Gillian Baverstock; Enid Blyton's daughter who lectured on her work
Hyfler/Rosner
Telegraph 29/06/2007
Gillian Baverstock, who died on Sunday aged 76, was
the elder daughter of Enid Blyton, the best-selling
children's writer of the 20th century, and the principal
keeper of her mother's flame.
A schoolteacher for much of her life, Gillian
Baverstock was much sought after by writers and academics
and lectured widely on the subject of children's literature.
Although she acknowledged Enid Blyton's flaws, Gillian
fiercely defended her against charges of having been the
"mother from hell", an emotionally cold and unenthusiastic
parent who was too busy turning out her Noddy, Famous Five
and Secret Seven books to bother with her own children.
On the evidence of Gillian's younger sister Imogen,
from whom she became estranged, the two Blyton daughters had
very different temperaments. Gillian's "more generous and
outgoing personality," Imogen wrote in 1989, contrasted with
her own "suspicious, defensive and often downright rude
character".
This contrast seems to have had its origins in their
early childhood; while Gillian recalled that "my mother
always seemed to have time for me", she conceded that
Imogen, four years younger, had been less fortunate.
A charmingly elegant and old-fashioned figure, who
framed her formal manner of speech in a rich, deep voice,
Gillian Baverstock adored her mother and took an active part
in protecting the Blyton oeuvre; the falling out with her
sibling appears to have been rooted in Gillian's acceptance
of her stepfather, Kenneth Darrell Waters, a surgeon whom
her mother married in 1943.
When the journalist Gyles Brandreth interviewed the
sisters separately for The Daily Telegraph in 2002 -
"because to meet them together would not be possible" -
Imogen described her mother as "arrogant, insecure,
pretentious... and without a trace of maternal instinct",
while Gillian was the more emollient, and believed that she
may have inherited some of her mother's gifts as a teacher.
"She could communicate with children in a quite
remarkable way, and not just on the page," she said. "She
was a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion."
Towards the end of her life, Enid Blyton expressed the
hope that Gillian would write her biography, and she did
indeed give the idea much thought in the months following
her mother's death in 1968.
In the event she passed the task to Barbara Stoney,
whose life of Blyton appeared in 1974.
Gillian Mary Pollock was born on July 15 1931 at
Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, the daughter of Major Hugh
Pollock, a book editor and former soldier, and Enid, née
Blyton, already a prolific and successful children's author.
Although it was her father's second marriage, Gillian was
his first daughter and while he never saw her again after
she was 10, she was said to have remained the favourite of
the four children of his three marriages.
Her childhood was idyllic; for most of the 1930s the
family lived at Old Thatch, a fairytale cottage complete
with lychgate, garden and a small menagerie of poultry and
pets. When Gillian was seven, the family moved to Green
Hedges, the redbrick mock-Tudor house at Beaconsfield that
would remain her mother's home until her death.
With her younger sister Imogen, she was raised by a
succession of nannies in a nursery with a real fire, in
front of which tea was often taken in winter. Amid what
Imogen remembered as the "grey loneliness" of Green Hedges,
where during the summer Enid Blyton liked to work on a swing
seat, Gillian cultivated a patch of garden. She successfully
planted and grew candytuft, cornflowers, love-in-a-mist and
Virginia stocks, and became a talented gardener.
From her 10th birthday Gillian was allowed to have
dinner with her mother each evening, a change of regime
after years of nursery food. At around the same time her
parents' marriage failed, and her mother divorced in 1942.
After prep school Gillian was sent to Benenden,
where - following her mother's second marriage - she
enrolled as Gillian Darrell Waters. On leaving in 1949 she
read History at St Andrews University.
From 1954 Gillian worked in children's publishing,
including, for a short time, a spell on Enid Blyton's
Magazine. In 1957 she married the television producer Donald
Baverstock at St James's Church, Piccadilly; 10 years later,
with their four children, the couple moved to Yorkshire,
following Baverstock's appointment as director of programmes
with Yorkshire Television.
Following in her mother's footsteps - Enid Blyton had
started as a teacher - from the mid-1970s Gillian taught at
Moorfields primary school, Ilkley, later becoming a
governor. Even after returning to publishing, when she
helped to run Darrell Waters Ltd, the family-owned company
that handled the Enid Blyton copyrights, she continued to
visit schools to speak about her mother and her stories.
More recently she had lectured on her mother's work at
major literary festivals. Gillian Baverstock supported the
Enid Blyton Society and became one of its three patrons.
On the perennial controversy over her mother's
perceived racist portrayal of black people as mere
golliwogs, Gillian took a pragmatic approach: it saddened
her to witness the inevitable revisions but she realised
that they were necessary if her mother's books were not to
rot on the shelves as history.
"She didn't know the golliwog would become politically
incorrect," she told the Telegraph in 1996. "It was a toy in
the nursery when she wrote the books."
Although in 1995 Gillian announced that she hoped to
buy the copyright in her mother's work herself, the
following year Enid Blyton's family sold its interest in her
literary estate - the proceeds of 700 titles that sold 400
million copies in 42 languages - for £14 million. With her
sister, she was a principal beneficiary of the deal, and for
a time remained a consultant to the buyers, Trocadero, now
Chorion.
She seized what she regarded as an opportunity to
further promote her mother's work, and advised the BBC on
its Noddy magazine, launched at about the same time. Later
she set up and published her own magazine for children, Blue
Moon, based on her own stories rather than those of her
mother.
Gillian's knowledge of children's literature and
literacy extended well beyond the works of Enid Blyton, and
she was in constant demand to speak at schools and festivals
around the country; one of her greatest joys was the contact
this afforded her with young people.
Gillian Pollock 's husband Donald Baverstock, who
later became controller of BBC1 Television, died in 1995.
Two of her four children survive her; her eldest daughter
Sian died last year and her eldest son Glyn died in 1983
following a car crash.
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Hyfler/Rosner
Gillian Baverstock
Daughter and defender of the children's writer Enid Blyton
The Independent
02 July 2007
Nicholas Tucker
The elder daughter of the phenomenally best-selling
children's writer Enid Blyton, Gillian Baverstock always
spoke positively about a mother described by Blyton's
younger daughter Imogen as "arrogant, insecure, pretentious,
very skilled in putting difficult or unpleasant things out
of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct". A
popular figure at literary festivals and much fêted at
meetings of the Enid Blyton Society, Gillian Baverstock
offered a different picture, of an admittedly difficult
woman still capable of delivering a lot of fun, not just in
her books but also in her home life. The sisters went on to
write strongly divergent descriptions of their childhoods.
At the time of Baverstock's death, they were no longer on
visiting terms.
Born in 1931 in Old Thatch, a large Tudor cottage in
Buckinghamshire a short walk from the Thames, Gillian was
looked after by a succession of nannies, not all of whom
were able to tolerate Enid Blyton's imperious manner with
her domestic staff. Gillian's father, to whom she was very
close, was Hugh Pollock, a handsome, previously married
editor at the Newnes book department with an outstanding war
record. Pollock later worked at Chartwell with Winston
Churchill.
Described as a "serene and beautiful child, with shining
hair and large expressive eyes", Gillian developed a good
relationship with a mother who had only just started her
writing career and therefore still had time to spare. But as
she got older, she was only allowed to visit her mother
every morning after breakfast and then again before tea. Yet
Gillian still remembered jolly stories and games, in
particular one involving her large, hand-made doll Amelia
Jane, later to feature in a famous Blyton series of her own.
After her 10th birthday, Gillian wrote years later, "I was
given the privilege of having dinner with my mother each
evening". It did not seem to strike her that what she still
regarded as a privilege was something quite taken for
granted by most of her contemporaries.
In 1935 Imogen was born, and Blyton decided to move the
family to Green Hedges, a large house outside Beaconsfield.
Busier than ever, Blyton had little time for Imogen, who by
her own account was always a less amenable character than
her sister. The two girls occupied a nursery directly above
their mother's study and even the mildest noise from them
during a writing session below could lead to sharp words, or
on occasions physical punishment.
By 1940 there were also problems in the marriage, with
Pollock away from home at the War Office School for Home
Guard Officers and drinking heavily. His wife, meanwhile,
was having an affair with Kenneth Darrell Waters, a
partially deaf and arthritic surgeon described by George
Greenfield, Blyton's agent, as "one of the most stupid and
philistine men I have met".
Deciding in favour of divorce, Blyton asked Pollock to act
the guilty party in return for an amicable separation and
access to the children. But after accompanying her beloved
father one sunny afternoon to see him off at the station,
Gillian - then aged 10 - was allowed no more contact. Years
later, she heard that her father had been a silent onlooker
at her wedding. Loyal to the last, she always refused to
blame her mother for imposing these restrictions.
Although she was doing well at her local school, Gillian was
then transplanted to board at Benenden in 1943, an
experience she never grew to enjoy. When she returned home
for her first holiday, she found Waters installed as her new
father. Required to take his surname, so that they could now
"all be one family", she managed to have an adequate
relationship with him despite his hot temper and rigid
views.
Domestic life continued, with each girl during the war doing
an hour's weeding a day in the large vegetable garden. A
publicity photograph taken in 1949, now on view at the
National Portrait Gallery, shows the two sisters playing in
the garden, appropriately enough at their mother's feet. She
meanwhile is sitting on a canvas chair, the battered
typewriter upon which she hammered out 10,000 words a day
balanced on her knees. Every evening, Gillian was allowed to
read what her mother had written that day, an experience she
always enjoyed to the full.
After reading History at St Andrews University, Gillian
worked in publishing, at one time helping produce Enid
Blyton's Magazine. But like her mother before her, she
eventually trained as a Montessori teacher, working for 20
years at Moorfields School for Girls in Ilkley while living
in the pretty village of Ben Rhydding. Married in 1957 to
Donald Baverstock, a Yorkshire Television director, she had
four children, two of whom had early deaths, one son, Glyn,
dying as a result of a car crash in 1983 and a daughter,
Sian, from a heart attack last year.
But despite these blows, Gillian Baverstock remained
charming and generous, unfailingly courteous to everyone,
including those who questioned her mother's reputation as a
writer or as a person. Constantly giving talks at literary
festivals and interviews to the media, she and her sister
were also involved in the running of Darrell Waters Ltd, the
company that handled the Enid Blyton copyright. But after
further family complications, they decided in 1996 to sell
their interest in their mother's literary estate. Gillian
and Imogen had some time before come to a joint decision to
phase out all the golliwog characters in new editions of
Enid Blyton plays and stories.
In 1997 Gillian Baverstock wrote Enid Blyton (Tell Me About)
followed by an equally slim volume, Gillian Baverstock
Remembers Enid Blyton (2000). Both were affectionate if
uncritical memoirs, strongly defending her mother both as a
woman of her time and as an incomparable story-teller. She
and her friend the comics editor Tim Quinn also launched
Blue Moon in 1999. This was a children's magazine within
which Baverstock retold traditional fairy tales, giving them
an unfamiliar twist. Stylishly produced, it is now a
collector's piece, having only lasted for 12 issues.
Gillian Baverstock loved spending time in her garden,
despite worsening arthritis. Although she looked something
like her formidable parent, her gentle and forgiving spirit
made her a very different person.
Gillian Mary Pollock, teacher: born Bourne End,
Buckinghamshire 15 July 1931; married 1957 Donald Baverstock
(died 1995; one son, one daughter, and one son and one
daughter deceased; marriage dissolved 1994); died Airedale,
West Yorkshire 24 June 2007.