It runs in the family

but sometimes in a surprising way!

Noggin the Nog

I am fascinated by the way some families just keep throwing off talent: nature or nurture? competition, cooperation, emulation? You can see the phenomenon across the arts, sport, even politics. Parents hand skills or inspiration on to their children, siblings echo, or complement, each other’s achievements. Sometimes, particularly with sports, you can assume that it is a combination of genetics and, dare I say it, pushy, or at least highly committed, parents. Jackie and Bobby Charlton. The Williams sisters. The Murray brothers. But how do you account for AS Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble? Or the Bronte sisters and the Mitford sisters - no pushy parents there, but a dash of competitive spirit mixed, to a greater or lesser degree, with mutual support.

And then there are the families where the talent diverges, and produces individuals with their own particular talents and choices: Henry James wrote novels while brother William focused on philosophy and psychology. Virginia Stephen chose to write, following in her father’s footsteps, while her sister Vanessa chose to paint. Rosamond Lehmann wrote novels, her sister Beatrix went on the stage, her brother John was a publisher. I particularly find it fascinating when there is little obvious connection between the way these family members rose to fame: Rick Stein is a restaurateur, his brother John is Emeritus Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford. Dominic Lawson is a political journalist, his sister Nigella is a TV cook and writer, her father was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Emma Bridgwater launched an eponymous pottery and lifestyle brand, her sister Nell Gifford founded a travelling circus greatly loved in my home patch of the Cotswolds, their younger sister Clover Stroud is a bestselling author. All of which is a very long introduction to one of my favourite, most intriguing families: the Postgates.

Oliver Postgate with a Clanger and the Soup Dragon

I grew up watching the extraordinary creative output of Oliver Postgate: Pogle’s Wood, with the delightful Pippin and Tog, led me to the more sophisticated Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine. I was just about young enough to enjoy The Clangers, first aired in 1969 and slightly too old ever to watch Bagpuss (from 1974).

Bagpuss

Oliver Postgate died in 2008, his partner in these films, Peter Firmin, died in 2018, but their work lives on and is still enjoyed by countless children (and adults!). Yet you would hardly have predicted this from their immediate ancestry: his father Raymond was a founding member of the British Communist Party, his mother Daisy was the daughter of George Lansbury, a revered Labour politician and leader of the party during the 1930s. His aunt Margaret married the socialist academic GDH Cole, and was a prominent politician in her own right, an alderman on London County Council and a member of the Inner London Education Authority. If ever there could be such a thing as Left-wing royalty, the Postgate/Cole/Lansbury family was it. And yet there was always another string to the bow: Douglas and Margaret Cole collaborated on a successful series of detective novels throughout the 1920s and 30s, contributing to the Golden Age of Crime Writing in Britain. Raymond Postgate might have begun life as a journalist on the radical left-wing newspaper, the Daily Herald, but after the Second World War he launched The Good Food Guide, which survives to this day, albeit now in digital form: the bible of the affluent middle classes. Oliver’s cousin was the actor Angela Lansbury.

I have recently enjoyed reading Oliver Postgate’s memoirs, Seeing Things, first published in 2000. His life was quite extraordinary: if ever someone could be said to have fallen into a career by accident, it was Oliver. When war broke out in 1939, his parents decided to send him and his older brother John to the safety of Dartington Hall School in Devon. It already had a reputation as progressive, not to say ‘risque’, mixed boys and girls, had no rules, no timetables. If his parents thought it would suit Oliver with his creative mind, they were sadly mistaken: he hated it and failed to learn anything of any use. As he put it:

WB Curry, the headmaster of Dartington, once described the education he purveyed as ‘education for discontent’, and as far as I was concerned he was right about that. Dartington not only omitted to teach me any manners, it gave me precious little education. It also, and this is something I have reason to resent to this day, gave me no practice or training in doing things I don’t want to do! This I believe to be one of the basic purposes of education because, after all, one spends most of one’s life doing things one doesn’t really want to do simply in order to clear the space to do what one does want to do. Dartington ignored this as part of a deliberate theory-led policy, and it did so without asking me or telling me.

After school, Postgate spent some time at art college, but then, as the War progressed and he was called up for military service, he chose instead to be a conscientious objector and spent some time at Feltham Juvenile Prison. Here he was given the opportunity to build a stage set for a local amateur dramatic society production, if only he could work out how to do it from inside a prison. This was an opportunity to indulge his creative fancies ‘in the middle of … an institution created and administered solely for the purpose of preventing such activity.’ It lit in the eighteen year old boy an interest in stagecraft that would take him into a job after the War, and eventually into creating puppets and filming them. But in his memoir he takes some time to reflect on his decision not to fight. His father had been a ‘conchie’ during the First World War, but that had been an easier decision, the enemy wasn’t Hitler and all he stood for. So,

…there was not a moment in that time when I was not aware, somewhere in my heart, that I had defied my country, had refused to come to its aid, and by that act had become a stranger. By virtue of its inherent goodwill and kindness my country had allowed me to continue to live and eat. It had not only allowed me to stand by my convictions, it had respected them. After that I knew I could not, in good conscience, refuse to reciprocate that generosity.

This piece does not have the time to follow all the twists and turns that took Postgate and Firmin into the world of children’s animations. No-one seems more surprised than Oliver at the success he achieved, working out of a barn in Kent. Along the way Oliver acquired a wife, Prue and her three children by her first marriage - the need to improve, or at least secure, a source of income became pressing. He had been working in television as a supplier of props and ‘had come to see that quite a lot of the material that was being sent out was pretty thin…so on the basis that I probably couldn’t do a lot worse, I sat down one morning in 1958 and took pencil to paper to write a story series for children’s television.’ This would be animated by moving paper cut-outs of mice against a flat background using magnets: Peter Firmin was the artist Oliver found to draw these backgrounds. Alexander the Mouse was born. This was followed by Ivor the Engine.

It was the character and charm of these Ivor stories that lifted Postgate and Firmin and their partnership, Smallfilms, into a different league. As one website puts it so beautifully:

‘the adventures of a small green railway engine running out of the Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company, which was, according to the narrator, "In the top left-hand corner of Wales." Ivor was driven by Jones the Steam who worked alongside his colleagues Owen the Signal and Dai Station, the man who looked after Llianog Station. Ivor's boiler was fired by Idris the dragon and the little engine's ambition was to sing in the choir like his friend Evans the Song.’

The first series ended on an emotional high, as Ivor gets to ‘sing’ along with a Welsh male voice choir performing Cwm Rhondda, Ivor’s pipes being played by bassoon. It’s well worth a listen today:

As someone comments on the YouTube video: ‘I’m not crying, you’re crying’…

Oliver wrote in his memoir that, having refused to fight for his country, he felt he owed his fellow citizens a return of their generosity. Surely these fabulous films, that have meant so much to so many British children, go a long way towards paying off any such debt. His memoir is self-effacing and modest in the extreme:

I got away with it beyond my wildest dreams and found I had set myself up to receive the greatest gift I could ever have hoped for, that of becoming an agent of delight, the means by which a river of fun and sheer enjoyment would be unleashed…The twelve or so worlds which Peter Firmin and I put together, peopled and gave life to, are other places with an existence of their own. I am always delighted when people come and tell me how much they enjoyed them, and I love their joy, but I am not being modest when I say I did not create that joy. I was just the cook.

Today the Smallfilms legacy is cherished by Oliver’s son Daniel, also a well-known writer of books for children. There’s just no stopping some families.

Postgate and Firmin animating my favourites, Mr Pogle, Pippin and Tog

If you would like to read about another of my favourite children’s programmes, here’s something I wrote in 2023 about The Herbs:

Here are the herbs