Today his work still resonates for many, evoking a gentle and comforting portrayal of British national identity during the Second World War. He first served with the British Expeditionary Force and depicted its retreat through France and Belgium before he was evacuated back to Britain from Boulogne in May 1940. During the war Ardizzone was appointed Official War Artist by Sir Kenneth Clark (of ‘Civilization’ fame – an admirer and collector of Ardizzone’s work).

To see’ is an artist’s starting point; to translate that vision into both three dimensional space and two dimensional representation, into both buildings and paintings, was Yates’s life-long concern, both as architect and as painter. The series continued until 1972 with Tim's Last Voyage which was followed in 1977 by Ship's Cook Ginger.After working as a clerk, he decided in 1926 to pursue art full-time; five years later he had his first one-man show at the Leger Galleries. The commission was to become the first of the many illustrated texts for which he would be best known, excitedly completed after having lived and dreamt that book for three whole months. Battle in an Orchard of Almond Trees in Sicily is a rare example of his wartime work which shows corpses. A Rigby, an authority on the artist Frank Branwyn whose murals adorned the school chapel, and Rigby encouraged Vaughan’s evident interest in the visual arts.

An artist and illustrator of consummate draughtsmanship, Edward Ardizzone's many book illustrations are recognised all over the world. Over the next 10 years Ardizzone continued to publish ‘Tim’ books, culminating in the publication of Tim All Alone in 1956 which won the inaugural Kate Greenaway Medal of the Library Association and, some 50 years later, was announced as one of the top ten winning works to receive this accolade. Ardizzone illustrated some novels by the American author Eleanor Estes, including Pinky Pye, The Witch Family, The Alley, Miranda the Great, and The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (1958 to 1972). scribbling over my lessons’ *) But his interest in drawing stayed with him, and after the day time committments of his first job as clerk for the Eastern Telegraph Company Ardizzone took evening classes in life-drawing at Westminster School of Art, London. After a few years the family moved to North London and here, interrupted only by his schooling at Christ’s Hospital, Hastings, Vaughan would live for the rest of his life.Edward Ardizzone [1900-1979] – universally known as ‘Ted’ – was born in Haiphon, French Indo-China (now Vietnam) to a father of Italian extraction and an English mother. He was an official war artist during World War II, working widely in Europe and North Africa, and his illustrated war diaries are notable records. After Catherine's death in 1992, the British government accepted 64 of Ardizzone's sketchbooks in lieu of inheritance tax and these are now held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. For Tim All Alone (Oxford, 1956), which he wrote and illustrated, Ardizzone won the inaugural Kate Greenaway Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject.

Directly after school she noticed an advertisement in The Studio inviting applications for a training programme specialising in linocuts at The Grosvenor School of Art, London. The first book by Ardizzone listed by the US Library of Congress is The Mediterranean: An Anthology (London: Cassell, 1935, OCLC 2891569), compiled by Paul Bloomfield, "decorated by Edward Ardizzone" with "each chapter preceded by illustrated half-title". Ardizzone always maintained that the art of a children’s book illustrator was particularly good when it was created as much for the child within the illustrator, as for the child viewing the illustrations. Ardizzone was educated first at Ipswich School and then, from 1912, at Clayesmore School, a boarding school in Dorset. Ardizzone died in 1979, not long after providing his famous illustrations to Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales.Ardizzone’s intimate, gently humorous drawing style made him able to humanise the events of the war through his work. And one of the greatest children’s illustrators himself, Maurice Sendak, declares the books…’the saltiest and most satisfying picture books created…’. He left behind him a wealth of acclaimed artistic work and a significant contribution to the canon of book illustration.

Agreeing a compromise, his father sent him to study machine draughtsmanship at the Knirr School of Art, Munich, with the thought that this would give his son a skill he might apply professionally.

In this capacity he first encountered the work of Samuel Palmer and of Blake, and Blake, particularly, was to have a life-long influence on his work. Yates attended Wanstead School where, showing an early engagement with painting, he created a mural entitled ‘Events at Sea’.