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British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War

Firing the youthful imagination

Owen Dudley Edwards
Edinburgh University Press, 744pp, £150,

Nicolas Barker

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Nicolas Barker on Owen Dudley Edwards' overview of WW2 children's fiction

These and many others are tackled in two parts, ‘The School of War’ and ‘Lessons which May have been Learned’, providing a chronological record and then, like Orwell, pondering the social consequences. It took time for established writers to adjust. Blyton was cut off from her beloved Dorset coast, and took to fairy fables. Brent-Dyer was spot on with The Chalet School in Exile (1940), escaping Austria thanks to a priest then murdered by the Nazis. Johns, a pilot in first world war, brushed up his RAF slang and daringly invented a woman air ace, Worrals of the WAAF (1940). A review of it in the Irish Times was banned by the censor; the editor then altered the names and reprinted it as Lotte of the Luftwaffe, which got through. The ensuing row did much to strengthen Irish support for the Allies. William confronted a Quisling, ‘ole Grissel. He’s handing over the country to ole Hitler’. The writers borrowed from each other, Biggles’s Ginger taken from William’s best friend, Blyton and Brent-Dyer also paying homage to Crompton. ‘This intertextuality was noted by child readers with pleasure long before academics made livings from it.’ Nor did they evade raw social edges. Encounters with evacuees and foreigners could be comic or threatening. Mary Treadgold’s We Couldn’t Leave Dinah confronted invasion itself, if of an imaginary channel island.

Authority, real (Richard Hughes writing for his evacuees), imaginary (Blyton’s Bill Smugs in The Island of Adventure) or bogus (William demolishing Mr Leicester, the pompous air-raid warden) takes on a new importance. So do women, in every sphere. Fathers were useless, either incapable or absent. Malcolm Saville’s Mystery and Witchend (1943), serialised on Children’s Hour before publication, took the logical step of transferring authority to children. And, as Eileen Colwell wrote of Blyton’s The Sea of Adventure, ‘But what hope has a band of desperate men against four children?’. As the war wore on, other aspects of it began to impinge. L. A. G. Strong, writing in The Spectator on 6 December 1940, foresaw the need for direction in books for children. ‘Puffin Books’, Penguins for children, appeared in 1941 under the firm hand of Eileen Graham. But dirigisme was punctured by William:

I’ve shown ’em how import’nt resp — what you said — an’ achievin’ are in developin’ the good citizen too. I’ve invented Sardine Toffee or pretty nearly, anyway. That’ll give the good citizen a whole stomachful of development.

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Margaret Stoll

April 21st, 2008 11:35am

I'm glad you mentioned Violet Needham. She doesn't seem to be remembered much nowadays although Blyton, Johns, Crompton et al are well recalled and their works presented to a modern audience (Martin Jarvis reading the William stories on Radio 4 - what a joy!)

No, Violet Needham brought a new word and a new concept to my vocabulary - 'fortitude'. The young hero of 'The Black Riders' and 'The Stormy Petrel' was a precursor of Alex Rider, the boy agent. 'To look a tyrant in the eye and say him nay' as Needham's hero Richard Fauconbois did, became an ideal of mine. And perhaps, an icon for those times.