‘A Window Into Ladybird Land’ — The Nostalgic World of Helen Day

An interview with the curator of ‘The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Artists’. Laura Dodsworth Dec 14, 2024

[I was interviewed by Laura last year and the interview was published on her substack ‘The Free Mind” (see link above). These are the questions she asked me]

[Laura]”I am so pleased I chanced upon you on X [Twitter]. One of your tweets must have been retweeted and caught my eye. I was instantly charmed by your ‘hobby’. Well, I call it a hobby, but would “obsession” be the right word?“

Thank you! Yes, my social media accounts are a labour of love. The whole ‘Ladybird Land’ thing is all a bit out of step with so much else that’s out there on social media — but it’s a fun, soothing, and light-hearted refuge for me — and others seem to pick up on that.

For many years now, I’ve been interested in the history of Ladybird books and in the artists who illustrated them. I began as a collector, but my interest soon broadened into a desire to understand better the social history that the books contain. I try to gather and curate information about the writers and artists and about the company up to the mid-1970s, when it was sold.

Yes, I know I’ve taken everything to extreme lengths. Ladybird Land has been such a big, absorbing part of my life for so long now, I probably now see it more as a way of life. It’s what I do and who I am.

I had a rush of nostalgia when I saw your website — it was a Proustian moment! It brought back a fondness for the Ladybird books but also my childhood, and what feels — especially these days — like a more sensible and charming world. Ladybird books gave us beautiful child-hand-sized windows into fairytales, history, nature, and science. We learned to read, learned about the world, and learned wonderful stories at once. Anyway, that’s me! Tell me about why and when you started collecting and what the collection means to you.

So many people talk about a Proustian rush and ‘Madeleine moments’ when they see pictures that I share. I’ve never read Proust, so I call it ‘time-travel for beginners’. There’s not much else that can whisk you away to your past — with all the memories and associations of childhood — as stumbling across a once-familiar picture from a much-loved childhood book. It bypasses the conscious mind and you are just back in your childhood — just there — for a fleeting moment.

I started collecting when my son was about one year old and I started to remember all those things that had given me pleasure as a child and what among those things I would like to share with my baby.

I began picking the books up when I chanced upon them at jumble sales, in charity shops, bookshops, and car-boot sales. Then the collecting gene kicked in and I just had to complete every series of books and find every series, and then find an early copy of every book and then first editions. It was quite easy in the early days — Ladybird books were not particularly valued or appreciated when I started collecting, and only a small band of collectors were researching and preserving the story of the company.

Today there aren’t any real challenges left for me among the books — but I’m always looking for original artwork, early ephemera, correspondence, or other objects that have something to tell about the Ladybird story. I’m most proud of this aspect of my collecting now — I have put together a significant archive of material that still has a lot to tell us about the 20th century — from the start of WW1 to 1999 — when the Ladybird factory was sold.

How many Ladybird books do you own?

I’m often asked this and the fact is, I don’t know. I don’t keep lists — and anyway, the number will be changing all the time. New books (usually condition upgrades) arrive all the time, while I also give a lot of books away to charity or sell swaps on my website to fund new purchases. Many thousands — but that’s all I can say.

Which is your favourite and why?

Asking me to choose my favourite is like asking me to pick between my children. I can give you different answers. I have only one book, Little Red Riding Hood, which has stayed with me since childhood and still has my name in the shaky hand of a 5-year-old who has just been given the book for her birthday.

As a child I loved history, especially anything with a female ‘lead character’, so I read The First Queen Elizabeth over and over again. I also loved the fairy tales — Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella (with their beautiful frocks) were favourites.

As an adult, I’ve come to really appreciate the nature books so much more — e.g. What to Look for in Autumn, illustrated by Charles Tunnicliffe.

Have the “sensitivity readers” come upon Ladybird yet, and is there much perceived offensive content for them to edit?

Oh very much so. They came early to Ladybird — in the late 1970s and 1980s, the books came in for a huge amount of criticism — some of it justified but a lot of it unfair. Ladybird tried hard to move with the times, but the times were moving a lot faster than their time-consuming production processes could bear. Furthermore, the books were really sturdy and well-made. They lasted even on school shelves and in families when they were passed from child to child and even from generation to generation. As a result, they often lasted way beyond their original era of production, and this only contributed to the sense that they were old-fashioned in attitude and outlook.

Bear in mind that the books I talk about, research, and share were the books produced between 1940 and the 1970s — before the sale of the company to the Longman-Pearson Group (now Random House).

I am concerned with vintage books — not the ‘Ladybird’ of today. The brand name is still in use, and new books are published each year, but that is not the ‘Ladybird’ of my interest or website. So I am interested in updates that happened between, say, 1960 and 1970. When I find updates, I ask myself what it was about the 1960s depiction of ‘a thief’, or ‘a house’, or ‘outside play’, or the depiction of Sir Walter Raleigh, etc., that by 1972 was considered unacceptable and in need of an expensive new re-write or new illustration. What does each update show us about the respective attitudes of those two periods? Those are the questions that interest me.

Talking of which, what do you think of this modern-day fashion for editing books by authors such as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to make them more “palatable” for supposed modern-day standards?

It depends. Generally speaking (and especially with fiction), I would rather keep books as they were intended at the time — if necessary, to add historical context or explanatory notes for a modern audience, so be it. We can learn so much about ourselves through seeing how ideas and attitudes change — it ought to make us more humble, less smug, and to acknowledge that there are many different ways of perceiving society and these are in constant flux. We today, in turn, will be judged equally harshly. Why would we want to airbrush that out?

That said, with books intended for children, especially non-fiction, purposely written to teach them about the current world around them, it makes sense to make constant changes to reflect this.

But pre-1980s Ladybird books are, by now, little historical artefacts — that’s how they should be enjoyed. Why pretend that a book written in 1958 contains the attitudes of 2024? What is to be gained from that?

Are you exhibiting your collection of books and prints so more people may enjoy it?

Back in 2018, I was asked by Canterbury Museum to put on a ‘Ladybird’ exhibition, and I chose to focus on the artists who provided the colourful backdrop to so many childhoods. The exhibition was very warmly received, and the requests started to flood in from other galleries and museums. The exhibition, called The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Artists, has been travelling almost non-stop since then.

A key section of the exhibition is a ‘browsing corner’, and it’s lovely to visit a venue and to see the books being enjoyed by different generations.

But sharing the pictures on social media has also become a big part of what I do — and people seem to enjoy my accounts, even when they didn’t necessarily have a ‘Ladybird childhood’ themselves.

What else do you enjoy reading?

I was a massive bookworm as a child, and at university in Exeter, my degree was in English Literature. But perhaps that’s what killed my love of challenging reading? Ever since, I find I want quite straightforward escapism from my reading.

So, with an exception made for all the works of my absolute favourite author, Jane Austen, my happy place is otherwise to be stuck into a book from a gripping series such as the Cormoran Strike series or something by Tana French — ideally on audiobook, as I have an increasingly short attention span.

Can you tell me a little about your personal and professional background?

After university, I taught English as a Foreign Language and travelled the world. Coming back to the UK, I worked in EFL, teacher training, and teaching modern languages (almost exclusively to adults).

What is your proudest and most important achievement?

There are three answers to this. Firstly, a happy marriage and a lovely son.

Then in my Ladybird work, I’m proud to have helped so many people to come to a new appreciation of the artwork they may have taken for granted from childhood. This has meant bringing a little more light to shine on the work of some of the 20th century’s phenomenal commercial artists.

Then finally, aged about 40, I asked myself whether it would be possible to teach myself a challenging foreign language (Mandarin Chinese) without living in the country, instead fitting self-study around my life and work. I have been a teacher of Mandarin for over 10 years now, so the answer to the question was ‘yes’. And I’m proud of that.

Describe your biggest epiphany and how it shaped you.

Both my parents were teachers, and I was sure I would not follow in their footsteps. But after university, teaching English as a Foreign Language was a great, short-term way to travel the world. I vividly remember one particular day — in April 1988 — standing in a classroom in Sydney while a class of adult foreign students were busy working in groups on a challenge I had set them. You could almost see the learning taking place — and it struck me like a bolt from the blue that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

That moment shaped everything, not only professionally but also personally; I met my future husband a few years later when he interviewed me for a teaching role.

If you were an absolute monarch for a day, what law would you introduce?

I don’t think I would enjoy being a monarch, even for a day. Far too people-y. I would probably choose to abdicate, late-morningish.

But before going, I would like to leave in place severe penalties for those people on antiques programmes who refer to PAtina as PaTINa.

What is next for you?

We’ve recently moved house and are thoroughly enjoying getting to know a new town. Also, for the first time, I have a house with space for a proper library, so planning that is pretty absorbing at the moment.

I only have a couple of bookings for my exhibition after next summer, so when all my artwork and books come back home, I would like to find new ways to share my collection with others.

This interview was published in December in Laura Dodsworth’s publication ‘The Free Mind’. The Free Mind is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support Laura’s work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.