Raymond Briggs 1934-2022

Image source: A Z Quotes

I was sad to hear we have lost Raymond Briggs. Every year from 1984 until 2017, I read The Elephant and the Bad Baby to the Kindergarten groups who visited my school library. In later years I found all the art in a format that I could share on my interactive whiteboard and this was wonderful because it allowed the whole class to see all of the tiny details in the illustrations. Our library copy of The Elephant and the Bad Baby was fairly small and difficult to share with a larger group.

It does everything an early childhood book should do. It has rhyme, rhythm and repetition. It has a plot, improbable main characters and it finishes with everyone having tea, as all good children's books should! Kinderbookswitheverything

The Snowman, Fungus the Bogeyman and When the Wind Blows are probably his most famous books. It is interesting to reflect on the way Raymond Briggs wrote and illustrated books for the youngest children (Nursery Rhymes) right up to adult books such as When the Wind Blows.

Briggs was a visual storyteller, in the truest sense. People tend to forget that The Snowman was a wordless book, and that’s because the story that the images convey is so vivid. That is a very hard thing to pull off, but Briggs made it look easy. Which is, of course, what geniuses do. The Guardian

There are lots of spin off titles from The Snowman including board books, a film (1982), a book of the film, sequels, a web site and tonight I discovered this novel by Michael Morpurgo illustrated by Robin Shaw.  

It seems so interesting that a wordless book could inspire a novel with 160 pages. Here is the blurb: 

One December morning, James is thrilled to wake up to see snow falling. He spends the whole day making his perfect snowman; he has coal eyes, an old green hat and scarf and a tangerine nose... just like the snowman from his favourite story. That night, something magical happens- the Snowman comes to life! He and James take to the skies on a magical adventure where they meet someone very special.

Here is a BBC Radio interview for adults with Raymond Briggs where he talks about his books and films.

A book about his parents’ long relationship and their traumatic deaths, “Ethel and Ernest,” was named the illustrated book of the year in 1999 by the British Book Awards, which had declared Mr. Briggs its children’s author of the year earlier that decade. New York Times

Life in Bogeydom is full of snot, smells, slime, scum and other unspeakable things, and Bogeymen live under the ground revelling in all the nastiness imaginable. Briggs has created a whole new world in this sophisticated cartoon-strip picture book for older children 

which will entice the most reluctant of readers into books. Penguin

Briggs was sometimes described as a political writer and it was easy to see why. In his black comedy of nuclear holocaust, When the Wind Blows (1982), an ordinary couple survive a nuclear attack and are still obediently following futile government instructions, unaware that they are slowly dying. The Sydney Morning Herald

Characteristically illustrated with soft-toned colored-pencil country scenes in big, easy-to-follow sequential panels, this outing celebrates a child’s gift for flights of imagination (though, to be sure, even Grandpa can see the refurbished puddles once they’re in place), while presenting an amusing picture of interplay between a hyper-energetic youngster and an elder caregiver doing his best to keep up. The Puddleman - Kirkus

Hopefully many High School libraries still have copies of The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman which (as Penguin say was) Raymond Briggs's visceral take on the Falklands War is uncompromising in its dark and moving satire of the build-up and aftermath of the conflict. This controversial book's infamous stars - General Leopoldo Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher - are depicted as robotic caricatures with a pointless blood lust.

Raymond Briggs was awarded the Kate Greenaway medal for The Mother Goose Treasury. 

Nursery Rhymes "contain quite rude, quite tough, quite gutsy material about money and marriage and work and laziness and theft - not sweet innocent pink and blue baby stuff."  Raymond Briggs quoted in The Telling Line by Douglas Martin (Magpies Magazine 1989). 

Raymond Briggs completed close to 900 illustrations for his Mother Goose Treasury. 

I have talked about this book series from Thames and Hudson. I have added the Raymond Briggs volume to my own shopping list.

I enjoyed the discovery that Raymond Briggs completed illustrations for many of the books in the series Antelope Books.  Most of these have been lost over time but really they were just as enjoyable as other vintage junior series such as Ladybird Books and Little Golden Books. Here are a few Antelope books including one by Australian author Barbara Ker Wilson. I find in odd that often the illustrator name was not included on the book cover:

Read more here

His earliest book was Peter and the Fiskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales by Ruth Manning Sanders (1958). 

I well remember the Hamish Hamilton books but sadly not these two illustrated by Raymond Briggs.

Raymond Briggs most recent book was Time for Lights Out. Read more here.

Blurb: In his customary pose as the grumpiest of grumpy old men, Raymond Briggs contemplates old age and death... and doesn't like them much. Illustrated with Briggs's inimitable pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out is a collection of short pieces, some funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife who died young, others about the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog... He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up.

I imagine many school and public libraries have copies of books by Raymond Briggs including these two about Father Christmas: