Peter, Jane and Harry
The Peter and Jane books date from a bygone era in literacy education. As a new exhibition of illustrations opens, Chris Arnot catches up with one of their creators

Peter is here. Jane is here. Harry is here as well. Peter and Jane are nine or 10. Harry is 91. Harry painted pictures of Peter and Jane for over 20 years. He is good at painting. The pictures are going to be put on the wall in Walsall. There is a new art gallery in Walsall. Harry lives not far away...

Generations learnt to read with Peter and Jane in the 1960s and 70s. They may have been bored rigid by those endlessly repetitive sentences, but at least Harry Wingfield's realistic illustrations provided some colour. Look at Jane helping Mummy to make a cake and you can see a little pink tongue protruding slightly from parted lips: a study of childhood concentration. As it says in book 4a of the Ladybird original key words reading scheme, "Peter has to help Daddy work with the car. Jane has to help Mummy work in the house."

So different from the home life of Biff and Chipper, Oxford University Press's modern equivalent. Biff is the girl. As her name suggests, she is not meek and domesticated. In fact, she and her brother have to be cajoled into helping their parents (Mum and Dad, rather than Mummy and Daddy). Biff and Chipper much prefer having adventures with their Gran, a game old girl in a shell suit; their Asian friend, Nadim; and their black friends, Wilf and Wilma.

You'll find them in the children's section of Ottakar's bookshop, a few doors away from Walsall's splendid New Art Gallery where some of Wingfield's illustrations go on show at the end of this month.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the Peter and Jane books are more prominently displayed in Ottakar's than Biff and Chipper. "Over 80 million copies sold," says a red band across the cover of each Ladybird hardback. The publisher has them reprinted at regular intervals, somewhere in the far east. No doubt that helps to keep the price down to £1.99 a copy. "Last week, we sold a whole set," an assistant confides.

Who buys them? Parents with a sense of nostalgia for their own childhoods, perhaps.

"Harry set the style for the Ladybird books," says Jo Digger, the curator who discovered that Wingfield was living almost on the gallery's doorstep. "He's responsible for creating a genre of visual imagery that is deeply embedded in our psyche as a country."

Beyond these shores as well, albeit to a lesser extent. "They're still used very much in places where people want to learn English quickly," says Lorna Hillman, a former primary school head in rural Oxfordshire. Her father, Bill Murray, wrote the texts that went with Wingfield's illustrations. When Bill Murray died in 1995, she, along with her brother, Tony, inherited his estate and royalties.

Bill Murray was an educational adviser for a borstal and, later, head of what was then called a "school for the educationally subnormal" in Cheltenham. "During the 1950s," Hillman recalls, "he did some research with an educational psychologist, a Professor McNally from Manchester University. They worked on written material and speech, using a Grundig tape recorder, and established that 12 words make up a quarter of everything we speak, read and write."

What's more, they concluded that 100 words account for half and 300 words make up three-quarters of our verbal intake and output. Ladybird emphasises this message in the introduction to every book in its key words reading scheme before Peter and Jane and Mummy and Daddy go on to repeat those words at every opportunity.

"My Dad was writing books in the days before political correctness," Hillman goes on. "It was considered perfectly respectable to build stories around happy, white, middle-class children. This was the kind of healthy ethos that Harry Wingfield's trailblazing colour pictures captured so well. Their realism was important to my father. He pushed for Harry to be paid well."

Just as well. Wingfield was a freelance commercial artist for most of his life, but he never took out a private pension. By the time he put the finishing touches to his last Peter and Jane illustration in 1980, he was 70 and being paid £100 a picture. Over 20 years on, he's still living in the same substantial semi on the leafy edge of Walsall borough.

The first thing you notice on entering the front room is his stunning portrait of his beloved wife, Ethel, who died five years ago. Only then do you see the other pictures - piles of them, face down on every available surface. "I must have sold between 350 and 400," he muses. "Along with the state pension, they keep me going."

If he chooses to sell at Walsall, prices will range from £500 to £1,000, with the gallery taking 33% commission. "I like to think I did a craftsmanlike job," he says, his red-rimmed eyes twinkling with amusement at the attention belatedly being lavished on his work. "But my brief was to clarify and explain the text. A commercial artist has a job to do. If he can make it easy on the eye, that's a bonus."

Wingfield is dismissive of claims in another national newspaper that the model for the real-life Jane has been unearthed in Shrewsbury. There was no real-life Jane. Or Peter, for that matter. Their images were forged from any number of photographs of local children, some taken on the new council estates that were springing up in the late 50s and early 60s.

"They were the sons and daughters of respectable workers," he says, "and they were well dressed. You didn't want dustbin kids. But they weren't as middle-class as everyone made out. And they weren't considered racist because it wasn't an issue when I started."

It is now. Particularly in multi-cultural inner-city areas such as Hillfields in Coventry, where St Benedict's primary was recently ranked by the Department for Education and Skills as among the top 100 nationally for showing sustained improvement.

"Peter and Jane served their purpose, like Janet and John did before them," says headteacher Maureen Perry. "But the characters were stereotypical and the language artificial. Children could decode what was written but they couldn't tell you what it was about. Biff and Chipper are livelier and funnier.

"Mind you," she adds, "the pictures were good."

Harry Wingfield's pictures for Ladybird are at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, from January 31 to March 17.