The Enid Blyton Society

Eddie Muir wrote:There is a nice two page article about Mary Gernat in the September issue of Best of British magazine:

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Thanks for letting us know about the article, Eddie. I picked up a copy of Best of British and there are a number of other articles that look interesting besides the Mary Gernat one - e.g. pieces on Paddington Bear, Grange Hill and York's Jorvik Viking Centre. I was interested to read that Mary Gernat had "regular meetings with fellow Enid Blyton illustrator Eileen Soper, for what Roger likes to call her jolly." Roger How (Mary Gernat's son) is quoted as saying, "I love to think of them meeting in a hotel in Bath once or twice a year with lots of tea and cup cakes."

I’m glad to hear that you found the September issue of Best of British of interest, Anita. Apart from the Mary Gernat piece, I also enjoyed a number of the other articles.

Anita Bensoussane wrote:I was interested to read that Mary Gernat had "regular meetings with fellow Enid Blyton illustrator Eileen Soper, for what Roger likes to call her jolly." Roger How (Mary Gernat's son) is quoted as saying, "I love to think of them meeting in a hotel in Bath once or twice a year with lots of tea and cup cakes."

Unfortunately I have been unable to find a copy of this magazine, but reading Anita's quote above I take this latest revelation about 20 years after Mary Gernat's death with a pinch of salt, and I wonder if it is just intended to make it look as if Mary Gernat was one of Blyton's main illustrators. In her later days Eileen Soper lived a semi-reclusive life and seldom left Wildings, despite being one of Enid's major illustrators and living in the same part of the world, they never met. Most of MG's illustrating was done after ES had finished, they never illustrated the same characters or worked for the same publishers.

I was puzzled when this amazing 'discovery' of of MG's 'original artwork' was announced about two and a half years ago as I had seen it all twenty years earlier when I went to see Mary Gernat at her home in Lymington. She told me then that she didn't have any of the original artwork as the publishers had kept everything, all she had was her rough artwork which she had sent to the publisher for approval before she did the actual artwork to be used on the cover. She showed me an enormous amount of this rough artwork and as I think I have said before I bought a couple of pieces from her. I asked her whether she had ever met any other Blyton illustrators and the only one that she mentioned was Stuart Tresilian who had been her tutor at art college. She would surely not have forgotten to mention regular meetings with Eileen Soper if they had taken place.