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THE LITTLE GREY MEN

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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. Denys James Watkins-Pitchford MBE (25 July 1905 – 8 September 1990) was a British naturalist, an illustrator, art teacher and a children's author under the pseudonym "BB". He won the 1942 Carnegie Medal for British children's books. [1] Early life [ edit ] This is a story about the last gnomes in Britain. They are honest-to-goodness gnomes, none of your baby, fairy-book tinsel stuff, and they live by hunting and fishing, like the animals and birds, which is only proper and right.”—From the author’s introduction Marcus Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers: Children's Books in Britain 1900–1960, The Library Association, 1962, p. 92.

The novel was one of Syd Barrett's favourite books; an excerpt from it was read at his funeral. [12] Television adaptation [ edit ] 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. Though it’s a little galling to discover that I am not the only person who thinks that 1941’s [Carnegie Medal] winner, The Little Grey Men by BB, is a terrifically moving elegy for an England now almost extinct, it is gladdening in the extreme to know that other people have also been beguiled by the beauty of a meticulously observed countryside inhabited by gnomes with a passion for pipe-smoking.

The Church Times Archive

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”. Cruel Giant Grum is a human gamekeeper who kills any animal that enters his wood. The gnomes witness his death in the first book. urn:oclc:799853853 Republisher_date 20130129195654 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20130129163740 Scanner scribe2.toronto.archive.org Scanningcenter uoft Worldcat (source edition) 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] Mr Shoebottom is an alcoholic petrol station owner who repairs the gnomes' boat after it is discovered by his son.

I love adventure stories, especially ones that take you on boat journeys. And now I love those that are piloted by wee little gnomes that are thousands of years old. There’s lots of stuff to love about this book; it’s an exploration of wildlife, and a celebration of biodiversity and communality. BB thanked me for my letter. He told me he lived in a round house (and drew a picture of it), which was built in the year that Samuel Pepys began his diary. It had a weather-vane in the form of a wild goose which he himself had designed so that its beak always faced into the wind. ‘Yes, I am married,’ he wrote, so I must have asked. He had one daughter called Angela, he said, but his son Robin had died when he was 7, two years younger than me. ‘I hope you will read my books to your children,’ he wrote, ‘though by then I shall have flown away like my wild goose.’

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. You can enjoy further adventures of the Little Grey Men little grey men in the sequel to this book called "Down The Bright Stream" where the gnomes set off in their boat to find a new home...

The Little Grey Men immediately reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness novel, in which a boat travels up the Congo in search of an ivory-trader called Kurtz, just as the gnomes quest for Cloudberry. There is also an episode which put me in mind of 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' chapter in The Wind in the Willows (1908) and a scene in E Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle (1907).In 1942, Watkins-Pitchford, now using his pseudonym BB, introduced thousands of children to the last gnomes in England, in his tale The Little Grey Men, which won the Carnegie Medal. I first came across the story at my Church of England primary school in the mid-1960s when it was added to the curriculum — no doubt to keep The Hobbit company — as another adventure tale that had very small people playing a starring part. The threegnomeshave many amazing adventures along the way. There is the terrifying incident with the stoat which nearly catches them, and their stay in Crow Wood, when they make friends with Squirrel, and where Giant Grum (the human keeper of Crow Wood) shoots and kills Otter! Otter had helped Dodder find his way up the Folly brook and reunited him with his brothers. Dodder feels so guilty about the death of his poor friend that he prays to Pan for help in ridding Crow Wood of Giant Grum and receives an answer - the death of Giant Grum - after which there is much banqueting by the animal folk and Dodder is named 'Dodder the Giant-Killer'! The last gnomes in Britain, three tiny brothers, decide to go looking for their missing brother Cloudberry, who sailed up the river two years ago and never returned.

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