Return to the Farm, Ronald Lampitt

Product Information

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). 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.”

Frank Hampson created the character of Dan Dare and was at the forefront of The Eagle magazine for many years. Poster, Great Western Railway, Devon by Ronald Lampitt, 1936. Coloured lithograph depicting red cliffs, a beach and the sea, overlooked by houses at a cliff's edge. The painting is in a mosaic style, made up of different coloured rectangles. At bottom left and right is the GWR roundel. One of a series of three posters in this style by Lampitt, the others advertising Devon and The Cotswold Country. Text at bottom margin reads "Paddington Station, London, W2 106; Printed in Great Britain Litho J Weiner Limited, London, W.C.1; James Milne - General Manager." Format: quad royal. Dimensions: 40 x 50 inches, 1016 x 1270mm. 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. 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 theyWhile generally favouring a muted palette range, the colour and vibrancy of this ‘Look and Learn’ cover, for example, show how comfortable he was with a colour range in marked contrast to the grey-green hues of most of his Ladybird artwork. Pudney(1909-1977) was a prolific British journalist and writer (despite leaving school at 16), memorable for his short stories, his wartime poem For Johnny(1941) and his BAFTA-winning documentary ‘Elizabeth is Queen’ (1953). In the aforementioned article, he proposes his vision: Born in March 1906, Ronald was the oldest of the three boys born to Roland Edward Lampitt and Florence (nee Pope). The family were comfortably off but, when young Ronald was offered a place to study at The Slade, his father refused to let him go, advising him to “get a proper job”.

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. John Kenney, for example, who illustrated most of the History books for Ladybird, also illustrated Thomas the Tank Engine. Ronald Lampitt, who lived most of his life in Kent and loved the local scenery, painted many beautiful and evocative scenes of country and suburban life for publications such as Illustrated, John Bull, Look and Learn and Readers Digest. A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 2: Norman Conquest to Present Day by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1966. 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.

ABOUT ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE

What to Look for Inside a Church by P. J. Hunt. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1972. For the next 20 years, Keen remained at the heart of the editorial process and it was his instinctive ability to recruit the best artists for his purposes and then to match artist to commission that underpinned Ladybird’s success over these years.

A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 2: Norman Conquest to Present Day’ by Richard Bowood, 1966. 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. 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. This is a winter landscape with leafless trees, a grey sky and fields bare of crops. The farmstead sits in the centre and, from Lampitt’s depiction, we can trace the farm’s origins and several phases in its development. This is, almost certainly, a product of the process of parliamentary enclosure Animals and How They Live by Frank Newing & Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1965.

Although born in the West Country, Lampitt lived most of his life in Sidcup and loved the Kent countryside. He was a good friend of Roland and Edith Hilder, who had previously illustrated 'Wild Flowers' for Ladybird, and together they formed a sketching club, going out for long walks in the countryside around Shoreham, armed with sketch pads. During the early days of the Second World War, necessity became the mother of invention for the company, then called Wills & Hepworth. 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.