Ladybird children didn’t go to boarding school; they went to the local newsagent’s on their bicycles. I wonder if the original target audinece were aware of the nostalgic, retrospective feel to them when they first came out?

Surely most people do in fact read using a combination (word recognition for most words; phonics for unfamiliar words)?The craftsmanship of these men, along with that of Berry, Harry Wingfield and Robert Lumley, is all the more remarkable because they worked in an analogue age when a mistake meant starting again.

Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. So it is interesting to look through the original and revised versions of the books to try to understand what it was about the 1960s books that was deemed unacceptable in the 1970s. Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB. He came to prominence in the 1960s as a member of the pop music vocal duo Peter and Gordon before going on to a successful career as a manager and record producer, helping to foster the recording careers of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt among others. This is not intended to be a full statement of all your rights under the Distance Selling Regulations.

In the first page of the second book you've got a picture of Bosworth Field and Henry VII being crowned, and he looks sort of dashing and good looking, so they [the Ricardians] get upset about the Tudor rhetoric. With the help of Peter and Jane, key words are introduced, practiced and developed through the levels. When we first started at school we were given the key words on little bits of card in a tobacco tin (imagine a teacher giving a kid a tobacco tin now they’d be struck off) then moved onto the books.

In comparison, Jane was much more docile; she was often portrayed just watching her brother do things, helping out Mummy in their house or sitting quietly with her doll. When she decided to leave the business, she recommended him to Linda Ronstadt at which point Asher became Ronstadt's manager. While most UK schools now use phonics based reading systems rather than just ‘look and say’ methods, it is down to Peter, Jane, Pat, Mummy and Daddy that many past generations of children have learned to read. Perhaps this achievable utopia was a compensatory fantasy for the illustrators who, born around 1920, had mostly known childhoods far harder than this.In the Peter and Jane series (aka Key Words Reading Scheme), Peter tends to hang out with Daddy in the garage, while Jane helps Mummy get the tea. This will be a worrying thought for most of us Brits aged between 30 and 45 (and a good many younger) who will remember Peter and Jane as childhood aquaintances who where charged with the task of teaching us to read.