How Raymond Briggs found his style

When firm friends Gerry and Tim set out across a golf course to find tadpoles one sunny day in postwar Wimbledon Park, the jeopardy is twofold. Not only should these naughty boys really steer clear of the club’s private grounds, but they also risk an encounter with a witch-like woman who lives nearby.

So opens The Strange House, a forgotten children’s story from the pen of a singular talent, the late Raymond Briggs. It is an early illustrated book that has been rediscovered by Manderley Press and is republished this month.

Briggs was to become the well-known writer and artist behind a trio of picture-book characters now admitted to the pantheon of British favourites: the revolting Fungus the Bogeyman, a grumpy Father Christmas and, of course, the Snowman. Each of these creations is stamped with Briggs’s trademark recalcitrant charm and direct melancholy – a mood recognised by any reader who has stared forlornly at the melted pool of icy water in the final pages of The Snowman. Briggs’s equally strong sense of grudging bonhomie is perhaps best summed up in the cry of “Blooming Reindeer!” exclaimed each 24 December by his Father Christmas.

According to the author’s stepson, Tom Benjamin, Briggs saw his job as “a combination of author-director and actor”. As a result, all that he drew had to be understood, rather than just observed. “An excited, angry or sad character is not just seen from the outside, but felt from within,” Benjamin tells The Observer. “Raymond would feel the emotions of his characters whilst drawing them. There is always poignancy and sadness in the work – and sometimes an anger at the cruelties of loss and disappointment as well. But, at the same time, he often found humour and warmth in his character’s situation.”

The first Briggs stories came a decade earlier than the famous books. The Strange House and then Midnight Adventure, now reissued together, were originally published in 1961. Both are backward-looking tales set in the residential south London landscape familiar to Briggs fans. They are also the sort of suburban adventures that drive the best children’s stories. Typically, a young life is shaken up by an unexpected challenge or a visit from a stranger; from Blind Pew’s arrival at the Admiral Benbow in Treasure Island, to the Pevensie children feeling their way through to Narnia in CS Lewis’s wardrobe. In Briggs’s story, a young girl must be rescued from the forbidding home of an unkind guardian.

The golf course and the dark brick tunnel depicted in The Strange House still exist, while the inspiration for the abandoned building at the centre of the plot once stood close to the street where Briggs grew up. “For Raymond, the specific details of people’s lives, and the places they inhabited and the objects they used mattered and had meaning,” recalls Tom. “He wasn’t interested in idealisation or whimsy. Everything he drew had a real source and his imagination was rooted in that.”

Briggs’s stepdaughter, Clare Benjamin, points out that, for her and her brother, the unremarkable world of their stepfather’s books actually looked quite exotic. “As children growing up in a village, these stories took Tom and I into a different world where Gerry and Tim get into scrapes in 1940s London.” The appeal, all the same, is in the contrast behind the details of daily life and the excitement of the plot.

For Tom’s daughter, Connie, one drawing in The Strange House stands out. It shows Gerry making a rooftop escape with the London skyline in the distance, and reminds her of a favourite of her grandfather’s images: Father Christmas eating his packed lunch on a roof, listening to the radio, as two reindeer stand by. “It’s the classic Raymond blend of fantastical and ordinary that excites the imagination,” she says. “It’s also so beautifully drawn, with the crisp snow, the inky sky above, glowing city lights below and the precise perspective of the chimneys.”

Clare points out that Briggs had been explicitly inspired by his memories of watching his own father, Ernest, work as a milkman. “Thinking about his dad’s early starts in all weathers, and applying that imaginatively to the job Father Christmas does was the starting point for that book,” she explains. “We see him going up and down chimneys in the cold and wet to make deliveries near and far, and then gratefully returning home to his fireside, dog and cat. Children and adults often notice these homely details.”

Briggs, who died in 2022 aged 88, grew up in the Wimbledon streets his readers have also come to know from Ethel & Ernest, his acclaimed 1998 graphic novel about his parents’ life together. The location appears again in the haunting When the Wind Blows (1982), when all conventional life is threatened by the ultimate peril of nuclear war.

Chris Riddell, the Observer cartoonist and author, was taught by Briggs at art school in the 1980s and has written the foreword to the republished stories. He sees shades of Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton in these two nostalgic tales, and in the heavily cross-hatched images, a visual echo of Edward Ardizzone, the artist and illustrator born in 1900.

“To me and my fellow students, these early examples of his work looked rather old-fashioned, and Raymond himself viewed them as such,” Riddell recalls. “Now, reading The Strange House and Midnight Adventure, I find myself fascinated by the insight they provide into my old tutor’s life and work.” They show the artist “coming into his own”, Riddell writes: “Like the man himself, they are treasures.”

The Strange House and Midnight Adventure by Raymond Briggs are collected together in a new hardback published by Manderley Press (£19.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17.99. Delivery charges may apply

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Illustrations by Raymond Briggs; portrait by Richard Saker