David Unwin; Children's author whose stories were popular in the postwar years and who later wrote a candid memoir about his autocratic father
Hyfler/Rosner
From The Times
May 1, 2010
David Unwin
Children's author whose stories were popular in the postwar
years and who later wrote a candid memoir about his
autocratic father
The author of more than 30 children's books, popular at the
time but now out of print, David Unwin was known to young
readers by his pseudonym, David Severn. The oldest son of
Sir Stanley Unwin, who for many years was the outstanding
public face of British publishing, David later described his
various attempts to cope with the loving but stifling
embrace of this insistently autocratic character in Fifty
Years with Father. His delightful memoir is a worthy
addition to the long list of autobiographical works
detailing complex relationships between fathers and sons.
The photograph on its back cover, Sir Stanley gazing sternly
at the camera with his adult son the picture of mute
dejection at his side, is as eloquent as the text.
David Storr Unwin was born in 1918, the successor to a
sister who had died as a baby and was himself a sickly
child. Concern with his health ran high throughout his
childhood and well beyond, only finally modified when a
heart specialist told him to stop worrying and get on with
his adult life. Brought up in Hampstead at a time when sheep
still grazed on the Heath, he was sent, aged 14, to board at
the fashionable Derbyshire progressive school Abbotsholme,
whose formal uniform consisted of heather tweed knickbocker
suits topping long woollen socks. Otherwise wearing shorts
and open-necked shirts, along with the school staff, the
boys enjoyed a relaxed atmosphere, calling teachers by their
nicknames and avoiding any corporal punishment. This release
from parental pressure ended when Unwin was 18 and required
to join the family publishing firm as an office boy. Ill
health soon intervened, with Unwin spending happy times in
the country or in Switzerland, well away from home in one of
his many searches for full recovery.
Spared military service in 1939, he returned to work at the
production department of Allen & Unwin, but now with
definite ideas of becoming a writer. However, feeling
daunted by the idea of addressing an adult audience, he
decided to write for boys and girls instead, taking his
grandmother's maiden name to avoid any spiteful comments
about being afforded any undue favouritism in the publishing
world. His first novel Rick Afire (1942) was accepted by
John Lane at the Bodley Head without any knowledge of the
author's true identity. Describing the adventures of two
children evacuated to a remote farm, it is a hymn of praise
to holidays spent in the deep countryside, which Unwin
always preferred to life in the city.
A national shortage of children's stories at the time, with
his father's firm alone losing over a million and a half
warehoused books in air raids, meant that any new novels
stood an excellent chance of immediate sales. Attractively
jacketed, and strikingly illustrated in black and white by
Joan KiddellMonroe, Rick Afire and its four successors in
what came to be known as the Crusoe series sold well,
allowing Unwin financial independence for the first time.
Hardly mentioning the war, these short novels featured a
young writer named Crusoe happily ensconced in a farm in
southern England, very much as Unwin himself had been in his
own recent past. There then followed a series of exciting
happenings involving main characters whose vocabulary and
received attitudes would have been immediately recognisable
to the middle-class audience for whom they were intended.
Unwin was married in 1945 to Periwinkle Herbert, A. P
Herbert's niece, whom he had courted while she was still a
girl, and this was now a happy time in his life, with the
arrival of boy and girl twins completing the union.
His next series for children featured the Warners, another
family living in the country and whose members were
passionate as well as knowledgeably informed about the ways
of wildlife and how best to preserve it. Dream Gold (1949)
was the first of a number of time-slip novels by which Unwin
later said that he would most wish to be remembered. It
describes how two mutually antagonistic boys both dream
about and then finally end up on an island beach 300 years
ago along with sailors waiting for a ship to take them home.
Problems in the boys' present relationship are linked to
tragic events in the past. Another of Unwin's favourites,
Drumbeats! (1953), is set in a progressive school similar to
the one that he attended, whose pupils could "wear what we
like, and to a certain extent, do what we like too". In this
story, a small group of them become transported back to
Africa in 1935 after hearing the beat of a sacred drum. They
then witness what happened to a doomed expedition taking
place at that time. This lively story was well written and
full of incident, although later on Unwin may well have
regretted having one young character accuse the school of
making its pupils "slave-like niggers".
This was followed by The Future Took Us (1957), another
time-slip story in which two children are taken into a
future run by a dictator who has banned all machinery, so
anticipating Peter Dickinson's better-known Weathermonger
series published ten years later. But by now Unwin's prose
style was beginning to seem wordy for its time and his plot
lines increasingly forced. When his novels appeared in
paperback they had to contend with many more fictional
rivals for young readers' attention also at a comparatively
low cost and often closer to the modern world of children in
speech and attitudes, let alone geographical setting.
Further fantasy stories included The Wishing Bone (1977).
This was to be his last children's book, with its references
to "Mummy" and "Daddy" - the names he used to address his
parents all his life - doing nothing to improve its poor
sales.
Unwin also wrote the texts for numbers of picture books,
with his Bill the Badger and Wily Fox series notably
successful. There were also two novels for adult audiences
written under his own name. But although The Governor's Wife
(1954) won the Authors' Club First Novel Award, neither it
nor A View of the Heath (1956) was commercially successful,
and it was left to Fifty Years with Father; a Relationship
(1982) to bring him back into the public eye. This was
written at the suggestion of his younger brother Rayner, who
as a boy had famously urged his parent to accept J. R. R.
Tolkien's The Hobbit, having read the manuscript overnight.
Witty and compassionate, it describes how the author, now
50, still found himself relying on his artlessly egotistic
and ever-controlling father even after his death. He recalls
numerous stories, often against himself as well as his
parent, such as the time his father commented on what good
company his son was after an evening when he had so
dominated the proceedings that David had barely said a word.
But there were also many details of the unsparingly
hard-working Sir Stanley's essential innocence and kindness,
and the way that this formidable figure was still allowed to
have the last laugh says much about the gentle and forgiving
personality of his good-humoured and continually
self-deprecating son.
David Unwin (David Severn), children's author, was born on
December 3, 1918. He died on February 11, 2010, aged 91
Lenona
http://1930-1960.blogspot.com/2010/02/david-severn.html
(this obit covers his books in more detail than above)
http://rec.arts.books.childrens.free-usenet.eu/Happy-90th-David-Severn!-British-writer-1940s-Wiley-Fox-books_T23098315_S1
(simple bibliography)
Excerpt:
"I write, very largely, from personal experience and tend to dovetail
my fictional plots into known topography, climate, [and] local
conditions. . . . My books for children, which I began to write in my
early twenties, are for the most part conceived out of a love for the
English countryside. Many are set in specific locations: Cornwall,
Wales, the New Forest. Some are straightforward holiday adventure
stories; others are not--and I am perhaps happiest when, as often
happens, my tales edge over into fantasy."
Lenona.