Born in March 1906, Ronald was the oldest of the three boys born to Roland Edward Lampitt and Florence (nee Pope). The family were comfortably off but, when young Ronald was offered a place to study at The Slade, his father refused to let him go, advising him to “get a proper job”. This is the story which is being told for the first time in Kent this summer at the Ladybird Artists exhibition at The Beaney in Canterbury. But for now this mixed farm has modernised but not changed completely. While horses no longer speed the plough they are still present, an integral part of farming life. This means that the farmer would have grown oats for their feed and maintained stables. Presumably it was these books which drew Lampitt to the attention of Ladybird’s Editorial Director, Douglas Keen. Over a 7 year period, Lampitt produced the artwork for 9 Ladybird books – all of which were to prove something of a fixture on school bookshelves over the period and beyond. These titles were:

Keen’s attempts to convince the directors initially fell on deaf ears so, undeterred, he decided to produce a prototype, non-fiction Ladybird book, aimed at the older child. His choice of topic was one that interested him personally – British birds – and he wrote the text himself. His mother-in-law and wife, both talented amateur artists, were asked to produce the illustrations. A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 1: Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird Books), 1966. Frank Hampson created the character of Dan Dare and was at the forefront of The Eagle magazine for many years. Yet there are more changes still to come. This landscape has not yet seen the combine harvester: the hedges are maintained and not yet ripped out. We can see some newly pleached with trimmings being burned. The gates have not yet been widened. The elms will be lost to Dutch Elm Disease in less than a decade introduced, like many of the first tractors, from North America.John Berry had a great gift for portraiture and this can be seen in his powerful portraits of People at Work for Ladybird. It can also be seen at the Imperial War Museum, where his wartime work as a war artist and portrait painter is still on display today. How can we tell? The boundaries in this landscape are straight. A surveyor’s pen drew them and his chains and lines made them a physical reality. His book illustrations included work for Summer Pie, Oxford University Press and Ladybird Books, many of them in collaboration with Henry James Deverson (1908-1972). Lampitt's association with Deverson included working on the Mainly for Children series published by the Sunday Times in the early 1960s but also went deeper as Lampitt was married to H.J.'s sister, Mona Deverson (1911-1995), in 1938. The couple had two daughters, Judy and Susan.

Initially I wanted to find out more about the history behind the books, which itself is a remarkable story. The company that was to become a phenomenon in children’s publishing had an unlikely start as a diverse local print and stationery business in Loughborough, Leicestershire. His main subject was landscape paintings and paintings of rural scenes; his scenic views of towns were published as travel posters by railway companies, including G.W.R. and Southern Railway.For years information on this has been very fragmented. Serious records of children’s illustrators of the 20th century have tended to overlook the Ladybird artists. John Kenney, for example, who illustrated most of the History books for Ladybird, also illustrated Thomas the Tank Engine. Ronald Lampitt, who lived most of his life in Kent and loved the local scenery, painted many beautiful and evocative scenes of country and suburban life for publications such as Illustrated, John Bull, Look and Learn and Readers Digest. As the supply of commercial print work dried up and with paper also in short supply, it was discovered that a whole book could be produced from one large, carefully laid out sheet of paper.

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). The lasting effect of the names John Deere, Minneapolis Moline and Allis Chalmers and their machines was more dramatic. A Ladybird Book of Our Land in the Making: Book 2: Norman Conquest to Present Day’ by Richard Bowood, 1966. Although born in the West Country, Lampitt lived most of his life in Sidcup and loved the Kent countryside. He was a good friend of Roland and Edith Hilder, who had previously illustrated ‘Wild Flowers’ for Ladybird, and together they formed a sketching club, going out for long walks in the countryside around Shoreham, armed with sketch pads. How can we tell? The boundaries in this landscape are straight. A surveyor’s pen drew them and his chains and lines made them a physical reality. The hedges are mostly of single species – hawthorn waiting for its May blossom – interspersed with trees. These are elms.Ronald never got that 'proper job'. Self-taught as an artist, he began to take on work as a commercial illustrator. Shortly before the war, in 1938, he married Mona Deverson, six years his junior.