Some Photos of Enid I hadn't Seen :)

[Rob Houghton]

Does anyone know when the dog attack occured, or if Enid wrote about it in her magazine at the time? As it was public knowledge, she may have felt obliged to do so. I gather she rarely wrote about the darker side of animals, which is a shame, as she could have used her position to warn children about things like not approaching stray dogs.

Barbara Stoney writes in her Biography that Enid Blyton was badly bitten on the leg by a stray dog in 1952. She had to spend some time in St. Stephen's Hospital, and it was her husband Kenneth who repaired the injuries to her leg. I think Enid did refer to the incident briefly in Enid Blyton's Magazine , saying that one of her fans had quipped that the dog wouldn't have bitten her if it had known that she was Queen Bee of the Busy Bees (a club which raised money to help animals)!

The incident is also featured in 'Sunny Stories', starring Maureen Lipman, if I remember rightly.

[Anita Bensoussane]

The incident is also featured in 'Sunny Stories', starring Maureen Lipman, if I remember rightly.

Yes, except that writer/director Ken Howard used a touch of artistic license in moving the event to later on in Enid's life, when she was sufffering from dementia. In the Sunny Stories programme, Enid gets confused and mistakes the dog for her fox-terrier Bobs (who had died many years earlier although he had lived on long after his death in her stories and magazine columns). She approaches the dog or calls it to her and it bites her. That works well in the programme as it serves to show Enid losing all sense of time and confusing fantasy with reality, but it's not how it actually happened.

[Rob Houghton]

The incident is also featured in 'Sunny Stories', starring Maureen Lipman, if I remember rightly.

Yes, except that writer/director Ken Howard used a touch of artistic license in moving the event to later on in Enid's life, when she was sufffering from dementia. In the Sunny Stories programme, Enid gets confused and mistakes the dog for her fox-terrier Bobs (who had died many years earlier although he had lived on long after his death in her stories and magazine columns). She approaches the dog or calls it to her and it bites her. That works well in the programme as it serves to show Enid losing all sense of time and confusing fantasy with reality, but it's not how it actually happened.

Thanks for that Anita: I was thinking at the back of my mind that there was something different about the depiction in Sunny Stories, and now I remember.