Return to the Farm, Ronald Lampitt

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Learning About Insects and Small Animals by Romola Showell. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1972. The hedges are mostly of single species – hawthorn waiting for its May blossom – interspersed with trees. These are elms. Growing up in the 1970s, I have long-standing memories of Lampitt’s artwork, mainly from using ‘Our Land in the Making’ and ‘Plants and How they Grow’ for school projects. I wasn’t interested in maps and associated his work with school and with the muted, muddy colours which are a characteristic of those books. It wasn’t until years later, when I came across other work that he produced, for Readers Digest, Look and Learn, the Whitbread Calendar and John Bull, that I fell in love with the wistful, nostalgic appeal of his landscapes, with expansive views dotted with the elm-trees, small lanes and oast house and tiny figures engaged in daily activity. For years information on this has been very fragmented. Serious records of children’s illustrators of the 20th century have tended to overlook the illustrators of Ladybird books.

Lampitt was a private man: sociable when among a small group of friends and family (the Deversons in particular) but with little interest in seeking entertainment further afield. When engaged on a project he spent long hours in his ‘studio’– a room at the top of the family home, coming down only for meals. He died in 1988, aged 82, after a long fight with Parkinson’s disease. 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. This is the story which was told for the first time in Kent this summer at the Ladybird Artists exhibition in Canterbury and has sinced travelled to different locations around the country. It is still touring. 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. A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 1: Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1966.The poster was first issued in 1961. This is a later version, which must date from 1965 or 1966, as it features the 'double arrow' British Rail logo and was issued by the North Eastern Region operating area, which merged with British Railways Eastern Region in 1967 and ceased to exist. Some of the artists, such as C F Tunnicliffe, S R Badmin and John Leigh-Pemberton are well known in the art world. However, when it comes to many of the other artists, despite the enormous impact they may have had on so many childhoods, it has been an area largely left to the hobbyist and the blogger, such as myself, to collate and record their story. Ronald never got that 'proper job'. Self-taught as an artist, he began to take on work as a commercial illustrator. Shortly before the war, in 1938, he married Mona Deverson, six years his junior. Birds and How They Live by Frank Newing & Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1966. 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.)

For many years I have been collecting original artwork, artefacts and stories about these artists and their world and I am delighted that The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge has given me the opportunity to share this fascinating story for the first time. 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. 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). The lasting effect of the names John Deere, Minneapolis Moline and Allis Chalmers and their machines was more dramatic.

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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. 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.

During the early days of the Second World War, necessity became the mother of invention for the company, then called Wills & Hepworth. In some ways the world of The Map That Came to Life does not exist today. These two children set off on a walk across unfamiliar country with only their map for guidance. They talk to strangers – who give them fascinating nuggets of local information rather than luring them into dark corners. Their dog spends most of its time off its lead, rivers and lakes hold no terrors for them, and, of course, this being 1948, they are not much troubled by traffic.For many years I have been collecting original artwork, artefacts and stories about these artists and their world and I am delighted that The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge first gave me me the opportunity to share this fascinating story. His other association with Deverson included working on the Mainly for Children series that was published by the Sunday Times during the early 1960s. John Berry had a great gift for portraiture and this can be seen in his powerful portraits of People at Work for Ladybird Books. 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.