Mary Treadgold

Mary Treadgold
Born	1910 London, U.K.
Died	2005
Occupation	Novelist Publisher
Genres	Children's fiction
carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/livingarchive/title.php?id=114

Mary Treadgold (1910–2005) was a British author who won the Carnegie Medal in 1941 for her children's book We Couldn't Leave Dinah.

Treadgold attended St Paul's Girls' School and Bedford College, London. She was a publisher by trade working for the firm of Raphael Tuck and later at Heinemann's as their first Children's Editor.^[1]

In her position Treadgold frequently read stories about ponies and pony clubs. She was dismayed by how subpar most of these were and decided to write her own while hiding out in her air raid shelter during the thick of World War II. Thus We Couldn't Leave Dinah was written.^[1] It is the story of children on a fictional Channel Island faced with leaving their pony because of the Nazi occupation.

No Ponies is set in post-war France, and The Polly Harris in post-war London, while several of the later books are set in the Heron riding school on the Downs.^[2] The Winter Princess concerns the visit of a young African princess to Hampton Court where she meets four English children. It has been described as "perhaps the most delightful book by a most talented writer", and as making "an effective contribution to the race question because there is no mention of it".^[3]

Mary Treadgold died on May 14, 2005 aged 95.^[4]

Selected bibliography

• We Couldn't Leave Dinah (1941)
• No Ponies (1946)
• The Polly Harris (1949)
• The Heron Ride (1960)
• Return to the Heron
• The Winter Princess (1962)
• The Weather Boy (1964)
• Journey from the Heron (1981)

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Mary Treadgold: We Couldn't Leave Dinah (1941)". The CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenway Living Archive. 1941. http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/livingarchive/title.php?id=114. Retrieved 2007-12-09. 
2. ^ Mary Treadgold at Jane Badger Books
3. ^ Marcus Crouch, The Nesbit Tradition, Ernest Benn, 1972 pp 218-221
4. ^ Death notice from the Times

Links

• Cheri Lloyd (2006) A Nation at War: The Work of Kitty Barne and Mary Treadgold, in Pat Pinsent (ed.) Out of the Attic

Persondata
Name	Treadgold, Mary
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1910
Place of birth	London, U.K.
Date of death	2005
Place of death