in 1972. Towards the end of the film there’s a parade of cattle for judging and the Holstein Freisians are outnumbered. The drive for greater milk yields meant that soon they would be ubiquitous and this would change how farms such as this would work and look. Mixed farms became specialised and, ultimately, larger and less diverse. A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 2: Norman Conquest to Present Day’ by Richard Bowood, 1966.

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Keen’s attempts to convince the directors initially fell on deaf ears so, undeterred, he decided to produce a prototype, non-fiction Ladybird book, aimed at the older child. His choice of topic was one that interested him personally – British birds – and he wrote the text himself. His mother-in-law and wife, both talented amateur artists, were asked to produce the illustrations. somewhere in the Kentish Weald in the 18th century. (Enclosure was the process by which common land and strip farming in open fields was brought into private ownership and the landless – who relied on access to commons to graze animals – were forced from the land.) Ronald George Lampitt (16th March 1906 - 1988) was an English artist and illustrator, perhaps best known today for his work for Ladybird Books, for railway posters and for the children's books 'The Map that Came to Life' and 'The Open Road'. Plants and How They Grow by Frank Newing & Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1965. This prototype served its purpose; the directors were finally convinced and in 1953 British Birds and their Nests, written by naturalist Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald and illustrated by Allen Seaby, was published. It was a great and immediate hit and set the company upon the path to extraordinary success.

Other illustration work by Lampitt includes 'Readers Digest', 'Look and Learn Magazine', Medici greeting cards and the Whitbread calendar.John Berry had a great gift for portraiture and this can be seen in his powerful portraits of People at Work for Ladybird. It can also be seen at the Imperial War Museum, where his wartime work as a war artist and portrait painter is still on display today. In this age of planning it is surely time that some innocent traditionalist thrust his way forward to offer mankind the ideal city. Whose ideal?goes up the snarl from the idealists. Ideal for what?chorus the realists. Ideal against whom?demand the tacticians. Why a city?moan the simple-lifers. Allow me for a moment to toy with dreams, taking a holiday from the magic of the materialists. The ideal city which I shall venture to plan must be controversial: for it is myself of whom I am thinking rather than of humanity in general. I have the vice, before my ink is dry, of all planners. I have a sneaking notion already that what is good for me must be good for the rest of mankind.” Of course, then I took this all for granted. It was only much later, when I myself was a mother that I began to appreciate what excellent books they were. One day I intercepted a bag of second-hand children’s books which a friend was taking to a jumble sale.