Ronald Welch (Ronald Oliver Felton)

The digging I've been doing over the past couple of days has rammed home once again the fact that here, in the UK, we seem to have had a dismissive attitude to our writers and artists who fall into the 'popular' category. Finding information on 99% of the artists who worked for Look and Learn has been a case of piecing together data one line at a time. You won't find their names in reference books yet, time and again, I hear comments from visitors to the Look and Learn web site -- and I've said it myself more than once -- that the artists working on Look and Learn were some of the finest artists Britain has ever produced. The same with comic strips: I got my start researching comic strip creators simply because I couldn't find anything about them (same story for paperbacks and, to a degree, old story papers).

Looking through the lists of authors who had contributed to Swift Annual the other day led me to compile a list (most things do!) and, of the 134 named authors who contributed across the nine annuals (1954-62, numbered 1-6 on covers then 1961, 1962 and 1963) only a dozen managed entries in The Author's and Writer's Who's Who, some little more than an abbreviated list of published titles, and I've found less than a handful in Contemporary Authors (admittedly this is an American series but it is supposed to encompass authors from around the globe).

And then, sometimes, information just arrives out of the blue. I was looking blankly at my list, wondering when I'd find time to research another 134 authors, when some information on one dropped into my e-mail inbox. A friend of mine, John Tipper (who knows well that I have an interest in biographical information on children's authors), had forwarded a note he'd received from Tom McGlynn on Friday, the very same day I'd bought a run of Swift Annual. The synchronicity is too perfect for me not to write about it.

Let's start with a picture from Swift Annual 1963 (1962)...

Ronald Welch was the pseudonym of Ronald Oliver Felton, born 14 December 1909, the son of accountant Oliver Felton and his wife Alice (nee Thomas). After attending Berkhamsted School (1922-28), he earned a place at Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied history (M.A., 1931). Welch then went on to work as an assistant history master at Berkhamsted before moving to Bedford Modern School as a senior teacher in 1933. That same year, Felton joined the Territorial Army and, during World War II, Welch became a major and served in Normandy and Germany.

In 1947, he became headmaster of Okehampton Grammar School, Devonshire, where he remained until 1964. He also began writing novels, publishing The Black Car Mystery under the pen-name Ronald Welch in 1950; others quickly followed: The Clock Stood Still (1951), and The Gauntlet (1951), the latter linking Welch with the Oxford University Press, who were to publish the majority of his books. The Gauntlet was also his first historical novel -- actually a science fiction timeslip novel in which a modern day boy finds himself in the 14th century sharing adventures with a distant ancestor.

The best of Welch's early novels was Knight Crusader (1954), his first fully-fledged historical novel, set in teh 12the century as its protagonist, a crusading knight named Philip d'Aubigny, battles his way through the Holy Land and, at the end, returns to Wales to found what was to become the Carey family in later novels. In June 1955, Knight Crusader won the Library Association's Carnegie Medal for the most outstanding children's book of 1954 (and the identity if 'Ronald Welch' became an open secret).

Over the next twenty-five years, Felton wrote a further 17 books, including a biography of Ferdinand Magellan (1955) and a single novel, Sker House (1954) under his own name. Many of his 'Ronald Welch' historical novels followed the exploits of various generations of the Carey family, starting with Captain of Dragoons (1956) which followed Charles Carey at the time of Marlborough's army at the Battle of Blenheim; Alan Carey joined Wolfe at Quebec in Mohawk Valley (1958), Christopher Carey serves under Wellington in the Peninsular in Captain of Foot (1959), the family's French roots are explored in Escape from France (1960) as Richard Carey helps his relatives escape the Revolution, For the King (1961), follows the adventures of Royalist soldier Neil Carey, Nicholas Carey (1963) is a soldier at the time of the Crimean War, Harry Carey takes to the sea in Elizabethan times in The Hawk (1967), Tank Commander (1972) was the most up-to-date of his historical novels, set during the grim days of the Great War, Zulu Warrior (1974) was set during the Zulu Wars whilst Ensign Carey (1976) was set during the days of the the Indian Mutiny.

Of the latter, one reviewer recorded, "Mr. Welch makes it clear that the English officers were often both ignorant and arrogant and that for many of them the mutiny was no more than they deserved" (The Times, 26 November 1976). This was a strength of Felton's work: he would spend six months researching the backgrounds of each of his novels and made sure that each was historically accurate. He did not shy away from grim details and, as Pamela Cleaver says in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers "he never glorified war, but made it quite clear that mud and discomfort, wounds and death were part of soldiering as well as comradeship and adventure." His accuracy sometimes made uncomfortable reading, especially in Zulu Warrior which "expresses the Jingoistic sentiments of the characters which are right for the times portrayed but out of mesh with today's attitudes both to Africa and the war."

So much for Ronald Welch, the author. Ronald Felton in person was an imposing character and Tom McGlynn writes:

Few attending Okehampton Grammar School knew that 'Felix' had written even one historical novel -- fewer still that he'd published several and continued to do so into the mid-1970s. Our ignorance of his writing was mainly due to the fact that Felix rarely referred to his books, despite the fact that the thousands he had taught over several decades represented a large potential readership. Only now, 50+ years later (and a retired history teacher myself) have I discovered that Felix wrote more than a dozen historical novels for young people -- all set in diverse periods and widely scattered locations.

Felix read history at Cambridge in the 1930s and was a Tank Corps officer in World War II. Because of that background he was in appearance, accent, dress, etc., a typical upper class Englishman. Yet he was a Welsh patriot, not least because of his firm grasp on the often tragic history of 'The land of his Fathers'.

He taught only 'A' level history -- in my day "Europe 1780-1920". But to the majority [most Grammar School boys left school after 'O' levels, aged 16], 'The Boss' was a remote figure who presided at morning assemblies and fulfilled the 1944 Butler Education Act's requirements on religious instruction (R.I.). I recall that Felix seemed to find his own R.I. lessons just as tedious as we did. The Butler Act's compulsory R.I. clause, I suspect, had been backfiring ever since -- achieving more since 1944 "to promote secularism via boredom" than the efforts of all British atheists and communists combined.

Ronald Felton was a big man, maybe 6' 4" and 220 lbs. He was 43 when I met him but seemed much older -- maybe because of the massive domed head and thinning, grey, swept-back hair. As my 6th Form history teacher he came across as a very different man from the impassive presenter of Middle Eastern fairy tales of my earlier years at OGS. Lessons on George the 3rd and 4th, Chatham, Charles James Fox, William Pitt, Napoleon (& Josephine!), Wellington, Goya, Brougham, Peel, Canning, Queen Victoria, Melbourne, Cardigan, Napoleon III, Disraeli, Gladstone, Kaiser Franz-Josef, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, Parnell, Chamberlain, the last three German Kaisers, Balfour, Lloyd-George and many others, were always enlivened with personal anecdotes.

I recall Felix expounding on Bismarck: in his student days lying in winter on a giant stove as a way of concentrating on his studies; how he took the measure of Russia as a diplomat in Sankt Peterburg; how he reacted to the news of the death in 1888 of Kaiser Frederick III (of throat cancer after an English surgeon failed to cure him) by saying with a shrug, "the young fool will soon destroy the Empire;" and how, in his last years, he warned his successors that "Germany and Europe must grasp that in the coming century the Americans will play a major role in all our affairs."

Felix added that if only the Anglophile Frederick III had died at 80 -- in 1911 -- rather than at 57, the entire 20th century would be unimaginably different. "No World War I. No Russian Revolution! But what instead?"

Notes

Biographical details are derived from Twentieth-Century Children's Writers and Author's and Writer's Who's Who. The Ronald Welch page at Collecting Books and Magazines includes a number of book cover images (and is the source for an entry for 'Ronald Welch' on Wikipedia). As you will see from the above picture (© Look and Learn Magazine Ltd.), the story 'The King's Hunt' originally appeared in Swift Annual and its appearance in Thrilling Stories of the Past for Boys (ed. Eric Duthie, 1970) was a reprint.

The year that Felton departed Okehampton School is uncertain: 1963 in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, 1964 in Contemporary Authors online and 1965 according to Author's and Writer's Who's Who (6th edition, 1971). I've plumped for 1964 as the average date.



(* Many thanks to Tom McGlynn and to John Tipper. John runs a very good web site, Collecting Books and Magazines, which has a wide coverage of children's authors and is well worth visiting regularly.)