Obituary: Antony Maitland

Antony Maitland

17 June 1935 – 7 August 2025

Brian Alderson remembers Antony Maitland.

Long years ago -say 1978– I was working on one of my customarily failing projects on children’s literature. I had been commissioned to edit a revised set of the Colour Fairy Books of Andrew Lang (Recte Mrs Lang!). The idea was to edit the story contents and accompany them with illustrations by contemporary illustrators who were asked to model their work on the famous original black and white drawings by Henry J Ford. We had got to The Green Fairy Book when Fritz Wegner took fright and said that he couldn’t manage the drawings. As a result my publisher, the late Patrick Hardy, called upon Antony Maitland as an emergency replacement. The result was magnificent with Antony producing 109 drawings following our hoped-for model, all done on time (Other choices for the finished books were; Blue: John Lawrence; Red: Faith Jaques; Yellow: Eric Blegvad; Pink: Colin McNaughton.

This was not Antony’s first success story. His very first drawings were done for Philippa Pearce’s Mrs Cockle’s Cat (1961) for which he was awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal. Soon after that he illustrated the first novel by Leon Garfield Jack Holburn (1964). This had been submitted to Messrs Constable as a novel but had been passed on to Grace Hogarth, their children’s books editor, for her children’s list, and she passed it to Tony to do some illustrations. It was an immediate success and he became one of Garfield’s illustrators of choice doing some of his best children’s books such as Black Jack (1968). Altogether he remained a highly thought of illustrator producing 21 books for other authors and four under his own authorship, the best being Idle Jack (1977). Most satisfying were drawings for Poor Cecco (1975), a commision of genius from Pam Royds who had succeeded Philippa Pearce as children’s editor at André Deutsch (the original was published in the United States with illustrations by Arthur Rackham against whom Tony’s drawings were far superior).

Amongst his other work was included Furniture Design, Graphic Design and Interior design. His interest in theatre also led him to create the moveable book (Encore 1984).

Tony died on 7 August 2025 aged 90 years; his long-term partner Roddy Taylor had died earlier in 2017.

Brian Alderson is a long-time and much-valued contributor to Books for Keeps, founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times.