Stephen Roberts delves into the life of prolific and much-loved author and illustrator Shirley Hughes
As an author of a mere two books I can only doff my cap to someone who managed to pen more than 50 published works that furthermore sold over 11½ million copies in a career lasting more than 60 years. For this month’s Cheshire Great I offer you Shirley Hughes.
Winifred Shirley Hughes was born in West Kirby, located in Cheshire at the time, on 16th July 1927. She was the daughter of Thomas and Kathleen, née Dowling, her father Thomas James Hughes being the owner of T.J. Hughes, the Liverpool-based store chain that first emerged in the city, in London Road, in 1912, and grew to a substantial enterprise comprising 57 stores at its peak (2011).
It’s fair to say that young Winifred, or Shirley as she was to become known to posterity, was born into wealth rather than penury although her father did die when she was just five. West Kirby is where she grew up, developing an early interest in art and being inspired by the likes of W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944) whose name would become a byword for weird contraptions.
She loved nothing more than a trip to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which houses one of the largest art collections in the country outside of London. Failing that, a trip to the cinema or theatre went down well where she became a people watcher, something that would prove invaluable for her future illustrations. Among other artists who caught the youngster’s eye was E.H. Shepard who illustrated A.A. Milne’s much-loved Winnie-the-Pooh books as well as The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
Educated at West Kirby Grammar (1935-43), which had opened just before WW1, Shirley reckoned herself not to have been a particularly gifted pupil; let’s put her down then as a late developer. Her home was directly behind the school, Easedale House on Meols Drive. She may have found Liverpool School of Art more to her liking, studying there from the age of 17, following that with a stint at the Ruskin School in Oxford.
After Shirley had finished with art school she moved to London and married the architect/etcher John Vulliamy in 1952, a marriage that was to last half a century until his death in 2002. The Vulliamy family had originally been Swiss and had moved like clockwork from, well, clockmaking to architecture. They were to have three children including Ed, a journalist/writer, and Clara, another children’s book illustrator with whom Shirley collaborated on the Dixie O’Day series. Shirley’s genes seem to have sent the eminent Vulliamy family in another direction.
Hughes dabbled with a career in the theatre as a designer but soon concluded this wasn’t for her and returned to illustrating which had been recommended by a former tutor. She cut her teeth by firstly illustrating the works of other authors including Teddington’s Dorothy Edwards (1914-82) whose My Naughty Little Sister books Shirley illustrated, and Sussex-born Noel Streatfeild (1895-1986) who had several of her novels adapted for film and TV.
Other authors illustrated by Shirley include the prolific Alison Uttley (1884-1976), novelist, poet and teacher Ian Seraillier (1912-94) and New Zealand authoress Margaret Mahy (1936-2012). Shirley worked mostly as an illustrator for other authors during the 1950s and ‘60s; her own time as an acclaimed author was yet to come.
The first of Hughes’ own books that she wrote and illustrated was Lucy & Tom’s Day (1960) which she followed up with more than 50 others including Dogger (1977), which was her first book to be widely published overseas, the Alfie series of books (1977), and the later Olly and Me series (1993). Dogger is a story about a toy dog, lost by its young owner but then reunited courtesy of a jumble sale. It’s the most famous of all her stories. Often, the best stories come from our real-life experiences, this one inspired apparently by Shirley’s son, Ed, who lost a favoured teddy. According to Shirley: ‘We did look everywhere, but we never found it.’ Shirley would continue to use her own children’s growing up as source material for her stories.
The first of the Alfie books, Alfie Gets In First in 1981, is another very believable tale where the young child of the title accidentally slams the front door shut on the rest of his family and unable to reach the catch has to work out a way of readmitting everyone. It reminds me of the time I locked myself in the bathroom when I was but a nipper, then couldn’t get out so resorted to demanding the Fire Brigade in a loud and persistent voice. We didn’t get a visit from men in uniform, however, I was threatened with my father (‘when he gets home’). Anyway, enough of the digression, all this output represented an affectionate feel-good take on childhood and there are little vignettes there that we can often relate to.
The last of the Alfie stories, Alfie on Holiday, was published in 2019. Given that little Alfie had been around almost four decades by then he was modernised for today’s generation if not exactly aged. He had something of Peter Pan about him that boy which is fair enough as Shirley named an edition of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, as being among her childhood favourites.
An illustrator as well as an author, in addition to those 50 authored works Shirley was also responsible for illustrating more than 200. The fact that she could both write and illustrate opened the genre of comic strips for her and the first of these she published was Chips and Jessie in 1985; a way of assisting some children to move from pictures to words. In both 1977 and 2003 Shirley won the Kate Greenaway medal for her illustration of children’s books, the first of those being for Dogger and the second for Ella’s Big Chance which was Hughes’ own personal take on Cinderella. Shirley’s celebrity was rather confirmed when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2001. The Walker Art Gallery, which Shirley had been drawn to as a youngster, staged an exhibition of her work in 2003.
Her first full-length novel came late in life, Hero on a Bicycle, published in 2015, which was a fiction for young adults whilst Whistling in the Dark, also in 2015, was inspired by her time at West Kirby Grammar and growing up on the Wirral during the war. In 1999, Shirley was awarded an OBE for her services to literature, then became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature the following year. The CBE followed in 2017. Universities in Shirley’s home area queued up to honour her: Liverpool John Moores University conferred an honorary fellowship on her whilst the Universities of Liverpool and Chester bestowed honorary degrees. Her final book was ‘Dogger’s Christmas’ (2020) in which she returned to her most successful story and updated it for the festive season and all at the age of 92.
Shirley Hughes died on 25th February 2022 at the grand age of 94. Michael Morpurgo, the ‘War Horse’ author, is quoted as saying about Shirley: ‘She began the reading lives of so many millions’. She’d published her autobiography, A Life Drawing, (2002) twenty years before. What kind of a person was she? All these words have been used to describe the Cheshire-born authoress: Graceful, elegant, wonderful company, funny, insightful and kind. For someone who bestowed so much pleasure it was apt that her laugh was both heartfelt and loud.
