Rex Benedict in Manhattan

Above: Giusi and Rex in the late 1960s.

Rex Benedict was amongst other things the author of a series of unusual Western novels written for children, two of which have previously featured on this blog, Good Luck Arizona Man, and Last Stand at Goodbye Gulch. Biographical details of the writer are scarce, so I was very pleased and grateful when John F Higgins got in touch via a mutual friend to share his childhood memories of Rex:


As a young boy, from 1967-70, my mother and I lived at 23 West 88th Street in Manhattan, a half-block from Central Park. The area was nowhere near as upscale then as it is now, but it will still a marvellous area to grow up in. A large part of my memories from that time are about our upstairs neighbour, Rex Benedict.

Rex and Giusi (“Juze-ey”) lived with their cat, Sonnet, in a 1 bedroom apartment directly above ours. Their flat had a nice, small terrace—their view was of the backs of our (north) neighbour’s buildings—and an even smaller study, in which Rex had his manual single-sheet desktop printing press! Many days after school, or on weekends, I would go up there and watch him put in one letter at a time, upside down and backwards, for whatever page in whatever self-printed book of prose (“Fantasano”) or poetry he was working on for his Corsair Press. Sometimes he let me do the typesetting. It was fascinating… especially the thin-or-thick blank pieces of metal he had to put in as spaces between words or at the ends of sentences or paragraphs.

Rex was a thin, tanned, gentleman with the most prominent Adam’s Apple of anyone I ever met, before or since. He brewed his own coffee using a stovetop espresso maker on his gas stove and rolled his own cigarettes… incessantly!. He had a wonderful, authoritative but not overbearing voice and often wore casual pants and short-sleeve shirts.

Rex and I bonded over Star Trek, which was just on its original run at the time. He and I would watch the episodes weekly on his black and white television set and shared a love of the Spock character. I am certain I learned the Vulcan hand salute in his presence. I seldom watch an episode of the original series now without thinking of him. Very fondly.

My mother and I moved to a Boston suburb half-way through 1970 and even though Rex mailed me a copy of Good Luck Arizona Man, we did not succeed in keeping in touch and, much to my lasting regret, I never saw him again. I am sure he was writing Arizona Man while I was still in New York but I’m not sure what memories I have of that; since he did not typeset it at home I have no tangible memories to hold on to. I just remember loving it when I read it and always wished his books had been more popular.

I think of Rex often and every now and then have tried to find out on the web what became of him. Sadly, he passed away some years ago and Giusi some time after. I will never forget him.

— John F Higgins



A collection of Rex Benedict’s Corsair Press books. Fantasano is a prose book, and the rest are thin collections of Rex’s poems. “In The Green-Grass Time” is dedicated to John F Higgins, as it was inspired by his adventures in Central Park.

Sofie den modige pilot

New Danish edition of Sadie the Air Mail Pilot from Forlaget Arvids.

Cover lettering based on Ludlow Tempo Heavy Inline.

Buy it here!

Review: My Country, by Kassem Eid

First posted at SyriaUK.

My Country, A Syrian Memoir
Kassem Eid, Bloomsbury, 2018

On the early morning of 21 August 2013, the Damascus suburbs of Zamalka and Ein Tarma in Eastern Ghouta, and Moadamiya in Western Ghouta, were attacked with rockets loaded with Sarin nerve agent. An estimated 1,500 people were killed. Kassem Eid, then 27 years old, was amongst the survivors.

The Sarin attack comes halfway through Kassem’s book. By then he has already told of how the people of Moadamiya had suffered regime violence, snipers, car bombs, massacres with hundreds shot or stabbed or burned by regime militia.

Childhood

When Kassem Eid was just three years old, his family came to Moadamiya. Only three miles from Damascus city, Kassem describes the rural quality of his childhood home town, with old mud houses, surrounded by fields and olive groves, with neighbouring families who had farmed there for generations. Kassem’s large Palestinian-Syrian family lived in one of the few modern buildings, a block built by the Ministry of Media for its employees.

Kassem describes his parents with great fondness, his late father working in TV, radio, and journalism, and passing to his young son an interest in the outside world and the English language through an illicit hoard of Reader’s Digest saved from the parents’ years in Saudi Arabia.

But as Kassem grew older, the harshness of his world was revealed. He tells of his first day at school, lined up under the sinister smile of the dictator Hafez al-Assad and reciting the daily pledges of loyalty, of learning that at every level Syria was governed by connections to the ranks of power, with no opening to advance on merit, and with privilege and power maintained by violence.

His friendships growing up included a few across sectarian divides. In particular he writes of his schoolfriend Majed, a son of a military pilot who goes on to be a fighter pilot himself, from an Alawite family, the same sect as Assad. Their relative positions are demonstrated in the sixth grade when Kassem outperforms Majed in test scores, only to be docked marks in his fimal report card to give the military officer’s son top place.

Later when the revolution comes, Kassem’s contacts with Alawites help him to arrange the smuggling of food and medicine into Moadamiya, but his relationship with Majed cannot survive the uprising. At their last meeting, Majed says, ‘Many Alawites hate Assad too, but we still fight for him, because if he falls, they’re coming for all of us.’

Revolution

Moadamiya’s revolution began with a protest on the afternoon of 18 March 2011. Around 300 people marched through the town centre calling for the resignation of the mayor, and for the return of municipal lands confiscated by the regime. Plain-clothes Shabiha regime agents arrived, armed with clubs, swords, and guns to attack the demonstrators. Despite this immediate resort to violence by the regime, Kassem describes himself and his family that evening daring to hope that freedom was possible for the first time in years.

With Shabiha militia on Moadamiya’s streets, the town’s community leaders went to negotiate with Air Force Intelligence chief Jamil Hassan, who threatened them: ‘Make sure that such events never happen again. We wil not be so forgiving next time.’ He was in a position to deliver on his threat. Germany’s chief federal prosecutor has recently filed charges against Jamil Hassan, for ‘crimes against humanity.’ He is charged with command responsibility for the systematic torture and killing of hundreds of detainees by Air Force Intelligence staff between 2011 and 2013.

Moadamiya’s residents knew much of what to expect from the start, even if they were to be shocked by the scale of what followed. Kassem knew from personal experience. Years earlier his eldest brother Yazid had spent months in prison after being picked up by Air Force Intelligence, and Kassem himself had previously been picked up by regime security forces, giving him a brief and brutal experience of the Syrian state’s violent system of institutionalised torture.

After the first protest, the Shabiha imposed a curfew on Moadamiya. Despite this, by early April Moadamiya saw daily protests of over 10,000 people, and over 15,000 people on Fridays, with every protest attacked by Shabiha.

The book describes how in those first weeks Kassem witnessed a horrifying sexual assault on two women by Shabiha, after which he persuaded his sister to leave Syria along with her young family. He and his brothers also persuaded their mother to leave for Jordan. Kassem began joining the protests, experiencing gunfire, and witnessing increasingly frequent killings by snipers.

Kassem puts the count of people killed in Moadamiya in the first seven or eight months as 200 people. More than 5,000 people were detained, including children, close to ten percent of Moadamiya’s total population. By the end of 2011, over seventy percent of the town’s population had fled. This was the point when some joined together to start the Free Syrian Army.

The year that followed, 2012, saw even more extreme violence, with executions in the streets and horrendous massacres where as many as 450 were killed by Shabiha in one event. Kassem describes the aftermaths of the massacres with images of pure horror. With his knowledge of English, Kassem focused on media activism, translating reports, filming fighting, and documenting casualties.

Although Kassem knew nearly every founding member of the FSA in Moadamiya from school or from the neighbourhood, at first he wasn’t ready himself to take that step. That day would come later, on the 21 of August 2013 when while still suffering the effects of nerve agent he picked up a gun and joined his neighbours in fighting to try and stop regime forces advancing into Moadamiya after the chemical attack.

Survival

The second half of the book describes what followed the international failure to respond forcefully to Assad’s chemical massacre: the grinding starvation siege of Moadamiya, the division and gradual surrender of the community, and his own surrender and then brazen escape from Syria.

But perhaps the bitterest experience was his time in America. He had told his friends in the first months of revolution that the United States had a million reasons to take Assad down. Now he experienced the alienation of visiting a society enjoying a privileged protected peace, disconnected from the reality of his war.

Protests in America were without gunshots, but a demonstration in America’s capital didn’t attract the thousands seen in Moadamiya. Just 1,400 people, most of them Syrian. Where, he asked, were Washington DC’s Muslims? Where were the non-Syrian Arabs, the Palestinians, the Americans who wanted to defend democratic values?

In America, Kassem spoke at universities, on news programmes, in meetings with policymakers. He writes that he was pleased when Samantha Power, Obama’s UN Ambassador, asked him to stand up in front of a Security Council meeting, but later he wished that he had not stood silently, but that he had screamed.

Kassem has cut a tight, powerful story from the span of his personal experience. No one book can capture the full scale of events in Syria in the past few years, but by the intensity of this sample of one neighbourhood seen through one pair of eyes, Kassem Eid’s memoir gives a powerful impression of the great drama and disaster of the Syrian revolution and its violent suppression.

The clear line Kassem Eid traces through this one vital part of Syria’s story should make a good introduction to readers not immersed in all of the war’s details, as well as being welcomed by those already deeply involved. May his testimony endure.

ELCAF signings on Saturday

The East London Comics and Arts Festival ELCAF is on this Saturday 14th of June at Oval Space, 29-32 The Oval, London E2. There’s a map here. I’ll be joining a horde of artists at publisher Nobrow’s table for a series of signings through the day.

Jim Stoten: Luke Pearson: Kellie Strom: Jesse Moynihan: Kyle Platts: Anne Simon: Andrew Rae: Nicolas André: Bianca Bagnarelli:

11.00–11.30 11.45–12.45 13.00–13.30 13.45–14.30 14.45–15.15 15.30–16.00 16.15–16.45 17.00–17.30 17.45–18.15

Nobrow will also be launching some new books, including; Moonhead and the Music Machine by Andrew Rae, Beyond the Surface by Nicholas André, Mr Tweed’s Good Deeds by Jim Stoten and Fish by Bianca Bagnarelli (due out August). Read more on Nobrow’s blog.

A pair of Danish sea serpents

Here’s a painting just finished for Danish publisher Arvids, a cover for an upcoming book. It was my first acrylic painting after a very long break from the medium – over three years I think. I found it an uncomfortable struggle to begin with, but by the end I was enjoying painting again, and sea monsters are always a pleasure!

‘Worse Things’ on sale and on film

Worse Things Happen at Sea, my Leporello book, went on sale this week in fine bookshops and via publisher Nobrow’s fine website. To kick things off I had the pleasure of spending time with the Great Eastern Street crew as I signed the first fifty to go on sale in London.

On Nobrow’s blog you’ll find a little film about the making of the book, made by Eddie Frost of Proudfoot. It was a pleasure to have him and his team visit.

In print

And available shortly from fine bookshops, or directly from Nobrow Press.

Inside, waves of paper, covered with inky sea monsters.

The original Leporello recorded a list of lovers, but this leporello is a litany of death and disaster.

The cover is a separate piece of paper, and doubles as a ballad sheet.

Thanks to wonderful Nobrow, seeing this in print has been the most satisfying revelation!

Launching my Leporello: sailing from Dublin Bay to the Swiss Alps

Worse Things Happen at Sea is the title of my forthcoming Leporello book from Nobrow Press. It’s a concertina book of ships and sea monsters, a series of disasters in both its subject matter and in the history of its making. During the drawing of it I’ve been losing my mind, losing my eyesight, and lost a couple of months’ work in a burglary. Now the art is all delivered, so barring a flood at the printers, it should be on sale in the next few weeks.

To launch the book, I’ll be travelling to a couple of events in Ireland and Switzerland with fellow Nobrow artists. Next week, illustrator Bjørn Rune Lie, Nobrow partner Sam Arthur, and myself, will be going to Offset, a graphic design festival in Dublin that runs from the 21st to the 23rd of March. Sam will be telling the story of Nobrow on Friday at 12 noon on the Magenta Stage, while Bjørn and I will be talking about our latest books on Sunday at 12 noon, again on the Magenta Stage.

Then in April, Luke Pearson, Andrew Rae, and myself, will all be exhibiting work at the Fumetto comics festival in Lucerne, Switzerland. As well as original drawings for Worse Things Happen at Sea, I’ll also be showing paintings from Het Zeemans-ABC (A Sailor’s ABC) the Dutch Little Golden Book by Nienke Denekamp that I illustrated a while back. Fumetto runs from the 5th to the 13th of April, and I will be there myself ’til the 9th.

America’s anti-interventionist prophets of doom

This is not about Syria, much, but about the first year or so of that earlier and incomparably bigger war where anti-interventionists were (similarly) not just against any direct involvement of American forces, but also against supplying arms. In those days of 1939 to ’41 there wasn’t of course any fear of such arms falling into the hands of Islamists, but there was, as today, a fear on the part of some that sending arms would be just a step on the road to direct intervention.

The pro-arms side argued that enabling Britain to defend itself would serve US interests by reinforcing an obstacle between Nazi Germany and the US. The anti-arms side countered that Britain was doomed in any case, and that any arms sent would be arms wasted at a time when the US defences were desperately weak and in need of urgent build-up.

If the prophets of doom had won the argument, their prophecy would most likely have been self-fulfilling.

Lynne Olson’s recent book, Those Angry Days, is an engrossing history of the time. She gives a number of examples of its doomsayers.

General George Marshall, Army chief of staff, argued in 1940 that if Britain were defeated after America sent arms needed at home, “the Army and the Administration could never justify to the American people the risk they had taken.” On June 24 General Marshall and Admiral Harold Stark urged Roosevelt to stop all aid to Britain. Roosevelt rejected the suggestion (Chapter 9).

A majority in Congress were also against sending arms. Senator Key Pittman, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged Britain to surrender to Hitler, saying “it is no secret that Great Britain is totally unprepared for defence,” and that “nothing the United States has to give can do more than delay the result.”

Churchill commented “Up till April [US officials] were so sure that the Allies would win that they did not think help necessary. Now they are so sure we shall lose that they do not think it possible.”

By 1941 there had been some shift in military thinking. Admiral Stark now believed American security required Britain’s survival, and pressed Roosevelt  to start US Navy escorts of convoys to Britain. General Marshall also supported escorts, but more as a way of strengthening America’s hemispheric defence and of buying time, rather than to ensure Britain’s survival. Similarly he supported Lend-Lease as a spur to US industrial capacity which would serve American defence even if Britain were defeated (Chapter 19).

Lynne Olson writes that “throughout 1941, Marshall received much of his military intelligence from staffers who were both anti-British and antiwar.” She gives the example of General Stanley Embick, who had openly aligned with the National Council for Prevention of War. A few weeks before Embick was to retire, Marshall had him included in War Department strategy discussions and White House meetings where Embick spoke not just against American entry into the war, but against any military or economic aid for Britain. Subsequently Marshall made Embick his senior military adviser.

Another example was Colonel Truman Smith, friend of isolationist campaigner Charles Lindbergh, and at the same time General Marshall’s main expert on Germany. According to Olson, “like most of his colleagues in Army intelligence, Smith made no secret of his belief that Germany would soon overpower Britain and that America should abandon what Smith saw as its hopeless attempt to save the country.” Smith circulated pessimistic intelligence reports about Britain’s chances of survival that charged Churchill’s government with “disastrous interference” in British military affairs. Smith also passed on military information to prominent anti-interventionist campaigners.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox experienced similar attitudes, and described to Secretary of War Henry Stimson “how he had to fight against the timidity of his own admirals on any aggressive movement … how all their estimates and advice were predicated on the failure of the British.”

I recommend the book. For more see Gene’s recent Harry’s Place post, After Kristallnacht.

Also related, Conflicting ideas, a post by Peter Ryley looking at recurring standpoints in debates on war and intervention down the years.

Cartoon by Dr Seuss, first published in PM Magazine, October 1st 1941. From UC San Diego Library Special Collections and Archives.

Vivat Rex Benedict

Time, I think, for a Rex Benedict revival. I have just finished reading the above book with Bo, Last Stand at Goodbye Gulch, and it has much the same fine qualities as Good Luck Arizona Man, on which I blogged earlier. Two more of his cowboy stories sit ready on the side table, Goodbye to the Purple Sage and The Ballad of Cactus Jack.

There is not much to be found about Mr Benedict online, but Last Stand at Goodbye Gulch includes this glimpse of the man:

About the Author

Rex Benedict writes that his biography can best be set forth in periods:

“There was the Oklahoma Period, where I was born and raised; the Northwestern State College Period, where I was educated; the U.S. Navy Period, where I flew from aircraft carriers; the European Period, where I translated and dubbed movies; the Greek and Roman Revival Period, where I pined among the relics; the Freighter Period, where I cruised endlessly on blue seas; the Corsair Press Period, where I privately published my greatest works and gave them all away; the Translation Period, where I translated many books, including The Decameron, into many languages, hopefully the right ones; the Juvenile Novel Period, where I astounded myself and others by writing Westerns; and finally the Terrace Period, where I now sit on West 88th Street in New York City, marvelling at it all.”

An antiquarian book site gives Rex Benedict’s date of birth as circa 1920. It also describes him as a British poet, so who knows. The rather perfect cover illustration for Last Stand at Goodbye Gulch is by Quentin Blake. It was published by Hamish Hamilton, London, in 1975. The first American edition was in 1974.

A school comics fair

I’ve been thinking recently about children’s comics, and the number of good books now available that are not widely known by children or parents. In the UK, regular bookshops carry only a fraction of the good children’s comics currently being published.

A curious thing has happened with comics in the past few decades. Many comics enthusiasts, creators, publishers, and traders, have been eager to escape the idea that comics are merely downmarket children’s literature. They have succeeded only too well, with the result that much comics publishing is now aimed at older collectors and connoisseurs. The books are more beautifully produced than ever, but more expensive, and much of the newer content, in aiming for greater sophistication, seems to lack the direct engagement, excitement, and humour, of past works.

Meanwhile fewer children buy comics at newsagents. There are some publishers of excellent comics for children but, with the exception of the best known titles, they seem to have a hard time getting their books into non-specialist bookshops, and comic shops attract mostly older readers.

Well, if we can’t get the comics into the bookshops, and can’t get the kids into the comic shops, a third option is to bring the comic shops to the kids, and that means into schools.

Book events in schools such as author visits and book fairs are now common events. I’ve had in mind for a while to try something similar with comics - a school comics fair. And next week, with the help of Gosh! Comics of Berwick Street, we’re going to hold the first one at my daughter’s primary school. I’m really looking forward to it, and from what I hear so are the kids!

Images on the flyer above come from the following good books:

• Yoko Tsuno: The Prey and the Ghost, by Roger Leloup
• Cat Burglar Black, by Richard Sala
• The Laureline and Valerian series, by Mézières and Christin
• Lucky Luke: Jesse James, by Morris and Goscinny
• Blake and Mortimer: The Yellow “M”, by Edgar P Jacobs
• The Rainbow Orchid, by Garen Ewing
• Moominvalley Turns Jungle, by Tove Jannson

Another 100 books you might enjoy - a post for Norm

Norm is gone, but Normblog is not. The ideas are vital, the words speak, intimacy with the mind endures.

Norman Geras’s last post on Normblog was titled A book list with a difference, or alternatively, 100 works of fiction you might enjoy. As a small tribute to him, I offer a complimentary list of fiction books. There is no overlap with his list as all of these come from the bookshelves of my children. They are still young and they have as yet read hardly any of Norm’s kind suggestions. Like his, this is not a ‘best of’ or a ‘must read’ list, but a list of books that we have enjoyed, some of which you may know, and some of which you might like to try.

The first one is by Ian Beck:

• Picture Book

This is an extraordinary book for the very young, its images simple yet intensely rich. As the children have grown older they have enjoyed many more of his books, for example his edition of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat, and a version of The Nutcracker written by Berlie Doherty, and more recently his Tom Trueheart children’s novels.

More picture books by a variety of authors:

Blessed are the peacemakers

It’s not 1938, Ed Miliband is not Chamberlain, Cameron is not Churchill, Assad is not the danger to Britain that Hitler was, and the Munich Conference is not any kind of decent analogy for the events of this week. But considering the current popular and political resistance to military action against the mass-murdering Syrian regime, and wondering how it will be perceived in future years, I think it’s worth remembering just how popular appeasement was in 1938 – remembering just how many people thought it fine and good and worth celebrating.

The following snippets are from Lynne Olson’s book, Troublesome Young Men, an account of the anti-appeasement Tory rebels who eventually brought Churchill to power. From Chapter Eight:

Most Britons greeted the news with an almost hysterical outpouring of relief and thanksgiving. The newspaper coverage, lavish in its praise of Chamberlain, helped orchestrate the jubilant mood. In two-inch type, the single word “PEACE!” was emblazoned across the front page of the Daily Express. Of the prime minister, The Times declared: “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield had come adorned with nobler laurels.” Lord Castlerosse, the portly socialite gossip columnist for the Sunday Express, exulted: “Thanks to Chamberlain, thousands of young men will live. I shall live.”

...

When Chamberlain’s plane returned from Munich on the afternoon of September 30, a delirious crowd of several thousand people stood in a driving rainstorm at Heston Airport, waving newspapers and Union Jacks, waiting to greet the man they considered the saviour of the world. The crowds went wild when the prime minister, carrying his signature umbrella, emerged from the plane. The dozens of policemen on horseback had a difficult time holding back the surging mass; everyone, it seemed, wanted to shake Chamberlain’s hand.

From Heston, Chamberlain was whisked away by car to Buckingham Palace, where King George and Queen Elizabeth waited to offer their congratulations. Through the car’s rain-streaked windows, Chamberlain looked out at thousands of cheering, flag-waving Britons lining the streets, some of whom, in their exuberance, leaped onto the running boards of the car and banged on the windows. At the palace another huge throng waited, and when Chamberlain and his wife stepped out onto the palace balcony with the smiling king and queen, there was an earsplitting ovation. It was an unprecedented event, the first time a ruling monarch had allowed a commoner to be acknowledged from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. According to Tory MP Edward Grigg, it was also “the biggest constitutional blunder that has ever been made by any sovereign this century.” By appearing on the balcony with Chamberlain, George VI was publicly associating himself with the prime minister’s policy, a violation of the political impartiality required of a sovereign in a constitutional monarchy.

But few people were thinking of such issues that day. Continuing his triumphal procession, Chamberlain returned at last to Downing Street, which was jammed by hundreds of people who had been waiting in the rain for hours. Across the street from the prime minister’s residence, Orme Sargent, an assistant foreign affairs undersecretary and a strong opponent of appeasement, watched the crowd from a first-floor balcony of the Foreign Office. Turning to a colleague, he acidly observed: “You might think that we had won a major victory instead of betraying a minor country.”

From Chapter Nine:

For weeks after Munich it was impossible to escape from Neville Chamberlain. Everywhere one went in Britain, it seemed, there were reminders of the prime minister and his historic journey. Toy shops featured booted Chamberlain dolls, holding a rod and reel in one hand and a little sign saying PEACEMAKER in the other. Candy stores sold sugar umbrellas, while florists displayed Chamberlain’s picture framed by flowers and bearing the inscription WE ARE PROUD OF YOU. Companies took out large newspaper advertisements lauding the prime minister, and the poet laureate, John Masefield, wrote a poem comparing him to the tragic Greek hero Priam and declaring that he had been “divinely led.”

Ten Downing Street meanwhile was flooded with letters, telegrams, flowers, umbrellas, toys, trinkets, and other items celebrating Chamberlain’s achievement. He put many of these articles on display in a large showcase, which he loved to show off to visitors. When Kenneth Clark and his wife came to lunch one day, Chamberlain proudly led them to the showcase, explaining that the articles “were sent to me in gratitude for the Munich agreement.”

As John Colville noted in his diary, Munich fed the prime minister’s vanity as well as his arrogance. With Chamberlain “almost canonised” because of Munich, it was “small wonder,” Violet Bonham Carter dryly remarked, “that he began to see himself as a Messiah sent down from heaven...”

The events of 1938 are seen in a very different light now. I wonder how will 29 August 2013 be remembered?

_

Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill To Power And Helped Save England is copyright © 2007 by Lynne Olson.

The still of Conrad Veidt surrounded by plaster statues of Chamberlain is from the Powell and Pressburger film Contraband, via the blog in so many words...

Peter and Wendy, Dor and Peggy

Earlier this month, Michael Sporn posted scans of a curious Disney book, a 1953 adaptation of Peter Pan published by Brockhampton Press in a semi-strip format used by them for a number of characters including Bruin, aka Rasmus Klump. What makes the book notable is that it follows JM Barrie’s story more closely than the Disney film, and so provides images rendered in the Disney style of episodes not included in the animated feature.

Unusual, but not unique as Brockhampton Press published at least one other Peter Pan tie-in book that was similarly more faithful to Barrie than Disney. The scans in this post are of another 1953 book, an edition of JM Barrie’s novelisation of Peter Pan and Wendy, abridged by May Byron and illustrated according to the model of the Disney film. I don’t think it’s the same illustrator as did the other Brockhampton Press book, as these drawing seems of a much higher standard. I would guess that the other illustrator had sight of at least some of these drawings to work from though, particularly the elegantly rendered one of the Never-Bird’s nest at the end of this post.

This book originally belonged to my mother, Dor. She turned ten the year it was published. Most of the illustrations are line drawings, and she carefully coloured several of them. When my daughter Peggy saw the book a couple of years ago, she asked if she could colour in some of the illustrations that were still untouched.

The book ends with Wendy growing too old to fly back to Never-Land with Peter, and her place being taken first by her daughter Jane, and then by her grand-daughter Margaret. Dor didn’t have a daughter, and died fifteen years before her grand-daughter was born, so I was very happy for them to meet in the pages of this book. I’m now no longer sure in some cases who coloured which drawing.

This is just a small selection of the images. The book was heavily illustrated, and the artist seemed someone with a strong sense of the requirements of book illustration as distinct from animation.

Any resemblance between this image and the title page of Sadie the Air Mail Pilot is unlikely to be a coincidence.

A Disney Wendy House, not seen in the Disney film.

Finally, here is the Never-Bird’s nest. This hasn’t been coloured in, so I was able to make a nice clean scan of it.

The book is copyright © 1953 Walt Disney.

Twit Archive 1-15 November 2011

Above, John Dog sings Imperfect Strangers.

Below the fold, tweets on Iran, Bahrain, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Cuba, Afghanistan, and on comics, children’s books, film, and music.

Twit Archive 16-30 September 2011

Above, Turner’s The Shipwreck, from 1805, via the Google Art Project selection of paintings from Tate Britain.

Below, more art tweets, animation, comics, books and music tweets, Danish elections, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Niger, and sewers in London and New York.

Twit Archive 13-31 July 2011

Above, issue 56 of De Poezenkrant, a magazine by Piet Schreuders. It’s available to buy here, a bargain!

In its paper pages you’ll find a story also mentioned in a tweet below, Anne Billson’s study of the several stand-in cats appearing in Carol Reed’s The Third Man. The link in the tweet is broken as her Cats on Film blog has since moved, but here it is, Cat of the Day 078, or as it’s titled in the magazine, The Third Cat.

Below the fold, more tweets on films, books, music, comics and cartoons. And Libya, Iran, Gaza, Breivik.

Twit Archive 21-31 May 2011

Below the fold, old tweets on Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Gaza. Also publishing, illustration, music and film.

Above, drawing by Louis Crucius (or Crusius), from the BibliOdyssey blog of book art.

Play in the Infants’ School

There is no Raleigh School on Ocean Street anymore, and no buildings from the time survive there.

Published in 1938, ER Boyce’s book tells of how as head teacher from 1933 she led an experiment in play-centred learning in the Infants’ School, with approximately three hundred children on the roll, aged between three and seven-and-a-half. From the preface:

In the heart of the East End of London, you will find an odd tangle of courts and alley-ways connecting long, narrow streets of shabby cottages, each housing several families. The monotony is broken by public houses and dingy shops which deal in very small quantities of groceries, cheap sweets or fish and chips. On fine evenings, these streets are scenes of lively social life. The children play and the parents gossip. In the hot weather, the babies crawl naked on the pavements. There are brawls and parties during the week-end: sometimes a piano is dragged into the street so that jollity may be enjoyed by all. The noise is often deafening; iron hoops and wireless mingle with shrill calls and whistles, the crying of babies and the laughter and shouts of women.

The children who live in this particular district have only one other playground, a small disused burial-ground, planted with trees and consisting mainly of concrete paths. They frequent a neighbouring street-market which, on Saturday evenings is picturesque in the light of flares. Many of them go regularly to the Penny Pictures; a cinema performance of cowboy and crook films. Each year there is a visit to the hop-fields. A certain number of them get an outing to Southend, many more dream of going and hear so much of it from others, that they invent stories of their own adventures at the sea.

The ordinary events of a child’s life are unknown. Birthdays are rarely kept, new toys are unusual, stockings at Christmas are seldom hung up and there is no annual holiday.

Their physical condition is extremely poor; there are three or four bonnie children in each class of forty, and these are not always fully grown. They suffer from rickets, impetigo, adenoids, rheumatism, colds, and various forms of malnutrition. The cases of underfeeding are comparatively small, but all of them live on a diet of cheap sweets and cakes, bread and margarine, fish and chips, and tinned food. The facilities for cooking are poor and the mothers are ignorant of good, simple feeding, and many of them are the wage-earners of the family and the small child is fed by the elder sister. The majority of the parents, especially the younger ones, make continual efforts to keep the children clean and tidy and have some conception of their duty to them. In spite of this, sores and cuts are always septic, hair is often verminous and many small bodies are flea bitten.

Nearby Duckett Street in 1939, found here. Copyright © Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives.

While aspects of the Raleigh School project are familiar to me from my children’s experience in London nursery schools, ER Boyce seems to have gone much farther than is usual today in her effort to work for a child-centred school where children experienced as much liberty as possible, and where academic learning developed out of the children’s own interests and curiosity.

Fighting Chaos with Madness!

For your viewing pleasure, here’s Beech Croft: A Road Trip, a true tale of DIY traffic calming in Oxford. You can read more about the road witches of Beech Croft Road at roadwitch.org.uk.

At the heart of this story is my friend Ted Dewan, illustrator, children’s writer, musician, whale dissector, head shrinker, and loving father to a rabbit, when he’s not busy witch wrestling.