J. P. Martin

J. P. (John Percival) Martin (1879–1966) was an English author best known for his "Uncle" series of children's stories.

Martin was born in Scarborough in the English county of Yorkshire in summer 1879 and became a Methodist minister in 1902 before serving as a missionary in South Africa and as an army chaplain in Palestine during the First World War. After the Second World War he lived in the village of Timberscombe in Somerset, where he died in March 1966. He was twice married.

The "Uncle" series

Martin's "Uncle" stories were first told to his children before he was persuaded to write them down for a wider audience. When they were first published in the late 1960s and early 1970s they were hailed as modern classics of children's literature, although their fame has faded considerably since then, leading for many years to a complete lack of reprints and great scarcity, although some of the stories have recently been re-published in the United Kingdom (ISBN 0-09-943869-0). The Uncle of the six books in the "Uncle" series is a millionaire elephant with a purple dressing-gown, a B.A. from Oxford, and a clean-living past marred by a single, never-to-be-forgotten discreditable incident. He has many friends and supporters, including the Old Monkey, the One-Armed Badger, the cat Goodman, Noddy Ninety, Cloutman, the King of the Badgers, and Butterskin Mute. He is also the owner of an enormous castle-cum-circus-cum-adventure-playground called Homeward:

:Homeward is hard to describe, but try to 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. The towers are of many colours, and there are bathing pools and gardens amongst them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom.

Uncle is the sworn enemy of the inhabitants of Badfort, an enormous fortress-cum-council-estate-cum-dark-satanic-mill that blights the landscape in front of Homeward. When the title character surveys Badfort through his telescope at the beginning of "Uncle" (1965) he looks "with disapproval along the whole length of Badfort, noting that there were more windows than ever stuffed with sacking", and when the Old Monkey goes there to rescue Uncle from imprisonment towards the end of "Uncle Cleans Up" (1966), he discovers that it has "hundreds of rooms, many with the roofs falling in, and all the passages were piled with rubble and broken glass", while the "only light was an occasional gleam from a scob-oil lamp".

Living in Badfort are the Badfort gang, nominally headed by the Hateman family, Beaver, Nailrod Snr, Nailrod Jnr, Fillisjug, and Sigismund, with the support of Flabskin, Oily Joe, the dwarvish, cowardly, skewer-throwing Isidore Hitmouse, the scheming ghost Hootman, and Jellytussle, an animated mound of bluish jelly. The Badfort gang, their hating Books, constant plots against Uncle, constant schemes to raise money, and spasmodic low feasting and drunkenness, are a large part of what make the "Uncle" books unique, and the illustrations drawn by Quentin Blake for first publication of the books have frequently been praised for capturing the exuberance and surrealism of Martin's prose.

The "Uncle" books are:

* "Uncle" (1964)
* "Uncle Cleans Up" (1965)
* "Uncle and His Detective" (1966)
* "Uncle and the Treacle Trouble" (1967)
* "Uncle and Claudius the Camel" (1970)
* "Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown" (1973)

Reprint

A hardcover reprint of the first volume of the Uncle stories was published in June 2007, according to Amazon.com (ISBN 1-59017-239-6).

External links

* [http://www.uncle-tv.com/author.html J.P. Martin biography and bibliography]
* [http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323657 Whatever happened to Uncle? The story of a neglected classic] from The Economist, 20 December 2005