The Enid Blyton Society

Eric Robert Parker was born in Stoke Newington, London, on 7 September 1898, the second son of Edwin Alfred Parker (a clerk with Waterbury Watch Co.) and his wife Helen (née Morton). Parker was a London County Scholar attending Northwold Road School where his artistic talent so puzzled the local authorities that they were uncertain what to do with him. The Council had no school sufficiently advanced to give him the scope he required, so the Education Committee decided to award him an advanced scholarship and a maintenance grant to cover the cost of his travel to an art school.

His studies were soon interrupted by the Great War in which he served with the Bucks Hussars. After the war he resumed his artistic career but as a freelance illustrator. His first commission had come in 1915 for a series of humorous postcards but his big break came in 1921 when he placed his first work with the Amalgamated Press.

He found his true metier as the illustrator of the Sexton Blake detective yarns in 1922. His first Blake cover appeared on Union Jack in October 1922 and Parker soon became one of the main Blake artists. His strength, like Arthur Jones before him, was atmosphere. Some of his drawing could look crude—although his characters were always recognisable—but the atmosphere he imbued into his drawings was always perfect for the story it illustrated, whether the dark, sombre gloom of the Paris catacombs or the open prairies. Parker also proved to have a lighter side when required that could bring humour to the illustrations that accompanied 'Tinker's Notebook' and the 'Detective Supplement' pages.

Parker was involved heavily in the early creation of Experimental Art's next two successes: for Princess, launched in January 1960, Parker illustrated various stories by Enid Blyton and, in 1963-64, produced the full-colour strip 'The Daughter of Lorna Doone'; and for Look and Learn, launched in January 1962, he produced 'scamps'—rough layouts, sometimes in colour—of pages so that artists would know how the feature was envisaged. He was to provide similar roughs for other papers, including cover layouts for Valiant and page layouts for Ranger.

Courtenay wrote:This is one of the most hideous, in my view — not only do the humans look like cartoon figures from some dodgy 1960s advertisement, but that attempt at Timmy has got to be the most inept portrait of a dog by an adult artist that I've ever seen:

Anita Bensoussane wrote:

Courtenay wrote:This is one of the most hideous, in my view — not only do the humans look like cartoon figures from some dodgy 1960s advertisement, but that attempt at Timmy has got to be the most inept portrait of a dog by an adult artist that I've ever seen:

Is it worse than this?

THE ERIC PARKER STORY