The writer Nicholas Stuart Gray died on March 17th 1981, 40 years ago today. He was only 58 years old.
There are a few articles on here featuring characters from his books; here is another, more general, post to mark the occasion.
Nicholas Stuart Gray
Nicholas Stuart Gray was a very private person and there is little information available about his life, Much of the material that does exist can be found in a short Wikipedia entry and The Pied Pipers by Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher, which contains interviews with some influential creators of children's literature.
Nicholas Stuart Gray was interviewed in 1974. He said something that I agree with very strongly. He said that he wrote plays -
“...to give the children a sense of magic. Nobody attends to this enough. They give them too much realism. They can see it all on the box, they can see frightful things there. They can read it in the papers. But they’re not being given a world to escape into…the world of the imagination...Children must have an escape line somewhere.”
Diana Wynne Jones, who was also of Celtic origin, had very similar views. She wrote about the uselessness and harmful effects of realistic children's books versus the beneficial effects of magic and fantasy.
Both writers enhanced the lives of many children. They provided pathways into other worlds for children who needed to escape from something and escape to somewhere. They knew what this was like themselves; they both had awful mothers and as children they both made up stories to make their younger siblings' lives more bearable:
“From a young age, he (Nicholas Stuart Gray) made up stories and plays to amuse his brothers and sisters, and to try and escape his unhappy childhood.”
Stella Gibbons too created wonderful fairy tales that she told to her two younger brothers to help them escape from and temporarily forget their unhappy situation.
