Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

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Tony Summerfield
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Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Tony Summerfield »

There was an interesting article in The Times about Biddy Baxter and Blue Peter, and how she was influenced by having received two identical letters from Enid Blyton. I have just seen her repeating the same story on the BBC Breakfast News.

Interesting to read that she marched into Donald Baverstock's office with her demands, as he was of course, Enid Blyton's son-in-law! :lol:
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Belly »

I enjoyed reading that Tony, thanks.

I wonder if Biddy realised that Donald was Enid's son in law? I imagine so. What an interesting twist of fate.

Wasn't it unusual that Enid sent the same letter twice to Biddy? I've read she replied personally to all fans so it seems unlikely Biddy would receive a 'stock' letter? (Although I think I read somewhere that she changed her policy on doing this when she received sacks of mail by the day but may be wrong)?

As I child I used to write to the BBC pestering them to put televise various EB books. I used to get a printed card in reply with the message 'thank you for your letter, we have passed it on to the people who plan the programmes, it was nice of you to write'.

My friend and I decided they might take more notice of us if we wrote pretending to be an adult male with the title 'Dr'. Interestingly we often got a few pages back when we adopted this approach and even one hand written letter. We used a typewriter as our 8 year old handwriting we realised was a bit of a give away! We never one got a stock printed card!!
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Pippa-Stef »

That's really something Belly!

And thanks for that new Tony! I saw it on BBC Breakfast this morning was obviously beaten to it, when it came to mentioning it!
"You're so sharp you'll cut yourself one day!" Hunchy said going to the door
"So my Mother told me that when I was two years old!" said Julian and the others giggled.

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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by dsr »

Is it possible that, faced with the same question, she gave the same answer? If EB was receiving thousands of letters from children, the chances are that hundreds of them were basically identical - maybe EB was writing on autopilot (she can't have had time for serious thought about each one) and what was essentially the same answer became exactly the same answer by accident.

I doubt that she deliberately wrote a standard identical letter, especially if it was by hand. She'd be too clever not to realise that simply copying out a standard letter and sending it all round the country was certain to be found out - if nothing else, she'd be sending identical letters to siblings who wrote in seperate envelopes - I suspect she just wrote the same thing without really thinking too hard.
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Anita Bensoussane
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

What a smashing article, very detailed and informative. Loved the description of Biddy Baxter and the remark that she would have made an excellent spy!

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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by lizarfau »

I really enjoyed that article - Blue Peter was great. As the author said, it must have had something to keep kids watching till the end of the credits, because I remember seeing Biddy Baxter's name at the end and also Rosemary Gill's!

Years ago, there was a documentary on TV about Blue Peter, and a fan said that when he was in his 20s he decided he'd like to replace his long-lost Blue Peter badge. So he wrote a letter trying to get one, and received a letter back saying something like, "According to our files, you're 27 years old, why do you want a Blue Peter badge?" So that filing system obviously worked. :lol:
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Belly »

That's amazing that they could tell he was 27 years old!

Back in the 1980s there was a competition to finish the limerick (about Goldie the new puppy):

There was a young dog on Blue Peter
Whose nature could not have been sweeter

I am not sure what the winning entry was. I was so proud of my effort I can remember it:

There was a young dog on Blue Peter
Whose nature could not have been sweeter
He ate Lesley's hat
And then ate a rat!
And was sick all over the heater
!

I think I missed the whole ethos/spirit of Blue Peter but a badge would have been nice!!!!
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

:lol:
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.

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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Viv of Ginger Pop »

It was interesting to see the emphasis on the expense of the Correspondence Unit. Enid had no such assistance, and Biddy had two handwritten letters from her!

Interesting also to see the conurtation of "middle class" given to an information programme. I had a lively spat with a customer today who told me that a local Grammar School was teaching that Blyton was "too middle class". I didn't enquire what subject this was :roll:

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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by lizarfau »

I get tired of that 'middle-class' label being applied to anything that's good. I was a working-class kid and I loved Blue Peter and Enid Blyton, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer and the rest. I didn't see any of it as irrelevant in any way to my own life in a poor outer suburb of Birmingham. All this criticism is based on patronising middle-class ideas of what working-class people want. :evil:
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Rob Houghton »

I grew up in Kings Norton, in south Birmingham, and identified 100% with everything Enid wrote, even placing the situations and settings in many of the books as being around the area in which I lived. :D I can never understand it when she is accused of being beyond the comprehension of 'lower classes' - what an insult. :evil:
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Belly
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Belly »

Wasn't Enid herself from a working class family originally?
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Rob Houghton
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Rob Houghton »

Yes. That's what makes these accusations so daft!! :roll:
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Kitty »

There are few things that rile me more than those who suggest children's literature should somehow be policed so that children may only read about situations they can 'identify' with. Thankfully it seems to have settled down a bit now. When I was little there seemed to be a concerted effort from booksellers and the school library to make us read as much misery fiction as possible - looking back I can see little literary merit in most of it - in fact none of the school/church-prize-type books of that sort that I won are still in print (or collected second hand) but it was very PC at the time. I can't remember anyone enjoying it - most of us ignored the stuff, read the Blyton/Crompton style of light fiction, Trebizon, and the heavier children's classics of the mid-twentieth century, along with adult fiction.

All that said, I do have vague notions of a very peculiar book about a family where the father had a nervous breakdown that became a cult classic for all the wrong reasons among one or two of us little monsters :oops: :? I'd quite like to reread it just for the nostalgia factor, but cannot remember enough to ever find it again!
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Anita Bensoussane
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Re: Blue Peter and Enid Blyton

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

Kitty wrote:There are few things that rile me more than those who suggest children's literature should somehow be policed so that children may only read about situations they can 'identify' with.
Yes, that does seem silly. Surely part of the joy of reading is that it opens up new horizons?!

I remember being excited, on going to secondary school, that I was going to be learning Geography as a timetabled subject. I imagined I'd be finding out about how people lived in different countries around the world. Instead, Geography turned out to be mainly about geology and the weather. When the teachers wanted to give an example of a particular rock formation or weather pattern, they'd usually choose an example from Snowdon, only a few miles away from our town. I suppose they thought we needed topics we could "identify" with! :roll:
Kitty wrote:All that said, I do have vague notions of a very peculiar book about a family where the father had a nervous breakdown that became a cult classic for all the wrong reasons among one or two of us little monsters :oops: :? I'd quite like to reread it just for the nostalgia factor, but cannot remember enough to ever find it again.
I wonder what that was? I recall borrowing a book from the library in the 1980s which was about a boy whose parents adopted a little brother for him. He was told that the little brother was eight years old but gradually began to suspect that he was older. It turned out that he was actually fifteen (and therefore an older brother) but was disabled in a way that made him appear younger. For some reason the boy's parents hadn't wanted him to know the truth about his brother's age. That's just about all I can remember now and I've forgotten the whys and wherefores of it all, but the whole thing seems so bizarre that I'm curious to know what the book was!

Anita
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.

"There is no bond like the bond of having read and liked the same books."
- E. Nesbit, The Wonderful Garden.


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