EXTRACTS: Illustrators Issue 5 © 2013 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

68 ABOVE TOP: ‘The Water Babies’ from Robin comic 1962 and the cover to the 1950 Heirloom Edition of the story. ABOVE: ‘The Death of King Rufus’ from Ida Foulis’s ‘This Land of Kings’, published in 1954. time spent at the family’s “little house” in Northamptonshire, where the twins were able to indulge their love of the rural life and the accompanying flora and fauna that so characterised much of their art. Their natural creativity manifested itself from an early age, during which they created home-made comics, and one effort involving the combined talents of Janet, Anne and Murray, entitled ‘The Life of Ponies’, prefigured the direction that much of their later artistic activity would take them. It is not surprising that their instinctive talent for art was encouraged and nurtured by their parents and that following the death of their father Grahame in 1946, their mother fully endorsed and facilitated their creativity as the girls set up a studio together at Doris’ London flat, which provided a perfect entrée into commercial art upon their graduation from St Martin’s School of Art. As Britain entered the 1950s, the work available for talented and industrious illustrators was relatively plentiful with a renaissance in periodical publishing, after years of war time paper rationing, offering a broad range of commissions, the concomitant boom in magazine consumption, the girls rapidly found outlets for their combined talents. One of their first commissioners was Shirley Brieger, a commissioning editor at Hulton Press, whose recent huge success with the launch of Eagle comic had emboldened them to follow this with a succession of colour comics, including one aimed squarely at very young readers under the banner of Robin . Brieger was impressed by both the talent of the twins and their ability to invest every commission, no matter how small, with total dedication. As a consequence they became regular contributors to Robin from the title’s debut on the 28th March 1953.