archive obituary: Eve Garnett (Times 11/4/91)
Robin Carmody
subscribers to view The Times and The Sunday Times archive as far back as
1st July 1985. I don't have a big collection of broadsheet newspapers
myself. This obit strangely fails to mention that much of her original
manuscript for the sequel to "The Family From One End Street" was lost in a
fire - it did not appear as "Further Adventures Of The Family From One End
Street" until (IIRC) 1956, many years after much of it had been originally
written.
RC
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Eve Garnett, author and illustrator, died on April 5 aged 91. She was born
on January 9, 1900.
Eve Garnett will be best remembered for her book The Family From One End
Street. Since it first appeared in 1937 it has been regarded as a landmark
in writing for children and has been much translated.
Eve Cynthia Ruth Garnett was the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel F. H.
Garnett and although she claimed to be the child of a "neo-Georgian
nursery", she tended to be reticent about the exact date and place of her
birth. She was educated at two schools in Devon and at the Alice Ottley
school, Worcester, from where she went to the Chelsea Polytechnic School of
Art. Before long, however, she had gained a five-year studentship to the
Royal Academy School where she won the Creswick Prize and a silver medal for
landscape painting. She was later to exhibit at the Tate Gallery, the
LeFevre Gallery and the New English Art Club.
Landscape and murals were her interest as a student but her stay at the
Academy was terminated after two years through illness, and she found her
concern turning towards the plight of the slum children of London. This had
arisen through a commission to illustrate Evelyn Sharp's The London Child
(1927) where she became "appalled by conditions prevailing in the poorer
quarters of the world's richest city" and determined to devote subsequent
work to showing up some of the evils.
Seen from the present, the results of this "propaganda" campaign were
threefold: a 40-foot mural at the Children's House, Bow, a book of drawings
with commentary, Is It Well With The Child (1938), and a story book for
children, The Family From One End Street. She had great difficulty in
finding a publisher for this saga of Mr Ruddles (sic - the actual family
name is Ruggles - RC) and Mrs Ruddles (ditto) the washerwoman, and the book
was deemed "not suitable for the young" but when it was eventually published
by Frederick Muller it met with considerable acclaim and won the Library
Association's Carnegie Medal for 1938. (Tolkien's The Hobbit was an
also-ran).
The Family From One End Street showed all Eve Garnett's qualities: a book of
cheerful stories written from the inside, without condescension and without
either the fervour of the evangelical books which she had enjoyed as a girl
or the dour commitment of today's stories of ordinary people. Moreover, her
illustrations, with their amusing captions, showed her command of the most
taxing of graphic skills: plain line-drawing with the content speaking for
itself, unmuddled by scribble or hatching.
Eve Garnett never equalled this achievement as either writer or illustrator.
Later books, such as Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn (1962), retained the
cheerfulness but made no great advance, while her drawings for books like
Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses (1948) and for her anthology A Book of
Seasons (1952) showed her plain-line work turning rather pallid.
At this time, however, she was becoming a keen traveller and she spent a
great deal of time in northern latitudes ("I have crossed the Arctic Circle
16 times, she once claimed). She was especially interested in the Danish /
Norwegian explorer and missionary Hans Egede, and visited Norway several
times to further her studies of his life. This research resulted in a
widely-broadcast radio play, The Doll's House in the Arctic, and in a book
for older children, To Greenland's Icy Mountains (1968). She spent much of
the latter part of her life in Lewes, East Sussex, and died in a nursing
home there. She was unmarried.
(c) Times Newspapers Limited