The suspicions of Beaver Hateman: Kate Summerscale on the Uncle Books

I read the first ‘Uncle’ book in the British Council library in Santiago, Chile, when I was about eight and my father was working as a diplomat in the city. I borrowed the next five volumes of the series in turn. 

I was delighted by Uncle – a millionaire elephant who wears a purple dressing gown, engages in savage skirmishes and is wildly generous to his followers – and he became more famous in our family than Babar. When we returned to England, I was amazed that no one seemed to have heard of him.

So wrote Kate Summerscale in The Complete Uncle, a collected edition of all six of the Revd J.P. Martin's books that was published in 2013.

It now fetches silly prices, just as the individual titles did before it was published. Which makes you wonder why the books have not remained in print.

Years before The Complete Uncle appeared, Imogen Russell Williams asked the same question in the Guardian, under the headline The Elephant Not in the Room:

Bizarrely, Jonathan Cape, the original publishers, don't want to reissue Uncle because the protagonist is rich, capitalist and deeply complacent, and therefore the books are "classist". But no one can fail to detect the gleeful humour and wry justice in the lampoons propagated by the Badfort tribe, even as they applaud the righteous wrath with which Uncle "kicks up" offenders 50 feet into the air. ...

Insurgent little pamphlets are dropped by Hitmouse from rickety biplanes: "TO ALL FREE CITIZENS: This is to announce that we have at last completed our plans against Uncle, the arch-bully, tyrant, and boaster!" Described by the Independent as "Animal Farm for pre-teens", Martin's sly ridicule of the imperious and pompous master of Homeward should be required reading for all baby Lefties.

With his hating book, where he writes the names of his enemies, and the skewers he uses as weapons, Hitmouse anticipated the modern journalist. But I will admit his Badfort News was my model when I wrote Focus leaflets.

Anyway, if you ever see one of the Uncle books at a reasonable price, snap it up. You will enjoy it.

I shall end by:

• admitting that Uncle was a subconscious influence on my creation of Lord Bonkers, though it took me years to realise it;
• sending you off to read my post on the discovery that the Revd J.P. Martin and Stanley Unwin, two giants of the British nonsense tradition, were both attached to Daventry transmitting station during the war.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails

Beavers and badgers. Badgers and beavers. It's all getting very confusing. How far this pair are correct in blaming Hegel for the societal organisation of the beavers and the impenetrability of T.H. Green I shall leave the philosophers to debate. In any event, Lord Bonkers is on record as preferring his brother, T.H. White.

The King of the Badgers is a character in the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books, but the king who appears in the Bonkersverse - debating weighty matters underground - owes most to the badger in White's The Book of Merlyn. Let's hope Labour will reward his statesmanship by ending the badger cull.

Saturday

Feeling in need of a chinwag, I make my way to the royal chamber of the King of the Badgers, deep beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to mark the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election. 

I find him in low spirits. His strategy of fighting the cull of his people through the courts while reining in the hotheads among the younger badgers has come to nothing. He is now inclined to let the young idea, as it were, shoot. 

Soon we are talking of the beavers, and the King suggests their guild-like organisation comes from reading Hegel, whom we agree is fundamentally unsound and responsible for making T.H. Green’s writing Such Hard Work. 

The King then tells me of a legend among the badgers that the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle is so pronounced because it was originally built by beavers, who were later driven from their home by usurping aristocrats. I shall make good use of this story next time I find myself talking to my new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails: it has The Ring Of Truth.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent
• The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal
• Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other

How Stanley Unwin and Uncle the elephant won the war

Before he became a performer, Stanley Unwin worked on the technical side of radio:

In 1940, Stanley successfully applied for a job at the BBC working on transmitters as a 'key thumper'. The Second World War was now underway and the Corporation desperately needed Morse operators across the country so he went off to do his bit at the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry.

Writing the foreword to the history of the station - Daventry Calling the World - in 1998, Unwin remembered that:

All of us at Daventry belonged to the Home Guard, having daily drills and rehearsals for potential air raids. A password was given each time a shift changed.

And there were air raids:

In 1942 a daylight raiding German plane strafed the buildings where we were ensconced, causing me to dash under the desk in the transmitter room. Mr Bill Gilbert, of Middlemore Farm, Daventry, informed us that it was a Dornier 215 fighter bomber. 

During the blitz on Coventry the drone of the raiding bombers accompanied the sound of the BBC monitored programmes as the incendiary bombs illuminated the horizon. Even the buzz of falling shrapnel from the anti aircraft fire could be heard on the transmitter site.

But Stanley Unwin wasn't the only giant of the British nonsense tradition at Daventry during the war. 

One of his grandchildren write about the Rev. J.P. Martin, author of the Uncle books:

With the beginning of the second world war he was minister in Daventry to the BBC engineers who were transmitting to the Empire at war and across occupied Europe.  Before the war they had secret experiments in the development of radar, the weapon which enabled the Spitfires to win the Battle of Britain. German planes crossed his Northamptonshire skies to destroy Coventry and its cathedral. ...

My mother Stella with my brother Andrew and myself was evacuated at three hours notice because Colchester was the initial target for Hitler’s Operation Sealion for the invasion of Britain in 1940. We were the most fortunate of refugees in Daventry with Nancy and J.P Martin. As a child one was always being told Uncle stories which J.P. Martin had dreamed up in the night.

It was exciting to see J.P. Martin collected in a jeep as a chaplain to conduct services at the army munitions depot at Weedon, which had been built in the Napoleonic wars. He was preaching again to men who again were fighting for freedom, dying in yet another war. Little did he think when he had volunteered as a chaplain in 1918 that he would be talking to his own sons, both born in the first world war and now of an age to be killed for their country.

Did Unwin and the Revd Martin meet? Were they friends? I'm sure they would have got on.

More Uncle stories published

I am delighted by the discovery that some hitherto unpublished Uncle stories by the Revd J.P. Martin have appeared in print.

You will find 50 pages of them in the biography J.P. Martin: Father of Uncle, which was written by his daughter, the playwright Stella Currey, back in the 1980s and published last year.

If you are not familiar with the Uncle stories, this post of mine will explain their attraction.

A remarkable Liberal Democrat gain - and the Uncle books

Last night Peter Pilkington gained the Dunster and Timberscombe ward of West Somerset Council for the Liberal Democrats:

Lib Dem           174 - 49.7% (+49.7)
Conservative    115 - 32.9% (-26.7)
Green                38 - 10.9% (-29.6)
Labour               23 -  6.6% (+6.6)

According to Mark Pack, "the two times previously the ward was up for election since it was created there wasn’t even a Liberal Democrat candidate".

Dunster is known for its castle, yarn market and station on the West Somerset Railway.

While Timberscombe has a claim to fame that is close to the heart of this blog. It was for many years the home of the Revd J.P. Martin, author of the Uncle books.

Unpublished Uncle stories discovered

Marcus Gipps writes:

The much-loved UNCLE series of children's books by JP Martin, illustrated by Quentin Blake, were fantastical, surreal, funny and heart-warming. Originally told by Martin to his children, they were finally published when he was over eighty years old - and the hilarious array of characters, including the rich but sometimes foolish elephant, Uncle, captured the imagination of children across the world.

I fell in love with them when I was a child and became determined to bring them back into print. In 2013 I was delighted to discover a whole community of fellow Uncle fans when I launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to publish The Complete Uncle.

I have since then stumbled across over 50 pages of unpublished Uncle stories, which are just as hilarious and well-crafted as the published work, and also a fascinating biography of Martin, the missionary turned author, by his daughter, which explores the unique imagination and experiences that informed this remarkable and inventive genius. 

These have never been seen before and I would love to share them with Uncle's legions of fans and introduce J.P. Martin and Uncle to more fans as well.

More details on the Kickstarter page Marcus has set up for this project.

Revd J. P. Martin, the Uncle Books and Quentin Blake

An exhibition and conference that celebrate the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books are to be held next month at the New Room, The Horsefair, Bristol.

The exhibition will run from 7 to 22 October. It will explore the links between Methodism and publishing in Bristol, celebrate the Uncle books and mark the achievements of the Martin/Currey family, particularly the involvement of James Currey in the African Writers Series.

The theme ‘Writing and Publishing in Bristol’ will run through both the exhibition and a free one-day conference on Saturday 15 October.

Further details can be found on the New Room website.

I am pleased to see these events being held. The other day I came across a new book on Quentin Blake that does not even mention Uncle.

Six of the Best 594

"People who are not very bright have this terrible tendency to pick a side in major intractable geopolitical conflicts, and support it as if it was a football team." Dan Davies offers a fair-minded account of Labour's problem with antisemitism.

John Blake puts Ken Livingstone right on Hitler and Zionism.

"The evidence built into a startling indictment of South Yorkshire police, their chain of command and conduct – a relentlessly detailed evisceration of a British police force." David Conn on the lessons of Hillsborough and the longest inquest in British legal history.

The Shropshire Star collects local residents' memories of the filming of Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth in 1949: "I shall never forget Jennifer Jones’ feet. She did all the running up Pontesford Hill and up to the Devil’s Chair in bare feet, and her feet were bleeding. She was absolutely brilliant, a lovely looking girl."

James Curry remembers his grandfather, the Revd J.P. Martin, who wrote the immortal Uncle books.

Adam Gopnik reviews a new biography of Paul McCartney.

Good news: There are plans to reprint the Uncle books

An Economist article from December 2005 said:

The “Uncle” stories of J.P. Martin, which focus on the doings of the eponymous hero, an elephant and benevolent dictator, were first published in the 1960s, and still enjoy a cult following. But they are now out of print. Indeed much of the “Uncle” canon is virtually unobtainable. Second-hand copies are snapped up by fanatical devotees and first editions go for hundreds of pounds. 

The slide of Uncle books into obscurity would have surprised some of the original reviewers. The Times Literary Supplement called the books “spellbinding”, the Observer predicted that they could become “a classic in the great English nonsense tradition”, while the Times Educational Supplement likened the books to Alice in Wonderland, a comparison that has been made many times since.

And as I explained when marking 20 years of Lord Bonkers:

I loved the Uncle books by the Revd J.P. Martin when I was a boy and only recently did I notice that their hero, who lived in a castle, had lots of friends and adventures and was given to very public acts of philanthropy, bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain Rutland peer.

The good news is that there are now serious plans to republish the Uncle books. Marcus Gipps writes about them on the project's KickStarter page:

I'm proposing to produce an omnibus edition of all six novels, with very high production standards, for £30 plus postage. I think you'll agree that's a major saving on the current cost of putting together a collection of all six books in tatty ex-library editions.

The book will include all of Quentin Blake's illustrations - the Uncle books were one of his first commissions and his style is an integral part of their overall appeal. It is also possible two buy a two-CD set of the Revd J.P. Martin reading from the books when ordering Marcus's omnibus volume.

You can read more about the project on Marcus's KickStarter page and also use it to make pledges towards funding the project. Me? I shall be buying the book and the CDs.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The King of the Badgers

The new issue of Liberator is with subscribers, so it is time to spend another week in the company of Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer.

I suspect apologies are due to T.H. White, the Revd J.P. Martin and even Kenneth Grahame.

Oh, and Liberator has a blog now.

Anyway...

Sunday

When in need of wise counsel, I take myself off to a woody bank beneath the Ornamental Arch I erected to mark the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election of 1969 and rap on a door half obscured by foliage. There, after much shuffling and snuffling from within, I am admitted to a dark hallway and then to the cosiest of studies. On its walls are shelves housing the works of our finest poets, a cricket bat signed by the 1948 Australians, an election address from Sir Alan Beith, an oar used by the victorious Oxford eight of 1954, a set of cigarette cards depicting the Presidents of the Liberal Party and a framed photograph of Dorothy Tutin.

There, before a crackling fire, I enjoy a modest supper of toasted cheese or angels on horseback and more than one tumbler of Auld Johnston (that most celebrated of Highland malts) while setting the world to rights with the King of the Badgers. This evening, I am sorry to learn that one of his granddaughters is unwell and is to be sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland to recover if the Wise Woman of Wing’s remedies prove ineffective.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

How the Uncle books anticipated the Murdoch press

It is always good to discover another fan of Uncle. The other day Cristina Odone wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

If the worst came to the worst, and her teachers suddenly joined the three-quarters of a million strikers on Thursday, I can entertain my daughter with her favourite “Uncle” books. Or rather, with the early volumes from that quirky Sixties series. The three later books are only available second hand, and are going for more than £1,000. 

One reason, according to devotees (and J P Martin’s works featuring a fabulously wealthy elephant and his loathsome foe Beaver Hateman command a cult following), is that publisher Jonathan Cape finds the series “classist”. Uncle is unashamed about his wicked wealth, and that, apparently, makes for uncomfortable reading in our egalitarian times.

I don't know if that is the real reason, but the continued obscurity of this wonderful series of children's books does need an explanation. And I own copies of two of those three later books, but they are battered ex-library copies and I doubt very much if they would fetch £1000 apiece.

As we are talking of Uncle, this is a good opportunity to salute the Revd J.P. Martin for his foresight in anticipating the Murdoch press in the shape of the character Hitmouse:

Hitmouse, a wretched little person who is the chief reporter on the Badfort News and who lives in a Nissen hut outside Badfort, was sitting by Hateman. He was bristling, as usual, with skewers and writing in a hating book.

That is from Uncle Cleans Up. In Uncle and his Detective we learn that he makes notes for the Badfort News in his hating books and never travels without it.

The parallels with the Murdoch press are uncanny.

Mind you, the tabloid press is not without its attractions. And Uncle, while unquestionably good, can be terribly pompous. If I lived in his castle of Homeward, I think I would read the Badfort News, despite the terrible things it says about him.

And, moving with the times, it seems you can read the Badfort Times online for yourself.

In which I meet Wartime Housewife

This afternoon I walked to Great Bowden and a household sale organised by Wartime Housewife, a fellow member of the Market Harborough school of blogging. She turns out to be just as sensible and pleasant in real life as on the screen, taking the power cut that had affected the village in her stride.

I came away with a homemade cake, a John Major novelty alarm clock and a copy of Uncle by the Revd J.P. Martin. What more could you ask for?

Also present was "The Father of My Children" who often features on the Wartime Housewife blog. He turned out to be Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England.

We talked about the School Prints from the Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham and I learned that it was he who fetched them back from Germany. They were still in the wrappings in which they had originally been shipped all those years ago.

As a philosopher once remarked, it is a small world.

Guardian Review: Eric Ravilious and Uncle's Homeward

As this blog is largely concerned with moaning about the views of Guardian columnists, I thought I would give the newspaper some praise for a change.

The Review section that came with today's paper had two things I found immensely pleasing. The first was an article on one of my favourite artists, Eric Ravilious:

Much of his subject-matter is pastoral and unassuming, and he was a virtuoso at capturing everyday scenes and little details from English provincial life. Among the sequences of his paintings were those featuring, in his words, "lighthouses, rowing-boats, beds, beaches, greenhouses". Even when he became an official war artist, he tended to domesticate any novelty or threat – fighter planes line up harmlessly beyond a garden hedge, and barrage balloons bob cheerfully in the sky.

The occasion for the article is an exhibition, Ravilious in Essex, which is on at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, until 14 August.

For an introduction to the artist see the site Eric Ravilious, which is maintained by his grandson Ben - a good Liberal who lives in Leicester. You may also be interested in the book Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life by James Russell.

Also in the Guardian Review today is a list of the 10 best castles in literature, as chosen by John Mullan. May of those you would expect to see are there: Gomenghast, Blandings, Wemmick's castle in Great Expectations.

But I was delighted to see this included too:

With its multicoloured towers and numberless skyscrapers, Homeward is the most wondrous castle in fiction. It is the home of an immensely wealthy, dressing-gown-clad elephant called Uncle in JP Martin's children's books. It contains fountains, water chutes, walls of sweets and ponds of treacle.

I wrote about Homeward myself after visiting the London Docklands recently. There is more about the Revd Martin and the Uncle books in an old post of mine.

Are the London Docklands the new Homeward?

I don't usually go to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference: too much travel, not enough conference. True, this year it is only up the line in Sheffield, but I am at busy at work and, as a pre-merger Liberal, I still regard it as an unsound SDP innovation.

So this morning I rose early and pushed my way through the crowd of urchins gathered to cheer famous Liberal Democrats as their trains passed through Market Harborough railway station. But I travelled south and went to the exhibition Churchill and the Anarchists at the London Docklands Museum.

It turned out to be a little smaller than I expected, but still fascinating. And the London Docklands Museum is well worth a visit in any case. (You have until 10 April, if you want to see the exhibition yourself.)

Some of the Docklands buildings now look like the worst of 1980s kitsch, but there is still an excitement to the area and in particular to the juxtaposition of old and new.

But something troubled me: where had I seen it all before? Then I remembered:

Uncle is an elephant. He's immensely rich, and he's a B.A. He dresses well, generally in a purple dressing-gown, and often rides about on a traction engine, which he prefers to a car.

He lives in a house called Homeward, which is hard to describe, but try to think of about a hundred skyscrapers all joined together and surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge over it, and you'll get some idea of it. The towers are of many, and there are bathing pools and gardens among them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom.

Many dwarfs live in the top storeys. They pay rent to Uncle every Saturday. It's only a farthing a week, but it mounts up when there are thousands of dwarfs.

That is the opening of Uncle by the Revd J.P. Martin. When the Docklands Light Railway makes a sudden, unexpected turn and climb to reach the station at West India Quay, you really do feel as though you are in Homeward.

I also took the train out to Beckton. With its romantic-sounding intermediate stations like Gallions Reach, I hoped it would give good views of the river and have the atmosphere of the last chapters of Great Expectations - or at least show me a bit of London railway history. But the area has been redeveloped and the line completely rebuilt with cuttings and flyovers.

Perhaps the line to Woolwich Arsenal would have given me more of what I was seeking, but I doubt it. Anyway, there is more about the wonderful Uncle books elsewhere on this blog.

Quentin Blake exhibition opens Sunday 13 December

News reaches us from the Chris Beetles Gallery in Ryder Street, Westminster:

On Sunday 13 December we celebrate the opening of our new exhibition, "Only Young Twice: The Lively Art of Quentin Blake".

The show contains 94 new works by Britain's most beloved illustrator, largely drawn from recent commissions, and displays all his characteristic flair, invention and wit. It is an essential exhibition for anybody who has grown up with, and delighted in Quentin Blake's enchanting illustrations.

A 28 page, fully illustrated catalogue of the exhibition is available from the gallery, priced at £5 (P&P £1 UK, £2 Europe, £3 World).

The Sunday itself will be a family day of fun, music by 'The Jelly Rollers', art, books and vast bowls of sweets, so please feel encouraged to visit with as many children as you can manage!

The great man himself will be at the gallery on the day, from 10-12am, and then from 2-4pm. He will be signing his newly published books, and looks forward to seeing friends, new and old.

Signed copies of these books will be available from the gallery, and can be posted to you if you so require.

The really exciting news is that those books include two of the Uncle books by the Revd J.P. Martin.

The exhibition runs until Saturday 9 January 2010.

Uncle Cleans Up to be republished

The Unbearable Oddness of Stevyn carries the welcome news that the second Uncle book by the Revd J. P. Martin is to be republished.

Uncle and Mistress Masham's Repose

The Daily Telegraph asked several writers to name their "unsung favourites" amongst children's books. Two of my own favourites are among those named.

Will Self chose Uncle by the Revd J.P. Martin:

Uncle is an elephant of grandiose character. He lives in a ramshackle castle with a couple of sidekicks, one a monkey, the other a lion who can increase his weight at will.

Uncle is really an exercise in materialist excess designed to appeal to the pre-pubescent proto-capitalist. The eponymous hero possesses high-speed lifts, enormous halls, numerous swimming pools etc etc… In the basement there's an oil lake which a mysterious Charon-a-like paddles a boat across.

And Jill Murphy chose Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White:

As with C.S. Lewis's stories, you're in awe of the imagination behind it. When I read it as a child I thought it had really happened.

Maria spends her days in a wonderfully dilapidated old country house, alone apart from the cook and her dog, an old professor living in the rambling rounds and her wicked governess Miss Brown, who is scheming with the vicar – Mr Hater – to steal Maria's fortune. Taking refuge from Miss Brown's bullying, Maria stumbles across a colony of Lilliputians (whose forebears escaped from the villainous Biddel of Gulliver's Travels) on a tiny island in the middle of the lake. When her enemies discover her secret, it is the Lilliputians who come to her rescue.

Uncle has a blog

Fans of the Uncle books by the Revd J. P. Martin will be pleased to know that Uncle now has his own blog

Holiday reading: The Uncle books

The Christmas issue of The Economist proves that the magazine has a heart after all. It carries an article on one of the neglected classics of British children's literature: the Uncle books by the Reverend J. P. Martin.

Who is Uncle? The article explains:

The hero is a millionaire who exercises one-elephant rule over a gigantic, moated castle called Homeward. His domain is so enormous that large parts of the castle—which is linked together by a fantastic array of lifts, railways and secret passages—are unknown even to its owner. Much of the books is taken up with accounts of expeditions to different parts of Homeward, which is populated by hundreds of animals, dwarves, ghosts and other eccentrics. Uncle, who strides around in a purple dressing gown, also has his own devoted (indeed sycophantic) entourage.

But across the moat from Homeward—and sadly within plain sight of Uncle—lies Badfort, an unpleasant shanty town of run-down huts, inhabited by Uncle's enemies, “the Badfort crowd”. While all is elegance and magnificence over at Homeward, the Badfort crowd, led by Beaver Hateman and his relatives Nailrod, Filljug and Sigismund, live a sordid existence. They wander around barefoot and unshaven, dressed in suits of sacking, and living off “skob fish” extracted from a dank stretch of nearby water called Gaby's Marsh, while quaffing an oily drink called Black Tom.

A straightforward battle between good and evil then? Not quite:

On the one hand, the elephant leader is undeniably a goodie and his rivals from the “Badfort crowd” are undeniably bad—gaining their living from a variety of petty swindles. On the other hand, Uncle is humourless and pompous, and many of the barbs slung at him by the Badfort crowd have an uncomfortable element of truth.

The Uncle books have rarely been in print since they came out in the 1960s. In part this is because too many publishers have failed to share Martin's sly sense of humour, and in part because, as the article says:

Quentin Blake, the book's illustrator, muses that “The books have always had terrific fans, but they have never attracted a mass following because they are so eccentric.” Charlie Sheppard at Random House agrees that “there just may not be enough truly eccentric children out there.”

Blake's illustrations help to explain why second-hand copies the books now fetch three-figure sums. Even the paperback reprint of the first two stories, which came out a few years ago, now seems hard to find. (I know. I gave mine away.)

But Uncle lives on amongst a select group of enthusiasts, and the Economist suggests that printing-on-demand technology may be his saviour. In the mean time you can find out more about Uncle and the Revd Martin here or join the Lion Tower discussion group.

Later. I have now found an Uncle bibliography.