The Enid Blyton Society

Questions about Enid Blyton feature regularly on the ITV quiz, The Chase .

Daisy wrote:I've just seen on BBC breakfast "The Sea of Adventure" being featured - albeit very briefly, by the presenters, one of whom read a small piece from it. It's book week I think! Nice that they both said it was a favourite of theirs.

Tony Summerfield wrote:I saw Louise Minchin reading that extract too. It was to celebrate World Book Day today and it was actually her own 'well-loved' copy of her favourite childhood book - mine too!

Excellent! Thanks for letting us know, Daisy and Tony. I didn't see much of the news this morning as I had to go to London for a hospital appointment but I've just caught up with the relevant parts of the programme on iPlayer and the mentions of Enid Blyton are hearteningly positive. Unfortunately I don't think people outside the UK are able watch BBC Breakfast, but if anyone is able to view it and missed it this morning it's available till 9.15 AM tomorrow:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... t-02032017" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I think there are two sections devoted to World Book Day, the first around 1:41:30 - 1:47:30. For those who can't watch it, children's author Frank Cottrell-Boyce (who is apparently the UK's first Professor of Reading!) talks about his favourite childhood book, Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green, and Louise Minchin shows us her childhood favourites, The Island of Adventure and The Sea of Adventure by Enid Blyton - Macmillan hardbacks which originally belonged to her dad. They're well-loved and she admits she even drew in them.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce says how important it is for children to grow up thinking of reading as a pleasure and not as a decoding exercise. For him, stories are associated with happy memories and he talks of how reading provides a break from life's problems, helps give people an inner strength and contributes to mental health. One of the most valuable things parents can do is to share books with their children. He says he's heard of many schools celebrating World Book Day in creative ways, including one school which has asked pupils to dress potatoes as book characters!

The second section is around 3:03:30 - 3:05:10. After seeing photos of children dressed up for World Book Day, we hear Louise Minchin read a short extract from The Sea of Adventure (about Horace Tipperlong) and learn that presenter Charlie Stayt also loved The Sea of Adventure as a child.

My son had never been asked to dress up as a book character for school - until today. He's 17 and in the Sixth Form, but all pupils - and teachers - were asked to come as characters. He thought it would be fun to go as Mary Poppins, so he did! Most of the costume could be put together from things we had at home, though we had to buy a cheap hat and artificial flowers from The Works and make a parrot's head for the handle of an old umbrella. He enjoyed getting into the role and ended up winning the prize for his year, so he's very pleased.

My daughter only had to dress up for World Book Day once, when she was in primary school, and she went as Dorothy from L. Frank Baum's Oz books.

A great link,thanks.

I've known Frank Cottrell-Boyce for about twenty years.
His children started out at the same Ursuline Convent Primary School as me,until they where home taught as they grew a bit older.
He's a very kind,generous man with a great sense of humour - well he laughs at my jokes,anyway!

floragord wrote:I was interested in the point made that all 3 of the participants had grown up in homes with large numbers of books, presumably that gives an advantage in developing an early and ongoing interest in reading?

From personal experience, I'd say yes - definitely. I was always read to as a very small child, and grew up with a love of books. My mom used to discuss the pictures with me, and ask me to point out things in them - she would read simple stories to me, and encouraged me to read Enid Blyton books, first reading the stories to me.

Books were very much a part of my life growing up. By the time I was 4 I could read quite complex sentences, which my mom built up out of flash-cards - and I could also read simple reading books. Many children these days can't even read when they start school, so its no wonder they find it hard work rather than fun when they eventually 'have' to learn to read. As was said in the interview - at school, reading simply becomes 'decoding' rather than being a fun warm moment between children and parents.

I totally agree, Rob. I grew up in a house full of books with parents who were both avid readers, and we were read to from a very young age. Both my sister and I could read well before we started school, simply from having been read to and learning to follow the words on the page. It pretty quickly became clear that books were the way into all kinds of amazing and exciting and imaginative new worlds, and reading was simply what you did to get there. And of course, a whole lot of those worlds for us were Enid Blyton ones, starting with Noddy and the Faraway Tree and the Wishing-Chair. There was no way reading could ever be a chore or simply "decoding" with an upbringing like that.

I completely agree with Rob and Courtenay.. In my case it has been the same, my mum absolutely loves reading and she is the one who first introduced us to the world of literature.. Our house has always been full of books, and I think thanks to that and my mum that right now, I am an avid reader and I have a great knowledge of many things...

My dad has never been a big reader but my mum is, so we grew up with plenty of books in the house and had loads of our own. We bought our baby his first books at the weekend and the lady asked how old our child was, she seemed mildly surprised when I said 'not even born yet'!

Good on you, Fiona. I did hear once that studies have suggested that reading aloud to your unborn baby actually has positive effects — apparently it calms and relaxes the baby in the womb and may even help him or her learn to recognise the sound of mum's voice... I don't know if there's any proof of this, but it sounds to me like a good enough excuse to start practising reading those books out loud!

Well just make sure you don't read aloud all by yourself in public.

I read a book to him this afternoon and if the kicking was anything to go by - he loved it! I read ' There's An Awful Lot of Weirdos in Our Neighbourhood' by Colin McNaughton as it was one of the few things I had that I thought would work in terms of the baby recognising the speech pattern (it's all funny poems). I borrowed a few other things from the library this afternoon and plan to try to read to him every day if I can.

To keep this on topic did anyone see the Cbeebies video they reposted this week featuring Blyton, Jacqueline Wilson, Malorie Blackman and Beatrix Potter. I made a Gif of some of Blyton's part as well.

Quite an amusing video. Gemma Whelan is an extremely versatile actress.

Love it!

Ha ha ha, brilliant! And how great to see Enid portrayed as a "cool" female author who wrote great books that have children wanting to read more and more — which is what I think most of us would agree she was, in her own way — instead of the usual negative comments...

And when you think, she was really the first female writer (apart from Beatrix Potter, but her books are vastly different) to have mass market appeal, as many modern writers do now - and all without the help of the internet and television!