Enid Blyton (20 page)

In a church magazine of the early ’fifties, she answered a reader’s question about the necessity of religious teaching in bringing up a child:

In early editions of the
Enid Blyton Magazine,
she encouraged readers to follow a daily course of Bible readings, either through the International Bible Reading Association or the Scripture Union, and she put her name to special issues of Coronation and Christmas Bibles – stocks of which very quickly ran out. This apparent interest in the spiritual welfare of the young, together with her already popular books of prayer and Bible stories, resulted in further commissions from ecclesiastical journals and an invitation from a church in the Midlands to give an address at a special children’s service.

She made visits to juvenile courts, commenting afterwards on what she had seen and heard; wrote a booklet in story form,
The Child who was Chosen,
to help adoptive parents tell their children ‘how and why they were adopted’, and by the late ’fifties, there were few situations relating to children which she had not covered in one way or another through her writings or talks. Even her views on child murderers were expressed in a poem written during Government discussions over the abolition of capital punishment (see Appendix 1) and she let it be known in no uncertain terms in a
Church of England Newspaper
article in the autumn of 1950 how she felt about those who corrupt the young:

She deplored the violence so often depicted in ‘American type’ comics and on the cinema screens, and wrote at length, in the same
Church of England Newspaper
article, on the need for more films to be made specifically for and about children:

The ‘best writers for children’ did not deal in murders, rapes, violence, blood, torture and ghosts – these things did not belong to the children’s world – and it was ‘perfectly possible’ to write any amount of adventure, mystery or ‘home’ stories for children without them and yet keep a child ‘enchanted and absorbed for hours’. She summed up the ‘books that children love most’ as those containing first-rate stories, well and convincingly told, with plenty of action, humour and well-defined characters – with animals as their friends or companions: ‘Children find it easy to identify themselves with animals, and love them in their books.’ These stories always contained ‘absolutely sound morals’ and it was a very heartening fact that the writers who held these convictions were ‘the ones whose books the children clamoured for most’.

That her own books fulfilled all these requirements, she had no doubt, as is clear from a letter to Mr S.C. Dedman which was reproduced in the Library Association Record for September 1949 (see Appendix 6) and by the introduction to her Complete List of Books, privately published in December 1950. In this she insisted that she did not write merely to entertain, ‘as most writers for adults can quite legitimately do’. She was now aware of her responsibilities as ‘a best-selling writer for children’ and she intended to use the influence she wielded wisely, no matter if at times she was labelled ‘moralist’ or ‘preacher’:

Although her two hundred school readers, teaching encyclopaedias and manuals are not included in this impressive catalogue of two hundred and fifty of her published works, this Complete List of Books shows something of the variety of her work up to that time. There were collections of short stories and annuals – which were mostly made up of items she had used previously in either
Sunny Stories
or
Teachers’ World
– books of plays and poetry, a religious section of ‘simply told Bible stories and prayers’, and several titles under the headings of ‘Farm’, ‘Circus’, ‘School’, ‘Family’, ‘Mystery’, ‘Adventure’ and ‘Nature’. In her Foreword Enid explained her reasons for writing so many books:

As she was also ‘interested in the things they love’, it was inevitable that she should write ‘every kind of book there is for children of all age groups’.

F
ollowing the success of her first full-length children’s adventure story –
The Secret Island
– in 1938, Enid had written a second book involving the same characters: ‘Jack’, ‘Mike’, ‘Peggy’, ‘Nora’ and little ‘Prince Paul’, and this proved as popular as its predecessor. She had by this time realised from her readers’ letters that these fast-moving, exciting tales, woven around familiar characters with whom the children could identify, had a far wider appeal than she first supposed and she set about writing other full-length stories on similar lines. These proved so successful that each developed into a series, whose followers were soon demanding that she should produce annually fresh ‘adventures’ or ‘mysteries’ for one or another of their favourite characters. Among those destined to remain most popular were The Famous Five (Hodder and Stoughton); The Secret Seven (Brockhampton Press); the Adventure series (Macmillan); the Mystery series (Methuen) and the ‘Barney’ Mystery books (Collins). All these consistently sold many thousands each year, both at home and overseas, and went into several reprints, including paperback editions, and some of the characters were taken up by commercial concerns to market toys, games and stationery.

By far the most successful of all the ‘family adventure’ books were the twenty-one stories Enid was eventually to write about ‘Julian’, ‘Dick’, ‘Anne’, ‘George’ and the dog ‘Timmy’ – The Famous Five. When she began this series in 1942 with
Five on a Treasure Island,
she only meant to write six books, but her readers had pleaded with her to increase this to twelve. Even this number, however, did not appear to satisfy the children and they wrote in their hundreds clamouring for more. By the time she had written the last book in the series – twenty-one years after the first – close on six million Fives books had been sold and this figure continued to grow with each year that passed, as a fresh generation of children began following the adventures. When paperback editions were brought out these alone increased sales still further by some sixty thousand on each title annually. Overseas the series proved equally successful. Within the first two years of Hachette publishing the books in France, a million copies had been sold there, and other countries – particularly Germany, her first overseas market – reported similar successes. A stage play,
The Famous Five,
ran for two Christmas seasons – at the Princes Theatre in London during 1955–56 and at the London Hippodrome the following year. Two books were made into films for the Children’s Film Foundation:
Five on a Treasure Island,
produced by Rank Screen Services, was filmed on location in Dorset and screened throughout the British Isles and overseas in the late ‘fifties.
Five have a Mystery to Solve
was made by Rayant Pictures Limited in 1963 and a Danish Company, Dimension Productions, filmed yet another two stories, some ten years later –
Five Go Adventuring Again
and
Five Get Into Trouble.

Enid always acknowledged that ‘George’, the main character in this series, was based on a ‘real person, now grown up’, but only once did she reveal the true identity of this girl ‘who so badly wanted to be a boy and acted as if she were’. The ‘real’ George, she wrote in
The Story of My Life,
had been ‘short-haired, freckled, sturdy and snub-nosed … bold and daring, hot-tempered and loyal’ – and, like her counterpart, had also been sulky on occasions. At the head of the same page in the autobiography appears a clue to the true origin of George, though the description of her physical appearance would seem to belie it. Beside a photograph of Enid with her spaniel, Laddie (also portrayed as ‘Loony’ in another series), is a similarly posed drawing of George with her dog, Timmy. Was this a wry joke on Enid’s part – or was she unaware of this photographic implication? No one knows. But it was only in an unguarded moment, many years later, while discussing the Fives’ popularity in France, that she eventually confessed to Rosica Cohn, her foreign agent, that George was, in fact, based upon herself.

She did not always draw her characters or situations from life, but would sometimes find, after she had completed her story, that her ‘undermind’ (as she termed it) had unearthed long-forgotten memories of people and places, or she would recognise someone she knew in a character she thought she alone had created. Bill Cunningham (or ‘Smugs’ as he preferred to call himself), who appeared in all eight books of the Adventure series, was one example of this. She had met the original at a hotel in Swanage the summer before her marriage to Kenneth, and had found him amusing company. She had laughed when he jokingly suggested that she put him into one of her books – just as he was, ‘bald head and all’ – and call him ‘Bill Smugs of the Secret Service’. But when she came to write the first of a new series for Macmillan –
The Island of Adventure
– she found, to her surprise, that this engaging man had somehow appeared in her plot, along with four children – Jack, Philip, Dinah and Lucy-Ann – and Kiki, a talking parrot she also recognised from her childhood. She never saw the real Bill Cunningham again, but the fictional version became an important character throughout this popular series.

A jovial Police Inspector – Stephen Jennings – who first came into contact with Hugh during the organisation of the Beaconsfield Home Guard, little guessed when he was introduced to Enid that he, too, would soon become well known to millions of her readers as Inspector Jenks of the Mystery books. After meeting him she had, from time to time, sought his advice on plots which involved police procedure and when she began writing
The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage
in the late autumn of 1942, she asked if he would mind being brought into the story as the kindly, shrewd Inspector, who was a friend to the five main child characters. He had cheerfully agreed and from then on appeared in every one of the fifteen books that made up the series. He was amused to discover that when he was promoted, first to Chief Inspector and then to Superintendent, Enid saw to it that his fictional counterpart was similarly elevated. His only criticism to her of the stories was that he felt she had rather ‘overdone’ her portrayal of the other, entirely fictitious, policeman involved – the rather pompous and stupid Mr Goon – all too often outwitted and sneered at by the ‘Five Findouters’: Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets.

Enid’s ideas for stories came from countless sources, but a great many were undoubtedly sparked off by hearing of the exploits of real children – either from themselves or their parents. Ewart Wharmby, of Brockhampton Press, happened to mention to her, soon after their meeting in 1949, that his four children had just formed a ‘secret’ society, with very firm rules and a password designed to keep intruders from their ramshackle ‘headquarters’ – a shed at the bottom of the garden. She was greatly amused by his story and was quick to follow it up by a letter to his eldest son asking for further details, which he duly supplied. With her usual intuitive skill over the handling of such matters, she enclosed money along with her letter of thanks – ‘to defray expenses’ – and was delighted to hear later that this had been spent on a feast of jelly and chips for the Wharmby secret society. But the rewards for Enid and Brockhampton Press were far more substantial, for out of this idea was created the first of the fifteen Secret Seven books, woven around the adventures of seven children and their dog, whose popularity both at home and overseas has only been surpassed by that of the Famous Five.

Other series with less adventurous themes were more than holding their own by the early nineteen-fifties, particularly those written around a family, farm or school. Enid had chosen the unusual setting of a progressive, co-educational boarding school for a story about
The Naughtiest Girl in the School,
which she wrote during the early war years. Her readers’ approval of both the serialisation of this in
Sunny Stories
and its later publication in book form prompted her, in two more books, to take Elizabeth, her main character, through to her final form at ‘Whytleafe’. It also decided her to take up the suggestion of Alan White of Methuen that she should write other girls’ school stories with a more conventional background. This resulted in two series for Methuen, centred around St Clare’s and Malory Towers, which Enid maintained were made up of a mixture of all the schools she had known ‘a bit of one, a piece of another, a chip of a third!’ Memories of her own schooldays and incidents related to her by her daughters ‘of the games of lacrosse, hockey and tennis, the little spites and deceits of school life, the loyalty and generosities of friendship, and the never-ending impact of one character on another’ were all recalled and transposed into what were to become immensely popular books, not only in her own country but overseas – particularly in Germany.