Looking to a bright new future ............ history books from the 1950s

Now I have never lost my love of the children’s history books I read back in the 1950s.*

The cooling earth

And so I have returned with another old favourite, and lest anyone thinks this is just a bit of nostalgia I have to say that these books offer up a fascinating glimpse into how history was being written for children and how some writers had embraced the idea that the past is not just about Kings and Queens along with a few of the good and the powerful.

R.J. Unstead and Edward Osmond wrote social history which explored everyday lives and broke new ground by explaining how geography and nature played a part in shaping the history of our country.

The Fotress Home

Added to which there were an abundance of fine illustrations by some of the leading artists of the day.

Of these the pictures of Alan Sorrell and Ron Embleton stand out as excellent examples of historical accuracy matched by a realism which then and even now I find most compelling.

And so to The Pictorial History Book which was published in 1955.  It is a wonderful book covering the history of Britain from the very beginning of the Universe, through to the 1950s lavishly illustrated and offering a mix of short paragraphs with longer explanations of events and detailed fact summaries covering everything from timelines to biographies and data.

My copy I think must date from Christmas 1955 or soon after.  It is now very battered and in danger of falling apart, having lost its protective cover a long time ago, and yet it is still magic to read, and often is a first port of call for information long before those adult reference books or a trawl of Wikipedia.

The New Model Army

So yes, a tad nostalgic indulgence perhaps, but also an exploration of how history was being presented to young people in the 1950s.

And of course it has become history itself for the book drips with the optimism of the 1950s.

The last two pages FROM TODAY INTO TOMORROW, are full of pictures accompanied with comments about “cheap air travel will make distance of no importance, [with] Holidays in the tropics taken all year round, ........ the drudgery will be taken out of housework by many labour saving machines” and “students from the Commonwealth will come to Britain to be taught in our technical colleges and universities.”

All of which was introduced by “In recent years the idea has been accepted in Britain that no citizen should be left unhelped if he is sick or if there is no work for him to do.”

Now, that then, and now is a pretty sound way to sign off on a history book.

Pictures; from The Pictorial History Book, & Co, Ltd Sampson Low, Marston & Co, Ltd, 1955

*Books Children, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Books%20Children

A Valley Grows Up ..... revisiting an old friend

I never tire of reading children’s history books.

Apart from the fact that most are beautifully illustrated and have a simple crisp text they are clues to how the study of history has changed. Victorian and Edwardian books tend to emphasis the growth of the British empire and well into the 1930’s much of the story is told bottom down through Kings and Queens and the brave, rich and great.

But by the 1950s the depiction of our “island story” has changed and much more emphasis is placed on social history.

Historians like R. J. Unstead produced books with fine illustrations which describe the lives of everyone from the nobility to peasant.

And I suppose my favourite of this new wave of books was A Valley Grows Up by Edward Osmond.*

It was published by the O.U.P and sold for 12s 6d. The magic of the book is that it told the story of an imaginary valley from 5000 BC to 1900.

The Valley around 5,000 BC

This it did through ten colour plates plenty of fine line drawings and a clear simple text. Here was the development of the valley’s landscape from prehistoric to Victorian taking in changes from an uninhabited forest through to tree clearing and early settlements.

All are here, from the Celts and Romans through to the Saxons, Normans and beyond.

His wife Laurie Osmond, produced a companion book, The Thames Flows Down, O.U.P., 1957.

The Valley in 1900

Like A Valley Grows Up, it gives that wonderful sense of historical sequence but carefully does not fall into the trap of describing change which is always progressive, always for the best and which seeks to show how the past is just a prelude to the achievements of today.

All the more a pity because it has long gone out of print.

I did however get a lovelly letter from Laurie Osmond who I had written to in the 1980s.

She thanked me for writing was pleased I still enjoyed both books and and kindly gave me permission to use the colour plates in a slide presentation I did for students which took the magic to a new generation.

I must confess to owning two copies of the Valley and one of the Thames.

Picture; cover of A Valley Grows Up

* A Valley Grows Up http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20Valley%20Grows%20Up

When geography became history .............. Looking at Other Children published in 1957

Now here is one of those children’s books from the 1950s which has become a history book.

I doubt that Jean and David Gadsby who wrote Looking at other Children ever thought that the passage of nearly 60 years would turn their geography book into a wonderful piece of history.

And yet that it what it has become.  It was part of a series on Looking at Geography published in 1957 by A & C Black Ltd and along with this one included Looking at Everyday Things, Looking at Britain, Looking at the World Today and Looking at Scotland.

Sadly I only have Looking at Children which ran to thirteen chapters and compared the lives of young people in Britain with those of the Amazon Rain Forest, Greenland, Saudi Arabia along with China, Norway, India and Holland.

It is a delightful book packed with fine line drawings and some colour plates.

Of course the book misses out on much of what we might today expect of a trawl through eight countries of the world.  There is nothing on the government or politics of each country or the issues of poverty and underdevelopment but that is to be a tad harsh on what was a book aimed at a young audience.

On the positive side there is much to ponder on starting with how each of these countries has changed over 58 years.

And what leaps out of the page is how different Britain looked.

It starts with those descriptions of everyday life including a time when annual holidays were still taken at British seaside resorts and high streets looked much as they had done three decades earlier.

So as spring arrived, “mother notices how dusty everywhere looks in the sunlight [and] she sets to work ‘spring cleaning’ – scrubbing, dusting and polishing every room” while “father digs the garden, plants the onion, lettuce, and carrot seed and sows early peas and flower seeds.”

But before any one challenges this as an idealistic picture of British life shot through with middle class assumptions it is one I remember from my own childhood and could have been replicated in homes from well heeled Surrey to working class Woolwich and suburban Chorlton.

In the same way I remember in the heat of the summer “the shop keepers pulled down their blinds, so that the sun did not fade the brightly coloured hats and dresses in their windows [and] everywhere was dry and dusty, and the water cart went round the streets.”

All of which may seem nostalgic tosh but was how we lived and it is delightful to be reminded of it from a book which in its way is part of that history.

Pictures; from Looking at Other Children, Jean and David Gadsby

*Looking at Other Children, Jean and David Gadsby, from the series Looking at Geography, 1957

This is Rome .......... from 1960

I have never lost my fascination for Rome.

I have friends who long ago fell in love with Venice, others who keep going back to Florence and yet more who never cease talking about Paris, but for me it is Rome.

It started with an all consuming interest in Roman history and has been cemented over the years by visits to the Eternal City.

The place always amazes me and you never quite get away from that feeling that down every street there is a ruin, and around every corner a piazza.

And despite its magnificent buildings, wide avenues and frenetic pace it remains on a human scale.

Over the years I have invested in guide books, scholarly accounts of the city and picked up those free little maps full of adverts for pizzerias, car hire firms and taxis and recently I added This is Rome to the collection and it is one of my favourites.

Unlike the others it is aimed at children, was first published in 1960 and comes from a series written and illustrated by Miroslav Sasek.

Now I am a great fan of the books of Mr Sasek, partly because they are informative and written with a degree of wit but also because of the illustrations which are bold bright and imaginative.

So on one page there is a fine picture of the Pantheon with a bit of history, while on another a mix of motorbikes with the caption, “Rome is full of statues, but full of motorcycles too.  We prefer the statues, they are so much quieter.”

And it is those illustrations which do it for me.

The style is one you saw a lot of in the 1950s and 60s, which still look fresh today.

In the same series are books on Venice, London, New York, Paris and Edinburgh as well as Hong Kong San Francisco and Texas.

In time I think I will collect the lot after all if the ones on Rome and London are representative of the rest they will not only be fun to read, very informative but will provide me with some excellent pictures to look at.

Picture; Rome, 2009 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, remaining images from This is Italy, Miroslav Sasek, 1960, reprinted 2007

A Valley Grows Up ..... revisiting an old friend

The cover

I never tire of reading children’s history books.

Apart from the fact that most are beautifully illustrated and have a simple crisp text they are clues to how the study of history has changed. Victorian and Edwardian books tend to emphasis the growth of the British empire and well into the 1930’s much of the story is told bottom down through Kings and Queens and the brave, rich and great.

But by the 1950s the depiction of our “island story” has changed and much more emphasis is placed on social history.

 Historians like R. J. Unstead produced books with fine illustrations which describe the lives of everyone from the nobility to peasant.

And I suppose my favourite of this new wave of books was A Valley Grows Up by Edward Osmond.*  It was published by the O.U.P and sold for 12s 6d. The magic of the book is that it told the story of an imaginary valley from 5000 BC to 1900.

The valley, 7,000 years ago

This it did through ten colour plates plenty of fine line drawings and a clear simple text.

 Here was the development of the valley’s landscape from prehistoric to Victorian taking in changes from an uninhabited forest through to tree clearing and early settlements.

 All are here, from the Celts and Romans through to the Saxons, Normans and beyond.

His wife Laurie Osmond, produced a companion book, The Thames Flows Down, O.U.P., 1957.

The Valley, 2,500 years ago

Like A Valley Grows Up, it gives that wonderful sense of historical sequence but carefully does not fall into the trap of describing change which is always progressive, always for the best and which seeks to show how the past is just a prelude to the achievements of today.

All the more a pity because it has long gone out of print.  I did however get a lovelly letter from Laurie Osmond who I had written to in the 1980s.

She thanked me for writing was pleased I still enjoyed both books and and kindly gave me permission to use the colour plates in a slide presentation I did for students which took the magic to a new generation.

I must confess to owning two copies of the Valley and one of the Thames.

Picture; cover of A Valley Grows Up

* Other posts on the book at http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20Valley%20Grows%20Up

Telling history the old fashioned way ..... People in History, R.J.Unstead

I am not a fan of that new generation of history books aimed at young people.

True they are colourful, offer high quality photographs, along with original source material and can be imaginatively presented, but all this comes with a price.

And that price is that they seem to sacrifice the story with its sweeping narrative and opportunity to get lost in the tale.

Added to which the amount of material on the page can be a tad bewildering and overpowering.

So I have turned to a fine collection of stories written by R.J. Unstead in the 1950s.

Now I am the first to point out that People in History was written from the stand point of “the great men and women in our country’s history” and of the twelve covered in the first volume only two are women.*

Nor is this any better in volume two in which only Queen Philippa and Saint Margaret, Queen of Scotland strut across the pages which are otherwise dominated by Kings and Princes.

But that is to miss the point.  In much of the books I was given at school, women played no part at all in “our country’s history” and there was a very clear assumption that our past was shaped by the actions of Kings and generals with just a grudging acknowledgement that perhaps Elizabeth 1 and Queen Victoria had to be included.

And Mr Unstead widened his interpretation of what constituted “great”.

So in volume one alongside King Alfred and Queen Boadicea were saints, a Pope and the Roman general Agricola while in the second volume Geoffrey Chaucer, William Caxton and Wat Tyler rub shoulders with William the Conqueror, the Lion-Heart  and Henry V.

And the presentation of men like Wat Tyler and John Ball are fair and the explanation for the Peasants Revolt does not trivialise or ignore the genuine grievances of the poor in Medieval England.

Of course with the passage of time, Boadicea has become Boudica and some of the illustrations would no longer pass the test of historical accuracy but that said Mr Unstead’s stories remain a jolly good read, and that I think is an important consideration.

For long before any of us develop the analytical skills to make sense of original sources we have  to have been captured by the magic of the past.

And while the stories are Mr Unstead’s version of events the selection and presentation of pictures and sources in the new generation of history books are themselves the product of someone’s choice, the logic of which may not always be explained.

So I think I shall go back to Boadicea’s anger that “the Romans treat us like slaves” and follow the marauding Iceni army’s encounter with the 9th legion and then on to Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium, before meeting their fate at the hands of the 14th and 20th Legions.

Picture; drawings  by J.C.B. Knight, from People in History, R.J. Unstead, Volume one

*Introduction, People in History, Book 1 From Caractacus to Alfred 1955

From dug out canoe to nuclear merchant ship ..... the history of sea travel from 1961

I don’t remember coming across Travel by Sea as a child, which is a shame because it would have certainly powered my imagination.

It is as the title implies the story of ships from early times to the mid 20th century and like so many of the books produced in the 1950s and 60s by A. & C. Black it is a fine mix of illustrations and text.

And like so many of these books what adds an extra element of interest is the final section which focuses on the ships which were plying the oceans in the middle decades of the last century.

Along with the changing design and technologies there are descriptions of how sea travel was moving from the preserve of the very rich and steerage class into the tourist trade.

So “travelling by sea today is like spending a holiday in a floating hotel” and the development of the cruise liner continues to be an important aspect of modern tourism

And nowhere is this more evident than in Naples where the tall ships given over to cruising the Mediterranean dominate the sea port.

I lost count of the number of these giants of the sea, patiently waiting for the hundreds of passengers who would soon be boarding for that potent mix of sun, foreign sites and a bit of history.

But what really fascinated me was the description of “the first nuclear-powered merchant ship to go into service.”

This was "the Savanah which in 1959 was being built in the U.S.A ...... [and which will be] fuelled with uranium oxide, [which] will enable it to operate for three and half years, covering 300,000 miles before refuelling.”

Now given the number of nuclear powered warships I don’t know why I was surprised but I was.

And she was one of only four such ships built and in her case remained in service for just ten years and today remains quietly moored in Maryland awaiting a developer with an idea of what to do with her.

All of which just shows what you can learn from a children’s history book published in 1961.

Picture; from Travel by Sea, 1961

*Travel by Sea through the ages, Robert J Hoare, 1961

From cave to castle and on to a high rise ............ the story of houses and how we used them

I never think you can get enough of the history books written by R.J. Unstead in the 1950s.*

This one comes from Black’s Junior Reference Books** and was published in 1958.

It was not one that I was given as a child but I rather wish I had because in just 80 pages it offers a clear and comprehensive description of houses from earlier times up to the mid 1950s.

It is paced full of interesting information on the style and construction of houses, along with the possessions that could be found in them and much about how people used their homes.

And above all it is the excellent collection of line drawings of everything from castles and cottages to windows, furniture and how the house moved from being a communal place to a more private residence of just one family.

It is also a book I often go back to as a starting point for ideas, and pictures of the everyday domestic objects from a 19th century kitchen range and copper to a Tudor  four poster bed and Roman Hypocaust.

It isn’t that I couldn’t find these elsewhere but there is a pleasure in leafing through the pages and coming across some old favourites.

Not that this is just a sad slide into nostalgia, instead it is a celebration of when history books for young people were informative, fun to read and just jolly good books to have around.

I suspect also they were embraced by teachers and librarians in those post war decades when education and schools were themselves undergoing profound changes.

So once again it’s a thank you to Mr Unstead and I rather think I will go looking for a few more.

Pictures; from A History of Houses, R.J.Unstead, 1958

*LOOKING AT HISTORY, PEOPLE IN HISTORY, TEACHING HISTORY IN JUNIOR SCHOOLS

**DEEP SEA FISHING, TRAVEL BY ROAD, THE STORY OF AIRCRAFT, COAL MINING, THE STORY OF THE THEATRE, TRAVEL BY SEA

R.J. Unstead

Of all my favourite children’s history books those written by Robert John Unstead are the ones I most frequently return to.

He was a prolific author and his career as a teacher shines through in what he published.

These were books to be read, enjoyed and understood by children, often reading on their own.

They were also full of both colourful paintings and more to the point simple accurate line drawings which could be copied.

I wonder how many young children like me spent hours carefully reproducing the picture of a Norman castle and comparing it to later castles, noting the changes in design.

I do not think you can underestimate the degree to which this brought history alive.

His other great strength for me was that much of what he wrote was designed to describe the lives of ordinary people, including their homes, forms of entertainment and work.

This was history from the bottom up and was a powerful counter blast to stories of Kings and Queens. Not that Unstead ignored royal stories there would always be a market for such history. But these are balanced by those given over to descriptions of the lives of all in society.

Picture; Cover of Looking At History A & C Black 1955

Rediscovering a bit of police history half a century ago

Now here is another of those books whose contents has passed into history.

The Eagle Book of Police and Detection, was published in 1960.

At the time I can remember thinking how modern most of what I was reading was but now with the passage of over half a century much of it looks as dated as those rattles carried by Peelers in the 1830s.

All of which offered up a fascinating hour or so of reading from the CID, and fight against crime on the Thames, to new the new technologies and methods of detection which were at the cutting edge of police work in the late 1950s.

Of course I am well aware that this book which was one of the Eagle collection will not be available to many people.

I long ago lost my copy and had to buy this one from Brian the Book on Beech Road in the 1980s and I doubt that many copies still exist.

So for those who will never come across a copy I shall just leave you with this image.

The caption reads “Old and new together in the City of London; a mounted officer of the exacting City Force with a walkie talkie apparatus.  City Force are distinguished by the brass on their helmets and the red stripes on their arm bands.”

For me the term walkie talkie is as familiar as the trolley bus and the telegram but for many they will be as remote as the horse drawn omnibus and the films of Tom Mix.

But then until last month I still had a clockwork mobile from the last century and a preference for the music of Glen Millar, all of which made my 1960 book on the Police a familiar friend.

Pictures; from Eagle Book of Police & Detection, 1960

*Eagle Book of Police & Detection, Richard Harrison, 1960

A history of the Ancient World in Italian

Now the thing about reading history books produced in other countries is they can offer a different slant on events you are familiar with.

Much of what I was taught was very Eurocentric and even when there was a nod to the histories of other parts of the world it often just became the story of Europeans abroad.

So that period when Europe began to expand beyond the continent was always presented as the European Voyages of Discovery with men like Columbus, Cabot and Cook credited with the  discovery new lands and people as if these “new peoples” had been lost till that moment in time.

Likewise looking at a map produced by the Soviet Union in the 1950s  which showed the country surrounded by what were perceived hostile countries goes a little way to understand the threat they felt.

All of which is an introduction to LE GRANDI CIVILTÀ DEL MONDO ANTICO, which is just what the title says, an Italian book on The Great Civilizations of the Ancient World.

It will of course make an interesting read given that it is in Italian and aimed at nine year olds.

So I rather think here is a double winner, for my Italian is almost non existent and I will get to discover a little of what our Italian family understand about the past.

Pictures; cover of  LE GRANDI CIVILTÀ DEL MONDO ANTICO, 2009, www.giunti.it

"a book about the everyday lives of the ordinary people of England"

I don’t think you can better the introduction by R.J.Unstead to his book Looking at History as a statement for what a children’s account of the past should be like.

“This is a book about the everyday lives of the ordinary people of England from the days when they lived in caves to the present day.  It shows how they built their homes and cooked their food, how they dressed, fought, travelled, worked and enjoyed themselves.

“This is, in short, a social history for children, which sets out to give them enjoyment and understanding that comes from ‘looking at history.’”

And this he did with “nearly 1000 illustrations which have been selected from contemporary sources or specially drawn, after careful research.”

There will be critics who point out that it is a book which is just about England, does not reflect the contribution of people who settled here from other places, and is light on its treatment of the role played by women in our history.

All of which is true, but it was written in the early 1950s when many history books concentrated on telling the story of Kings, Queens, generals and the rich.

By contrast Looking at History and many of his other books are history from the bottom up, and are as much about the poor, and working people as they are about the powerful, the famous and the people of plenty.

And for me what drew me in and still does are those illustrations some of which are in colour but most were line drawings which had a realism that made the book a must for a six year old.

In fact it was those line drawings which really captured my imagination, and years later when the book was republished in the 1970s substituting coloured versions of those pictures I for one thought the impact was muted.

That said the book could be found in schools and libraries from the 1950s onwards.

It was divided into four parts and continued to be used from the 1950s well into the 1970s.

Now I have lost touch with the children’s history books and rarely pick them up but those produced by Mr Unstead still have a special place on our book shelves.

Picture; The Press Gang, J.C.B. Knight, from LOOKING AT HISTORY, R.J. Unstead, 1955, A. &C. Black Ltd

Sailing with the Phoenicians to the Tin Islands and more ......... A Picture History of Great Discoveries 1954

I am back with another of those history books written for children in the 1950s.

Many of the ones I was given at the time have survived and sit on our book shelves along with others that I have bought over the years.*

What makes A Picture History of Great Discoveries different is that while it was originally published in 1954 it has been reissued along with A Picture History of Britain.**

They were part of a series which also included the history of France and Italy and were striking in their use of colour and dramatic images.

That said I never quite took to these books in the way that I did to those of R.J. Unstead whose pictures were simpler and more realistic.

But the images in both books are of their time and reflect a style of painting which will be all too familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 60s.

And Great Discoveries is also a book of its time when it was still fashionable to write about voyages of exploration and the discovery of the “New World” with that Eurocentric notion that these were places which having been lost were now rediscovered.

I doubt that the peoples of the Americas, or Africa and the Far East ever quite saw it that way.

Still A Picture History of Great Discoveries remains a fascinating glimpse into how children’s history was written over sixty years ago and by extension how our view of the world and its history was shaped.

Picture; cover of A Picture History of Great Discoveries

*Books Children, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Books%20Children

** A Picture History of Britain, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/a-picture-history-of-britain.html

Never throw away those children's treasures

Now I am on a roll and have begun searching for the history books I read as a child.

Not that this is just a voyage into nostalgia although I have no doubt that is a factor.

No this is about looking again at the style and approach to writing history books for young people.

In time  I will slide into those Victorian and Edwardian books which are full of Kings and Queens and stories of Empire which of course was the staple of my father’s generation who remembered Empire Day and school room maps which showed a quarter of the world in British red.

But for now I am after those of the 1950s, full of magnificent illustrations and shot through with those new ideas that history was also about the “common people” and should include the history of the fire place, the bed and humble potato.

Not that this is as easy as you may think.

Some of these books I still have given to me as presents when I was growing up, but the rest I have to buy again.

And some like The Picture History of Italy will have to come from the USA.  It was going for $4 and with postage at $20 it has cost far more than its original cover price of 12/6d.

Of course someone out there will get back to me with an offer for the book at a fraction of the cost but the deal is done along with A Picture History of France and This is Rome.

And the point of the blog?

Never let your childhood books slip from your grasp and remember that even the humblest children’s history book has much to say about the time it was written.

Like the text book I used for years in school on the 18th century which in its 21 chapters only featured one woman and that was Marie Antoinette, other woman did make it across the pages but were relegated to walk on parts or in the case of many other men women and children were just in the background as fodder for the greats.

Picture; cover of A Picture Book of France, Clarke Hutton, 1965 and This Rome, Miroslav Sasek, 1960

A Picture History of France 1951

I never tire of looking through A Picture History of France by Clarke Hutton.

It is another in the series which was published in the 1950s, by the OUP and while it ran to three reprints is unavailable except as a second hand copy.

I first came across it on a rainy day in Edmund Waller school sometime around 1958.

Like the others in the series it is the artwork that marks it as something special.*

Back then the text was a little too dense but the illustrations were bold and colourful.

At the time I have to admit to being unimpressed with that artwork which lacked the realism of illustrations in other history books.

But now it has a quality which appeals to me.

The style is typical of the period, and looking at the buildings and the historical figures is to be reminded of similar illustrations on posters, and adverts in books, magazines and even on those framed pictures you got in train compartments.

A Picture History of France covers the entire history of the country and in keeping with the approach to history which was becoming fashionable breaks from a series of stories of Kings and Queens and widens its story concluding with a survey of France in the 1950s.

I could have chosen any one of the illustrations from its sixty-one pages but fastened on this describing the south.

Pictures; cover of A Picture History of France, and a detail from page 60

* A Picture History of France by Clarke Hutton, 1951, OUP

**A Picture History of Australia, Britain, Canada, Great Discoveries, India, Italy, Russia, The United States of America

Looking at Ancient History

This is another of my favourites and well worth a look at.

In just over 100 pages R J Unstead presented the young reader of the late 1950s with a sweeping story of the lives of people  from Ancient Egypt through the civilisations of the Two Rivers and to Crete, The Greeks and the Romans culminating with a section of What we owe to the Ancient World.

And like so many of Mr Unstead‘s books it mixes wonderful illustrations with descriptions of everyday life.

What I particularly like about the book is that concentration on “ordinary lives” which were beginning to become part of how history was presented to young people.

Picture; cover of Looking at Ancient History, R J Unstead, 1959

A Picture History of Britain

I first came across A Picture History of Britain, by Clarke Hutton on a wet winter’s day sometime in the 1950s. 

It had been published in 1945 and I guess the Oxford University Press were on to a winner right away. It tells the story of Britain through a number of bold colourful pictures with an accompanying text. Later he wrote A Picture History of Great Discoveries.

Now, I must admit that I was never completely sold on the pictures which were not realistic enough for me, but looking again at the reprint published in 2007 I have to say there is something very striking and attractive about these illustrations.

If there are criticisms of the books it is that they are very eurocentric but they are a product of the time they were written and this serves only to show how history writing for children has changed.

Picture; Cover of A Picture History of Britain

Back on Hadrian's Wall rediscovering a love of all things Roman

Dubnonum circa 250AD

I have been thinking about what started my long love affair with history and in particular the Romans.

It began while I was in school and well over half a century later it is still with me.

Now most of the time I crawl over the lives of people from the last two centuries but it doesn’t take much to trigger that old fascination with all things Roman.

Looking back it will have been those simple line drawings from the books by R.J. Unstead and later that magical book A Valley Grows Up followed by the fine illustrations of Alan Sorrell and Ron Embleton.

A view of the Wall, drawn in 1955

At its most basic it will have been a young boy’s interest in all things military from the legions and their campaigns and slowly blossomed out to all aspects of Roman life.

It has taken me to Rome and Pompeii and from Bath to Hadrian’s Wall along with countless museums across the country always with that simple wish to discover more.

Of all these places it will be Hadrian’s Wall which is there amongst the top three.

It is partly the romance of the place, the continuing discoveries that come up out of the ground and of course the way that every time I go back there are fresh interpretations.

Only yesterday my friend Lois shared the idea that the Wall was a way of containing the troops in what one academic has called “Wolf cages.”

And of course every Roman Emperor knew that to secure his position he had to ensure the loyalty of the army, whether that came from donations, profitable military campaigns or simply keeping them busy like building Hadrian’s Wall.

When I was at school the Wall was simply a way of stopping marauding tribes from invading the peaceful bits of Britain.

Later it was seen as more a statement of power and that bold assertion that this was the end of the civilized world.

But those that lived beyond it might have much to gain from the presence of the army which made  the Wall a customs and control point supervising the cross border economy.

Wood writing tablet

Now I don’t pretend to be anything but a novice when it comes to interpretations of the Wall’s part in the complicated history of Roman Britain but it has thrown up some fascinating glimpses of life on the frontier.

Of these it must be the  the Vindolanda writing tablets which I still go back to.

They range from simple lists of military supplies to letters home, requests for clothes and the invitation to a birthday party written around AD 100 from Claudia Severa, the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, to Sulpicia Lepidina.

Now these bring me as close as I can get to the Romans and along with that blog by Lois  on Hadrian’s Wall have sent me off on a quest again.

I have dusted down the map of the Wall, dug out the books I have on its history and started looking at train timetables.

All of which just leaves me wondering on whether I shall go east to Wallsend close to where father was born or head directly north from Manchester to explore the western side.  Cumbria beware.

Pictures; the Wall as interpreted in 1955, from Looking at History, R.J.Unstead, the imaginary Roman town of Dubnonum from A Valley Grows Up, Edward Osmond, 1953 and Wood writing tablet with a party invitation written in ink, in two hands, from Claudia Severa to Lepidina, uploaded by Fæ, 1986 and  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unportedlicense.

*New thoughts on Hadrian’s Wall and and exciting open on-line courses from universities around the world, Lois Elsden,
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/new-thoughts-on-hadrians-wall-and-and.html

**Lois Elsden Writer, http://loiselden.com/

A Valley Grows Up ............ the early centuries

I have been re posting* some old stories of a book from my childhood in the hope that the O.U.P. might republish it.

It is Edward Osmond's story of the changes to a valley over time  and has long been one of my favourite books.

Two views of the valley.
The valley about 5000 BC
The valley about 250 AD
Picures from A Valley Grows Up E Osmond, O.U.P. 1953
* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20Valley%20Grows%20Up

A Valley Grows Up more from a wonderful book

 I have decided to revisit an old favourite which I first posted last year * and which deserves to be seen again.  I only hope that the O.U.P. will republish soon.

Two views of the valley from the book A Valley Grows UP
The valley about 1170 AD
The valley about 1900 AD
Picture; from A Valley Grows Up E. Osmond, O.U.P. 1953


*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/a-valley-grows-up-revisiting-old-friend.html