Ronald Lampitt: The Ladybird artist as social historian

This illustration, A Farm in February, is not from a Ladybird book, but it is by a Ladybird artist, Ronald Lampitt.

And if you're tempted to dismiss it as an exercise in nostalgia for that reason, you should read an article by Adam Chapman:

Lampitt has captured a time of change. The Labour government’s 1947 Agriculture Act secured prices and hastened investment and development and here we can see the tangible results in affordable technology. This farm is perhaps the result they imagined. 

That’s most obvious in the juxtaposition of bright red tractors - the nearer pulling a disc harrow, breaking up the heavy Kentish clay, the further ploughing. The Second Word War brought American tractors to the British countryside in huge numbers (the same ‘Lend Lease’ programme supplied tanks and planes in their thousands). 

Chapman also says:

Even the animals signify the time. The black and white cows that most urban dwellers think of as normal (on milk bottles and children's books) are Holstein Freisians, another post-war introduction. These were the tools by which farmers boosted milk production, but they displaced native breeds like the Dairy Shorthorn and native, dual purpose (milk and meat) breeds.

And he concludes:

Ronald Lampitt saw all this and recorded it for Treasure Magazine. It can be dated, just by what it shows, to a February day in the late 50s [the picture was published in 1963 but may have been produced a few years earlier] but the details it includes show the past and present of this small farm and hints at its future.

The biography of Ronald Lampitt on the Ladybird Fly Away Home site reveals that he illustrated nine books for them. Among them were Understanding Maps, which I had as a boy, and a pair on what to look for inside and outside a church.

I was touched to find these two when I cleared my mother's house and have kept them.