There has been a great deal written about this new discovery in the past week, but few people seem to realise that this manuscript actually came to light four months ago in October last year. For those that haven't seen it I thought I would show you what Hannah Green at Seven Stories put in her Blog at the time. This was on October 29th after we had exchanged a few emails:-
"I have been in touch with Tony Summerfield of the Enid Blyton Society today regarding a mystery typescript entitled Mr Tumpy’s Caravan. The typescript was purchased as part of a lot of short stories, and is a complete story running to some 177 pages. We initially wondered if it was unpublished, as we were only aware of the Mr Tumpy strip books and this typescript did not resemble any of them.
However, Tony pointed out that Enid also published a picture story book called Mr Tumpy and His Caravan. Surely, what we had must be the typescript for that? This seemed a reasonable conjecture, given the similarity in title, and we set about sourcing a copy of the book in order to confirm this. But Tony was still keen to see the typescript, so this morning I sent him scans of the contents page and the first page of chapter one.
To my surprise, and great delight, he replied very swiftly to say that our reasonable conjecture was, in fact, wrong. We do indeed appear to have a typescript for a complete, unpublished Mr Tumpy story book! This is an incredibly exciting discovery which I couldn’t possibly keep to myself. In the coming weeks we will hopefully be able to share more details about this unpublished story – I still haven’t had a chance to read more than the first few pages! But I am very much looking forward to the task, and to sharing any further exciting discoveries."
Four months later this has now become "news" and all sorts of people are jumping on the bandwagon to grab publicity for themselves. Amongst the many enquiries I have had, two of the stranger ones are the BBC Gardener's World programme and the Camping and Caravanning Club Magazine!
Numerous people have come forward to say that they had this book as a child, but so far they have all been referring to
Mr Tumpy and His Caravan which was published in September 1949, using material that had been published as a daily picture strip in the
Evening Standard.
There has been a great deal of speculation about the date of this book and for various reasons after discussion with both Anita and David Chambers I have now come down to an opinion that it was written in the late 1920s. Several of the ideas used in the book bear a strong resemblance to both
The Book of Brownies written in 1926 and even more so to stories that appeared in
Sunny Stories for Little Folks in 1928. These ideas would have been fresh in her mind at the time and the general style of what I have seen of the manuscript would seem to point to this period. It certainly wasn't written in the late 30s as I have seen suggested elsewhere, if this had been the case it would not have remained unpublished.