Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features    
Subject:   20th Century  

Now aged 92, Harry Wingfield is on the verge of his first ever retrospective exhibition, which opens at the New Art Gallery in Walsall on 10 February (check date). His name is unfamiliar but his work is instantly recognisable, encapsulating what now seems a poignantly innocent era in the nation’s history. Wingfield played a vital part in creating the distinctive look and design of Ladybird Books. He invented Peter and Jane and illustrated most of the books in the “Key Words Reading Scheme”. In doing so, he drew the pictures that helped teach much of the population to read.

He also created an ideal world: a perfectly harmonious, cosy vision of childhood in which Mummy and Daddy never quarrel, Peter and Jane never misbehave, Pat the Dog’s tail wags in perpetual contentment and the sun is always shining. It is a place which perhaps never quite existed, except in the imagination. But like John Major’s fantasy England, where cheerful bobbies ride their bikes, where it is forever teatime and where there is always a cricket match on the village green, Wingfield’s world still exerts a powerful pull on the imagination.  

I suspect many people have owned examples of Wingfield’s work for years without really knowing that it was his. I recently discovered a cache of my old Ladybird Books in a cardboard box under the stairs, and most of them turned out to have been illustrated by him. They would be collector’s editions if so many pages were not torn or obscurely scrawled on in bright blue ballpoint pen. The experience of re-reading them is rather painful, such is the abyss separating childhood 40 years ago and childhood now. Here, for example, are a couple of brief passages from a little tome entitled Things We Do:

“The children are at home. They make a shop. ‘I will be the man in the shop,’ says Peter. ‘Then let me be Mummy,’ Jane says. ‘I want some things for the house,’ she says, ‘and then I want some things for tea. Give me some flowers please, and I want some of this, and some of that.’”

“Now the children have to work. Peter has to help Daddy work with the car. Jane has to help Mummy work in the house. She likes to help Mummy work. ‘It is good to work, and it is good to play,’ says Mummy. ‘Let us put the play things away, and then water the flowers. Then we will make the beds’, she says.”

Wingfield’s Ladybird illustrations, like the books themselves, went to the heart of a profound postwar desire for a stable and happy family life. They have been subsequently criticised for their presumed racism and sexism. But these now quaint pictures of boys and girls doing things like mending their bicycles are partly so affecting because they remind us of a world in which misguided political correctness – like so many of the other banes of modern life, such as the universal parental terror of child abusers, which keeps so many young people indoors, or the pervasive dulling influence of computer games – had not yet come into existence. Ladybird books were consciously aimed at families living in the newly built working-class council estates of the postwar period – a predominantly white sector of the British population felt to be in great need of “aspirational role models”, as they are now called. In presenting an evidently idealised picture of family life, it was hoped that Ladybird books might help mothers and fathers get on better with their children as well as teach them to read.

Part of the power of this imagery stems from its sheer ordinariness, its approachable, generic simplicity. Wingfield never studied art full time, attending evening classes at Derby Art School and later at Birmingham (where he met his wife and collaborator Ethel, an expert on early learning). He learned to keep a file of potentially useful images and clippings: images of mothers and fathers, children, animals. This helps to explain the resemblance between many of his tableaux and the editorial spreads and ads in women’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. He is long since retired but his approach to illustration remains completely unpretentious, to judge by his own brief comment in the catalogue to the forthcoming exhibition: “The illustrator’s duty is to aid and abet his given text, and to draw suitably for mass reproduction by mechanical means. If however he can combine that with an amount, however modest, of ‘picture quality’ to please the eye in addition, that’s a bonus.”