The Family from One End Street (A Puffin Book)

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Meet The Ruggles family that lives at No.1 One End Street in the fictional town of Otwell. Jo Ruggles is the local dustman and his wife Rosie is the local washerwoman. Jo and Rosie’s singular source of pride is their large brood of seven children. Yep, you read it right. Seven children. And each of these seven children has a distinctive personality and the promising ability to get into all kinds of mischief and mayhem. The Ruggles family is always low on funds but never on dignity. The Senior Ruggles rule their little clan with a blend of old-fashioned discipline, gentle cajolement and a gruff optimism.

However, I see no harm in occasionally revisiting novels you read as a child and trying to assess it objectively. CILIP, successor to the Library Association, assigns the subject tags "family large roisterous" and "family working class" in its online presentation of the Carnegie Medal winning books. [2] Plot [ edit ] In 1938, Garnett won the second annual Carnegie Medal awarded by the Library Association for The Family from One End Street, recognising the best children's book by a British subject for the previous year. [2] On the 70th anniversary of the Medal it was named one of the top ten winning works of the previous seventy years, selected by a panel from a public ballot to propose the all-time favourite. [3]Episodically structured, it became therefore the first book I loved for its characters rather than its plot. And it was the first book not only for me, but for all of its readers when it was first published in 1937, to make urban, working-class children its heroes. Some critics detected a patronising tone towards Garnett's characters, but others praised her for avoiding both sentimentality and condescension and replacing them with what one called "a careful truthfulness" instead. There were two sequels, Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street published in 1956 and Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn published in 1962 and subtitled "A One End Street story" in the United States. facing mum’s wrath when you came home with scabby knees, unravelling pigtails and a huge grin on your face. William, the youngest Ruggles child, is entered in the Annual Baby Show, but the family is concerned as he is a late teether. He wins his age category (6–12 months) but an older competitor wins the Grand Challenge Cup as William has no teeth. The Ruggles return home only to find that William now has a tooth. Every family member is given one chapter, including the baby William, and then the last chapters are about the family and their bank holidays, particularly their bank holiday to London for one day. Oh, when you read a description of how the family walks to catch the train for London, with their hodgepodge bags and clothing and so proud. Rose tells Old Jo not to wave with his left arm because he has a slit under the sleeve!

This is a very good book. I could criticise this for avoiding complex emotions and adult psychology, but that would be churlish. Its strength are many. I first heard about The Family from One End Street: and Some of Their Adventures by Eve Garnett from the BBC television special, "Picture Book: An Illustrated History of Children's Literature", which my husband and I watched together a few years ago. In a segment of the show, Jacqueline Wilson, author of The Story of Tracy Beaker, spoke of the way Garnett's portrayal of working class life resonated with her as she grew up in similar circumstances. She identified the book as the first children's novel to show what it was truly like to be from a poor family. We have hunted high and low for this book for years, and it was only a shot-in-the-dark search at OpenLibrary.org that finally led to me finding and reading it. It was an added bonus that the book won the 1938 Carnegie Medal, making it possible for this to be the first book I will review for the Old School Kidlit Reading Challenge. This is the story of the Ruggles siblings Kate, Peg and Jo — three of the seven children of Mr Ruggles the dustman and Mrs Ruggles the washerwoman — who go on holiday to the Dew Drop Inn, in the fictional country village of Upper Cassington, while Peg and Jo convalesce from the measles and Kate takes the opportunity to learn about agriculture, her planned future career. Wow! This is how we should all live our life. Talk about being like children to become holy. The mother, Rose, is a laundress, and the father, Old Jo, is a dustman (garbage man), and they love their life and their seven children (although the wife does comment that that is plenty). Rose says early on in the book that where would the world be without a laundress and a dustman? Set near London around the 1930s, this is sure to please not only the kids, but the parents who can completely relate to the comical, haphazard predicaments!Now tie all that up and what you have is a childhood that didn’t have much technology but what it did have was a tremendous capacity to create happy memories.

The writing structure is very clear, but I never felt it was unnecessarily simplified. There are strong characterisations of most of the Ruggles family, even William, although Peg perhaps get a bit over-shadowed. It attempts to portray life of a working class family with seven children. They seem to make do and get by, which I suspect might be slightly optimistic for the mid 19930s (but see above about churlishness). I particularly enjoyed the chapters where the three boys have their adventures. This, when I was growing up, was pretty near being The Best Book Ever. I read it over and over again, and it delighted me every time. The Ruggles family is at the center of this book. Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles are a dustman and a washerwoman, and they have seven children: Lily Rose, Kate, Jim, John, Jo Jr., Peg, and William. In each chapter, a member of the family has a problem or adventure which the reader experiences through that character's point of view. These include Lily Rose's accidental destruction of an article of clothing belonging to one of her mother's laundry customers, Kate performing well enough to be admitted to a school for which the cost of uniforms might be far outside the family budget, and William being entered in a baby show, which he would have a better chance of winning if only he would cut a tooth. Though the family is poor, there is very little in these episodes that would elicit pity from a child reader. Rather, the Ruggles have just as much fun - and get into just as much trouble - as any Melendy, Pye, Moffat or other literary heroine found in the children's books of the 1930s and 1940s.Garnett subsequently wrote a final book in the series, Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, which details Kate's return visit to Upper Cassington alone the following summer, with the setting remaining as the late 1930s. This was first published by Heinemann in 1962.

Josiah Ruggles works for Otwell council as a dustman and his wife Rosie takes in washing. They have seven children, so life is hard, but they are a happy family. I loved learning, as an adult, that this beloved book was ground-breaking for being the first British children's book to depict the everyday lives of normal working-class kids, instead of the polished "desirable" lives of upper-class children. The stories are of family life set in a bygone era, where there are no electronic devices to distract the children, and they can play outside creating their own adventures, even though sometimes it lands them in hot water! And if the children want anything, i.e. a trip to the cinema, they come up with ideas as to how to make money to do so, not just hold out their hand and expect mum and dad to cough up, which they could not anyway as they are quite poor. Poor but happy and content with their lot and happy to save what little they earn (doing any odd job) for Bank Holiday treats such as a visit to the sea, where they would eat pork-pies and doughnuts on the promenade. The Family from One End Street was born from author and artist Eve Garnett’s (1900 – 1991) eye-opening experiences of the poverty in London. Coming from a middle-class family, she trained as an artist in London in the 1920s and there observed the day to day realities of working class children. Initially publishers were reluctant to publish the book, saying the content was unsuitable and in recent years it has been accused of being condescending rather than ground breaking but her close observation of the children she used to draw in the street makes the children of her story lively, full of character and very real – and a generation of working class children got to see the world they were growing up in portrayed in print.

Eve Garnett lived in Lewes, Sussex for the last half of her life. She published more books but her greatest interest was in painting and she had several London exhibitions. it still delights me. The scenes are so evocative, and the children so perfectly drawn. (Both in the writing and the adorable and funny illustrations!) Recent British editions have been published by Puffin. The Family first appeared as a Puffin Book in 1942, under the editorship of Eleanor Graham, only a year after Penguin Books introduced the imprint. lying on a beach with your talkative family and wriggling your toes in the sand as you snarfed down sandwiches and slabs of fruit cake. There is a wholesomeness and innocence to these stories, and a feeling of nostalgia for a time when things were more straightforward and less complicated, which make them very appealing in today's current climate of increasing materialism and toxic social media.