Animals and How They Live by Frank Newing & Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1965. You can see more of Ronald Lampitt’s work, along with other Ladybird book ‘golden-age’ artists, at the exhibition The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists 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. 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.

For years information on this has been very fragmented. Serious records of children’s illustrators of the 20th century have tended to overlook the Ladybird artists. 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. Mid-20th century British illustratorRonald Lampitthad a predilection for maps. It probably was no coincidence that he got to draw, in the Illustrated Magazine of 17 February 1951, the proposal of John Sleigh Pudney for an ideal city. 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: 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

Blogspiration

These last books were published at a time of great change for Ladybird. Douglas Keen was looking to retire and, together with his co-directors, the decision was made to sell the company to a large publishing conglomerate. Perhaps somewhere in this upheaval lies the reason why Lampitt illustrated nothing more for Ladybird. Towards the end of the film there’s a parade of cattle for judging and the Holstein Freisians are outnumbered. The drive for greater milk yields meant that soon they would be ubiquitous and this would change how farms such as this would work and look. Mixed farms became specialised and, ultimately, larger and less diverse.

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). There was a shortage of well-made, colourful and robust non-fiction books to meet the demands of the burgeoning education market.Learning About Insects and Small Animals by Romola Showell. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1972. 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”. His book illustrations included work for Summer Pie, Oxford University Press and Ladybird Books, many of them in collaboration with Henry James Deverson (1908-1972). Lampitt's association with Deverson included working on the Mainly for Children series published by the Sunday Times in the early 1960s but also went deeper as Lampitt was married to H.J.'s sister, Mona Deverson (1911-1995), in 1938. The couple had two daughters, Judy and Susan. 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, perhaps 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.) Even where the machines themselves are invisible their presence is felt: the sheep are hemmed in by square bales of straw, providing some shelter from the winter winds.