Enid Blyton (19 page)

All her business matters with her publishers were discussed either in person or through her distinctive, hand-written letters – by now very well known to all who had regular dealings with her. The recipients never failed to be astonished when they discovered that she kept no copies of these letters, but could usually rely on her extraordinarily retentive memory should she have to refer to the contents again. George Greenfield, who eventually became one of her literary agents in 1954, described Enid at that time as having a ‘card index’ mind, for he had known her to ring up and refer to certain paragraphs of letters she had written six or even twelve months previously – and she could always remember the terms under which she had signed contracts with editors and publishers.

Enid realised that she had been fortunate in being able to establish herself as a best-selling writer during the war years, despite the obvious publishing difficulties, and that this was in no small measure due to the links with her readers of
Sunny Stories
and
Teachers’ World
and the faith of her publishers in her eventual sales. Even at the most desperate period of shortage it was rumoured that one house allotted sufficient paper for the printing of some hundred and fifty thousand copies of a single title in a popular series and others set aside enough to print between twenty-five and a hundred thousand copies of each of her new books. This certainty over her selling powers was evidently justified for no sooner were most of these on the market than they were out of stock – as her readers would continually inform her. She commented on this in several wartime editorial letters in
Sunny Stories
and went on to suggest that if the children could not obtain the books they wanted, they should either try the public libraries for other titles or borrow from their friends: ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you more,’ she wrote in March 1944, ‘but I can’t get the books myself, sometimes! You shall have as many as you like after the war.’ Once the restrictions were over, she soon set about keeping this promise and the relinquishing, in the autumn of 1945, of the column she had written for
Teachers’ World
for almost twenty-three years gave her the opportunity she needed to widen still further the range of her writing activities.

She decided to wind up her column on the retirement of Mr E.H. Allen, who had taken her first contribution to the magazine and had continued to follow her career with friendly interest throughout his editorship. Enid disliked changes not of her own making, and did not feel inclined to fall in with any fresh ideas that a new editor might bring, and her last ‘Letter from Green Hedges’ appeared on 14 November 1945:

Seven years later Enid also withdrew from
Sunny Stories
after twenty-six years as its editor – though this time there was no letter of farewell. She had already circulated teachers, librarians and educationalists and advertised widely in newspapers and other periodicals that she would soon be starting up her own fortnightly magazine. It would be, she told them, the only one from then on to be written entirely by herself and to contain ‘all the stories the children love best’.

The first edition of this
Enid Blyton Magazine
appeared on 18 March 1953 – some two months before the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – a circumstance which Enid was quick to follow up with a six-part serial
The Story of Our Queen,
and a special photographic competition with seats to watch the Coronation as first prize. In a later issue she suggested readers might like to send their own personal Christmas messages of affection and loyalty to the new monarch. This resulted in a special leather-bound volume, containing a letter from Enid and twelve selected greetings from the hundreds received, being despatched to the Queen.

The new magazine, which was published by Evans Brothers, contained an editorial letter, puzzles, competitions, a nature-lovers’ corner and serials, short stories and strip cartoons featuring characters already well known to Enid’s regular readers. As with her previous publications, the
Enid Blyton Magazine
was also used as a means of encouraging children to help with several worthy causes and regular news was given of four clubs specifically formed for this purpose.

In a 1957 article describing these sponsored clubs, Enid wrote that she felt young people should help animals and other children:

Membership of her clubs, she explained, did not merely mean the wearing of a badge, it meant ‘working for others, for no reward’ and from all corners of the world she received hundreds of letters each week enclosing money and information on the many ingenious ways it had been raised. These children wrote of how they had saved their bus fares, helped with odd jobs, organised concerts, sales and fetes and the publishing of these letters acted as a further stimulus for other readers to do likewise.

The oldest and largest of the four clubs involved was the Busy Bees – the junior section of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. Enid had been interested in this society since 1933, when she first started writing articles and short stories for its publications. She had frequently mentioned the work of the PDSA in her
Teachers’ World
columns and when she became ‘Queen Bee’ of the Busy Bees in 1951, she encouraged membership still further through her letters in
Sunny Stories
and monthly contributions to its own magazine,
The Busy Bees
News. When she decided to give information about this club’s activities in the
Enid Blyton Magazine,
some hundred thousand readers joined in less than three years.

The Famous Five Club originated through a series of books about the ‘Famous Five’ – four children and a dog – the first story of which was published by Hodder and Stoughton in the autumn of 1942. So popular did this series become that Enid was commissioned to write a fresh title each year and the Fives created such a following that regular readers of these books asked if they might form some kind of ‘fan’ club. Enid agreed, on the condition that the club should also serve some useful purpose and suggested that it might help raise funds for a Shaftesbury Society Babies Home in Beaconsfield, on whose local committee she had served for several years.

This home had been founded by a group of wealthy Beaconsfield residents to house convalescent, deprived children from the East End of London, but when it was taken over by the Shaftesbury Society in 1921, it was used mainly for boarding out pre-school infants in need of special care. Enid had first been introduced to the home in 1945 and had subsequently taken to visiting it occasionally with toys and sweets for the children. When she became a committee member in 1948 she also began giving considerable financial help and interested herself still further in its activities. In 1950 alone, she made over by deed of gift her accumulated royalties on
Before I Go To Sleep
(Latimer House, 1947) – amounting to several thousand pounds – and other cheques followed once the Famous Five Club got under way in 1952. Despite her busy writing life, she made a point of visiting the home regularly and always attending the monthly committee meetings, and was thus able to report in her magazine on the children’s progress and how the money raised by the club was being spent. In time, members provided funds towards such amenities as the furnishing and equipment of a special ‘Famous Five Ward’, a paddling pool, playground, sun room, summer house and a host of other extras, including visits to the pantomime and contributions towards Christmas and birthday celebrations.

Enid became chairman of the committee in 1954 and remained so until the closure of the home in 1967, but the Famous Five Club, with a membership approaching two hundred and twenty thousand – and still rising steadily at a rate of some six thousand each year – has since provided a special Enid Blyton bed at Great Ormond Street Hospital and a mini-bus for disabled children at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

Soon after launching her new magazine, Enid had visited one of the Sunshine Homes for Blind Babies – another cause in which she had always had a special interest – and mentioned the visit to her readers. She suggested that they might like to help her form a society to help raise funds for these blind children and asked for their assistance in choosing its name. Although ‘Lamp-lighters’ was the choice of many, Enid preferred ‘The Sunbeam Society’ for ‘Sunbeams light up the dark places and bring joy and delight to everyone.’ Within six years of the society being formed, its yellow badge – depicting the head of a blind child turned towards the sun – was worn by, according to Enid, ‘over 22,000 of my warmest-hearted and generous readers.’

The main object of the
Enid Blyton Magazine
Club was to help the young children with cerebral palsy who daily attended a special centre in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London. This centre had been the subject of a Week’s Good Cause broadcast appeal made by Enid in May 1955 and, once again, the response from her readers to the suggestion of forming a club on the centre’s behalf was overwhelming. Ten thousand requests for membership were made within the first month and by January 1957 the club had recruited its hundred thousandth member. Evans Brothers decided to mark the occasion by inviting Enid and some of the children who had worked for the club to a celebration party at the magazine’s headquarters at Montague House in London’s Russell Square. There was a special cake and Enid was presented with an initialled and dated gold replica of the Magazine Club badge. Funds raised by this club eventually helped to furnish a hostel attached to the centre and to provide various other extra amenities. Enid broadcast two further appeals on behalf of these children and in 1960 was elected a Vice-President of the Friends of the Centre – by which time the Club’s membership had increased to around a hundred and fifty thousand.

When she decided to close the magazine in September 1959 (see Appendix 5), Enid was determined that this would not mean that her clubs would also cease to function without their ‘headquarters’. With the exception of the Famous Five Club, which was then handled by the books’ publisher, all were kept alive through the organisations they had helped and by the Enid Blyton diaries (first published by Collins in 1950) which continued to give news of all four and the charities they supported. Monetarily, they had contributed between them around £35,000 during the magazine’s six years of life – in those days a sum which, Enid told her readers in her last editorial letter, ‘even grown-ups would find difficult to raise’.

But the charities supported by the four clubs were not the only causes to benefit through Enid’s interest. She made mention from time to time in her magazine of other organisations needing help, often following up in her ‘letter’ any broadcast appeals she had made. After one such appeal on behalf of a home for retarded boys, the secretary wrote: ‘To us, whose children are usually at the tail end of public sympathy, the response was nothing short of miraculous …’

Enid’s attitudes, generally, had by this time become well known. Each new year she would urge her readers to make ‘Be kind and love one another’ their resolution for the coming twelve months; ‘kindness of heart means you cannot possibly do or say anything that would hurt anyone or upset them.’

She had for some years made regular visits to exhibitions and large bookshops and stores to talk to groups of children and she would invariably weave a moral into the stories she told them on these occasions. Such was her personal magnetism and charm that even the most unruly bunch of youngsters – sometimes numbering a hundred or more – would within moments of her appearance be quietened down into a well-behaved, adoring audience, listening and absorbing all that she had to tell them. This effect upon those she met was by no means confined to children only, for even cynical adults at other gatherings (such as the Foyle’s Literary Lunch of 1947, at which she was a guest speaker) were won over by her personal charisma.

Her letters and articles, giving her views on a variety of topics, appeared regularly in the national press and she was frequently being quoted – both at home and overseas – on anything appertaining to children and their care. At the opening of an exhibition of mothercraft at the Central Hall, Westminster in November 1949, she was widely reported for her criticism of the Government’s call to married women to work in factories, as she felt this would mean ‘abandoning children to the care of others’ and in all her interviews both on the radio and with the Press, she stressed the need for a secure home background and the part a mother should play in achieving this. She wrote of her own family in
The Story of My Life
(Pitkin, 1952):