Why Enid Blyton? What do people like about her books?

[Francis]

The love of the natural world and blissful scenic settings that permuate Enid's
books certainly encouraged children to value these things - they certainly did to
me. In that respect she encouraged attitudes that were receptive to the environmental
message. The thought of Uncle Quentin getting a Nobel prize is worth thinking about! I
expect that Enid must have been aware of the need for energy replacements when she
wrote '.....Kirrin Island again' but she would not have been thinking of global warming or
reliance on fossil fuels.

[Chrissie777]

The love of the natural world and blissful scenic settings that permuate Enid's
books certainly encouraged children to value these things - they certainly did to
me.

Hi Francis,

Blyton books made me very interested in exploring Great Britain, visiting castles and ruins, a tin mine in Cornwall, Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset etc.
There's still so much to visit in England and in Scotland as well as Wales...
My dream trip would be going to the isles from "Sea of Adventure".

[MJE]

My dream trip would be going to the isles from "Sea of Adventure".

     Exactly where are these islands? Are they real, and did Enid Blyton set the story in specific islands? Or did she just invent a group of islands in roughly the geographical area she wanted?

Regards, Michael.

[Anita Bensoussane]

It would be interesting to know whether anyone has any ideas on that, though it's likely Enid Blyton didn't have specific islands in mind because that would have required a fair amount of research and would also have meant she'd be restricted in describing things like the length of the children's journey, the distance between various islands, etc. Oh, and it's important to the story that one of the islands has a lagoon. We know that Enid Blyton went to Scotland (her first husband, Hugh Pollock, was Scottish) so she may have visited little islands and got a feel for them. And if she was unsure of details like flora and fauna, she could easily have consulted a book or two. In Chapter 6 Bill says they're heading for islands off the north-west coast of Scotland and adds that there are hundreds of them, some too small to map. Jack finds the Isle of Wings on a map but that doesn't necessarily mean we could do the same!

Bill and the others travel to Scotland by train. They change trains at "a very big and noisy station" and then take a slower train to "a big seaside town". They spend the afternoon and evening on a motor-boat, making their way to an island which has a few inhabitants. After camping there for the night they set off again the next morning, speeding over the water for five hours before they spot more islands in the distance. And the following day they make one of those islands their headquarters. Since Enid Blyton even avoids naming any towns, I imagine she didn't want to tie herself to an exact real-life location.

My dream trip would be going to the isles from "Sea of Adventure".

Same here!

[MJE]

It would be interesting to know whether anyone has any ideas on that, though it's likely Enid Blyton didn't have specific islands in mind because that would have required a fair amount of research and would also have meant she'd be restricted in describing things like the length of the children's journey, the distance between various islands, etc.

     I get the impression that Enid Blyton tends to make up fictional locations much of the time. At times they may be *based* on real places she knew, but so long as she gives them a new name, she can get away with changing things to suit the story.
     And I think that's fair enough. A lot better than the approach taken by Sir Arthur C. Clarke (science-fiction writer mainly known for "2001: A Space Odyssey"), who, in his novel "The Fountains of Paradise", apparently (I'm saying this second-hand, because I haven't read the novel) used the setting of Ceylon (Sri Lanka today) as the site for a "space elevator", or device to transfer objects or people from the Earth's surface to a geostationary satellite orbiting Earth, and geostationary satellites (ones which appear to sit still over a spot on the Earth's surface) are possible only if situated exactly over the Equator - so Clarke took the liberty of moving Ceylon several degrees south so that it was crossed by the Equator, so making this plot possible.
     To my mind, that is sloppy plotting. It would have been far better to invent a fictitious island on the Equator, or else use a country that is already crossed by the Equator. But Clarke lived in Ceylon for most of his life, knew it intimately, so I guess he wanted to use it in his story.
     I don't mind how many liberties Enid Blyton took with supposedly real places she used in settings, such as Bourne End, Brownsea Island, Corfe Castle, or whatever, just so long as she doesn't call her partly fictitious places by those names, or use other multiple details that unmistakably link her settings with the real places. (I must say that, when I looked up Brownsea Island, it appeared to me to be vastly different from the Whispering Island she used in "Five Have a Mystery to Solve", supposedly based on Brownsea Island. For one thing, it appears to be far more developed, and to have been so for many years, than the Whispering Island seemed to be.)

And if she was unsure of details like flora and fauna, she could easily have consulted a book or two.

     Of course - the Internet didn't exist then. I guess researching stuff was far harder then. Maybe you sometimes actually had to visit places. I suppose some might say that that would be best even today, but it's not always possible.

In Chapter 6 Bill says they're heading for islands off the north-west coast of Scotland

     Yes - I'd forgotten whether she said what part of Scotland, or whether it was just Scotland in some vague, general sense.
     However, looking in an atlas at the north-west coast of Scotland, the possibilities don't look all that promising. There are the Hebrides, where there are certainly enough islands, but they are mostly quite large; and otherwise there are scattered, lonely groups of small islands, but only a very few clustered together - not hundreds - and surrounded by empty sea for what looks like hundreds of miles.
     Of course there are the Shetland and Orkney Islands - but those are not north-west Scotland, and appear to be more densely inhabited and developed than Enid Blyton's islands were.
     So the possibilities really don't look all that good, unfortunately - unless I'm missing something.

... and adds that there are hundreds of them, some too small to map.

     Well... maybe. But some maps are incredibly detailed. However, maybe not in those days.
     But I bet Army Ordnance Survey maps have always been detailed. They would presumably be used for planning war campaigns or strategies, and we all know that, when it comes to war, no effort or expense is ever spared. I have such a map of a good part of the Adelaide hills, which was given to me as a child because I was interested in maps, and that was back in the 1960s, and it is incredibly detailed for its "one mile per inch" scale.

Bill and the others travel to Scotland by train. They change trains at "a very big and noisy station" and then take a slower train to "a big seaside town".

     I recall the first train was an overnight train. Are there (or were there) train journeys in Great Britain long enough to take overnight? What cities or towns would they run between?

Since Enid Blyton even avoids naming any towns, I imagine she didn't want to tie herself to an exact real-life location.

     Yes, I think that's what she does. I would too - or else if I did want to mention names or had to, I would use fictitious ones.

Regards, Michael.

[Daisy]

I always imagined the children with 'Dr Walker' set off from a London station and travelled overnight to Glasgow. Yes, sleepers were (are?) quite common. I had the pleasure of travelling on one from Aberdeen down into England with my father when I was eight. I don't know the name of the destination station, but we did end up in London. There may have been a break to see grandparents in Carlisle though. So yes, I think the picture of the overnight journey in 'Sea' was pretty accurate. My journey was in the 1940s too!
The journey north would take at least eight hours, so just right for a good night's sleep!

[Fiona1986]

Bill and the others travel to Scotland by train. They change trains at "a very big and noisy station" and then take a slower train to "a big seaside town".

     I recall the first train was an overnight train. Are there (or were there) train journeys in Great Britain long enough to take overnight? What cities or towns would they run between?

The longest train journey I could think of for GB would be Thurso to London (though you could probably make it longer by heading to Cornwall or Devon) at 12 hours 42 minutes (that includes two changes and about 1 hour total of waiting at stations)

It's about 4.5 hours taking a West Coast route from London to Glasgow, and you'd need to add at least two or three hours to that for a train up to somewhere like Fort William or Kyle of Lochlash.

You could take either of those as a sleeper train today, so that you'd travel overnight and not waste a day. I'm pretty sure both the journeys would have been substantially longer on a steam train.

[Daisy]

Thanks for bringing me up to date Fiona. Yes, the steam trains were slower. If I remember correctly (which is sometimes questionable!) it took about 4 hours to travel from London to Darlington in the 50s - a journey I did a few times when visiting future in-laws in Durham.

[Poppy]

Well... where do I start?
I love the way the children are not accompanied by adults when in the middle of an adventure but are on their own and solve the mysteries themselves.
I enjoy the thrilling mysteries they solve.
You make friends with all the characters.
And that is the Enid Blyton secret!

[Moonraker]

I'm pretty sure both the journeys would have been substantially longer on a steam train.

A train hauled by steam locomotive, Mallard, did 125mph, breaking previous records, on the 3rd July, 1938. This record has never been beaten.

Of course, journeys are usually quicker today due to the acceleration speed of modern trains.

http://www.wandleys.demon.co.uk/mallard.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[MJE]

Yes, sleepers were (are?) quite common.

     They used to be common in Australia, too, in my childhood, and no pleasure was greater to me than a journey in one of these trains overnight, in my sleeping compartment. I loved it in my early years - almost to the point of fanaticism. But, sadly, they are disappearing now, except for the long trips of the Indian Pacific (Sydney to Perth) and Ghan (Adelaide to Darwin), which have gone very much towards appealing to tourists, and are very expensive indeed. (They're not in any way trying to compete against airlines doing the same routes.) But the intercapital overnight trains are largely gone now - maybe entirely.
     I kind of lost interest in trains at that point, because I no longer liked the way the railways were going, and they just didn't any longer have the magic of the old trains I was so familiar with; so I'm a bit vague on what replaces them now. I think in one or two cases there is one of those high-speed trains that covers the distance in a much shorter time during the day, and maybe also just ordinary-speed trains during the day on one or two routes. Maybe some have just disappeared, and people catch a bus or fly. (Cheap air-fares are probably the main thing that killed off these trains.) I think Queensland still has a couple of its long-distance trains, and again they are probably mainly oriented towards tourists.
     The sleeping berth fares were more expensive, to be sure - but one thing massively in their favour was that, by giving you a night's accommodation while you get to and/or from your destination, they might well save you the cost of an extra night or two in a hotel or motel.
     But my memories of my many trips in those trains are still full of nostalgia today, since they are something I will never experience again now. Sad.

Regards, Michael.

[Chrissie777]

It makes me sad, too.
Many years ago when I was a child, we often took the train from Braunschweig (Northern Germany) to Munich in Bavaria (Southern Germany), but couldn't afford a sleeping compartment. It was a train ride that lasted all day long and was exhausting.
After I watched "North by Northwest" by Hitchcock, I was dreaming of a long train ride at some point later in life.
Last year when we started planning our honeymoon, we thought how wonderful it must be to take the train from Québec City (Eastern Canada) all the way to Vancouver, British Columbia, on the Canadian West Coast.
Then we did some research and for a 6 day train ride a sleeping compartment would have cost us US $12.000 (!!!). That's absolutely insane. You can almost make a trip on the QE2 for that amount of money.
To make things worse: there is not even a fully connecting train ride possible through Canada from East to West. In-between there is a gap of 30 or 40 miles (I think that's in the Lake Louise area) where you need to rent a car in order to catch the connecting train to Vancouver.
To make a long story short: we ended up renting a cabin at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains, CA, instead. It was lovely.

[Francis]

I remember picking up the Trans-Canadian train at Lake Louise about
20 years ago and going from there to Vancouver - it was not expensive
and the journey was magical. We spent plenty of time in the Observation
car.

[Chrissie777]

But did you sleep in the sleeping compartment? Or were you just riding the train during the day? I'm talking about the Rocky Mountaineer train.

[MJE]

I'm talking about the Rocky Mountaineer train.

     That *was* horrendously expensive - all the more so if those were old prices from years ago. Even the Australian Indian Pacific and Ghan which I mentioned are not *that* expensive. According to the relevant web pages within http://www.gsr.com.au" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (or http://www.greatsouthernrail.com.au" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), the fares are around $1,500 to $2,000 one-way (for both trains), depending on the exact type of sleeper you have. The type of sleeper would govern how much space you had, and whether a single traveller would have to share a compartment with a stranger or not (not something I would at all relish). But even the cheaper sleeper is probably more than double the air-fare for the same journey - maybe three times as much, if you can get a special deal on a cheap air-fare, or use one of the no-frills budget airlines. And the airline would get you there within 3 hours, as against the train's 3 days.
     I've never done an overnight train journey sitting up. I would expect it to be pretty hard, and anyone I've spoken to who has done it confirms this - no-one has ever recommended it for its own sake, and it's purely an economy thing - nothing more. I don't know if train journeys in Australia significantly longer than 12 hours have a sitting-only option available - but I think this would be incredibly hard - not my idea of fun at all.
     As I said, the few sleeper trains that still exist in Australia seem to be very much geared to tourists, so I would guess that sitting-only tickets would be available only for shortish trips - 12 hours at the most, and that only during the day. If a train is tourist-oriented, it's not likely to provide options that tourists don't like taking anyway.

Regards, Michael.