Ursula Moray Williams (19 April 1911 – 17 October 2006) was an English children's author of nearly 70 books for children. Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, written while expecting her first child, remained in print throughout her life from its publication in 1939.
Her classic stories often involved brave creatures who overcome trials and cruelty in the outside world before finding a loving home. They included The Good Little Christmas Tree of 1943, and Gobbolino, the Witch's Cat first published the previous year. It immediately sold out but disappeared until re-issued in abridged form by Kaye Webb at Puffin Books twenty years later, when it became a best-seller.
Contents |
Williams was born in Petersfield, Hampshire, by ten minutes the younger of identical twins. She and her sister Barbara were talented artists and for six years from the age of ten wrote and illustrated books for each other's birthdays and at Christmas.
Both were enthusiastic Girl Guides, attending some of the movement's first camps, and some of Ursula's early books were collections of stories she had told to her own Brownie pack.
The girls were also keen riders – on hobby horses at first. To save for a pony they kept goats, selling their milk which they refused to drink themselves.
Thanks to their uncle, the publisher Stanley Unwin, the twins visited the Alps, which later inspired some of Ursula's most vivid writing, most notably the trilogy that began with The Three Toymakers. Its final volume, The Toymaker's Daughter, was among her finest, and most moving creations.
Williams' greatest source of ideas, however, was the extraordinary house in which she spent her teenage years, North Stoneham House, a large, dilapidated mansion set in woodland north of Southampton. Events from her remarkable childhood recur repeatedly in her fiction, with North Stoneham described at greatest length in the 1941 A Castle for John-Peter and depicted in Faith Jaques’ illustrations for Grandpapa's Folly and the Woodworm-Bookworm of 1974. In many regards, her life was as remarkable and inspirational as that of her fictional heroes.
She was a friend of Puffin Books editor Kaye Webb, and organised riotous parties for the Puffin Club, of which she was made the first honorary member. She worked with illustrators like Shirley Hughes, Faith Jaques and Edward Ardizzone.
Much of her later writing included disruptive, but essentially good-hearted children, and was influenced by her work as a juvenile magistrate and as a highly-involved school governor. Locally she was greatly admired for her many acts of kindness and an instinctive Christian faith.
Personal problems including her brother's threatened suicide, family crises, the death of her husband, the loss of an eye, and her near death to cancer, interrupted her work, but the indomitable author went on writing until the age of 80, and achieved the longest published career of any children's writer of her generation.
She married Conrad Southey "Peter" John in 1935. They lived at Hampton, near Kingston upon Thames, then Esher, before moving to Gloucestershire in 1942, and Beckford, Worcestershire, in 1945. Peter died in 1971. They had four sons, three of whom survived her. She died in 2006 at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire.[1]
Many of Williams' manuscripts and further correspondence are held at Seven Stories, the Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle.
An exhibition, marking the centenary of her birth, opened in Winchester in April 2011.[2]