For years information on this has been very fragmented. Serious records of children’s illustrators of the 20th century have tended to overlook the Ladybird artists.

This new venture proved to be a commercial success and the plan to abandon book publication after the war was eventually dropped. Yet we can see evidence of the medieval and later landscape of open fields, shared by the tenants of the manor: there’s a hump in the field to the left of the farm. This is surely the headland, where ploughs once turned between two fields, now ploughed out. His other association with Deverson included working on the Mainly for Children series that was published by the Sunday Times during the early 1960s. How can we tell? The boundaries in this landscape are straight. A surveyor’s pen drew them and his chains and lines made them a physical reality. somewhere in the Kentish Weald in the 18th century. (Enclosure was the process by which common land and strip farming in open fields was brought into private ownership and the landless – who relied on access to commons to graze animals – were forced from the land.)

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The Story of Bread by H. J. Deverson. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books in association with Ranks Hovis McDougall (Puffin Picture Book 119), 1964. Learning About Insects and Small Animals by Romola Showell. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1972. Lampitt was a private man: sociable when among a small group of friends and family (the Deversons in particular) but with little interest in seeking entertainment further afield. When engaged on a project he spent long hours in his ‘studio’– a room at the top of the family home, coming down only for meals. He died in 1988, aged 82, after a long fight with Parkinson’s disease. The Story of the Ladybird Artists 1940-75, can be seen at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury until 23 September 2018, and is open Tue-Sun. Admission is free

On one of our recent visits to a local secondhand bookshop, my wife came across a copy of The Map That Came to Life, a book she read avidly when she was a child. Written by H. J. Deverson and illustrated by Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life was first published in 1948, and was much reprinted. It describes how two children (and a dog) go on a walk across the English countryside with an Ordnance Survey map to guide them. Much of what they find on the way is marked on the map, whose symbols for roads, railways, telephone boxes, tumuli, and so on and on, turn to reality along the way. The reader, meanwhile, learns how to read a map, and how maps have much to teach us about the world around us. A book that many will remember from school, The Map that Came to Life was produced in 1948, with friend and brother-in-law Harry Deverson. This book, which introduces map reading to children via the story of two children going for a walk, was followed some years later by The Open Road – in which the same two children explore the countryside with Uncle George, in his Hillman Minx Convertible Coupe. United Kingdom Ronald Lampitt was born in Worcester in 1906. He painted in oil and watercolour but is best known for his work as an illustrator or children’s books and railway posters. The many magazines he contributed to included Zoo, Passing Show, Illustrated, Modern Wonder, John Bull, Look and Learn and Treasure. In the 1930s he produced a number of very popular travel posters for railway companies including the Great Western Railway and Southern Railway. As a book illustrator he worked for the Oxford University Press and most memorably for Ladybird Books, for whom he illustrated many publications. In association with his brother-in-law, Henry James Deverson, he produced the Mainly for Children series, published by the Sunday Times in the early 1960s. He is known for his extensive aerial views of landscapes and townscapes, which are the result of his war service in RAF Intelligence where he was employed making drawings of bombing targets based on aerial photographs. This is a winter landscape with leafless trees, a grey sky and fields bare of crops. The farmstead sits in the centre and, from Lampitt’s depiction, we can trace the farm’s origins and several phases in its development. This is, almost certainly, a product of the process of parliamentary enclosurecame across these 1950’s John Bull magazines with covers illustrated by Lampitt. They exemplify his Betjemanesque vision of an England it.Ronald Lampitt was one of the 30 illustrators involved in the creation of the book. He, like the others, was a humble ‘commercial illustrator’, as they

For many years I have been collecting original artwork, artefacts and stories about these artists and their world and I am delighted that The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge has given me the opportunity to share this fascinating story for the first time. The hedges are mostly of single species – hawthorn waiting for its May blossom – interspersed with trees. These are elms. Mid-20th century British illustratorRonald Lampitthad a predilection for maps. It probably was no coincidence that he got to draw, in the Illustrated Magazine of 17 February 1951, the proposal of John Sleigh Pudney for an ideal city.

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Towards the end of the film there’s a parade of cattle for judging and the Holstein Freisians are outnumbered. The drive for greater milk yields meant that soon they would be ubiquitous and this would change how farms such as this would work and look. Mixed farms became specialised and, ultimately, larger and less diverse. Many of these books were in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Henry James Deverson (Lampitt was married to Deverson’s sister, Mona). The two men collaborated on a number of children’s books, including The Map that Came to Life (1948, Oxford University Press), The Open Road (1962) and The Story of Bread (1964, Puffin Books). This is the story which is being told for the first time in Kent this summer at the Ladybird Artists exhibition at The Beaney in Canterbury. Born in March 1906, Ronald was the oldest of the three boys born to Roland Edward Lampitt and Florence (nee Pope). The family were comfortably off but, when young Ronald was offered a place to study at The Slade, his father refused to let him go, advising him to “get a proper job”.

Although born in Worcester, he adopted Kent as his home, living in Sidcup for 50 years, until his death in 1988. The Kent countryside figures prominently in his art and illustration and at weekends he used to go out sketching with his friend, artist Rowland Hilder who was a Kent native. However, he also illustrated railway posters in the 1950s and 60s for destination including Bexhill-on-Sea, Harlech Castle and St Michael's Mount in Cornwall.His friend and brother-in-law Harry Deverson was a well-connected Fleet Street journalist and helped Lampitt to find work with various publications including 'Illustrated' and the popular weekly magazine 'John Bull'. [1] Together they also produced two books: 'The Map that Came to Life' (1948) and 'The Open Road' (1962), written to introduce children to map-reading and the pleasures of exploring the countryside. Lampitt was particularly skilled at producing illustrations of large topographical areas and his first commission for Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books) was 'Understanding Maps'. He went on to illustrate a total of 9 Ladybird books until the sale of Wills & Hepworth, in 1972. This prototype served its purpose; the directors were finally convinced and in 1953 British Birds and their Nests, written by naturalist Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald and illustrated by Allen Seaby, was published. It was a great and immediate hit and set the company upon the path to extraordinary success. Harry Wingfield and Martin Atichison are today perhaps best known for illustrating the Peter and Jane books that taught so many of us to read. But Aitchison’s wartime service saw him working with Barnes Wallis, producing artist’s impressions to help sell the idea of the Dambusters bouncing bomb – which was tested at Reculver. The poster depicts a village in the Dales, accompanied by lines from A E Housman's poem, 'The Merry Guide'.