Return to the Farm, Ronald Lampitt

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A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 1: Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest’ by Richard Bowood, 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.

John Berry had a great gift for portraiture and this can be seen in his powerful portraits of People at Work for Ladybird. 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.Ronald Lampitt was born in Worcester in 1906. He was a self-taught commercial artist and illustrator, who produced artworks for John Bull magazine, The Sunday Times, Reader's Digest and other publications. He worked on children's books in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Henry Deverson and illustrated nine Ladybird books and the magazine Look and Learn. The Story of Bread by H. J. Deverson. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books in association with Ranks Hovis McDougall (Puffin Picture Book 119), 1964.

Frank Hampson created the character of Dan Dare and was at the forefront of The Eagle magazine for many years. What to Look for Inside a Church by P. J. Hunt. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1972. 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. 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.Other illustration work by Lampitt includes 'Readers Digest', 'Look and Learn Magazine', Medici greeting cards and the Whitbread calendar. Animals and How They Live by Frank Newing & Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1965.

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 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. The poster depicts a village in the Dales, accompanied by lines from A E Housman's poem, 'The Merry Guide'. Although born in Worcester, he adopted Kent as his home, living in Sidcup for 50 years, until his death in 1988. The Kent countryside figures prominently in his art and illustration and at weekends he used to go out sketching with his friend, artist Rowland Hilder who was a Kent native. However, he also illustrated railway posters in the 1950s and 60s for destination including Bexhill-on-Sea, Harlech Castle and St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. thatch, stonework, porticos and a random juxtaposition and size realationship, but at its heart, it is not. The same concept could have been used featuring a really exciting range of modern archetecture. Now that would have been something. But who knows perhaps in a

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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. 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. On one of our recent visits to a local secondhand bookshop, my wife came across a copy of The Map That Came to Life, a book she read avidly when she was a child. Written by H. J. Deverson and illustrated by Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life was first published in 1948, and was much reprinted. It describes how two children (and a dog) go on a walk across the English countryside with an Ordnance Survey map to guide them. Much of what they find on the way is marked on the map, whose symbols for roads, railways, telephone boxes, tumuli, and so on and on, turn to reality along the way. The reader, meanwhile, learns how to read a map, and how maps have much to teach us about the world around us. United Kingdom Ronald Lampitt was born in Worcester in 1906. He painted in oil and watercolour but is best known for his work as an illustrator or children’s books and railway posters. The many magazines he contributed to included Zoo, Passing Show, Illustrated, Modern Wonder, John Bull, Look and Learn and Treasure. In the 1930s he produced a number of very popular travel posters for railway companies including the Great Western Railway and Southern Railway. As a book illustrator he worked for the Oxford University Press and most memorably for Ladybird Books, for whom he illustrated many publications. In association with his brother-in-law, Henry James Deverson, he produced the Mainly for Children series, published by the Sunday Times in the early 1960s. He is known for his extensive aerial views of landscapes and townscapes, which are the result of his war service in RAF Intelligence where he was employed making drawings of bombing targets based on aerial photographs.

During the early days of the Second World War, necessity became the mother of invention for the company, then called Wills & Hepworth. 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. 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. came across these 1950’s John Bull magazines with covers illustrated by Lampitt. They exemplify his Betjemanesque vision of an EnglandHis main subject was landscape paintings and paintings of rural scenes; his scenic views of towns were published as travel posters by railway companies, including G.W.R. and Southern Railway. 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. Yet there are more changes still to come. This landscape has not yet seen the combine harvester: the hedges are maintained and not yet ripped out. We can see some newly pleached with trimmings being burned. The gates have not yet been widened. The elms will be lost to Dutch Elm Disease in less than a decade introduced, like many of the first tractors, from North America. 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.