Gladys Peto

Regular readers will recognise this book - I mentioned it in my recent post on Books I Would Save From a Fire.


My copy of Gladys Peto's Bedtime Stories belonged to my mother - a Christmas gift from a family friend in 1933. I first made its acquaintance when I was 7 and lying in a darkened room with a bad case of the measles. The illness affected my eyes, so I couldn't read, or even look at pictures, myself. Instead, my mother spent as much of her time as she could reading aloud to me - and once she'd worked through the books on my shelves, she clambered around in the loft and retrieved Enid Blyton's Yellow Fairy Book (but not the one everyone else knows - this was another by the same name and I've never been able to find mention of it, even on eBay), a couple of other story books from the 1930s, My Farm and My Pets, and - most intriguingly of all - Gladys Peto's Bedtime Stories.

How I loved these stories. They were quirky and weird and unlike any stories I'd heard before. My mother - who had been a Miss Read-type village schoolteacher before I came along - was (and is) absolutely brilliant at reading to children. The characters in the stories came alive - most of them rather spoilt, upper middle-class, Home Counties girls, with bobbed hair, home from boarding school for the hols.

But the adventures in Peto's stories were as far removed from my staple Famous Five and Secret Seven stories as could be. No adventures on rafts and in smugglers' caves for these young ladies - oh no. Here were encounters with mermaids and strange old women who were (or maybe they weren't) really witches, a shopkeeper with a sheep's head, flying topiary, secret rooms, talking white rabbits garlanded with flowers. Surreal rather than merely whimsical, Peto's world made a kind of sense once you'd surrendered to it.

The tales are so ingrained in my childhood memories that it is difficult for me to read them afresh and assess them dispassionately.

Once I'd recovered from the measles and the curtains were opened once more, of course I discovered the sheer joy of the illustrations. Sinuous, long-legged children, in stylish, fashion-plate costumes, populate the pictures in a languid and detached manner. The subtle, carefully co-ordinated colours seemed quite alien back then in the psychedelic 1960s; the penmanship was, even to my childish eyes, something quite special and different from anything I'd encountered in children's books before. What intrigued me most was the way that every picture quivered on the brink of bursting into flower. Stylised flowers appear everywhere, gratuitously - they clamber over dresses, drift across furniture, burst through floorboards, and lodge in odd corners of nearly every picture, as if they simply can't keep away.

It's really no exaggeration to say that - young though I was when I spent hours poring over them - Peto's illustrations changed the way I looked at the world around me and inspired an interest in patterns, textiles and illustration.

What a joy it was when my grandmother donated some (then) ancient clothes to the Dressing-Up Box, to recognise in the fabrics similar stylised floral designs. (Oh Lord - supposing they'd been genuine Peto designs that ended up sodden at the bottom of the garden or cut up to make clothes for Sindy!! Ghastly thought.). From that point on, I could spot a 1920s/30s textile design a mile away - and in my own more - ahem - 'sinuous' days, I loved to find, adapt and wear 'vintage' clothing from that era.



I'd never bothered to find out more about the author/artist of this special book, but a bit of Googling recently has revealed that Gladys Emma Peto (1890-1977), worked as an artist, fashion designer and illustrator of books for children, including (like this one) collections of stories which she wrote herself. Her advertising illustrations for Ovaltine and many other well-known products were seen everywhere on posters and in magazines and she also designed pottery, textiles and dresses.

After school, she studied at the London School of Art. Later, in the 1920s, with her husband, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she travelled to Malta, Cyprus and Egypt. Her drawings, paintings and writing from this period were published in J M Dent’s ‘Outward Bound Library’.

Peto’s Wikipedia entry is short but give some interesting background and reveals her to be quite ahead of her time in commercial terms: what follows is a quote from the Wiki page:

“Sometime in the 1920s the Empire Annual for Australian Girls published ‘Poster Art Work for Girls, A Talk With Miss Gladys Peto the Well-Known Poster Artist.’ Peto there discusses her beginnings. Her family was not especially artistic, except for herself. As a girl in Maidenhead, she would go out ‘in her father's trap’ and notice interesting people along the way. She would get home and sketch them. From thence to High School then Art School. After a few years learning academic techniques, she approached her various editors and publishers with her sketches expecting instant success. She didn't find it, but sold two little drawings. It was a beginning. ‘And [her] family's somewhat discouraging queries as to how I was going to live on that amount did not debar [her] from trying further.’ In keeping with the Empire Annual's mandate to offer guidance, Peto informs the interviewer that a girl with training, talent and inventiveness might well be able to make her way as a commercial artist: ‘there is a good living to be made from this particular type of artistic endeavor.’ No figures are mentioned, but it is noted that ‘several people are aware that this young lady, as one of the best-known depicters of ‘fashionable life,’ and a designer of posters which attract much public attention, makes an annual income which many men in very high positions might well envy.’”

Hope you enjoy these pics (it was difficult to decide which ones to scan!) - click on them to enlarge.