Enid Blyton

by Barbara Stoney

  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:

  … they are not interested in helping adults; indeed, they think that adults themselves should tackle adult needs. But they are intensely interested in animals and other children and feel compassion for the blind boys and girls, and for the spastics who are unable to walk or talk …

  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):

  We all have a sense of humour. We are all (thank goodness!) good-tempered. Nobody sulks, nobody complains, nobody is unkind. But that, of course, is largely a matter of upbringing. Spoilt children are selfish, complaining and often conceited. But whose fault is that? It is the mother, always the mother, that makes the home. The father does his share, he holds the reins too – but it is the mother who makes a happy, contented home. She is the centre of it. She should always be there to welcome the children home, to see to them and listen to them. I was lucky to have a gift that could be used at home. I could not have left my husband or my children and gone out into the world to make my career. All true mothers will know what I mean when I say that …

  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:

  He can certainly be brought up without it – but not ‘properly’ … Religious teaching provides a moral backbone throughout life; it gives a child invincible weapons with which to fight any evils, any problems he meets …

  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:

  I want to take up the whip that Jesus once used when he drove out from the Temple the polluters of holiness and goodness. I want to whip out those who pollute the innocence and goodness in the hearts of children …

  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:

  It cannot be said too often that the cinema is one of the most formidable powers for good or evil in this world, and most especially for children. Its great danger lies in the fact that it can make evil so attractive, so tempting and irresistible. Adults are mature, they can resist the attraction portrayed if they wish to. But children are not mature, they are credulous, they believe whole-heartedly what they see. As the twig is bent, so the tree will grow, and the false world portrayed in many adult films must have warped great numbers of developing young minds.

  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’:

  my public, bless them, feel in my books a sense of security, an anchor, a sure knowledge that right is right, and that such things as courage and kindness deserve to be emulated. Naturally the morals or ethics are intrinsic to the story – and therein lies their true power…

  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:

  It is not usual for one author to produce such a number of books, nor is it usual to produce such a variety. Authors tend to keep to one subject, and, where children are concerned, to one age of child only. . . But my difficulty is, and always has been, that I love all ages of children from babyhood to adolescence …

  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’.

  11

  Following 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, w
hose 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.