Ladybird and the M.O.D – the plot thickens

If you have been following the story, you know that the special M.O.D- commissioned Ladybird book is the holy grail of Ladybird book collecting – a book thought to exist but which has never been seen.

The story so far …

The story goes in Ladybird circles that in the 1970s the Ministry of Defence approached Ladybird and asked if they would produce a special, customised version of ‘How it Works: The Computer’ for MOD staff. The stipulation, however, was that the book should have plain boards, to spare the blushes of the staff to whom it would be issued, should they be spotted reading a kids’ book. No one has ever come forward to say that they have a copy of this book so some in Ladybird Land believe it to be a myth. However, a few years ago I spoke to the manager of the binding department at the factory, who remembered the printing of the special commision, which he describes in some detail in the interview you can read on the page linked above.

So following my interview with John, the Binding Room manager, I was convinced at last that the book really was published and that, at one time, 250 copies of the-book-no-one-else-has-ever-seen were in existance. Consequently, it was with some surprise that, a few months later, I received the following email from the then-General Sales Manager of Ladybird, stating clearly that he had turned down the M.O.D’s request.

Dear Helen

I attach a cutting from the Sunday Telegraph [from 1977] which should throw light on the elusive brown paper edition of How It Works The Computer. To the best of my knowledge this was the end of the matter although the alternative version on your website is more fun.

Brian Cotton 
(Ladybird Books 1973 – 1995)

So there we were – how very frustrating. The Binding Manager recalled printing the books (and recalls it all in some detail).

The Sales Manager, Brian Cotton, remembered rebuffing the request – and can back this up with a contemporary source.

So where does this leave us?

The following is the result of my own pondering.

The truth will be a mixture of the two recollections. I would imagine that the MOD did approach Brian Cotton who did refuse (or began by refusing) the request. However, by some means or other the request was taken down the line and the team on the factory floor deemed the task manageable – and so the books were indeed printed.

That was the best way I could reconcile two convincing but contradictory recollections. (I should add too that the contemporary newspaper article then dwelled on Ladybird’s super-successful reading scheme characters – Janet and John.

Since the Janet and John books were not published by Ladybird at all, it does lead one to question the rigour of the newspaper’s research – a point not lost on the writer of the memo below).

And then, later in the year, at the opening of the Shrewsbury Museum showing of my exhibition, I met a very pleasant lady with the rather distinctive name of Richildis Tonks (known as ‘Dis’) who, for the first time, was able to tell me more about the commisioning of the book by the MOD. I asked her if I could record her story on my phone and she agreed. You’ll find the whole interview here

For those who don’t want to listen to the whole thing, here’s a summary of what she told me.

“My name is Richildis Tonks and my father’s name was Lieutenant Commander Graham Cooper of the Royal Navy.

In the late 90s, I first read the story that the MOD had commissioned a Ladybird book and I showed it to my Dad and said to him, “You were in the Navy, you were a computer nut – had you heard this story?”

He replied immediately – “Yes, that was me”. That was the first time I found out that he worked for the MOD. I didn’t know earlier because he was covered by the Official Secrets Act and he took it very seriously. There was very little that he would ever tell us about what he did. He worked for NATO and I was born in the USA – and that was in the 1970s. He joined the navy around 1971.

So that’s how I found out that Dad was the man who commissioned Ladybird to print a small batch of their computer book in order to cover training when the MOD introduced desktop computers. Most of them had never experienced a computer before; it wasn’t just the secretarial staff but also the military personnel more widely. Dad was commissioned to teach the staff because he had a degree in computing and had been working towards his PhD in computing when he joined the Navy.

He chose this book because, he said, it was the most sensible book he had ever come across that broke things down easily and quickly for people who were going to be thrown in to using a computer very suddenly.

He didn’t want the staff to feel that they were reading a children’s book; if these airmen, naval officers, army officers were seen reading children’s books, they either wouldn’t read them or would be bullied in staff quaters. These were different times, there was quite lot of different attitudes in the Armed Forces. So he asked Ladybird to do them differently, so the covers didn’t look like a Ladybird book. I don’t know whether they were plain covers or not, but he called them a ‘special batch’.

As far as I know no copies were allowed out. We suspect that, Dad being Dad [he was a stickler for rules and procedure] probably had them classified so that people felt they were reading classified documents and so that if anyone wrote notes on them, the notes couldn’t be a security problem. Given the political climate of the day, it was a time when you wouldn’t want even pencil marks in a book to be lying around. So he probably gathered them back in and destroyed them after use. When we asked him about it, years ago, he confirmed that he never kept a copy.”

So is this the last of the twists and turns in the tale of the MOD Ladybird book? Have all questions been answered? Can avid Ladybird book collectors still seeking the Ladybird equivalent of the Holy Grail finally abandon the quest?

I wonder.