THE LITTLE GREY MEN

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A whimsical classic of talking gnomes and magical woods for fans of The Wind in the Willows from a British Carnegie Medal recipient In 1975 The Little Grey Men was adapted into a 10-part animated series called Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder and Cloudberry by Anglia Television in the U.K. Brendon Chase was dramatised into a 13-part series by Southern Television in 1980. The plot, involving three gnomes who set off upstream in search of a fourth who went a-questing two years earlier, is thoroughly wrapped in rhapsodic descriptions of bird song and nodding wildflowers, bubbling waters, breezes and storms, grassy pastures, the pleasures of angling, and nature observed from ground level. . . . [F]ans of Wind in the Willows will feel right at home.... The story winds down to a happy twist at the end. Given patient listeners, this Carnegie Medal–winner makes a leisurely but finally engaging read-aloud.

The housekeeper told us that the previous summer BB’s wife Cecily, his emotional mainstay, had died prematurely after being enveloped in pesticides sprayed by the neighbouring farmer. He himself died sixteen years later, in 1990, flying away like his wild goose weather-vane just before my first child was born. urn:oclc:799853853 Republisher_date 20130129195654 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20130129163740 Scanner scribe2.toronto.archive.org Scanningcenter uoft Worldcat (source edition) Not to mention the writing style-- so old and rich, I really wish we still spoke like that, ngl. I actually could only read bits at a time to soak it all in. And that one day I read a chapter during the rainstorm with tea?? 😭😭😭 BRING ME TO THAT FICTIONAL LAND. Although BB was 65 when he wrote to me, The Little Grey Men is subtitled ‘A Story for the Young at Heart’, and this is what he was.

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The Little Grey Men: A story for the young in heart is a children's fantasy novel written by Denys Watkins-Pitchford under the pen name "BB" and illustrated by the author under his real name. [2] It was first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1942 and it has been reissued several times. [3] Set in the English countryside, it features the adventures of four gnomes who may be the last of their race. At the same time it features the countryside during three seasons of the year. The book was published in 1942, in the dark days of the Second World War. BB’s warm-hearted fairytale lightened the wartime gloom. Such is the book’s appeal to young and old alike that it has stood the test of time and it is still in print. Its sequel ‘Down The Bright Stream’ (1948) continued the gnomes’ adventures in similar grand style. I've read just over 90 books this year, most of them having remained unread on my shelves for a few years - 2017 was a catch-up year. And if I was to choose my favourite book of the year, it would be 'The Little Grey Men' by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford). He was an active conservationist, and according to Matthew Oates, the author of His Imperial Majesty: A natural history of the Purple Emperor butterfly (to be published by Bloomsbury), he played a significant part in rescuing the Purple Emperor from local extinction by nurturing its larvae in his garden and fighting the Forestry Commission who kept removing its food source, the sallow.

Watkins-Pitchford won the 1942 Carnegie Medal recognising The Little Grey Men as the year's best children's book by a British subject. [4] Dodder- "the eldest and wisest of the three, was the shortest in stature, but that was because he had a wooden leg...His beard was a beauty, it hung below his belt, almost to his knees, and would have been snow white if he had not dyed it with walnut juice... Unlike the others, Dodder wore a coat and breeches of batskin, with the ears left on. He drew this almost over his head in cold weather, so that he looked like a very curious elongated bat without wings."

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Oates credits BB with inspiring his lifelong devotion to that particular butterfly by writing captivatingly about it in Brendon Chase, a children’s novel published in 1944 and made into a TV series in the 1980s. Since researching BB, I have come across many people, from amateur fishermen to gamekeepers and naturalists, who speak of the effect his writing has had. Denys Watkins-Pitchford was born in Lamport, Northamptonshire on the 25th July 1905. He was the second son of the Revd. Walter Watkins-Pitchford and his wife, Edith. His elder brother, Engel, died at the age of thirteen. Denys was himself considered to be delicate as a child, and because of this was educated at home, while his younger twin, Roger, was sent away to school. He spent a great deal of time on his own, wandering through the fields, and developed a love of the outdoors, which was to influence his writing. He had a great love of the outdoors and enjoyed hunting, fishing and drawing, all these things were to influence his writing greatly. At the age of fifteen, he left home and went to study at the Northampton School of Art. He won several prizes while there, but was irked by the dry, academic approach, and longed to be able to draw from life. Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett & the Dawn of Pink Floyd". Archived from the original on 8 January 2008.

As BB says in his introduction to The Little Grey Men, most fairy books portray miniature men and women with ridiculous tinsel wings, doing impossible things with flowers and cobwebs. He may have been referring to Cecily Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies, first published in 1927. As he rightly adds, ‘That sort of make-believe is all right for some people, but it won’t do for you and me.’ His gnomes are never sentimental or twee. They are just a short imaginative step from the woodland creatures that are their friends. In his memoir The Idle Countryman, published in 1943, a year after The Little Grey Men, BB stresses his love of wandering alone in the wild, especially at dusk, and the mix of enchantment and fear it can generate. My dad bought the beautifully illustrated book The Little Grey Men, by B.B. (ages 8 to 12), for me when I was 8 or 9. It’s about three gnomes searching for their long-lost brother. Aside from being a rattling good adventure story, it’s a wonderful sort of nature study, following gnomes through the seasons.Although the gnomes may be imaginary beings (I'm not entirely prepared to cede that point), the world they inhabit is very real and described in straightforward but eloquent language. The author is intimately connected to the countryside in a way most of us have lost--not just as observed beauty but as an intimate companion. Such narratives overwhelm me with longing to "return" to something that lives deep in our imaginations, something close to us but always just out of reach--in a word, Arcadia. A older child able to use a dictionary could read this alone as he/she would come across words, nouns usually, being names or countryside descriptions we don't use any more but which an adult would understand.

Robin Clobber is a human seven-year-old boy, a scion of a noble family, who meets the gnomes and whose model ship is found and used by them. Marcus Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers: Children's Books in Britain 1900–1960, The Library Association, 1962, p. 92. I felt it a bit of a shame the book could be read as a piece of Conservative propaganda. It was published in 1942, so of course we’re well into the Second World War. The ethnic nationalism, the imperialist language and tropes, the Eurocentrism, the normalisation of blood sports (fox hunting), the sexist asides the narrator feels the need to add within multiple misanthropic criticisms of humans, yet oddly deifying them in the process (a young boy is compared to the nature god Pan).... It’s a bit of a mystifying mixture.

Today, the whole of humanity is in the same predicament. As we have thrived the rest of nature has suffered, and we have entered what E. O. Wilson has called “The Age of Loneliness”. Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL7499237M Openlibrary_edition The novel was one of Syd Barrett's favourite books; an excerpt from it was read at his funeral. [12] Television adaptation [ edit ] Denys James Watkins-Pitchford MBE was a British naturalist, children's writer, and illustrator who wrote under the pseudonym "BB" and also used D.J. Watkins-Pitchford.