FROM THE RESEARCH LIBRARIAN

Nicola Daly, our current research grant recipient, has made several visits to work on her project. It is always a pleasure to see books from the Dorothy Neal White Collection being used for in-depth research and we are very much looking forward to Nicola’s final research report at the 2015 AGM in May.

I was very pleased to be able to show Jill Shefrin, our guest speaker at our October meeting (see p.7), around the Dorothy Neal White Collection. Jill spent two hours with me in the morning, so she had time to look more closely at the items that particularly interested her. That afternoon, Ruth Lightbourne showed Jill the Alexander Turnbull Library’s Special Printed Collections.

I have been very busy over the past few months preparing an exhibition for the Turnbull Gallery. “A Child’s War” opened on 24 November and explores the impact of World War I on the lives of New Zealand children. The exhibition draws on several Turnbull Library collections and includes manuscripts, photographs and ephemera as well as published material. A significant part of the show is made up of wartime children’s literature from the Dorothy Neal White Collection.

For more about the exhibition see p.7.

IN THE DISPLAY CABINET

#3 Nursery Rhymes

The current display cabinet offering is a selection of nursery rhymes and Mother Goose collections.

Nursery rhymes have a long history, and thrived as part of the oral tradition for many years before finding their way into the printed book. Many of them did not start out as children’s rhymes at all, originating as ballads, folk songs, or street plays.

The first known published collection of nursery rhymes was Tommy Thumb’s song book (1744), and the first to include Mother Goose in the title was John Newbery’s publication Mother Goose’s melody; or Sonnets for the cradle, thought to have first been published around 1765. Generally portrayed as a crone in a pointed hat, flying on a goose’s back, there is no conclusive proof that Mother Goose was ever a real person, although many theories about her historical origins have been put forward.Mary Skarott
Research Librarian, Children’s Literature

AUDREY COOPER

Committee member Audrey Cooper has not been well recently. Very best wishes Audrey from the committee and your many friends.

NOTES-BOOKS-AUTHORS 12

The Society launched Number 12 in the series Notes-Books-Authors recently, a forty-page booklet by Trevor Mowbray entitled The Nineteen-Forties: a Turning Point in Writing for Children . This is the text of a talk Trevor gave to the Society in 2011 about the boundary between the Dorothy Neal White Collection and the National Children’s Collection. As the School Library Service began buying books in the nineteen forties that date was decided as the beginning point of the National Children’s Collection. Trevor had done a research paper when he was employed by the National Library on the significant titles of the Forties to see what was involved and that formed the basis of this essay.

The scope had widened however to include not just titles in the National Library collections but also other books by authors who were popular with children at that time such as Richmal Crompton, the author of the “William” books, Enid Blyton and Helen Dore Boylston. Some mention also had to be made of the many film and radio series that originated in the time such as the “Lassie” stories.

The very small number of New Zealand publications are recorded while the bulk of the titles came from America and England. Picture books flourished at that time and many have become all-time classics. Children’s family stories and animal and school stories were all developing and starting to break away from the very middle class, unrealistic tales of the thirties. The ground was being prepared for the burst of vigorous writing for children in the Fifties and Sixties. New genres of science fiction and career fiction were just beginning. You will enjoy going back to see if you can recall the favourites of your childhood.

N-B-A 12 was launched at the Friends event in October by writer, librarian and advocate for children’s literature, Barbara Murison. She welcomed this survey on writing for children published in the 1940s and was delighted to see listed many of her own favourites. She entertained the audience with the memory of locking her grandmother in the pantry. Barbara was not at all bothered by the punishment of not being allowed to visit her grandmother again, but very upset that this meant she would no longer have access to the Just William books!

Notes-Books-Authors 12 (ISSN 01145428) is available free to members and will cost others NZ$5.00. If you have not received your members copy – or wish to buy one – please contact mary.skarott@dia.govt.nz

Trevor Mowbray
FDNW Committee

JILL SHEFRIN

On October 28 we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to host the Canadian academic Jill Shefrin. Her topic To excite their attention with images and pictures; printed pictures in formal and informal education of children in the long eighteenth century was fascinating and illustrated with some very engaging images. Looking at the period from about 1660 to 1820 Jill has explored newspaper advertisements, ephemera, diary entries, letters, and games, as well as the artefacts themselves to discover many examples of pictures used to ’instruct and delight’.

One of the most delightful examples of an illustrated book for a child that Jill showed us is the Book of Silvia Cole held in the Osborne Collection at Toronto Public Library. This handmade reading book dates from about 1720 and include pictures from a child’s life – the family and neighborhood activities

To find out more about Jill and her research go to teetotum.ca – and in case you are wondering Jill does explain her web address (/tee tot m/): noun. A small four-sided spinning top used as a die in games of chance. (Oxford English Dictionary)

A CHILD’S War – WORDS AND PICTURES FROM WORLD WAR I

An exhibition in the Turnbull Gallery, Level 1, National Library of NZ, Wellington 24 November 2014 to 27 February 2015 Monday-Saturday 10:00am to 5:00pm

This exhibition explores the affect that the Great War had on the children of New Zealand. Curator Mary Skarott uses material from across the collection to illustrate how, although children had no invading forces to fight, the adult world sought to win their hearts and hands to support and contribute to the war effort.

Some New Zealand children’s reading during World War I did not go much beyond the School Journal and perhaps the newspaper. Others, though, read stories and informative books about the events of the war. The exhibition includes a selection of children’s books from the Dorothy Neal White Collection that were published during World War I.

BOOK REVIEW – We wish you a Kiwi Christmas

Every year brings a few children’s Christmas books adding a New Zealand flavour to old themes. This year we have a bi-lingual play on “We wish you a merry Christmas”. This is a wonderfully colourful book by Lynette Evans with illustrations by Myles Lawford.

Easily sung to the favourite Christmas tune in both English and Te Reo Māori, the words have been adapted to include some of our native birds in this story of how they help Santa to find his way again after a crash landing.

In addition there is a CD in both Māori and English at the back of the book. This is sung by Pio Terei with the Māori lyrics by Ngaere Roberts. Backing vocals are by Marian Burns and the singers from Marina View School, Auckland.

Lynette has written many children’s books, fiction and non-fiction, about New Zealand and international wildlife. Myles has illustrated number of titles for Scholastic, including The 12 Days of Kiwi Christmas, Doggy Ditties and The Letterbox Cat. Entertainer, Pio Terei is the well-known New Zealand presenter of ‘The parenting show’ and enhances this book with the vocals in the CD.

A lovely interactive book for the younger reader, with added encouragement to explore the bi-lingual lyrics in a sing-along version.

Corrina Gordon
FDNW Committee

OBITUARIES

Carrick Elliot Lewis
16 May 1937 – 23 October 2014

It was a shock when I learned of the death of Carrick Lewis. Carrick, with his wife Norrina, had been keen members of the Friends, regularly attending events, including the 2014 AGM in June. At every annual general meeting Carrick could be counted on to recognise the work of the committee and also to contribute to the discussion – and so it was this year. We missed him at our October event, but it was not until his memorial service, held a Lychgate Chapel on 6 November 2014 that I learned that he had been ill for some months.

Although Carrick never served on the FDNW committee he was involved in many other organisations, both local and national, and on the executives of several. He had a strong interest in politics and the environment, as well as in the arts and education. Among the organisations in which he had an active interest were the NZ-USSR Society (Wellington branch), the Humanist Society of New Zealand, Grey Power (Wellington Central), the Victoria University Club and the National Library Society (NZ). He was also a former president, and an honorary life member of the United Nations Association of New Zealand, an active member of the New Zealand Labour Party, and a PSA secretary-organiser.

Carrick is survived by his wife Norrina, and his brothers Martin and Eric, both of whom spoke at his funeral. We will miss Carrick’s involvement with the Society, and we offer our condolences to them and to Carrick’s many friends and extended family.

Mary Cadogan

Literary historian, broadcaster and writer with a fascination for children’s literature whose 1976 book You’re a brick, Angela! became a standard text

’Noël Coward talked about the potency of “cheap music”. Well. I’m a great believer in the potency of “cheap literature”,’ Mary Cadogan once said.

Mary Cadogan, who has died aged 86, was a literary historian, chronicling the history of children’s books, romantic and detective fiction and many other aspects of the popular culture of the last two centuries. A writer, critic and broadcaster, she was a passionate advocate for the pleasures of times past, who delighted in passing on her love of writers and their work, as if sitting beside the reader and sharing some much-thumbed book or comic that had amused her, thrilled her or caught and excited her imagination.

Cadogan’s literary career was triggered by a chance meeting in the mid-70s with the Belfast-born writer Patricia Craig, with whom she shared an interest in the school-story genre. This resulted, in 1976, in their collaborating on You’re a brick, Angela!, a review of girls’ books between 1839 and 1975, spanning a wide spectrum of writings, from the moral and improving tales of the Victorians, via school adventures and comic papers, to the novels of Joan Aiken, Nina Bawden and others. Thoroughly researched, filled with sharp observations and, above all, wittily written, the book garnered wide critical praise and swiftly became (and has remained) a standard text.

The book’s success led to two more collaborations with Craig, Women and children first: the fiction of two World Wars (1978) and The lady investigates: women detectives and spies in fiction (1986), volumes which, like their forerunner, offered a new perspective on the often overlooked role of women in popular fiction and the contributions of female writers

Cadogan had found her metier and her personal reputation was secured with biographies of two authors responsible for much-loved characters from children’s fiction: Richmal Crompton: The woman behind William (1986) and Frank Richards: The Chap Behind the Chums (1988).

She would return to the disaster-prone William and his Outlaws in The William companion (1990) and Just William through the ages (1994) and to Billy Bunter, the Owl of the Remove, and his fellow students at Greyfriars school, in a series of publications in collaboration with John Wernham and Tommy Keen, devoted to the characters and stories in the prolific canon of Charles Hamilton and his alter ego, Frank Richards.

Other successful titles included Chin Up, Chest Out, Jemima!: A Celebration of the Schoolgirls’ Story (1989), Women With Wings: Female Flyers in Fact and Fiction (1992), And Then Their Hearts Stood Still: An Exuberant Look at Romantic Fiction Past and Present (1994) and in 2008, the year of her 80th birthday, Mary Carries On: Reflections on Some Favourite Girls’ Stories. Her affection for the picture-strip adventures of Rupert Bear, created by Mary Tourtel for the Daily Express, inspired Rupert and the Women in his World (2006), while admiration for Enid Blyton led to a collaboration with Norman Wright on two treasuries of Blyton adventure and school stories. Cadogan was a regular reviewer for the Birmingham Post for almost two decades and contributed reviews and features to many national papers and magazines. For a more specialist readership, she edited the Story Paper Collectors’ Digest (1987-2008) and acted as co-editor of the Just William Society Magazine (1995-2003).

Born in Ealing, west London, she was the daughter of Thomas Summersby, a policeman, and his wife Ivy, a nurse. The family later moved to Kent, where Mary was educated at Bromley county grammar school for girls, matriculating in 1944. Her youthful reading would have an impact on her later writing career, as she noted: “I used to devour the Magnet and the Schoolgirl avidly in the 1930s … at the same time as I was devouring the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Anna Sewell. It never struck me then, or now, that there was anything fundamentally in opposition about these two types of reading.” She said that there was a often a weekly scramble to get her hands on her brother Tom’s copy of the Magnet before he could read the comic himself.

She began her working life as programme secretary for the BBC’s variety and, later, schools broadcasting departments. In the former she encountered many well-known entertainers of the day, including Tommy Handley and Arthur Askey, while others – among them Frank Muir and Arthur Marshall – became and remained friends. She subsequently trained in music and dance therapy for young polio victims and worked as secretary to the welfare committee of the Infantile Paralysis Fellowship (now British Polio Fellowship).

It was in their offices that she met one of her literary heroines, Crompton, a keen supporter of the charity and herself a polio sufferer, though she never plucked up the courage to question Crompton about her famous literary creation, William Brown.

In 1950 she married Alexander Cadogan, an engineer. They began attending talks by the Indian writer and teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, a man she once described as being ’the great spiritual force of the 20th century”. From 1958 until her death, she worked for the Krishnamurti organisations in England as the first company secretary of the Krishnamurti Foundation, 1968-1995, and subsequently as a governor of the foundation and its international school at Brockwood Park in Hampshire. She also chaired the foundation’s publications committee and edited several of Krishnamurti’s books, including two volumes of his dialogues with the theoretical physicist Professor David Bohm.

Cadogan was a recipient of the Silver Cross of St George award from This England magazine, a lifetime achievement award from the Children’s Books History Society and, in 2009, received an honorary doctorate of letters from Lancaster University for having “enriched the store of human knowledge and added to the sum of human happiness”.

She once said: “Noël Coward talked about the potency of ’cheap music.’ Well, I’m a great believer in the potency of ’cheap literature’.”

She is survived by Alexander and their daughter, Teresa; and by her brother Tom.

• Mary Cadogan (Mary Rose Summersby), writer, critic and broadcaster, born 30 May 1928; died 27 September 2014

• This article was amended on 9 October 2014. The original stated that You’re a Brick, Angela!, published in 1976, was a review of girls’ books between 1839 and 1985. In fact, the first edition of You’re a Brick, Angela! included titles published up to 1975, and a later edition took in the following decade. This has been corrected.

Brian Sibley
The Guardian, Monday 6 October 2014 13.35 BST

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