Authorgraph No.175: Terry Deary
Terry Deary is in the business of making history popular – ‘horriblehistory’, that is, ‘history with the nasty bits left in’. He is also in the business of provoking his readers to think – particularly about people in the past and their behaviour, of saying ‘Look at that. Isn’t that terrible? What would you have done?’ It’s his ‘revenge’, so the biographical blurb on his books tell us, for history lessons ‘so boring and badly taught that he learned to loathe the subject at school’.
Terry’s subversive, alternative take on history and its presentation was evident in The Terrible Tudors (1993), the first of his Horrible Histories: from its debunking of history teachers and ‘rotten rulers’ to its focus on ‘ordinary people… like you and me…, what made them laugh and cry… suffer and die’ to its jokes, cartoons, period recipes, practical projects and quizzes. Now 50 Histories on, the series has consistently surprised us by finding new ways of looking at history and regularly topping bestselling and most borrowed library book lists. With UK sales of over 10 million and worldwide sales double that, the series, translated into 31 languages and sold in 37 countries, has changed the face of non-fiction publishing and children’s attitude to history. How did this phenomenon occur? I meet Terry at Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle, to uncover the ‘horrible history’ of Horrible Histories, its many ‘gory’ offshoots and its fictional counterparts.
Terry arrives preceded by an ‘anti-establishment, anti-authority, alternative education’ reputation – one, it emerges, born of a social conscience rooted in a working class childhood in the bombed shipyard area of Sunderland in the 1950s. Terry’s father was a butcher. His shop where Terry worked most Saturdays from five to 16, backstreet football and school games moulded him – football especially: ‘That’s where you learn about life…, where you work out who you are, what your relationships with other people are and what the rules of life are’… not at exam-focused, ‘time filling’, ‘time wasting’ school.
Terry grew up surrounded by poverty – a ‘great privilege’, he says, in a family which was close, caring and secure. His experiences of social inequality as a boy, reinforced by the public school ethos he encountered at Monkwearmouth Grammar School when he passed his 11+, history lessons and his brief encounters with books like Enid Blyton’s Island of Adventure and John Buchan’s The 39 Steps – where people like him were either villains, nobodies or absent from an upper or middle class world of adventures, set him firmly ‘on the side of the underdog’ – now the heroes and heroines of his fiction and histories. Power and ‘undeserved’ privilege were suspect, dangerous, self-interested – a legitimate target ‘to make war on’.
Terry ‘drifted’ into teaching, training as a drama teacher as a way into the ‘flourishing’ seventies development of Theatre in Education. His love of acting dates from an appearance in a Christmas show at the Sunderland Empire, aged six, when one of the acts asked for volunteers to sing ‘Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer’. ‘My parents pushed me up on stage – the lights, the applause…’ Terry was hooked. His father played clarinet in a dance band and soon his son played too – ‘a joy’ which grew into folk-singing in clubs as a teenager and acting in amateur theatre before turning professional when he joined Theatre Powys, a Welsh community theatre group in 1975.
It was here that Terry began to write, initially shaping group improvisations into dramatic form. A ‘natural mimic’, he had always been able to imitate authorial voices – Blyton’s or Shakespeare’s. Now he began to find a ‘fresh new voice’ – the voice we know today, one he likens to that of the late comedian Tony Hancock, ‘aggrieved and rather stroppy’: ‘Cor, I don’t believe it… Stone me’. The direct address to his readers (‘Isn’t that what I told you a few chapters ago? Wasn’t I right?’), a sure feel for dialogue (stories told in dramatic dialogue pepper our conversation) and an ability to visualise scenes being ‘enacted’ with characters ‘reacting’ give a theatrical pace and engaging immediacy to his work. Terry knows how to ‘work’ an audience.
Asked to write a children’s play, he created The Custard Kid, a Western spoof. When its ‘sensational’ six week run ended and the costumes were packed away, Custard Kid was ‘dead… gone… That was it’. To keep ‘this great story alive’, Terry turned it into a book. ‘Nobody had ever said that somebody with my background could be writer.’ After 23 rejections, A & C Black published Custard Kid in 1978 and a new career as a fiction writer began in between acting and later working as an advisory teacher in English back in the North East.
Some 50 books on – many for reluctant readers, Terry wrote aChristmas joke book for Scholastic. A history joke book was to follow. ‘Where do the French buy their guillotines? At the chopping centre. My editor asked: “Can you put in some odd facts?” What did the French use to test their guillotines? What would you use? [addressing me]… They used corpses from the local mortuary… true. Who could do that? Who could pick up a corpse, put it on the beheading machine, cut off the head, pick up the two bits and put them in a coffin? I couldn’t… I thought: “These facts – horrible though they are – are much more interesting than the jokes.” So we started off doing a joke book with some facts and ended up with a fact book with some jokes. Nobody had done it before. We invented a new genre.’ Horrible Histories was born.
The secret of their success? ‘Dead simple,’ Terry says. ‘It’s the fact that I’m a children’s author, not an expert. So instead of the author’s voice being “I know this. I’m going to tell you”, it’s “Cor, you’ll never guess what I found out about these terrible people called the Tudors? Would you believe it?”‘ An enthusiast, then, sharing his findings, not an historian – an inventive one too who knows how to draw readers – particularly reluctant readers – in: first with jokes, then cartoons or a newspaper cutting on to a full length story ‘until you go back and read the whole book’… like Billy Casper, inKes, a poor reader who steals a book on kestrels, and ‘forces himself to read it… because he wants to know the information. That’s the key – desperately wanting to know.’
While Horrible Histories may appear to follow a winning formula, subject, content and Terry’s ‘take’ dictate shape and approach. Ideas may come from his publishers but Terry makes each subject his own by reading the latest books, which give him a context for the ‘horrible facts’ that he then asks his researchers to unearth. The Frightful First World War, for instance, has a ‘narrative arc, taking you in. Year one 1914 is hope, year two – disillusion, until you come to the end and high expectations. Just when you think “We’ve won”, 1919 with the flu epidemic, disabled servicemen sleeping rough, and music hall cynicism brings you down.’ The Epilogue pointedly goes farther: ‘The cruellest thing of all was that the war didn’t solve any problems and… didn’t bring peace’… only the horrors of World War II. ‘Never again… It’s your future. It’s up to you’.
Horrible Histories, then, are not only gruesomely entertaining or funny. ‘What I want to do,’ Terry says, ‘is look at how human beings interact in traumatic situations and then ask the reader to measure themselves – “How would I react in those situations?”… It’s the same if you’re writing fiction or non-fiction. You take characters and put them through situations. The readers’ job is to measure themselves against these people and find out who they are… That’s the whole purpose of children’s literature for me… discovery, challenge and change.’
His brain ‘teaming with ideas’ ,Terry regularly experiments with new ways of storytelling and of engaging young people with history and Horrible Histories from computer games, exhibitions, audio, and a one man show to plays for Birmingham Stage with a 3D virtual component: ‘A head gets chopped off and bounces into the audience’. A CBBC Horrible Histories series, scripted by adult sketch show writers, in which Terry, to his delight, acts, is set ‘to revolutionize children’s television’ this spring. With his long time illustrator Martin Brown – the Willans and Searle of history books, a new graphic series, High Speed Histories, is in the making.
Terry’s diary is full until 2012 with a book a month planned – a rigorous schedule for an author who treats writing ‘as a business rather than just an art form’ – a view he recognises is ‘counter to the general concept of an author’. ‘Writer’s block’ is not part of his vocabulary: he sets himself daily work targets of 2,000 – 4,000 words. Nor is the notion of writers who ‘write for themselves – not a good business proposition’. As he writes, he’s ‘very conscious of somebody listening to [his] words’. He alternates non-fiction and fiction.
Of his 196 published books, 101 are fiction. While individual stories featured in his early work, historical fiction series predominate now. Here Terry translates his winning blend of ‘foul facts’ (note his signature use of alliteration), alternative history, authorial asides, and jokes into tales likeGory Stories that owe much to his own reading. Terry cites historians Lyn Macdonald, Michael Wood, Hunter Davies and Charles Nicholl as writers whose work has shown him new ways of looking at history; but it is his liking for ‘cheap trashy thrillers’ that is echoed in these fast, pacy, cliff-hanging, page turning series, and humour that is ‘laugh-out-loud funny’. His Fire Thief Trilogy is an anarchic marriage (and reimagining) of Greek mythology (Prometheus, unbound, escapes through time to find a human hero, but becomes a ‘hunter hunted’ too); a Gangs of New York setting in sinister Eden City, and three theatrical heists. The dialogue – especially between Zeus and Hera – fizzes, as do authorial footnotes and plots narrated by three young con artists. Master Crook’s Crime Academy promises more madcap historical mayhem and laughter. Set in Wildpool (Terry’s Sunderland as it was) in 1837 – the year of Victoria’s accession, the first workhouses, the Corn and Poor Laws, the Chartists, and much more, this new series offers a lesson in crime (and history) for each month of the year. Here Oliver Twist meets Robin Hood in Lemony Snicket territory.
Terry writes in a work room under the eaves of an old converted pub on a 35 acre small holding where he lives with his family in a former pit village in County Durham. Here he looks eastward over the fields to Sunderland and his working class roots which ground a writer whose ‘radical’ retellings of history have made Horrible Histories ‘iconic’ and their author, proud of his alternative status, into the most popular and ‘influential historian’ in Britain.
Books by Terry Deary
Published by Scholastic
Horrible Histories Gory Stories
(£4.99 each pbk)
Blackout in the Blitz,9781407108308
Raiders and Ruins,9781407108216
Shadow of the Gallows,9781407103662
Tomb of Treasure,9781407102962
Tower of Terror,9781407103471
Wall of Woe,9781407103334
Master Crook’s Crime Academy
(£5.99 each pbk)
1: Burglary for Beginners,9781407110158
2: Robbery for Rascals,9781407110165
A-Z by title within series
Illustrated by Martin Brown
(£4.99 each pbk unless otherwise stated)
Angry Aztecs, 9781407104256
Awesome Egyptians, 9780439944038
The Awful Egyptians, 9780439953962
Awful Egyptians, 9781407104201
Barmy British Empire, 9781407104218
Blitzed Brits, 9781407103433
Bloody Scotland, 9780590543408,£7.99 pbk
Cruel Kings and MeanQueens, 9780590542098, £7.99 pbk
Cut-throat Celts, 9781407104263
Dark Knights and DingyCastles, 9780590542982, £7.99 pbk
England,9780439979283, £7.99 pbk
France,9780439979252, £7.99 pbk
Frightful First World War,9781407103020
Gorgeous Georgians, 9781407104195
Groovy Greeks, 9780439944021
Horrible Christmas, 9781407108148,£8.99 pbk, 2008 edition
The Horrible History ofthe World, 9780439954556, £8.99 pbk
Incredible Incas, 9781407104270
Ireland,9780439014366, £7.99 pbk
Measly Middle Ages, 9780439944014
Rotten Romans, 9780439944007
Rotten Rulers, 9780439959360,£7.99 pbk
Rowdy Revolutions, 9780590543767,£7.99 pbk
Ruthless Romans, 9781407104249
Savage Stone Age, 9781407104287
Slimy Stuarts, 9781407104294
Smashing Saxons, 9781407104188
Stormin’ Normans, 9781407104300
Terrifying Tudors, 9781407104225
Terrible Tudors SpecialEvil Edition, 9781407107387, £7.99 hbk plus CD
Even More Terrible Tudors,9780590112543
The Twentieth Century,9780590542661, £7.99 pbk
The USA, 9780439999397,£7.99 pbk
Vicious Vikings, 9780439944069
Vile Victorians, 9780439944045
Villainous Victorians,9781407104317
Wicked Words, 9780590542579,£7.99 pbk
Woeful Second World War,9780439943994
Groovy Greeks/Percy Jackson (World BookDay 50-copy pack), with Rick Riordan, ill. Martin Brown, 9780955944697, pbk (March)
Groovy Greeks/Percy Jackson (World Book Daybook), with Rick Riordan, ill. Martin Brown, 9780955944680, pbk (March)
Horrible Histories TV Tie-Ins
(£4.99 each pbk, June)
Awesome Egyptians, 9781407104867
Blitzed Brits, 9781407109473
Groovy Greeks, 9781407104904
Measly Middle Ages, 9781407109480
Rotten Romans, 9781407104874
Terrible Tudors, 9781407104898
Vicious Vikings, 9781407104911
Vile Victorians, 9781407104881
Horrible Histories Collections
(£6.99 each pbk unless otherwise stated)
The Angry Aztecs and TheIncredible Incas, 9780439968027
The Barmy British Empire and The Blitzed Brits, 9780439951715
Blood-curdling Box, 9781407108155,£30.00
Cruel Crimes and PainfulPunishments, 9780439979276, £7.99 hbk
Frightful First World Warand Woeful Second World War, 9781407109077 (April)
Gorgeous Georgians andVile Victorians, 9781407109671 (April)
The Groovy Greeks and theRotten Romans, 9781407109688 (April)
Horribly Huge Book ofTerrible Tudors, 9781407110905, £9.99 (June)
The Smashing Saxons andThe Stormin’ Normans, 9780439959391
Terrible Tudors and SlimyStuarts, 9781407109718 (April)
The Vicious Vikings andThe Measly Middle Ages, 9780439963473
Horrible Histories City Books
(£4.99 each pbk)
Dublin, 9780439954686
Edinburgh, 9780439953979
Loathsome London, 9780439959001
Oxford, 9780439953948
Stratford-Upon-Avon,9780439953931
York, 9780439953924
Horrible Histories Country Specials
(£7.99 pbk unless otherwise stated)
England,9781407110417 (May)
Ireland,9781407110226 (May)
Scotland,9781407110233 (May)
Wales,9781407103693, £4.99 pbk
Horrible Histories Handbooks
Blitz, 9781407105680,£6.99 pbk (April)
The Horrible History ofthe World (mini), 9781407103501, £6.99 pbk
Knights, 9780439955775,£5.99 pbk
Pirates, 9780439955782,£5.99 pbk
Trenches, 9781407104744,£6.99 pbk
Villains, 9781407103051,£6.99 pbk
Warriors, 9780439943307,£5.99 pbk
Witches, 9780439949866,£5.99 pbk
Horrible Histories Activity Books
Awesome Activity Book,9781407103044, £7.99 pbk
Horrible Histories Annual2009, 9781407106618, £6.99
Groovy Greeks ActivityBook, 9780439962919, £3.99 pbk
Horrible Christmas StickerBook, 9780439949910, £4.99 pbk
Horribly Hilarious JokeBook, 9781407108377, £4.99 pbk (June)
Incredible Incas ActivityBook, 9780439959070, £3.99 pbk
Measly Middle AgesActivity Book, 9780439958981, £3.99 pbk
Savage Sticker Book, 9781407105345,£7.99 pbk
Savage Stone Age StickerBook, 9780439959049, £3.99 pbk
Slimy Stuarts Sticker Book,9780439958998, £3.99 pbk
Horrible Histories Novelty
Rotten RomansShuffle-Puzzle Book, 9781407102382, £12.99 bd
Terrible Tomb ofTutankhamun Pop-up Adventure, 9780439963824, £17.99 bd
Terry Deary’s Terribly True Stories
(£4.99 each pbk)
Terry Deary’s TerriblyTrue Crime Stories, 9780439950190
Terry Deary’s TerriblyTrue Disaster Stories, 9780439950404
Terry Deary’s TerriblyTrue Horror Stories, 9780439950251
Elizabeth Hammill OBE is initiator and co-founder of Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books. Currently a Collection Trust trustee, she is writing about children’s literary museums for two forthcoming publications.
Photograph courtesy of Scholastic Children’s Books.
