Harold Beards

Harold Beards produced a number of pages for Swift Annual on a variety of subjects

Beards was a cartoonist and postcard artist. He was contributing to Printers' Pie as early as 1934. Also contributed to Daily Mail Boys Annual (Associated Press, 1956), The Wolf Cub Annual 1960 (C. Arthur Pearson, 1959), Daily Sketch Children's Annual (Associated Newspapers, 1963) and probably many others.

The pictures at the head and tail of this little entry show some of the diverse subjects he covered in Swift Annual, where he contributed pages between number 5 (1958) and the 1963 cover-dated issue (1962). The images from Swift Annual are © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd. The postcards I've nabbed from eBay. Both the above seem to date from around 1951.

Illustrations
Africa and Southern Asia by Martin Simons. London, Hulton Educational, 1954.
Opera Stories for Young People by Gladys Davidson. London, Cassell, 1958.
Wool Merchants of the Fifteenth Century by G. Scott Thomas. London, Longmans, Green, 1958.
Spiked Shoes by Jim Peters & Robert J. Hoare. London, Children's Book Club, 1959.
Robin Hood, retold by Ronald D. K. Storer. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971.