Thursday, August 11, 2022

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.



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.










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:





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:





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