Valediction 15: A Toy Town Box

Brian Alderson is bidding farewell to old favourites as he donates his remarkable collection of children’s books to Seven Stories. His latest gift is a collection of Toy Town adventures.

One of the attractions of the plethora of children’s books published in London by the Oxford University Press between 1906 and 1939 (see our previous Valediction) was their unpredictability. True, some series such as the Biggles books or the girls’ school stories followed a standard pattern while other series followed a variable pattern of their own, such as Oxford’s editions of the Peek-A-Boo books or were single titles following the whim of whoever was doing the design.

Some form of box occasionally put in an appearance such as May Byron’s The Counterpane Book, illustrated by Millicent Sowerby (1913) an entirely individual production[1].

The present boxed set of four 16-page booklets is of particular interest as marking the first appearance of Toy Town in Hulme Beaman’s oeuvre. The first story, The Road to Toy Town sees Tom and his dog make their way there over the hills and through the forest. The three companion volumes deal with quite separate events there. The figure drawing does not emphatically imply the wooden figures that were to become one of Hulme-Beaman’s specialities, but the idea was ready for development. That was to occur in 1929 after one of the ‘Aunts’ on the daily wireless programme Children’s Hour spotted the potential for a radio serial. Hulme Beaman joined the team, turning Toy Town into Toytown and peopling it with the cast of citizens from the satirically conceived Mayor and his side-kick Ernest the Policeman to the talking animals Larry the Lamb and Dennis the Dachshund.

I can speak with nostalgia of those early broadcasts, being a child before the war, coming home from school with Children’s Hour on every day at tea-time and with Toytown especially looked forward to. It was, thus, an aural experience rather than a literary one and I have no idea of how many programmes were scripted by Hulme Beaman who died suddenly of pneumonia in 1932. (If you google Toytown you can find a list of the 29 scripts by him and their dates.) Collections of stories were published by both Collins and Oxford but I never read them. In my early years as a children’s bookseller however (c.1955) we stocked two of the OUP collections, survivors from the Amin House of the thirties.

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. His most recent book The 100 Best Children’s Books is published by Galileo Publishing, 978-1903385982, £14.99 hbk.

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Biblio details:

S.G.Hulme Beaman. Hulme Beaman’s Toy Town Series [1925]

A hinged cardboard box covered with pink checkered paper with an illustrated title label113x110 mm. on lid containing four volumes 1[6] pp. 135x110mm. In a single gathering. [1] title-page (Title, vig., ‘By S.G.Hulme Beaman. Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press London) [2-15 text illus.in 3 colours in various consistent placements]; [16] concluding page stating THE END / Printed 1925 in Great Britain by Morrison and Gibb Ltd. Edinburgh.  Orange paper overboard, pictorial title. In three colours on paper 120×100 mm. to front.

Titles:

The Road to Toy Town

Trouble in Toyland

Jerry and Joe

The Wooden Knight

[1]I discussed this volume in Newsletter 112 of the Children’s Books History Society (June 2015)