Ladybird’s transition years – a journey through a cardbord box

Lynne Bradbury, 9^th June 1947 – 9th June 2020

I’d like to take you on a journey through a cardboard box, and on the way I’m going to talk about Lynne Bradbury. What part did Lynne Bradbury play in the Ladybird story? Well here’s the short answer. On the 1st September 1977, Lynne became Senior Editor at Ladybird Books. She worked there – utterly immersed and personally invested in her job – up until the closure of the Loughborough factory in 1999.

The 1970s, when Lynne joined the company, was an important decade in the Ladybird story. At the start of that decade, the decision was made to sell Ladybird to a large conglomerate then called Longman-Pearson. Up to this point, just three long-serving directors had steered the company on an incredible journey that saw a small, provincial printing company transform itself into a world-class publisher of children’s books and turned the brand into a household name.

But as the 1960s came to a close, the Managing Director of Ladybird, James Clegg, was past the age of retirement and keen to secure the company’s future. So the decision was made to sell; to trade-in control and independence for, what at the time seemed to be, long-term employment security for the many staff employed by the Loughborough business.

The sale was finalised in 1972 and Clegg retired. Over the next two years, Editorial Director Douglas Keen began gradually to hand over the reins for book content and commissioning and eased into retirment. To complete the transition, in 1979 the last member of the old triumverate, George Towers also retired.

This is the point that I, and many other collectors of Ladybird books, begin to lose interest in the company – the golden-years were over and fundamental changes in direction, priorities and personnel led slowly to demise of those qualities we associate with the Ladybird brand. But this still left an important chapter in the company’s history that I actually knew precious little about until last year, when the death of Lynn Bradbury led me to find more about these key transition years.

Shortly after her death, circumstances (and the fortuitous invervention from someone who had read a recent magazine interview I’d given) put me in touch with Lynne Bradbury’s brother, Richard, who could not have been more helpful. He sent me the following short biography of Lynne, which you will find here.

In addition to the information, he also sent me a big box of items that had once been in Lynn’s office when she worked for Ladybird. These included books and some original artwork – in fact, some of the items you can see in this photo on the shelves behind Lynn and on the table in front of her.

The day the box arrived on the doorstep was very exciting – and not just because we were in the middle of the 2020/1 winter lockdown and frankly anything out-of-the-ordinary felt like a treat.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to take you through my trip through the box – looking at the items he sent to me from Lynn’s office, singling out some of the items and explaining why these seemed significant to me as part of the Ladybird story. (Before I begin, I should add that Richard said in an email: “Lynne would not have wanted anything for them and neither do I” – which, in itself, tells you rather a lot about this family.

Here’s the box:

As you see, the box they came from was an original box from the Ladybird factory – the sort used in the 70s and 80s. In itself it tells a story of transition – the logo is pretty well the original 1960s logo but the typeface set at an angle – and the fact that there’s no mention of ‘Wills & Hepworth’ -shows that this is the new world. Boxes like this were produced in vast numbers, of course, but rarely survive for long. Who would value an empty old cardboard box? Me!

As you see – there was a lot in there. Many books were ‘modern’, 1980s and 1970s with shiny laminated covers, but surprisingly many were not.

Experimenting

This picture captures just how keen the new brand owners were to shake-up and re-invent their asset. Only one book in this picture is the standard ‘Ladybird’ size – and that is a franchise book with Warner’s (whoever thought it would be a good idea to take Beatrix Potter’s classic, beautiful stories and replace them with photos of soft toys!)

Proof copies

If you look carefully you can see the proof stamp on the back cover. Inside, alternate pages are blank – so the proof copy has been subject to a different production process than a normal book. Perhaps made of sheets printed only on one side?

It’s also interesting to me because this is probably the last book that artist Harry Wingfield illustrated for Ladybird – in 1981, shortly before the company bought their laminating machine and moved away forever from matt cover books. If any one artist represents classic 1960s Ladybird better than Harry, I can’t think who. So it feels like another link with the past – the old giving way to the new.

Signed copies

The box contained a number of signed copies. Some were signed by Lynne herself and had been given as copies to friends and family. Others were signed by writers whom, presumably, she had commissioned. I believe there was once a Ladybird library kept in the factory with a signed copy of almost every Ladybird book that was ever published. But no one knows what happened to those books when the factory was sold off in 1999. It was a chaotic period, with sales held on the premises to shift a lot of the factory contents deemed low value or worthless. Ex-employees were encouraged to take mementos and cupboards were sold off with the contents intact. But I doubt if these books were part of the missing library; these books cover only a small arc of time and seem to have been part of Lynne’s personal collection.

Authorship

Seeing these signed books, however, was a reminder of just how many books Lynne, as director, wrote herself. This was a new departure. Over the years in which Douglas Keen’s hands had been on the editorial tiller, books were generally written by experts in their field or by education specialists. Sometimes friends and family were brought in to write books where they were well qualified. For example, artist Martin Aitchison’s metallurgist father was commissioned to write ‘The Story of Metals’, whilst his wife, an experienced art teacher, wrote the text for the three Great Artists books. But over the ‘golden years’, the managers did not themselves write books – at least not until Keen came to retirement. Shortly before leaving, Keen co-wrote the book ‘What on Earth are we Doing’, because environmental issues troubled him more and more in his later years at the company. He was quick to appreciate the destructive path that society appeared to be on with regard to nature and the environment and did not wish to leave Ladybird without making an attempt to flag these issues up to young readers. (Keen also contributed to the text of the Ladybird book Dinosaurs – although he created a pen name, making a surname of his forename).

But in the 1970s and under the new regime, that seems to have changed. All the senior editorial managers (including Editorial Director Vernon Mills and Senior Editor Audrey Daly) seem to have written a number of Ladybird books each. Partly I imagine this was because Ladybird’s target market age group was getting steadily younger and the need for experts seemed less pressing. You might think this would be a bit of a gravy train for the managers – putting their name to a simple but well-selling book to supplement their income with the royalties. But that was very much not the case. Part of Ladybird’s commercial success came from the fact that they almost never paid royalties to anyone – neither writer nor artist. Both artists and writers were paid a flat fee on delivery of the work. (This is one of the reasons why, when the Wills & Hepworth years came to an end, much of the original artwork was given back to the artists. It was acknowledged that they, as freelancers, could supplement their perhaps meagre pensions with the sale of the pictures themselves). If the managers wrote books it was seen as part of their job. They received no income or royalty of any kind – so it represented a cost-saving to the company. Cost-saving, with every passing year, became ever more central to every decision.

Overseas deals

Another way to increase revenue was to take the existing list of Ladybird titles and find a new market. In the late 1970s and early 80s a huge amount of effort was put in to working with overseas agents to translate and distribute old and new titles across the world. In the box were books designed for sale in Switzerland, France, Japan and the Arabic-speaking world. Many of these books are anachronistic – the copy of Cinderella you see above, for example, has the look, logo and layout of the 1964 book but was printed after 1975.

Royalties

Lynne Bradbury, by all accounts, had something of a prickly demeanour on first acquaintance but, when you got past that initial impression she could be an enthusiastic and inspirational mentor. To Rod Ritchie, a young sales executive taken on by Ladybird in the 1980s, her passion and intensity left its mark; she had, he said, a huge impact on his subsequent career and, even after he left the company, they remained good friends to the end.

Rod tells a story about the book shown above: Santa Claus has a Busy Night. “In 1985 Ladybird decided they needed a Christmas book; and quickly, if it was to be printed and be available for booksellers to order. She took up the challenge and went into an office that evening, clutching two packets of cigarettes. She emerged early the next morning, in a huge cloud of smoke having smoked most of them but having just written “Santa Claus has a busy night”. It sold half a million copies, and she took no royalty for it.”

The story is, to a great extent, an adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ ‘Father Christmas’ written for young children and illustrated by Jon Davis. The company was to go on to publish Briggs’ own version with text added by Lynne. The task of adding text to a graphic story as well-executed as Briggs’ may not seem the most demanding of jobs – but there was skill and market-expertise involved. As you can see from the picture above, Lynne has written in her own name on the acknowledgements page of The Snowman; royalties might not be important but due credit was.

Lynne’s Library

And so it comes to pass that a number of the books you can see on the shelves behind Lynne in the picture above are now in my hands. A large number of these have the words ‘Readers Office’ written in pen on them. For the most part, these are in excellent or mint condition. I’ve pondered on what best to do with them. Any writing on a book would normally devalue it – but in this case I think it adds to the value if, like me, you are interested in Ladybird books and the company’s history. All but one of the books (Charles) has laminated boards so frankly if you scrubbed them hard enough with a scourer you could probably remove the writing. But why would you?

The collection of ‘Readers Office’ books will only be a small sample of the number that were once on her shelves and they’re a fairly random selection, so I feel no compunction in breaking them up. Lynne’s brother told me that her favourite charity was Comic Relief. So I’ve decided I shall sell some of them to anyone who might be interested and to give ALL profits to Comic Relief in her name.

(PS The books have now been re-homed. Over £200 was raised for charity through this activity)

Among the books in the box was also this one – one of the pastiche pretend-Ladybird books published by Michael Joseph a few years ago – long after Lynne left the company. Apparently she loved these pastiche books so it’s appropriate that this one – produced in aid of Comic Relief – should also be the last stop in my tour through the Lynne Bradbury box.

Postscipt.

This blog post may be long – but it’s not really the end of the story. I’ve dealt with the books from Lynne’s office, but shortly after that box arrived, another parcel arrived from Lynne’s brother, containing some of the artwork that she commissioned and evaluated in her working life. You can see some of it, on the table in the foreground of the picture of her office. We aren’t talking here about precious and valuable golden-age artwork. All of it is from the 80s or 90s and most was never used in a Ladybird book – but the artwork itself had a tale to tell – a tale which I’ll post here soon.