J.P. Martin: Father of Uncle, including the Unpublished Uncle

By J.P. Martin, Stella Martin Currey and Quentin Blake

The much-loved UNCLE series of children's books by JP Martin, illustrated by Quentin Blake, were fantastical, surreal, funny and heart-warming. Originally told by Martin to his children, they were finally published when he was over eighty years old - and the hilarious array of characters, including the rich but sometimes foolish elephant, Uncle, captured the imagination of children across the world. Fans include Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix, Kate Summerscale, Martin Rowson, Will Self and many more.

While exploring the JP Martin archive 50 pages of unpublished Uncle stories were stumbled upon, which are just as hilarious and well-crafted as the published work, and also a fascinating biography of Martin, the missionary turned author, by his daughter, which explores the unique imagination and experiences that informed this remarkable and inventive genius. These have never been seen before and hopefully these can be shared with Uncle's legions of fans and introduce JP Martin and Uncle to more fans as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788031066

J.P. Martin

no ATA

Book preview

J.P.Martin

Father of Uncle

A Master in the

Great English Nonsense Tradition

1879–1966

Quentin Blake’s illustrations throughout all six Uncle books capture the mood and spirit of J.P.Martin’s stories. Uncle’s close helpers, The Old Monkey, The Cat Goodman, and Lucy the Parrot, decorate the Christmas tree.

(Battle for Badgertown page 143 The Complete Uncle page 715)

J.P.Martin’s Uncle Books

All volumes and editions illustrated by Quentin Blake

Quentin Blake’s endpapers of Uncle’s Castle of Homeward.

(The Complete Uncle page xxii)

J.P.Martin

Father of Uncle

A Master in the

Great English Nonsense Tradition

1879–1966

Stella Martin Currey

Edited by James Martin Currey

© James Martin Currey 2017

Uncle text copyright © J.P.Martin 1964; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1964

Uncle Cleans Up text copyright © J.P.Martin 1965; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1965

Uncle and His Detective text copyright © J.P.Martin 1966; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1966

Uncle and the Treacle Trouble text copyright © J.P.Martin 1967; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1967

Uncle and Claudius the Camel text copyright © J.P.Martin 1969; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1969

Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown text copyright © J.P.Martin 1973; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1973

All Uncle books first published by Jonathan Cape, now an imprint of

Random House Children’s Publishers UK

Quotations from these six books are used with permission from Random House Group Ltd.

Illustrations are used with the permission of the Quentin Blake archive All rights reserved.

The right of J.P.Martin to be identified as the author and of Quentin Blake to be identified as the illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This collection first published in Great Britain in 2016 by Matador.

ISBN 978 1 788 031 066

Typeset by Kate Kirkwood

[e-mail]

Management of design and cover by

James Currey & Glenda Pattenden

Most of the line illustrations have been scanned by Marcus Gipps from Quentin Blake originals, but the files for Uncle and His Detective and Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown are missing from the archive, and have been scanned from first-printing books.

Matador

9 Priory Business Park

Kibworth Beauchamp

Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK

Tel: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Family Tree

Map 1 England: Places with which J.P.Martin was associated

Map 2 South Africa: Pilgrim’s Rest, Roodepoort & Mafeking 1904-13

Map 3 Palestine & Egypt 1918-19

1 Introduction A Master in the Great English Nonsense Tradition

2 Cannibals & Crookballs 1841-79

3 Trapping the Half-timers 1879-96

4 More Frivolous Letters I Fear You Could Not Find 1896-8

5 The Firm Shore of Recollection

6 Eyes of a Luminous Brown 1898-1904

7 Gold Miners at Pilgrim’s Rest 1904-7

8 The Merry Wives of Mafeking 1907-13

9 Drives with the Respectable Horses 1913-16

10 It May Make You More Practical 1916 -18

11 Jerusalem, Magnificent yet Mean 1918

12 The Camels are Coming! 1918

13 Elephantine Ideas in Egypt 1919

14 Traction Engines Goin’ Up Camborne Hill 1919-21

15 Those Queer-Tempered Angels, the Earth & Sky 1922

16 The Super-Subtle Venetian 1922-9

17 Lady Lionease, Sunset Beach & Comfort Cove 1929-31

18 We Are Becoming Quite a Literary Family 1931-6

19 King of the Badgers & Badgertown 1936-40

20 Daventry Calling & Brass Barking 1940-4

21 Bomb Disposal as a Game of Chess 1944-7

22 A Dance of Joy on a Lonely Road 1948-60

23 The Lover of Paradox 1958-66

24 Uncle: Fantasy within a Framework of Reality 1963-6

25 Uncle: Three More Pots of Honey 1966-73

Appendix Unpublished Uncle Stories

Index

All six Uncle books build up to a great battle between Uncle’s followers from the Castle of Homeward and the Beaver Hateman lot from Badfort. This archetypal battle was drawn in 1967 by Quentin Blake especially for Stella Martin Currey and R.N.Currey, who encouraged J.P.Martin to write down his stories in 1934 and who then persevered for 30 years before they got Jonathan Cape to publish them from 1964 onwards.

(The Complete Uncle page 762)

To Quentin Blake

Who enhanced

J.P.Martin’s originality

& to Clare Currey

15 November 1936 – 26 April 2016

In memory

of all the publishing

achieved together

Preface

There is an underground army of enthusiasts who think that they personally have discovered the secret treasure of the Uncle books for the first time. Uncle was on the front cover of the Christmas Economist 2005 with a three page article asking ‘Whatever happened to Uncle?’ Things started to happen.

The New York Review of Books Children’s Collection published Uncle in 2007 and followed it with Uncle Cleans Up in 2009. It appears in Puffin in 2017. Steady sales show that new generations are responding with fresh delight half a century after the original publication.

The publisher Marcus Gipps was fast onto Kickstarter crowd-funding in March 2013 and found that over 700 members of this underground army were willing to pre-order copies of The Complete Uncle, which would republish the last three books for the first time. He went on to secure substantial orders from the book trade. He invited distinguished journalists and writers to give accounts of how as children they first discovered the elephant Uncle in his purple dressing-gown riding on a traction engine.

How did such crazily inventive ideas spring from J.P.Martin’s imagination? What events in an interesting and varied life sustained this feat of storytelling? He had always written adult novels in the hope of making some money to add to his minimal stipend as a Methodist minister. All his manuscripts were declined. All around him books from his family were getting published. In 1934 his daughter Stella Martin Currey, novelist, and her husband R.N.Currey, poet, encouraged him to write down the Uncle stories which he had been telling his family and friends since the time of the First World War.

For thirty years Stella and Ralph Currey resolutely kept trying to get Uncle accepted. But publishers were only interested in ‘juvenile fiction’ for their ‘rewards lists’ as prizes in schools and Sunday schools throughout the Empire. Uncle’s knockabout battles with the Bads were not considered suitable for children. The children would have loved them but they were not asked. At last in 1964 Jonathan Cape launched Uncle to superb reviews in the satire-rich sixties.

In writing this biography in 1984 Stella Martin Currey was able to make use of J.P.Martin’s archive. He was always writing, always recording. He kept a journal and saved family letters. His Palestine Journal of 1918 charts the day-to-day happenings as the Ottoman Empire suddenly collapses. The monuments he saw on his trip up the Nile fed through into the elephantine excitements of Uncle’s castle. His missionary aunt and uncle had saved others and themselves from the cooking pots of the cannibal king of Fiji. His mother’s letters to her daughter in France have an unexpected frivolity for a parson’s wife. His wife Nancy emerges with power from his pages.

The original title Uncle was my Father reveals how Stella Martin Currey’s script was a family memoir. It was decided that it needed to be a biography. Stella Martin Currey quotes the lively memories of her sister Grace and her brothers John and Hal. Her own vivid reminiscences are now presented inside quotation marks in equal standing with those of her siblings.

An impersonal narrative has been adopted which integrates James Martin Currey’s additions into Stella Martin Currey’s original text. Quotations from J.P.Martin’s journals and letters have been gathered under topics reflecting his delight in the strange ways of his fellow humans which he transferred onto animals in the Uncle books.

Clare and James Martin Currey felt it necessary to place J.P. and Nancy Martin’s lives in a firmer historical context. They were of that doomed generation who first suffered war on an industrial scale in the so-called Great War. They worked among people made destitute in the inter-war depression. Then they found that their own children had grown to an age to have to fight in the Second World War. Then came the Cold War which, in the fifties and sixties, all too nearly became hot. So this book provides an insight into the social realities of the first half of the twentieth century.

The list of Kickstarter supporters at the back of the book proves that for a start a biography of J.P.Martin will be of interest to the underground army of enthusiasts.

Acknowledgements

The first acknowledgement must be to J.P. and Nancy Martin’s four children Stella, Grace, John and Hal. His sister Dora Fowler Martin, herself a novelist, also provided vivid written memories of her mischievous brother who told her serial stories on the long walks to chapel. His grandson Andrew’s contributions are revealing and it is sad that he did not live to read the manuscript of this represented book.

Marcus Gipps has supported this publication of the biography from the first. His publishing skills and ready advice have been valuable at every stage. His enthusiasm has been a great encouragement. The support he conjured up for The Complete Uncle with his inspired use of Kickstarter crowdfunding has shown that there is an army of Uncle supporters. Many have again subscribed to this project.

Quentin Blake’s illustrations have been integral to the success of the Uncle stories. I am grateful for permission to include examples of his work which so absolutely capture the spirit of these extraordinary books. I must also give thanks to Marcus Gipps who rescanned the original artwork from the Quentin Blake archive with the enthusiastic help of the archivist Liz Williams.

I should like to thank James Gibbs and the New Room Planning Committee in Bristol for their initiative in holding an exhibition from 7 to 22 October 2016 called ‘J.P.Martin, Uncle and Quentin Blake’. It was held at the New Room, John Wesley’s Chapel in the Horsefair, Bristol, which is the oldest Methodist chapel in the world.

I am grateful to Random House Childrens’ Books who have given permission for reproduction of the passages which have been included in boxes in the text. The quotations have been chosen to suggest how events and dreams in J.P.Martin’s life could have welled up in his creative imagination.

It has been a pleasure to work again with the typesetter Kathy Kirkwood and the designer Glenda Pattenden.

Margaret Cornell, with help of her son Tim, completed the index on schedule despite being at that time confined to hospital bed. Kate Esslin and Alice Martin have kindly allowed royalities to be used to pay for the index, maps and family tree.

J.P.Martin’s granddaughter Alice Martin, publisher in Finland, has gone through the proofs with professional care. She has recently found her father Hal Martin’s account of the exchange in 1935 between 17 year olds at Ilfeld School in Germany for sons of Nazi leaders with Kingswood School. Zoe Parsons, archivist, has helpfully provided information from the school records.

Judith and Matthew Oates, grandchildren of J.P.Martin’s brother Norman, have taken a helpful interest.

Clare Currey keyed the lengthy original typed manuscript so that editing and rewriting could be carried out on screen. Clare Currey’s critical responses have been central to James Martin Currey’s emerging ideas about how to present this book thirty years after it was originally written.

Map 1. England; places with which J.P.Martin was associated. Dates record his Methodist circuits.

Map 2 South Africa: Pilgrim’s Rest, Roodepoort and Mafeking 1904–13

Map 3. Palestine and Egypt 1918–19

1. Introduction

A Master in the Great English Nonsense Tradition

The publication of Uncle by J.P.Martin some fifty years ago in 1964 was greeted with reviews comparing the author to the great masters of the English nonsense tradition. The first review was by Penelope Mortimer in the New Statesman of 13 November 1964:

Mr Martin’s Uncle was invented to entertain the author’s four children and only later, like all the great stories, written down. The manuscript was sent ... on the round of publishers, and, incredibly, rejected by all of them. Now, at last, it is being presented with all the enthusiasm and care it deserves – Mr Martin, bless him, is in his mid-eighties … Uncle is a very likely character, an elephant of stature. The world of some of his characters has the dream-like predictability, the almost uneasy sense of déja-vu, of Carroll’s Wonderland, but with Uncle we are part of it, not observing it from the outside through the eyes of a self-righteous and frequently outraged visitor. The illustrations of Quentin Blake are exactly appropriate.

Geoffrey Moorhouse said of Uncle Cleans Up in the Guardian of 15 December 1965:

Once, or at the most twice, in a generation, someone strikes a vein of fantasy that is acceptable to almost anyone from the age of 6 onwards because it is fantasy within a framework of reality. A hundred years ago Lewis Carroll managed it with Alice ... What [ J.P.Martin] is really doing is to build a very rare kind of bridge between extreme youth and extreme age.

Philippa Pearce put the whole sequence in context reviewing the fifth book in the Guardian on 3 November 1969:

Each one of the ‘Uncle’ books, including the newly published Uncle and Claudius the Camel, is completely enjoyable and understandable by itself. But it would be misleading only to consider the books individually. They are based on a rich jumble of manuscripts which, in their turn, are based on a great achievement of sustained story-telling, first to the author’s children, then to his grandchildren …

Battle is essential to the stories, because of Uncle’s deplorable and aggressive neighbours, the Badfort Crowd. In their machinations, ambushes and running fights, there is plenty of violence – Uncle’s kick-ups are meteoric – but very little injury indeed, and no death. In this respect, surprisingly, J.P.Martin turns out to be far milder than Beatrix Potter: after all, Peter Rabbit’s father had actually been put in a pie by Mr McGregor.

In an article in Folio Autumn 1976 Richard Ingrams identified the formula which gives free range to J.P.Martin’s satirical imagination. He pointed out how every three or four years the Martin family would move to a different Methodist circuit and so would be able to explore a new city or town with twisting backstreets, gas-works, docks, mysterious locked buildings and shops with strange names selling curious goods. Ingrams says:

Usually a chapter takes the form of an expedition by Uncle and his party to an unexplored corner of his estate. It is during these trips that he comes across a collection of bizarre characters like Professor Gandleweaver who runs a fish-frying academy, the antique dealer Steiner Brashbag who has in his shop a Spanish spider trap, a mediaeval boaster’s stool, ‘made to plunge a boaster into water’, or Robin Hood’s toothbrush. The place is full of strange museums, libraries and art galleries presided over by eccentric factotums of one sort and another. There are also shops like that of Gleamhound the Chemist whose remedies work backwards so that Stomach Joy causes severe abdominal pains, while Jumbo Bunion Destroyer is well calculated to raise bunions on a perfectly healthy foot.

A letter to J.P.Martin in December 1964 from Michael Howard, a director of Jonathan Cape, publishers of the renowned Arthur Ransome, said ‘I cannot remember any Children’s book, at least since the war, getting off to such a brilliant start’. They had just started to commission work by Quentin Blake. Richard Ingrams, in the article in Folio, claimed that Quentin Blake’s work in the Uncle books are his masterpiece: ‘[ J.P.Martin] was a man of truly original humour and like all inspired writers for children created another mythical world as real as this one … Every illustrator must hope that he will be given the opportunity to illustrate a classic.’

At Christmas 1934 Stella Martin Currey and R.N.Currey, who were both professional writers, suggested that J.P.Martin ought to write the stories down which he had been telling his children from the time of the First World War. The first manuscript was submitted to Jonathan Cape in 1935. Rejection after rejection followed. The publishing of ‘juveniles’ in that period was dominated by books considered suitable for ‘the rewards list’ which sold to schools and Sunday schools throughout the British Empire. Letters of refusal frequently stated that, though the publisher’s readers had been highly entertained, the manuscript could not be accepted because it would not fit into ‘the rewards list’. The six Uncle books contain no moralising or preaching except in pompous speeches by Uncle himself. The underlying theme of all the books is that of the fight between ‘the haves’ in the castle of Homeward and ‘the have-nots’ at Badfort led by Beaver Hateman. Each book builds up to a set-piece encounter of total ferocity between Uncle’s lot and ‘the Bads’. Nobody gets killed. Wounds heal. They are certainly not the stories for children to be expected from a nonconformist minister in the Methodist church. JPM felt that writing down his ‘grotesque’ stories helped him to conform to the pressures of his job.

Richard Ingrams reflects in his article in Folio on why it took thirty years to get a publisher to accept Uncle:

To anyone familiar with the world of children’s books the long delay in the recognition of Martin will not come as too much of a surprise. The Wind in the Willows, Robinson Crusoe, and many other classics would, I suspect, find it hard to find favour with modern publishers in search of nice inoffensive matter with the right kind of message. Such people could easily mistake the violent horseplay in Uncle for cruelty and be uneasy about political undertones which are not there.

J.P.Martin’s father, grandfather and a number of uncles and cousins had been, for over a century, ministers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Two of his relations, James and Mary Calvert, had a national reputation for their work in Fiji. The Calverts and their children lived next to the cannibal ovens, and articles, poems and lectures describing the spectacular horrors provided the public with the sort of excitement obtained today from television. For J.P.Martin the stories of the brothers Grimm were mild compared with the real stories he heard from his mother about his aunt and uncle.

Richard Ingrams has mentioned the strong influence on J.P.Martin’s imagination of the family move every three or four years to a new manse. John Wesley insisted that his ministers should regularly change to a fresh circuit to avoid the spiritual danger of becoming too comfortable; too many parsons of the established Church of England settled down in a parish for life. Certainly Methodist ministers and their wives had very little chance of ever being too comfortable with limited stipends and manses often in slum areas of the great cities. Wesley might have been surprised by the point of view of the Martin children. The great September move provided new places to explore. J.P.Martin’s younger sister Dora wrote:

How we used to pity other children! They did not have the three-yearly excitement of going to live somewhere else. Our ambition was to move off to the Isles of Scilly or the Shetland Isles, but our luck never held. Father was a very good preacher and was greatly in demand in the big churches of the industrial North. He always had more than one invitation to choose from when the time to move came.

J.P.Martin, in a family photograph at the age of ten (p. 25), has an expression of mischievous interest. Here is the future author of the Uncle books, observing, absorbing, being amused at the contrasts of life in the soot-dark cities. It was to be natural for him to confront the towered glory of Uncle’s Homeward with the ramshackle pile of the Hateman residence. Badfort was the reality, Homeward the dream:

… think of about a hundred skyscrapers all joined together and surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge over it, and you’ll get some idea of [Homeward]. The towers are of many colours, and there are bathing pools and gardens among them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom … Exploring in Uncle’s house is a tricky business, but, there’s one comfort, you are sure to come across something to eat even if you have lost your way.

Uncle picked up the telescope as soon as the Old Monkey had gone and had a look at Badfort himself. It’s rather hard when you have a splendid house yourself that the chief view from your windows should be that of your enemy’s dingy fortress, but this had to be endured, and it’s quite useless to pretend that Uncle wasn’t interested in the huge sprawl of Badfort, and the unseemly Badfort crowd who inhabited it.

(Uncle pp. 9 &11)

The processes involved in creative writing are unconscious. In this book these boxes with quotations from the six Uncle books suggest ways in which JPM’s experiences in life had filtered down into his imagination. Reviewers have pointed that in the Uncle stories, however wild the fantasy, however rough the action, practically every episode in the books is founded on an aspect of real life. Anything is taken for granted. Nothing is explained.

Uncle acknowledges that life without the fights with the Badfort crowd would lack the tonic of excitement. As Hateman himself says when Uncle is reproving him for bad manners: ‘Oh stow it, Uncle! You know jolly well you’d be bored stiff if we didn’t have a dust-up occasionally!’

Once these battles start it is necessary for Uncle to win, but his self-important grandeur has to be kept within bearable limits. A platform on which he is sitting as guest of honour is sabotaged from below by the Badfort lot. There are unseemly interruptions to the song ‘Hail to Glorious Uncle!’ Periodically Uncle’s purple dressing gown – his regular wear – is soiled by cascades of ashes or mud. There are shouts of ‘He stole a bike!’ There are placards: ‘Down with the cocoa-cadging humbug.’ The Badfort News continually shouts ‘Rise in your thousands and do down the dictator.’ Satire came naturally to J.P.Martin.

J.P.Martin had a life of singular variety and interest. He was gifted at finding amusement in the most unpromising situations whether in England, South Africa, Palestine or Eygpt. He was brought up in great Northern manufacturing cities and turned 21 at the beginning of the new century. A Methodist parson, who has to change circuits every three years, comes into contact with people of all classes and in all kinds of jobs, living in positions sometimes of comfort, or of struggle and degradation. The Wesleyans focused on the settlements which had sprung up in the industrial revolution where the established Anglican church, for reasons of class and conservatism, was slow to respond.

JPM volunteered as a missionary and rebuilt a war-damaged chapel in the South African gold rush town with the Bunyanesque name of Pilgrim’s Rest. Rough hewn miners from Cornwall and Wales placed bets about whether the padre would survive the crossing of a flooded river. There Nancy and he started their marriage and he rapidly came to depend upon her organising capabilities to run his circuits. Her hats dominate the picture of the merry wives of Mafeking. They returned to England just before the ‘Great War’ and he became chaplain at Wycliffe public school where he gave communion to privileged young men who were about to be killed going over the top in France. He chose to volunteer as an Army Chaplain because ‘it would be easier for me to talk to young people if I had taken some active part in the war’. He might have been blown up on the Western Front but instead was sent to the Turkish front in Palestine. The unexpected and sudden armistice in October 1918 gave him the chance of visiting all parts of the Holy Land which meant so much to him personally – and gave him dramatic encounters with camels. His friend the Colonel of the artillery regiment invited him to join him in early 1919 on a tour by boat to the extraordinary sites up the Nile at Luxor and Aswan. ‘There was a sort of platform spread with rugs and cushions and on these the Colonel and I reclined in lordly style.’ Many elephantine images have seeped into the grandiosity of Uncle’s Homeward.

Camborne in Cornwall was full of Uncle-like traction engines supplying coal to pump water from the tin mines; the price for coal was going up and after the end of ‘The Great War’ the demand for tin fell and the miners’ families were cast into destitution at the closure of the Dolcoath Mine which literally ran underneath the major Methodist Chapel. His friends were often out of the ordinary; in Carlisle a fellow preacher was to become the gipsy Romany on Children’s Hour, one of the first celebrities of the BBC. The strike by coal miners in his congregation in Kingswood to the north of Bristol lasted longer than the General Strike. The Martins then went to Clevedon on the other side of Bristol which, in spite of the depression, was still comfortable with people who had worked in the professions, run the colonies or inherited wealth; they provided a rich crop of characters such as General Boar and Lady Lionease. Manchester was a total change with the redoubtable Nancy going out into the red light district to give comfort to a girl who had run away from her home in the country and did not dare tell her mother. That city gave them both delights with its galleries and shops and cinemas round the corner. As Mayor’s chaplain in Northampton he was provided with a silk gown made by the tailor to the Quorn hunt and quietly delighted in the absurdities of public life in Badgertown.

During the second world war he was minister in Daventry to the BBC engineers who were not only transmitting to the Empire and across occupied Europe but were also running secret experiments with radar, the weapon which enabled the Spitfires to win. German planes crossed their Northamptonshire skies to destroy Coventry and its cathedral and their nursing daughter Grace was blown under her patient’s bed when her Bristol hospital was bombed.

J.P.Martin was driven in a jeep to the army munitions depot to preach to the men who again were fighting for freedom in yet another war. Little did he think when he volunteered as a chaplain in 1918 that he would be talking to his own sons, both born in the first world war and now of an age to be killed for their country. We are now better at acknowledging the psychological damage of warfare. His experiences in the front line in Palestine would have been of great value at helping his son John come to terms with calmly working day after day in bomb disposal when he had seen friends blown up in front of his eyes. His son Hal was nearly paralysed by a disease similar to polio in Palestine and his father had to help him cope with the psychological hammering of the aftermath.

When JPM retired to Exmoor he volunteered to bike and walk to chapels over two districts. All the time he was recording in his journal and letters his amusement about the awkward brigade in his church, whose characters infused their way into Uncle. There were local gipsies who ‘witched’ neighbours by leaving stuffed leopards on the doorstep and sought support from JPM, although they would never cross the threshold of his chapel. The badgers, bears and gorillas in Uncle seem quite reasonable in comparison. His battered typewriter, with the return spring powered by the weight of a gas pipe, continued to pound out Uncle stories. Often at breakfast he would tell the story of dreams he had in the night and by evening they had become new chapters of his stories. Life and Uncle were never far apart.

At the age of 17 J.P.Martin had taken the train for London:

I set out for London, with no thought of God. In fact the thought of God was the very last one in my mind. To see the world was my idea, and I went away without a word to my parents. I can see now that I caused them great pain, but at that time I didn’t realise this. Arriving in London I wandered about in the streets and was overwhelmed by the multitude of people. Suddenly the thought came into my mind where will all these people be in a few years time? And the answer came they will all be gone. Immediately the thought came to me but God will be here. And at that moment I saw clearly that the main thing to do with my life was to give it to the service of God.

Hal Martin, JPM’s second son, wrote about his mysticism:

No portrait would be complete which did not take full account of Dad’s religious devotion; that is difficult to harmonise with the rampaging sense of humour in Uncle. I believe his sense of responsibility to God was sometimes almost crushing, and that he had a rapturous freedom from responsibility in his writing … Religious thinking by JPM was nearly all conscious (not dreamed) and thus subject to self-reproach. But much of Uncle was dreamed – a product of the mind in its free-est state – an expression of his extrovert side and a form of relief. He often said that telling, or writing, the Uncle stories took his mind off the worries of day-to-day life. I do believe that they were also a relief from the pressure of his religious thinking.’

J.P.Martin was 84 when he wrote to his family in 1963:

Tremendous news! ‘Uncle’ has been taken by Jonathan Cape. It is a bit startling to me, living in this solitude, to hear that this family book is getting afloat at last. I can’t help feeling that this is the work of a Higher Power.

His family could not help thinking that the faith of Stella Martin Currey and R.N. Currey had also helped. They had used their every skill as professional writers to keep on searching for a publisher for thirty years until the satirical sixties caught up with J.P.Martin.

Fifty years on Uncle is not automatically accepted in the Observer’s words as ‘a classic in the great English Nonsense tradition’. Instead in each generation an underground club of Uncle fans have felt that they are the chosen, they are the people who have joined in with Uncle’s battles with the Bads. Marcus Gipps’ Kickstarter hardback The Complete Uncle and the New York Review of Books selection for their Childrens’ Classics have confirmed the faith of this secret army.

As this book was about to go to press the news arrived that, some fifty years after first publication of Uncle, it had been decided to put it into Penguin’s renowned Puffin Books.

NOTE

John Percival Martin was known as Percy as a child and by his wife Nancy and other relations. In the Methodist ministry he used J.P.Martin probably to distinguish himself from his well-known father Rev John Martin. When he wrote he used J.P.Martin. His initials JPM, almost like a nickname, were widely used to refer to him in the family. Throughout this book JPM and J.P.Martin are used interchangeably.

2. Cannibals & Crookballs 1841-79

J.P.Martin had among his forbears heroic missionaries and also a champion wrestler. His father. John Martin, the eldest son of a Methodist farmer, was born in 1841 near Redruth. Cornwall was, in every sense, far from the rest of England. Competition was local, and the wrestling champions were the heroes of the countryside. John Martin had to be fit to win those fights on Bodmin Moor and Perranporth Sands. No doubt he saw this physical effort in the context of his Christian belief that the body should be kept healthy in the service of God, for he was also a local preacher in the Wesleyan Church.

One summer evening, at the age of twenty-three, John Martin was preaching in the small Methodist chapel of Mowla near Redruth. His life was to be changed because in the congregation was the Rev Thomas Binney, the Principal of Richmond Theological College, who next day called to see John Martin’s parents to tell them firmly that such a gifted young preacher should be in the ministry. Soon after this John Martin gave up all his rights in the big farm to his brothers and took, with his father and mother, a first trip to London. After three years at Richmond College he was ordained and fulfilled three years of supply work before he could be appointed to a church of his own.

Soon after his ordination John Martin proposed to Edith, the fifth and youngest daughter of a Wesleyan minister, the Rev George Browne Macdonald. Naturally young ministers often married the daughters of other ministers, but Edith Macdonald was exceptional in that two of her sisters were already married to well-known artists, and another two would become the mothers of men who later were to become very well-known. One of the Macdonald girls was the wife of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, and another of Edward Poynter, a future President of the Royal Academy. The other two became respectively the mothers of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin.

Edith’s father was about to retire and perhaps by then her parents were too dependent on her to encourage the match. At any rate she refused John Martin and she was never to marry.

Stella Martin Currey read with particular interest The Macdonald Sisters (1960) written by Earl Baldwin of Bewdley who said of his aunt Edith, ‘between the lines of the one poem she left it may be discerned that had fate been kind the chaste authoress might have been blessed with a husband and home of her own’.

‘I gave a copy of The Macdonald Sisters to my father because I had been told this story about my grandfather. Well, I suppose I’ve just missed moving in grander circles, he said, but I can’t help being thankful it didn’t happen. My mother was perfect for him – and for us! ’

In 1870 John Martin married Ellen Fowler, daughter of the Rev Philip and Mary Fowler, after he had been appointed to his first church at Bacup in Lancashire. Dora Fowler Martin, J.P.Martin’s younger sister, when herself in her seventies described her parents: ‘Mother had the most lovely pink-and-white complexion and a mass of red-gold hair. Both mother and father had exceptionally beautiful hair. Father’s was a mass of thick black curls which he was forever trying to straighten. The two of them had temperaments that were as different as their hair. Although devoted to her puritanical husband mother did not always find him easy to deal with. That’s where her humour helped. She could wave away his Celtic storm-clouds by making him laugh. I remember that he was reluctant to give my baby sister Connie permission to play with bricks on Sunday till she said, reassuringly: She can build chapels, you know, John. He laughed with her then.’

The thriving industrial ugliness of Bacup could well have been a shock to John Martin. He had thought of himself as going to minister to the spiritual life of the people of Bacup. This vision of dedication to spiritual matters vanished abruptly when he went to his first church financial meeting. One of his stewards told him that twenty thousand pounds had to be raised, at speed, so that a new school and church could be built in a growing suburb. ‘Don’t look so down, Mr Martin, I’ll give five thousand, I know Sutcliffe will give ten. Joe Lord will stand for five. Others I’ve got in mind will give a thousand each. All we’re here for today is to discuss tenders and builders.’ This was never to happen to John Martin again, and it never came near happening to J.P.Martin. When one gruelling fund-raising effort was looming up he said: ‘You know, those Bacup chaps remind me of Uncle.’

On her wedding day Ellen Martin heard her new husband John state with Celtic emotion that he hoped all his sons would become ministers and all his daughters missionaries. By marrying Ellen he was entering a family which included two heroic missionaries already admired throughout his native Cornwall for converting the cannibals of Fiji to Methodism. In 1865 when James and Mary Calvert sailed into Falmouth the fishermen took the horses out of the shafts of the carriage waiting for them at the quayside, and in honour pulled it themselves through the streets to the manse of Mary’s brother Philip Fowler. Ellen, born in 1849, was about seventeen at the time. From such a background it can be seen why John Martin hoped for a crop of ministers and missionaries. Their children were: Harry, born in 1871, Norman in 1873, May in 1875, Percy in 1879, Dora in 1882 and Connie in 1887. Helen, born in 1877, lived for twelve months and died in the year before John Percival Martin (Percy) was born in Scarborough on 5 August 1879.

Ellen Martin was a good raconteur and stories of the Calvert aunt and uncle lost no colour in the telling. She saved letters from the Calvert children all her life and without doubt she was influenced by the spectacular soul-serving careers of their father and mother. Perhaps she was not so much pushing her children towards the mission field as enjoying the terrifying adventures that were part of missionary stories. Equally she got amusement out of stories of how her youngest brother John Wesley Fowler, having got a maid with child, was shipped off to South America where he started an alligator farm, made a lot of money and died in Texas. Ellen was apt to say, particularly in times of financial stress, that she was sorry she had lost all contact with him.

Although all six Martin children suffered exposure to the Calvert saga, it was only J.P.Martin who became a missionary, and that in a place where there was no danger of having a human leg or arm presented in a friendly way at the kitchen door. Dora was an entranced admirer of the Calverts and did her best to influence the next generation. Helen Oates, the daughter of JPM’s elder brother Norman Martin, wrote:

I had an overdose of Calverts when I was a child from Aunt Dora, who thought it would be splendid if I followed in Mary Calvert’s footsteps and became a missionary in Fiji. I didn’t want to go, but dared not tell anybody. It was bottled up inside me for a long time until on one of my infrequent visits to the cinema I saw a horrid film about a tropical island. It was too like Fiji for words. I came home in tears. Mother discovered what the trouble was and said she did not want me to go to Fiji any more than I wanted to go, and if Dora was so keen on Fiji she should go there herself.

No doubt Dora had long nursed hopes of doing just that but she, perhaps like Edith Macdonald, was caught in the Victorian and Edwardian trap of being the youngest unmarried daughter who it was assumed would care for ageing parents. Only after the death of John Martin in 1930, when she was over 50, was she free to adventure through a range of jobs which provided backgrounds for several novels.

When J.P.Martin, on the publication of Uncle, was asked to supply some biographical details, he listed among facts he felt to be of importance: ‘I was related to the Rev James Calvert who was the agent in starting Christianity in the Islands of Fiji.’ James Calvert’s papers in the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University give evidence of how effective was the work done in Fiji by James and Mary Calvert.

Today on television, computers and tablets people gaze in their homes on the intimate habits of animals and the beauty of flowers through the inspired photography of naturalist explorers like David Attenborough. In the nineteenth century the lectures of explorers, like Darwin who was financed by the Royal Geographical Society, were fund-raising social events. Missionaries were also renowned. People from a wide range of classes found excitement and entertainment in the fund-raising lectures by missionaries, who had endured horrific experiences and penetrated uncharted lands where flora and fauna were as new and mysterious as the exotic people they tried to convert to Christianity.

When Calvert’s Fiji and the Fijians was published in 1858 it was an instant success. The English Review said:

No romance has such wild scenes, hairbreadth escapes, such a straight-forward and convincing account of the moral transformation and of rapid and steady victories gained by the heroic labours of men and women over unutterable ferocity.

Christian journals in England and America contained accounts of James Calvert’s spiritual struggle for the soul of the Cannibal King Thakombeau. Only when victory was accomplished could cannibalism be effectively abolished.

1. Rev James Calvert (1815-92). J.P.Martin’s uncle, who converted the cannibal king and founded the Methodist church in Fiji. James and Mary Calvert’s stories of survival became renowned in Victorian England. In 1865 when James and Mary Calvert returned from Fiji, the fishermen of Falmouth took the horses out of the carriage sent to meet them at the quayside and in honour pulled the carriage themselves through the streets to Mary’s brother Philip Fowler’s manse.

2. Rev Philip Fowler, a grandfather of J.P.Martin, at the age of about 39 in 1852. He married Mary Ann Sanderson on 11 August 1843.

3. Sarah Ellen Fowler in about 1865 aged 16. She was born 6 December 1849 as the fourth child of Philip and Mary Fowler. Ellen was to marry Cornishman Rev John Martin on 28 September 1870, and her fourth child John Percival Martin was born in Scarborough on 5 August 1879.

Dozens of descriptive poems were written about James and Mary Calvert such as:

Who can forget the awful, thrilling scene

When round you stood the infuriated throng

Of blood-stained cannibals with horrid mien

Who rent the air with yells both loud and long.

Above your head the fearful club is raised,

The envenomed spear is pointed to your breast,

And now the white man’s flesh is felt and praised

And all anticipate the horrid feast.

The children of Victorian missionaries were often the first casualties of the spiritual wars their parents waged, and it was to the Fowler home that the Calverts sent their eldest daughter Mary to be cared for by her uncle and aunt. They realised, rather belatedly it might be thought, that she was suffering from life in such close proximity to the cannibal ovens. When Mary was sent to England James Calvert wrote in his accompanying letter:

This is our life here. The warriors returned yesterday from a victorious fight. Fourteen prisoners were killed and eaten on the spot. One leg of a boy was tied by the foot to a tree for convenience in cutting up. Yet, in the midst of all this unfeelingness one little boy was carefully burying the head of the boy whose leg hung above him. Next day the bodies of two females, whole and uncooked, were brought by a crowd of blackened and noisy savages who after presenting them to their chief cut them up for the oven. Such scenes stagger faith, and chill charity.

Poor Mary died after a month or so in the Fowler home, and magazines were bombarded with poems about her. ‘A Flower of Feejee’ (so spelt) was a title used in more than one journal. James and Mary Calvert did not hear about her death until four months after it occurred. They sent their other children to the Fowlers, and these survived.

James Calvert was a versatile man. Before he entered the Methodist ministry he had completed a seven year apprenticeship to a printer in Malton and so took with him to Fiji a printing press and bookbinding plant. He was also a grammarian and teacher. He and Mary held teaching classes, and he was transcribing and printing the vocabulary and grammar of the Fijian language so that schools could be started. And all the time he was patiently talking to King Thakombeau. He was so confident that Thakombeau was about to become a Christian that, when he went home to see the British and Foreign Bible Society’s production of his first Fijian grammar safely into print, he had a splendid box of ebony and mother-of-pearl made to hold the King’s first Bible. When Calvert got back to Fiji Thakombeau had reverted to eating people. The box was not presented to him, but was sent back to Ellen Fowler in England and has been kept by Martin descendants.

Mary Calvert moved about among the Fijians as fearlessly as her husband. She was an accomplished horsewoman and her ability to ride bare-back won their respect. Once, when James Calvert was away, fourteen of the young women who attended her reading classes were captured to make a feast for old Tanoa, the father of Thakombeau. Mary Calvert found a Fijian boy she could trust and, with the young wife of another missionary, set out at once