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00:00Lady Bird books were once as much a part of childhood as lace-up shoes and warm school milk.
00:27To open a familiar one is to go straight back in time.
00:31I'm going to spoil the ending for you.
00:33These colourful little hardbacks were full of information on myriad marvellous subjects.
00:39They made the natural world fascinating.
00:42To me as a child, knowing that this was out there with a scowl on its face like that was tremendously exciting.
00:50They made fairy tales enchanting.
00:53Snow White and Rose Red kept their mother's cottage so clean and tidy it was a pleasure to go into it.
00:58And immediately you're there in this perfect little world.
01:01And they made history dramatic.
01:04This is the first time I've held this book for 52 years and it really began a lifelong passion that I have for Nelson.
01:12The vintage years for Lady Bird were between the 1950s and the 1970s when they offered up the world of knowledge to children in a very particular way.
01:22One of the things that is so good about Lady Bird is actually there's a huge amount of detailed factual content and it was very carefully researched.
01:30What 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.
01:40These early Lady Birds are also time capsules that shed light on what Britain used to be like and how we used to think.
01:47All growth is good. Building motorways is good. To aspire was a good thing. That was the consciousness that presides in the Lady Bird universe.
01:55This felt like a very safe world, like the sort of world how the world ought to be.
02:00For three generations millions of Lady Birds multiplied on the nation's bookshelves.
02:05And the story of how that happened and the creative force behind them is described in this interesting documentary.
02:15It's wonderful. If any more birds would like that.
02:20The Lady Bird book story. The birds that got Britain reading.
02:25Necessity is often the mother of invention and the iconic shape of a Lady Bird book was invented to get round wartime paper rationing.
02:38The company behind the idea were not even publishers.
02:41Wills and Hepworth were a Midlands printing firm casting around for a means to keep their presses rolling.
02:47Their foray into children's books was made possible by the discovery of an ingenious way to beat the paper shortages.
02:53And Helen here is going to show you what they did.
02:57Somebody 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.
03:05You 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.
03:12That make, do and mend approach gave us the now familiar Lady Bird book.
03:16Seven inches high by four and three-quarter wide. 52 pages long with text on the left-hand page and pictures on the right.
03:25They sold initially for two shillings and sixpence.
03:28Yes, the way the bunnies started. Bunnikin, of course, was last.
03:34Fluff called Bunnikin, don't dawdle. Well, he said, you go too fast.
03:38The early books were charming but hard to actually read.
03:43Wills and Hepworth had no feel for children's books beyond coloured pictures.
03:47I think it's clear that Wills and Hepworth didn't really see the value of what they were doing.
03:52They didn't see this as their core business.
03:55But one of their employees saw more potential in the book.
03:58His name was Douglas Keane.
04:02Keane was a salesman with the company, and after the war he set about convincing his bosses to take a different tack.
04:08Keane thought Lady Birds would be better as educational books.
04:12Post-war Britain was a society changing fast.
04:15Why not use the Lady Bird format to make books to inform children about the world and what was in it?
04:21Keane could see the kind of book he had in mind.
04:23So he went home, sat at his kitchen table and made a prototype.
04:28This telephone directory sized object is the prototype that my father made himself
04:34to try and convince the board of directors that an educational book about birds would be a good seller.
04:41He chose birds for the first book because that was the thing he loved most
04:45and the thing he was most interested in and was most knowledgeable about.
04:48I think my mother did some of the little sort of line drawings as well as illustrations and he worked out a text.
04:59As well as his wife, Keane also enlisted the help of his mother-in-law,
05:03a gifted amateur artist who did the colour paintings of birds.
05:06This massive prototype became a mock-up of how the book would actually look when it was published.
05:20Again, a little watercolour painting by my grandmother
05:24and some cutting and sticking that he did, typing little bits out himself, cutting other bits out from books
05:30and making an actual size mock-up of how the book would look.
05:36Keane stuck to the existing Ladybird format of picture on one side and text on the other.
05:42The difference was in the content.
05:44He now took his sample books and showed them to the board at Wills & Hepworth.
05:47Once he'd produced this and shown it to the directors, they then realised that this would work.
05:56They hadn't been able to imagine it before, but once they could see this in front of them,
06:00they realised that this could become a commercial possibility.
06:04In 1953, the first edition of the British Book of Birds and Their Nests rolled off the printing presses.
06:14To create it, Keane employed both a famous naturalist and a wildlife artist.
06:19Their names were a big selling point.
06:22This is the first book of British birds.
06:25And I think it's a lovely, lovely bird book
06:28because the illustrations, which were done by a notable artist, Seabee,
06:34are exquisitely produced.
06:37Bullfinch, oh, look at that, what a fantastic bird.
06:39And there is its egg.
06:41And they're there in the snow.
06:43Skydark looking out of the back of its eye like a cat
06:46when he thinks he's about to do something nasty to it.
06:51And this is, I mean, yes, all these pictures are incredibly evocative
06:53and, of course, they are all absolutely classic English garden birds.
06:59So there was...
07:01You could look up from the book and see them flickering around in the garden.
07:05Keane's instinct that a bird book might be popular proved right.
07:09It tapped into a vogue for bird watching that the BBC also picked up on.
07:17Bird speeds are usually grossly exaggerated.
07:20But you can take this, I think, as a safe general rule,
07:25and that is that the bigger the bird, the faster it flies normally,
07:32and the smaller the bird, the faster it seems to fly.
07:39Now, young twitchers could buy an affordable hardback pocket guide
07:43with unusually generous colour illustrations and bite-sized bird effects.
07:46The boldfinch is one of our most beautiful birds.
07:51The nest is made of twigs lined with hair and is just a shallow cup.
08:01Starlings are very clever at imitating the songs of other birds.
08:05Starlings singing away, and there's its blue egg.
08:09And I'd already found half of one of those on the lawn in my garden.
08:13So I was really pleased to be able to say, you know,
08:16that egg that I found is a starling egg.
08:18So this book was having a practical use immediately.
08:21Douglas Keane was one of Wills and Hepworth's top salesmen.
08:27Debonair, hard-working and smart.
08:30And now he had a product he really wanted to sell.
08:33He loaded up the company car and set about marketing it with gusto.
08:37In order to help promote the books in the bookshops,
08:43he would actually make or get made cut-out models of some of the animals
08:49and then those would be used in bookshop windows.
08:52He was very good on the sort of presentation,
08:54the retail psychology side of it, of what would draw people's eyes.
08:58For the bird book, he did a mock-up with little stuffed birds and real branches.
09:05That was the sort of thing he did.
09:07And he would get the showcases made by a local carpenter.
09:10He would get a local sign writer to paint them.
09:13It stopped people in their tracks as they walked by the bookshop window
09:18and the children would see this big attractive display and say,
09:22Look, Mum, can I have that book?
09:24And the manager would feel that he'd had something done specially for him
09:26and therefore put extra effort into making a good display of books inside the shop
09:31and to getting the assistants to sell the books.
09:35Keane's creative salesmanship paid off.
09:38Very quickly the books sold out and were soon followed by Bird Books 2 and 3.
09:43Very quickly letters came into Wills and Hepworth from happy bookshop owners.
09:48For the attention of Mr Keane.
09:51As a matter of interest, we thought you would like to know
09:53that since displaying the special set of Ladybird British birds and their nests
09:57we have sold over 300 copies of this book.
10:00We are swamped with orders. An increase of 40%.
10:04Dear Sir, I feel sure you will be interested to know
10:07that during the last 24 days we have sold upwards of 700 of your Ladybirds.
10:12I thought you would be interested to hear the results achieved at the branches
10:14where the special displays of Ladybird books have been featured.
10:18Bridge End 513.
10:20Clenethley 200.
10:21We have now reached well over the 1,000 sales mark of the Ladybird bird book.
10:25We are very pleased with these results.
10:28One letter in particular convinced Keane he was on the right track with factual books for children.
10:33It was from a primary school advisor called John Gag.
10:36Gag claimed schools were in desperate need of well written educational material
10:42and thought the Ladybird formula might be the answer.
10:47Teachers are almost vainly seeking easy reference books of many kinds, wrote Gag.
10:53With British birds you have now rung the bell.
10:56But we want lots more.
10:59Keane already had ideas lined up for more books.
11:02And the success of British birds meant the board of directors were open to his suggestions.
11:09In 1956 Ladybird launched a new history series.
11:13It was a smart move.
11:15The subject was part of the school curriculum and the potential for titles was almost endless.
11:20It will probably surprise you but of all of the Ladybird books that I had,
11:24probably my favourite wasn't any of the wildlife titles.
11:28It was this book here, which is the story of Henry V.
11:31Here's the map.
11:33It shows the route from Southampton, which is where I lived and where I was born and grew up.
11:38So this had that immediate context.
11:40Over they go into France and there was the siege here and they go on this long march
11:44and they end up here at the muddy field in Agincourt.
11:49The history series was very timely.
11:52Britain had just come through a war.
11:54Children were aware of the role heroism, leadership and sacrifice had played.
11:57To write the series, Douglas Keane needed someone who could handle such big themes for children.
12:03And he found him in the children's department at the BBC.
12:06England expects two words which down the years have shaped the course of history.
12:18Two words which in our country's need have never failed to find an echo in our English hearts.
12:23There is no order of a tyrant king to a slave people.
12:27These are freedom's words addressed to free men.
12:30Thou's to withhold or give.
12:32England expects.
12:34That speech was written by Laurence de Garde Peach.
12:38A dramatist rather than an historian, de Garde Peach was not an obvious choice.
12:44But he was, as it turned out, an inspired one.
12:47This is the story of one of the greatest and bravest sailors England has ever known.
12:51Will you see, how could that not go straight into your heart like an arrow?
12:53The second paragraph says, his many adventures from his first boyhood voyage to the last great victory at Trafalgar are described in this interesting book.
13:02The history books are almost literally everything you really need to know about British and Scottish history in tiny little book form.
13:17The story of the first Queen Elizabeth in that is just, it's just amazing.
13:26De Garde Peach's take on history was that it was an awfully big adventure, full of interesting and colourful characters you could relate to.
13:36L de Garde Peach, I think, is a fantastic writer because he brings a sort of immediacy and cheeriness to the way that he conveys history.
13:43It makes it very easy to understand and it's quite personality based, which I really love.
13:48One of my favourites is the story of Charles II, which is quite partial.
13:53And it says, one of the pages says, King Charles was dark and good looking.
13:56What was much more important, he was a very friendly man.
14:00But perhaps what made him most popular was that he was gay.
14:03That is why King Charles II was known as the Merry Monarch.
14:07They're fantastic. That's L de Garde Peach for you.
14:10I think this is a really amazing scene.
14:13This is a scene of the young Oliver Cromwell as a boy.
14:17And he meets the future King Charles I, who's of course just kind of, you know, a young prince at that age.
14:24And there's a big tussle and guess who wins?
14:25Well, of course, it's Oliver.
14:26But the visual quality of this, the bright blue of Charles's 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.
14:40It'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.
14:56I think it's just a brilliant combination.
14:57It was as if you made friends with whoever it was. So you'd read this book and you would really see things from Oliver Cromwell's point of view, but then you would read Charles II and you would see it from Charles II's point of view and then so on and so forth.
15:11The illustrations were by commercial artist John Kenny. Kenny was wonderful at faces and could depict muskets, ships and costumes with accuracy.
15:26But he also understood drama and could stir children's hearts with his paintbrush.
15:31I mean, look at this. This is an illustration, the hail of arrows. It's a very rich picture. I mean, it's horrific.
15:40These are people being slaughtered in the most savage and incomprehensible way.
15:45But the illustration itself is just amazing. Look at the horses with their mouths open and people flailing about.
15:53And I would look at this and I would imagine the horror as a child of being in amongst this turmoil of extreme violence.
16:02So it appealed to me. Absolutely not to say that. But it did. It did.
16:10In this picture, Warwick has been summoned to a meeting, a sort of peacemaking meeting at Coventry, but he gets a sort of uneasy feeling.
16:19And then this kind of horseman gallops up. They're only just kind of, you know, a few hundred yards from Coventry.
16:24And he gallops up and he says, look, it's a trap. They're coming to get you.
16:29And as Ladybug describes it, the kind of men at arms are already kind of visible, kind of coming towards Warwick.
16:35And he turns his horse and gallops away. So it's just incredibly exciting as a child.
16:40The death. Well, death is always interesting. You see Mondet having just been shot by the person high up in the sort of cross beams of the French ship.
16:55The Adventures from History series inspired three generations to love history and went on to sell 13 million copies.
17:04The books were emotional and partisan and made no bones about it.
17:08It really interests me now as a professional historian, you sort of have to ask, does history really matter if there isn't any kind of human or moral dimension to it?
17:16And all right, I can now see, which I didn't at the time, that Ladybug were telling one version of a story.
17:20And there are lots of other versions that you could quite reasonably kind of tell as well.
17:25But I think the thing I loved and even now I really like is that they put their cards on the table and they try to sort of show the sort of human side of it.
17:33This is a book which weighs two ounces or something, but it comes with an amazing sort of gravity of its own.
17:48And 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 is my bedroom that I shared with my brother.
17:54I can see my mum, who died young, just sort of moving around in the room.
18:01I can see the pictures on the wall.
18:04And these are the kind of things which, well, it's a world, very, very powerful.
18:12With both the bird and history titles proving lucrative, Douglas Keane was given free reign to explore other educational ideas for Ladybirds.
18:19Looking for gaps in the market, Keane found himself drawn to the area of preschool learning.
18:26In this programme, we're seeing how a child's early language development develops in communication with its mother in the home.
18:34I've wondered about the three pigs. How does that record go?
18:38It's part of the big bar wolf.
18:41The 1950s was seeing a growth in interest in how very young children learn to read.
18:51Research was showing that if mothers engage their infants with learning at home,
18:55it had a marked effect on how well children did when they went to school.
18:59Douglas Keane, with two daughters of his own, knew how big a part home could play.
19:04My father was aware that before children even get to school,
19:09what they've learnt from their mother and from reading with their mother is going to be very important.
19:13And that what is most important is the attitude to reading.
19:17And that a child who goes to school already enthusiastic about books,
19:21if not necessarily able to read, is at a huge advantage.
19:25Keane hired an early learning expert named Margaret Gag, wife of the letter-writing John,
19:31to write a series of books for preschool children.
19:34In case you were wondering, the letters after her name don't stand for National Farmers Union.
19:39They stand for National Froebel Union.
19:41Froebel being the German educationalist who invented kindergarten.
19:45Here is the fish.
19:47Gag used words which young readers would have found familiar.
19:50And the illustrations were bright and involving.
19:53These books looked simple, but a lot of thought went into their design.
19:57As a teacher now, when I look at the words, what I really appreciate is the font.
20:04It's really unusual to have such an accessible font, for example,
20:09to make the letter A look like the sort of an A that a child could recognise.
20:14They cut off the top of a D.
20:16It was attention to detail like that, which made it very, very easy on the eye.
20:22Shopping with Mother was illustrated by graphic designer Harry Wingfield.
20:28He lived in suburbia with his wife and two small children.
20:32And it was this everyday world that came through in his pictures.
20:35That was very new because in the 50s and 60s, a lot of the suburbs were built and a lot of people lived in suburbia,
20:44which had hitherto not been a world that was depicted at all in anything really.
20:49You know, kitchen sink drama of the 50s and so on was considered really weird because it was an ordinary working world.
20:56We are going shopping.
21:02What shop is this?
21:04The toy shop.
21:06The toy shop.
21:07Oh, look at that little bunny.
21:09For children, it was like looking in a mirror.
21:13Shopping with Mother was my trip with my mother to the shops.
21:19No question.
21:20I recognise the shops.
21:22I recognise the people in them.
21:24Every shop that they go to, I think, oh yeah, that's like Mr. So-and-so on the village green.
21:29There was a rare parade of shops along one side of the heath.
21:33And they all looked exactly like this.
21:36There wasn't a chemist there, but the grocer looked exactly the same.
21:39I mean, it might as well be me really looking in through this shop and they even looks a bit like me.
21:44I had a school blazer like that with stuff round the edges.
21:49And I do remember girls with those little coats.
21:52The fashion is absolutely spot on.
21:55These pencil-like slim models wearing this sort of suit with a nipped in waist.
22:03And those mushroom-like hats sitting on the top of their heads, those are so familiar.
22:08She is Little Miss Average.
22:13Harry Wingfield used popular 50s icons as source material.
22:17The effect this had was curious.
22:19It made his Lady Bird books look exactly like real life, but with extra gloss.
22:26Lady Birdland.
22:28It's a place we all wanted to be, really.
22:31The sun shines, everything works.
22:34Everything is kind of in Technicolor.
22:37It's like watching a film.
22:44People are decent to each other and you know where you are and nothing can harm children.
22:51The postman smiles. The policeman smiles.
22:54Adults are there to help children orient and find their way around the world.
22:58Lady Bird books in general began to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.
23:04Everything in their world was good.
23:07If roads are built, it will be great.
23:08There will be more prosperity and then more people will be able to work building nuclear power stations and running shops.
23:14And that's good.
23:15It's pre-consumerism.
23:16So 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 Lady Bird universe.
23:27The Learning to Read series was another huge success.
23:31In 1958, Douglas Keane was promoted.
23:33He became creative director and he based himself at home in Stratford-upon-Avon.
23:38Here he held his editorial meetings with the experts he needed for each book.
23:43My father felt a big degree of personal responsibility for accuracy and authenticity in the books.
23:51One of the reasons he was always very, very determined to get the best possible expert on any subject
23:58was so that he knew then that he could rely on the information there.
24:02Facts were important, but it was the artwork that was captivating children.
24:06More and more, Keane relied on illustrators who could make information exciting.
24:11He was very clever in finding artists who were really good at getting their detail right.
24:18The detail had to be spot on worth of clothing, of background buildings and so on.
24:24And the pictures had to be really interesting compositions, absolutely packed full of stuff happening.
24:31As each new series of books went ahead, so new artists turned up at the Stratford House.
24:40For the People at Work series, Keane brought in John Berry, a former war artist with a very photographic eye.
24:47John Berry was exceptionally good at working very accurately.
24:54So 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.
25:04I remember John Berry as being one of the most exciting of the artist. He was quite an exuberant cockney. He stayed overnight on several occasions.
25:15My sister remembers taking him a cup of tea in one morning and seeing him sitting up in bed bare chested and smoking.
25:22And I think this image has stayed with her.
25:25Douglas Keane'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.
25:37The Lord's Prayer came first. I was about nine or ten when Harry Wingfield came down and photographed me for that one.
25:45And then that followed on with the science series.
25:47A 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 Lady Bird books of nursery rhymes.
26:03Frank Hampson saw things from the most peculiar angles.
26:08So you'll have pictures of the three blind mice, you know, and you're looking from the floor up at the mice.
26:14You know, Dr Foster. Terrifying character floundering in your sort of eye line to the water.
26:26One of the most prestigious artists Keane employed was Charles F. Tunnicliffe, a Royal academician who was invited in the late 1950s to create a series of books about the countryside.
26:36I was surprised to see Charles Tunnicliffe in the Lady Bird book because I always knew him as a wildlife artist.
26:48And it was one of the first times that I realised that serious artists also were illustrators.
26:54What I liked about these was that the scenes were very real.
27:06And within the Lady Bird book, given the, you know, the, what it needed to achieve, which was to have a diversity.
27:12I 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.
27:19You've got some pheasants on the, 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.
27:32This 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.
27:45And I think it's just stunningly original because of course, it's seen from the wood pigeons perspective.
27:50Tunnicliffe'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.
28:02The fifties and sixties were a period of rural upheaval. They marked the changeover from the old agricultural ways to the new.
28:09Each 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.
28:25These sweeping changes were a much debated topic. Modernisers argued that factory farming was the future. Traditionalists lamented the passing of the old ways.
28:37Tunnicliffe's illustrations told children that both could co-exist.
28:42The 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 kind of urban intrusion into rural life is a really hot issue at this time.
28:54One 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.
29:02So it seems to me the seed drill here harmonises perfectly with the rural scene. It's these soft muted blue and grey colours, the brown of the fields.
29:11Look at the brown of the man bending over the seed drill. So it's a vision of perfect harmony.
29:15And in many ways, I think that was actually really quite innovative because it's not just taking nostalgic view of the countryside,
29:22but trying to come to terms with the real facts of change in the countryside.
29:26This is really all about justifying the ways of modern farming to Ladybird readers.
29:31What 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 hooper swans migrate.
29:53The 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.
30:11Standing 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.
30:28Published in the day of primary school nature corners and weekend family rambles, these books were all part of helping children stay in touch with the land.
30:41I 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.
31:03And Tunnicliffe was a perfect choice for that because Tunnicliffe understood the countryside. He was a countryman. He was a countryman at heart.
31:18As more and more titles were devised, more top-flight illustrators lent their creativity to the Ladybird brand.
31:26Martin Aitchison was a master of character.
31:30Ronald Lampet had an eye for landscape and maps.
31:34Frank Humphreys could capture every detail of the Wild West.
31:39And Robert Aiton and Gee Robinson made children just love making things.
31:43Douglas Keane now found himself at the heart of factual publishing at a very exciting time.
31:58So 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.
32:07Not that everyone thought that this was a good thing.
32:14Good evening. Christmas, you may have heard, is coming.
32:18And probably some millions of dads and mums and uncles and aunts all over the country are now thinking about children's books.
32:25But 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?
32:33Are the old classics, Treasure Island and Kidnapped and Little Women and Black Beauty and so on, still favourites?
32:43Douglas Keane had his own response to that.
32:46In 1964, he launched a fiction series featuring old European fairy tales.
32:52They were retold in classic Ladybird style.
32:56Once upon a time, well that's always a good way to begin, there was a little girl called Cinderella.
33:00Her mother was dead and she lived with her father and her two elders.
33:04I mean, that's absolutely it, isn't it? Bang, bang, bang.
33:07When the dwarf caught sight of Snow White and Rose Red, he shouted,
33:10You ugly creatures! Why do you stand there staring instead of trying to help me?
33:14And he is horrible, by the way. He is just horrible. He used to scare me.
33:18Cinderella's elder sisters were beautiful and fair of face.
33:21But because they were bad tempered and unkind, their faces grew to look ugly.
33:24An Orwellian perception, as it turns out.
33:28The Well Loved Tales series is a bit of a phenomenon, honestly.
33:34I think, erm, adored, strangely adored, by two, three generations of people who grew up with them.
33:43My daughter, when she was tiny, had this edition, which ended up like lots of her Ladybird books.
33:51The spine dropped off and the pages became a bit dirty.
33:57And there's often cornflakes and things stuck in there.
34:00But this is just evidence of a child loving a book, having it, using it, was just a wonderful toy.
34:06The ugly sisters made things really do all the work in the house.
34:14She carried coal for the fire, took the meals, washed the dishes, dropped them, mended the clothes, swept the floors and dusted the furniture.
34:23She worked from morning till night without stopping.
34:27To write the books, Keane hired an educationalist called Vera Southgate.
34:32Her task was to render each fairy tale down to 26 small pages.
34:38What's important to a child is not quite what's important to an adult.
34:42You know, major plot points, obviously you have to reach all those milestones, but you also have to say things like,
34:48Snow White and Rose Red kept their mother's cottage so clean and tidy, it was a pleasure to go into it.
34:53And immediately you're there in this perfect little world, and that's very important for the, you know, interruption of the advent of evil into it.
35:00It's such an art keeping the right level of detail without sort of clogging up the train of thought or the narrative.
35:11And staying within your 56 or whatever page boundaries.
35:16Sorry, I shouldn't open these books while I'm talking because I lose the thread because I start reading.
35:20The series was shared between two illustrators, Eric Winter and Robert Lumley.
35:31They stuck to the Lady Bird formula of the picture helping the words along for young readers.
35:35I was talking to somebody recently who was being very snippy about the illustrations, and I think it's lots of people 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.
35:52Realistic illustration is good for very young children because they are not good at interpreting pictures.
36:02But for pictures to look as if they're like photographs, real people, a child immediately, immediately homes in on that and can understand and read the illustrations perfectly clearly.
36:15I can just remember looking at a picture of Cinderella weeping into her handkerchief and thinking this was just such a beautiful picture.
36:25And I remember asking my mum, why is the Mona Lisa a famous picture and not this picture?
36:31Why do people queue to see the Mona Lisa and nobody queues to see that? Why?
36:35The 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.
36:49But I don't think 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.
37:06At Lady Bird, all illustrators and authors were entirely at the service of the brand.
37:10And the thing I've only just noticed about all these Lady Bird books is the well-loved tales, especially, is that, of course, they don't have any author on the outside.
37:21And I think they were, yeah, they're all retold by Vera Southgate, M-A-B-com, on the inside.
37:30I presume again, again, it's the branding, it's this that you're looking for and this is the bit you trust and want to find.
37:40The well-loved tales added to the growing library of Lady Bird's.
37:50Every week, tens of thousands of them flew into the bookshops and then out again almost as quickly.
37:58Lady Bird's were sold not just in bookshops, they were sold in corner stores, chemists, places where people went to do other things.
38:08So a kid would have their pocket money or they'll be there with their mother or their father or their granny and they'd pick up a Lady Bird book.
38:16It would be something that a lot of people did once a week.
38:19After all this time, a Lady Bird book still cost just two shillings and sixpence.
38:24It 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.
38:32With the price so low, the way publishers Wills and Hepworth made money was by sheer volume of sales.
38:38And there were about 700 of them or so, so there were an awful lot to choose from and people collected series.
38:45Once you got one, you got another one and then you put them together on the shelf and I'm OCD and probably always have been.
38:55So then it meant having another one and another one and another one.
38:58Then you had your wildlife section, then you had your history section and then you had your science section, weather and other stuff like that.
39:05You know, and then there were a few oddities, the underwater exploration and the seashore which fitted in, you know, and I liked having a whole stack of my books together.
39:18Producing such a wide array of titles was a lot of work.
39:22With so many books to proofread and check for error, Douglas Keane once again roped his family in to help.
39:28My 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 it out on big A4 sheets.
39:40And then you'd have the pack of drawings that would come through from the artists.
39:44And we'd go through and I'd be looking at the text, looking at the illustrations, making sure that they all tallied.
39:51And, yeah, it was very, I'm sure it was very good for my reading.
40:01For anyone who loved and worked with books as the Keanes did, illiteracy was an unimaginable handicap.
40:08But then, as now, some children found reading extremely difficult.
40:13Well, I felt I'd just be able to sit down and start to read off just like that without any trouble at all.
40:20But it came as a big surprise to me when I found I couldn't.
40:27Research was highlighting that 10% of children were failing to read by the time they left primary school.
40:32A matter of concern for all involved.
40:36I've been studying this over the past six years and I find, quite conclusively,
40:41that children who are very backward at the age of seven remain backward throughout their school life no matter what is done about it.
40:51The determination to help what were then known as backward or remedial children was such that there was no shortage of learning schemes.
40:58Hopes were high for one new concept called the Initial Teaching Alphabet, or ITA.
41:05Yesterday, 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.
41:15The use of a new alphabet.
41:16Now then, I'm going to try some hard words now. Let's see if you can get these. What about that one?
41:24Nymph. Nymph. Nymph. Nymph. Nymph. Nymph. Nymph, that's right. And this one?
41:30Soldier.
41:35Lady Bird printed some of their books using ITA, though not with any great conviction, nor in any great number, and they did not sell well.
41:43ITA was just one of many fashionable theories being tried out.
41:48Each class I went in, they seemed to have a different idea of teaching me to read than the other, and I kept on getting mixed up.
41:56They were all very helpful, but they just had these different ideas of how to teach to read.
42:02A man called William Murray was also looking for a clear way forward.
42:06Murray was headmaster of a remedial school in Cheltenham, working with young delinquents, nearly all of whom had literacy problems.
42:14He was at the sharp end because he was teaching young men who had failed.
42:19And you had to find ways of getting through to these young people.
42:26And then, what should they be learning then? What are the most used words?
42:31William Murray and his colleague Joe McNally found that in the English language there are 400,000 words.
42:41But most of us use only 20,000 words in everyday speech.
42:48And of these, just 300 words are the most common.
42:52But the killer finding of their research was that you could narrow down the amount of words needed to begin to read to just 12.
43:00Only 12?
43:02Yes, 12 key words make up 25% of a child's vocabulary, which was a breakthrough piece of research.
43:09And soon after this, at an education conference, William Murray met Douglas Keane.
43:22My father learned about the key words concept from William Murray and was very attracted to that idea
43:28because it had an aura of scientific basis for something which could become a commercial reality.
43:40After much discussion, Keane and Murray came up with an agreement.
43:45From 1964, Wills and Hepworth would roll out 36 titles,
43:50three for each of the 12 stages of the Keyword Reading Scheme.
43:54A huge commitment.
43:55It was such a risk because of having to publish so many titles all in one go
44:03and take a leap of faith that this was going to be a scheme that teachers were going to say,
44:10yeah, this is the right one, this is the way to teach children.
44:14Another issue is that 12 words don't make a story.
44:18So the scheme was made workable through the idea of a domestic setting.
44:22Two children, Peter and Jane, and their faithful red setter Pat the Dog,
44:28led the familiar Lady Bird lifestyle, a glorious version of normality.
44:34It was Harry Wingfield who first painted the world of Peter and Jane,
44:38and then other Lady Bird illustrators, chiefly Martin Acheson, were brought in to help with the workload.
44:43There's no artist like Martin Acheson, I think, for being a chameleon.
44:49And those first pictures of Wingfield, Martin then took up the baton,
44:55and, you know, even if you're very accustomed to looking at the artwork,
44:59he did a very, very good job.
45:00In the early books, the pictures worked harder than the words, but the main thing was, they worked.
45:13You read the pictures, just like you read the words, Peter, Peter.
45:20You look at Peter, you know that, the child will know that's Peter.
45:26Now you know the principle.
45:28So now, you know that, you know that's Jane.
45:32So now you know what Jane looks like, the word looks like.
45:37And that very simple basis, I suppose, is the basis of all reading,
45:42recognising a word and understanding what it stands for.
45:48Here is Peter and here is Jane.
45:55Peter is here and Jane is here.
45:57It was tremendously successful.
46:01I grew up learning to read with Peter and Jane.
46:04Everybody my age did.
46:06For decades, Peter and Jane was synonymous with learning to read.
46:10Well, the reaction was enormous because the books were selling so quickly.
46:31And it was taken on in schools, but also it was very, very popular with parents.
46:36It was very accessible and within no time at all, well, fairly quickly,
46:42we were talking about millions of books being sold rather than tens of thousands of books being sold.
46:50I think people actually undervalue the role they played in the literacy of that era,
46:57how fundamentally they were wrapped up with concepts about learning to read.
47:01Peter and Jane were more successful than Douglas Keane could have dreamt.
47:09Lady Bird's yearly turnover leapt from £1 million to £5 million.
47:14By the late 60s, over half the primary schools in Britain were using them to teach literacy.
47:19And the scheme was launched in other languages.
47:21The whole Peter and Jane series was produced in Welsh and then in Irish and in Gaelic.
47:30And a range of titles whose content could translate to other cultures were published abroad as well.
47:36All sorts of languages were produced.
47:39They were sold, you know, there was Afrikaans, there was Maltese, there was Serbian.
47:42At home, the brand was now part of the culture. Everyone knew the books and what they stood for.
47:49Ah, Betty, this flying book, it's got all the pilot's language in it.
47:54Negative, positive, affirmative. I've got to learn all this.
47:58In Parliament, Mr James Plaskett MP taunted a member of the opposition, saying,
48:02I can conclude only that he's misread his Lady Bird Book of Economics.
48:11Apocryphal stories began to circulate about the use of Lady Birds in the grown-up world.
48:16I know for a fact that people who, in their professional lives, have used Lady Bird books to learn how to do things.
48:25Computing, for example, the hovercraft is used by technicians on hovercrafts now.
48:30The Understanding Maps book was indeed used by the army in the Falklands War for teaching map readings to soldiers.
48:38Even the police were rumoured to have taught cadets car maintenance with a Lady Bird book.
48:46In 1971, Wills and Hepworth changed its name to Lady Bird Books Limited.
48:52And two years later, when sales reached 20 million books a year, Keane and the other directors sold the company.
49:00My 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.
49:11With Keane gone, what would happen to the brand that had been so much his personal vision? The answer was not long in coming.
49:21Once Longman Pearson took over, there was an initiative to use different typefaces, to use more cartoon-like forms of illustration, to use photography.
49:37They 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.
49:51They just looked like anything. They looked like a catalogue. They looked like a leaflet you could pick up in a bank.
49:56They didn't look like a lovely, magical world any longer.
49:59At the same time, the Lady Bird generations were growing up, their old books being given or thrown away.
50:06Once cherished, these were now looking rather tired and old-hat.
50:10And the new owners of Lady Bird thought that too.
50:13In the early 80s, they gave the Adventures from History series a modern makeover.
50:18Pictures such as these have shaped the first images of history for 13 million young people.
50:23Alas, the Vegas of Fashion are finally catching up with El Lugard Peach, and Lady Bird are rewriting their history books.
50:31His trenchant views are obviously thought too strong for today's youth, and his purple prose is being doctored to produce a blander, more balanced view.
50:40Peach on George I.
50:42He was a very stupid man, and as he never took the trouble to learn to speak English, he was unpopular with everyone.
50:48As a king, he was completely unimportant.
50:51The revised Peach?
50:53George I could speak no English, and never bothered to learn.
50:58And so his place at meetings of government ministers was taken over by a chief, or prime minister.
51:04Do you like Peach as a historian?
51:06Yes.
51:08I have my doubts as to whether one really ought to rate him as a historian as such, or whether one perhaps ought to look upon him as a publicist.
51:14But, for what he was doing, I think there's a lot to admire in the man.
51:19Now what do you think he was doing? What were these 13 million copies achieving?
51:24Selling history.
51:26So what would your advice be to the publishers, and to those who think that Peach is maybe a little bit ripe here and there?
51:31I think I would keep Peach, because what the man was doing, successfully with 13 and a half million sales, was arousing interest.
51:40And that is something which I think must be kept.
51:46By the 1990s, boxes of ladybirds could be spotted in charity shops and boot sales.
51:51You could pick up a second-hand copy for next to nothing.
51:54Which is when people started to collect them.
51:56When 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.
52:07And in were some falling apart editions of, I think they were Shopping with Mother, and a Talkabout book.
52:12And 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.
52:26It was, something about the artwork was different, and my brain started buzzing, and I started thinking of more books.
52:33And 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.
52:42In 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.
52:50And 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.
52:56And in fact, my children used to resent it and come home from school if I was making scones.
53:00They'd go, oh, you're being ladybird again.
53:02Because they just wanted to watch telly or get on the computer.
53:04They didn't want to kind of do baking and, you know, that kind of thing.
53:08So that was what impelled my own collecting, I think.
53:10And I think it's interesting why different people collect different things, what they want, what they're trying to find.
53:16What I particularly love about collecting older ladybird books is seeing the way that they've been used,
53:23seeing the fact that they've been given as a school prize for something,
53:27or, you know, given to somebody from Aunty Whoever with the date as a birthday present.
53:33And it really gives them a history and shows how much they were loved.
53:36Many collectors are interested in rarity value, the books that did not sell well and so were not printed in any great numbers.
53:45These can now fetch upwards of £2,000 each.
53:49But for another kind of ladybird fan, the value is not about money.
53:52The illustrations, once so faithfully done, have become precious pieces of social history.
53:59I mean, Tanikliff's pictures here, which are of the countryside, are full of birds.
54:05I mean, 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.
54:15Where are they now?
54:17And a flock of about 30 coot floating around on this pond.
54:21You'd have to go a long way to find as many as 30 coot.
54:25So this is a picture of a world which, in important respects, in terms of the number of birds in it,
54:31and of the trees that we see in it, cannot be seen any more.
54:35Look at this, the partridge.
54:36Now, when this book was first written and printed and sold and went into the hands of budding naturalists,
54:45this bird was very common all over the UK.
54:47Sadly, it's very, very uncommon now.
54:53A lot of the jobs that are shown, like the pottery makers, are gone.
54:57They depict an obsolete sector of the working world.
55:01There's one that's in a big store, and it's a sort of old-fashioned big department store that's shown.
55:06And it has an entire sewing department.
55:08It has a picture of lots of women on sewing machines saying when people buy things in a big store,
55:13they sometimes want to have things altered because they don't fit.
55:16So the items are sent up to the sewing room to be changed for each individual customer.
55:20Well, of course, that's completely...
55:23I mean, I don't think any child now would have a clue that that had ever been a possibility.
55:27So they're interesting from that kind of social history perspective, too, now.
55:37The ladybird books are very much of a kind of time.
55:40Modern agriculture has developed completely out of scale with the traditional countryside.
55:45So this was a kind of precious moment, perhaps a moment of balance,
55:49when actually mechanisation and a traditional countryside did seem compatible.
55:53And that's, in many ways, I think, much less clear-cut, much less certain now.
56:02Everyone who had ladybirds as a child tells the same story.
56:06They read their favourite books so often they became part of their DNA.
56:10And when I look in this book now, which I recently retrieved from my father's attic,
56:15it says,
56:16To Christopher, love your gran and grandad.
56:20And I can recall implicitly all of the drawings.
56:25And if you were to sit me down with a biro and say,
56:29go on then, outline where the animals are and vaguely what they were doing,
56:33I think I'd probably score about 70%.
56:37It's very hard to recreate what it feels like to be a child.
56:41But if anything can, it's opening up a ladybird book
56:45that I knew well as a child,
56:48and it bypasses everything that comes between it.
56:51Suddenly, I don't feel, I just sense the feelings I felt
56:56when, as a six-year-old, I stared at that ladybird book picture.
56:59I can't imagine what the child would be like to whom these didn't instantly appeal,
57:09who didn't manage to find a favourite somewhere along the way.
57:14And when you meet something like that in your childhood,
57:18they become part of your most formative, some of your most formative experiences.
57:23What we take in as children, by and large, in fact almost without exception,
57:33is what we remember best.
57:35Because, like creatures, we are imprinted by these things
57:39at a more fundamental level than is simply possible in our later lives.
57:44So, whether we like it or not, and actually in this case we like it a lot,
57:46there is a kind of bedrock which has in our minds, in our hearts,
57:52which has footprints on it.
57:54And these footprints are the footprints of ladybirds.
58:03Coming up next this evening here on BBC Four,
58:06there's a battle for Britain's past in heritage in just a couple of moments.
58:10Stay with us.
58:11To be continued...
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