Recently, I was clearing out nonsense from our attic and came across something very precious indeed...
This is, of course, a letter from the tooth fairy, Fairy Primrose and dates from the late 1970s.
Now, when I told Mr Walker what it was, he gave me a look that I am very familiar with - It was the look of a man who really doesn't want to point out how odd my family is, but he married into it so really, it's his own fault. As far as I was concerned, as a child, the tooth fairy was called Fairy Primrose and when I lost teeth, I sent her a little letter along with leaving the tooth under my pillow. Occasionally, she would write back. Before you all point out the obvious, yes I am very much aware that it was my father who wrote the letters (although he denies it to this day) but the reason they are from Fairy Primrose was because I absolutely loved Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairy books.
This post feels familiar as we will be treading similar ground to my post on Kate Greenaway and to a lesser extent Edith Holden, the Edwardian Lady of Diary fame, covering how I inadvertently absorbed Victorian culture in the 1970s and '80s childhood. I'm not saying that is why I am the way I am today, but it might answer some questions. It also makes me feel like I need to write a book on all the pieces of Pre-Raphaelite influence that crept upon us in the latter part of the twentieth century. Today's subject is the originator of my good friend Fairy Primrose, Cicely Mary Barker, and how she ended up saving the beloved toy manufacturer, Hornby.
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| Cicely in pursuit of fairies, in a boat |
Let's start with Cicely, born in 1895 in Croydon, which doesn't fill me with visions of fairies (apologies to Croydon). She was the daughter (and granddaughter) of a seed merchant so it can be guessed that there might have been a fair amount of plants around the Barker home. As a child, Cicely had epilepsy and was too delicate to attend traditional school with her sister Dorothy (who was 2 years her senior). Instead, little Cicely read and drew at home, until her father enrolled her at Croydon Art Society in around 1908, together with a correspondence course on art. In the Mitcham Advertiser in 1909, there is a report of a Miss Cicely Barker winning 1st prize for an outdoor sketch in a children's art competition in Epsom. She went on to win an honourable mention at the 1910 Art Society show with her still life, aged only 15, and again the following year with a water-colour of a figure.
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| First edition of Flower Fairies of the Spring (available on Abebooks) |
The Croydon Times was a supporter of Cicely from the start, posting in 1924 how she was a young writer and illustrator to watch, after the success in 1923 of her first book Flower Fairies of the Spring. There were certain elements that came together for this winning formula which was to make her name and keep her a household name for over a hundred years. Firstly, and most simply, after the death of her father in 1912, Cicely, her mother, her maternal grandmother, and sister Dorothy all lived together at 17 The Waldrons in South Croydon where Dorothy ran a school. This gave Cicely an inexhaustible amount of child models to be her little fairies. Secondly, in 1917, two little girls in Cottingley, Yorkshire, got hold of a camera...
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| Frances Griffiths and Fairies (1917) |
There wasn't an universal belief in fairies, no matter what some accounts tell you, however in a world rather ravaged by war and a pandemic, I think the public wanted a bit of a distraction and so fell for Fairy Fever. In the newspapers that reported on the photographs, a decent amount of scepticism about the 'alleged "fairies"' (Leeds Mercury, December 1920) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyles "Evidence" (Shipley Times and Express, 1922). However, the sheer amount of enjoyment that the public obviously got from the whole tale shows that Cicely was pushing on an open door. According to the beautiful Flower Fairies collection published in 2016 by Frederick Warne, Cicely was not only deeply religious but also a lover of the Pre-Raphaelites and wanted to keep her fairies as close to nature as she could manage. She travelled to Kew Gardens to find the right plants to sketch, and I think the joy of her work lies in the fact that her plants are wonderful studies and highly realistic, lending a sort of verisimilitude to the little poppet with wings beside it.
In 1924, Cicely published Spring Songs with words and pictures, together with music for the songs by Olive Linnell (1880-1957). Flower Fairies of the Summer naturally followed in 1925 and was welcomed by an enchanted public. When Autumn followed, the books began to be sold as sets, and each was accompanied by Olive's music.
For more on Olive, see this lovely page.
Just a note, but I was delighted to see that in the 1921 census, Cicely is recorded as an artist. It makes such a difference. Onward to the 1930s, and throughout 1930 the Kent Tuesday Express published a fairy poem every month in their newspaper. This was an interesting move, as Cicely wasn't a Kent resident (I think she was living in Surrey which I grant you isn't far) but I think it was a reflection of how broad the appeal of the poems was, aside from the images. We tend to think of Cicely as a painter who wrote some words to accompany their art rather than an illustrated poet, but maybe we should think of her the other way round? By 1931, children were acting out the fairy poems as entertainment. At the Rose Hill Wesleyan Church in Derby, children between 2 and 10 years old performed as part of the bazaar. A year later in the Dundee Courier, an Easter party for children was reported to contain the 'Spring Songs' by Cicely and Olive, performed by the Ogilvy family, including Lord and Lady Ogilvy.
In 1933, Cicely was praised for the release of her book A Little Book of Rhymes New and Old, which includes poems by Shakespeare, Blake, Lamb, Keats, Coleridge as well as Lewis Carroll and Walter de la Mere, with numerous illustration and twelve colour plates and released just in time for Christmas. The same year, she also released the Little Picture Hymn Book, containing three dozen hymns illustrated but without music (presumably already known to the reader). 1934 saw the release of the Flower Fairy Alphabet and it is clear that Cicely had become a household name for safe, charming entertainment, perfect for gift-giving and, no doubt, Sunday School prize-giving.
In 1939, Cicely, Dorothy and their Mum all appear together on the pre-war register, still living in the school-house in Croydon, although Dorothy had retired. The same year, Cicely held an exhibition of her holiday sketches of landscapes, at the Craft House in Reigate. She also exhibited some sketches of children but I noticed that added to these were some of the original sketches for the flower fairies, which were not for sale. I wondered if she had to include them to guarantee an audience, like a musician who always has to play their most famous song.
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| The Primrose Fairy (1923) Cicely Mary Barker |
The 1940s were not financially kind to Cicely, who wrote in the Daily Express that due to the colour printing in her books, she did not earn very much money from her high sales, some years earning less than £200 (which equates to around £8000 in today's money), bearing in mind that she was the only bread winner in the house of three women before the introduction of the Basic State Pension in 1948. The only one of her paintings in a national collection comes from this period and contains no fairies at all...
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| Out of Great Tribulation (1948) |
This is the sort of thing I would expect to see in the little Bibles we were given as children, but also makes me think of the mural in this church after the Great War. She also decorated panels for St Andrew's Church in Croydon, which are still there today. An interesting move she made in the 1950s, possibly to diversify her income streams, was a portrait of General Sir Ernest Cowell, as reported in the Croydon Times in 1952. Sadly, I can't find a copy of it because I'd love to see what she made of him.
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| CMB in older age |
Cicely's mother died in 1950 and Dorothy followed in 1954. Cicely designed stained glass in memory of her sister for the now-demolished St Edmund's at Pitlake (really useful page here) and until the end of Cicely's own life in 1973, she remained in the public consciousness as the flower fairy painter. At her death, people knew who she was and there was renewed interest in her works which fitted perfectly into the floaty 1970s, with the Blackie Publishing group slipping them into Christmas offerings alongside modern things like Topsy and Tim. The books grouped nicely with Kate Greenaway and all things Victorian, skipping neatly into the 1980s, where sets of prints were advertised to hang in your child's bedroom (no doubt on their 'apple white' walls). The Stratford and Avon Herald advertised flower fairy presents from 30p for Christmas with jigsaws and a birthday book being favourites. It seems inevitable that someone would think of turning them into dolls but it is who and what happened next that is surprising.
In 1984, toys for boys ruled the marketplace, mainly because boys tended to collect things whereas girls had a doll or toy that could have small accessories (or furniture etc) added on special occasions. This changed with the introduction of My Little Pony which was the biggest selling toy of that year, making girls' toys rule for the first time since Sindy's heyday in 1979, sparking a girl economy revolution. Big sellers included Palitoy's Care Bears, Poochie from Mattel and Charmkins from Hasbro, all of which were American properties, so British companies scrambled to create their own whimsical lines. Hornby, based in Margate in Kent, were famous for their trains but with the growth of home video games, heirloom toys like the pieces they offered were falling from fashion and so they diversified not into other boy toys, but towards girls with things that were more ephemeral. They created Pound Puppies (small soft collectable dogs), but also, in 1984, just in time for Christmas, a range of flower fairies...
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| A 1985 music box |
Blackie jumped aboard the resurgence of the brand in time for the 60th anniversary of the original titles and reissued the books for £2.95 each in hardback with full colour dustjackets, or £11.95 for a boxset. This was March 1985, after which The Bookseller reported, Blackie Publishing planned to spend around £15k on the production of a range of point of sale materials for bookshops, which they showed off at the London Book Fair that Spring. This included window display stages, cut out fairy figures, window stickers, posters and leaflets which would be sent out to bookshops that placed an order over £150. Looking to Christmas of that year, Blackie had great plans to produce different adaptations of the books and send them all over the world as the foreign rights market were clammering for fairy fever, with the biggest market being Japan. Japan had at this time just exported its own Victorian themed toy, the ever popular Sylvanian Families, so went wild for the dolls, although the Bookseller ended on a rather racist note about changing the fairies faces for foreign markets, and the rather odd statement 'Let us hope Cicely Mary Barker is settled comfortably in her grave.'
Hornby saw boys return to trains and unlike some of its other British competitors, it flourished. By 1986, Pedigree had given Sindy a disasterous rebrand then passed her over to Hasbro (I remain devastated) and Palitoy had ceased as a British company and vanished, as noted in the New Socialist (don't tell me I'm not flexible in my sources). Hornby's very British face, its factory in Kent and the success of both its boy (trains and Scalextric) and girl toys was a source of industrial pride. Not only that, the interest it all created led to the publication in 1985 of A Regency Lady's Fairy Bower by Amelia Jane Murray (or Lady Oswald as she was also known (1800-1896)), published for the first time 90 years after her death with obvious links (and reference in the reviews) to Cicely's work.
Not only that, but the success of one lady illustrator's work as a doll emboldened Hornby to create a second line based around Mabel Lucie Attwell's Boo Boos. Unfortunately, they did it like this...
Hornby's Flower Fairies have been named one of the last British girl dolls, which is hard to argue with and Hornby's fairies continued until 1989. Hornby put their hopes in their fashion doll Cassy, a seven inch supermodel who loved horses and disco and would rival Barbie. Sadly, she did not.
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| Candytuft figure, c.1999 available on eBay |
The Flower Fairies persevered and became the domain of aunts and grandmas, existing in delicate, beautiful little statuettes for your mantlepiece, and decorative plates. The books remain ubiquitous, proof that in England on sunny afternoons, fairies will be swinging off your begonias (not a euphemism). The Woodland Trust produced a range of enamel brooches that supported their charity, and Cicely M Barker and her fairies have been absorbed into the national consciousness, like Peter Rabbit and Paddington Bear, somehow saying something about our character, our dreams and values. The reason I find things like the flower fairy dolls fascinating is that, years after their creation and the death of their author, these characters live on as things children can hold in their hands and create more stories and rhymes about. This is even more true of the fairies than of Pedigree's Kate Greenaway terrifying moppets, as they are so tactile and endearing. I made the mistake of buying an assorted lot for tuppence on eBay and now our house is crawling with them.
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| Honestly, this one is no help at all, but is everso cute... |
