A small boy in collar and tie teeters on homemade stilts made out of upturned flowerpots and bits of string, a stern-looking man in a nuclear facility barks something important into a red phone, a woodpecker perches on the side of a tree. For many of us who grew up between the 1960s and 80s, the images from Ladybird books were the first art we ever saw. And, without quite realising, we have loved it ever since.
If you need reminding – or persuading – of the brilliance of Ladybird illustration, then head to Bexhill, East Sussex, where Ladybird By Design opens at the De La Warr pavilion on 24 January. Here you will find 200 pieces of original artwork from the “golden age” between 1958 and 1973 when the company was selling many millions of books every year. If you were aged between two and 12 during those decades, then the chances are you had several of those slender hardbacks on your bedroom shelves. Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.
My favourite Ladybird was The Story of Clothes & Costume, which is one of the hundreds of titles included in the De La Warr exhibition. It starts with people in prehistoric bearskins and finishes in the 1960s with a picnicking family in drip-dry polyester. Along the way there are monochrome Puritans, poodled-haired cavaliers and, best of all, the one that I traced endlessly, a Victorian lady at the theatre in an oyster evening dress decorated with a tumble of roses. The images are fully realised scenes, crammed with incident. On one page, an Elizabethan merchant gloats over a chest of gold; on the next, the Cavaliers skip with merriment during a stroll in the grounds of their stately home. Meanwhile, the Puritans cluster in prayer around the dinner table, sincerity etched on their grave faces.
The illustrator is Robert Ayton, who was one of Ladybird’s chief contributors during the golden age. Born in 1915, Ayton trained at Harrow College of Art and initially worked in advertising, producing designs for Castrol and Rolls Royce. After demob in 1945 he turned to editorial work, contributing to the newly buoyant Ladybird brand (technically the imprint started in 1915, but the books didn’t emerge in their familiar form until the second world war). The Story of Printing was one of Ayton’s, as was Tricks and Magic, The Story of Furniture, Your Body, The Story of Nuclear Power, Toys and Games to Make, not forgetting The Night Sky and about 45 others.
Ayton’s CV serves as a pattern for the other freelance illustrators who were responsible for turning Ladybird into a global phenomenon during the 1960s. John Berry designed the Tiger in Your Tank logo for Esso before producing the People at Work series for Ladybird, which gives an unparalleled account of the social landscape of late-industrial Britain, one filled with miners, potters and engine drivers. Then there’s Frank Hampson, creator of the Eagle’s Dan Dare, who illustrated that quintessential Ladybird series, Kings and Queens of England. Most distinguished of all was CF Tunnicliffe RA, the renowned wildlife illustrator who produced the lyrical What to Look For (in Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn) series.
The craftsmanship of these men, along with that of Berry, Harry Wingfield and Robert Lumley, is all the more remarkable because they worked in an analogue age when a mistake meant starting again. “If my students could draw like that today I’d be over the moon,” says co-curator of the De La Warr exhibition Lawrence Zeegen, dean of the School of Design at the London College of Communication, before adding candidly, “actually, if I could draw like that I’d be over the moon”.
Getting the Ladybird gig, though, didn’t mean that you were given carte blanche to create 24 images of your own imagining. The artwork needed to be instructive as well as illustrative, regardless of whether the reader was learning to sew, discovering nuclear power or taking up coarse fishing. For instance, Ayton’s images for Your Body, with their intricate cross-sectioning and precise labelling, would not be out of place in a biology textbook. Yet Ayton gives his cricket-playing skeleton and rose-sniffing skull such joie de vivre that you can see why there are hospital consultants working today who owe their vocation to Ladybird.
Getting on the roster of commissioned artists was hard – Ladybird’s editorial director Douglas Keen knew what he wanted and, if you didn’t manage it within a couple of tries, then you would never hear from him again. Once accepted, though, you could find yourself doing a whole series, which meant 10 books or 240 images. Today, the children of golden-age Ladybird illustrators still remember the times of plenty that followed from a series commission – even though the artists were paid a flat fee rather than royalties, which must have vexed even the sunniest of souls, given Ladybird’s cumulative sales figures, rumoured at the time to be as high as £24m.
This swollen statistic is all the more extraordinary, given the brand’s stuttering start. Although Wills & Hepworth jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years.
Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service.
To enter Ladybird’s world again is to relearn a universe that is both strange yet uncannily familiar. Inevitably the books express the values of their times. In the Peter and Jane series (aka Key Words Reading Scheme), Peter tends to hang out with Daddy in the garage, while Jane helps Mummy get the tea. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, every one in the children’s world looks exactly like them, apart from Pat the dog.
Still, if Ladybird books were conservative on gender and race, they were positively brisk on class. The world of Peter and Jane – and all the other children who appear in the Ladybird universe doing magic tricks, going to the shops, taking batteries apart or learning to swim – is both modern and modest. As illustrated by Berry, Wingfield and Martin Aitchison, the children appear to live in one of the postwar new towns. Their home is probably privately owned but it could conceivably be a newly built council house. Their adventures involve going on a train or to the beach with Mummy and Daddy. There are no prep-school japes here, no solving of improbable mysteries or clifftop rescues.
Perhaps this achievable utopia was a compensatory fantasy for the illustrators who, born around 1920, had mostly known childhoods far harder than this. Busy providing a safe, stable environment for their own little Peters and Janes, men such as Berry and Wingfield showed a world where things were, on the whole, getting better. Modernity increasingly presses into the frame: Jane and Peter eat off a table that looks like knock-off Habitat, Mummy wears slacks and Daddy even starts to help with the washing-up. More disruptive changes, though, are kept at a safe distance. Carnaby Street, with all its troubling freedoms, has no place in the Ladybird world, nor does the cold war or Vietnam.
Visitors to the De La Warr pavilion – itself a wonderful mid-century construction, like a grand ocean liner that has run aground on Bexhill’s pebbled beach – will doubtless be pulled to the Ladybird exhibition by nostalgia. But it is other pleasures that will make them want to stay, suggests Jane Won, the exhibition’s co-curator. Won herself did not grow up in this country and was unfamiliar with Ladybird until she started work on the project. Nonetheless, she reports finding something fascinating about images such as the cover to Eric Winter’s Learning to Sew, in which needle and thimble take on a luminous presence, or Gerald Whitcomb’s picture of a pair of socks in Sound and Pictures, which appears to be vibrating on a higher frequency than the rest of the world. It is this quality of hyperreality that accounts for contemporary practitioners including Gavin Turk and Jeremy Deller collecting Ladybird art, finding in it a commentary on the binaries that they explore in their own work: authenticity v mundanity, artisanal v artistic, value v worth.
Still, you don’t have to be driven by the rhetoric of cultural theory to find yourself compelled to linger at the exhibition. All you need is an ability to attend to your own puzzlement. There is something, you see, that has always troubled me about the last picture in my History of Clothes and Costume book. In the picnic scene, in which the polyestered family of four enjoys an alfresco lunch, the father is wearing a cravat. It worried me terribly at the time because, although I knew dads sometimes daringly donned cravats for a cheese and wine party, I hadn’t seen any at a picnic. And looking at the image again, I’m still convinced there’s something odd about it. Did the illustrator, Ayton, have an off-day, was his eye somewhere else, or is this his sly joke about Britain’s clumsiness in the new age of informality? Whatever the answer, it’s exactly this kind of small tear or snag in the smoothly ordered visual surface of the Ladybird universe that keeps you coming back for one more look.
• Ladybird by Design opens at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, East Sussex, next 24 January and runs to 10 May, see dlwp.com; Ladybird by Design by Lawrence Zeegen is published by Penguin in March.
