Barbara Sleigh
Encyclopedia
Barbara Grace de Riemer Sleigh (1906–1982) was a well-known British children's writer and broadcaster.

Family and career

Barbara Sleigh was born in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, the daughter of the artist Bernard Sleigh
Bernard Sleigh
Bernard Sleigh was an English mural painter, stained-glass artist, illustrator and wood engraver, best known for his work An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland, Newly Discovered and Set Forth which is in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.-Education and work:Sleigh was apprenticed to a wood...

 and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both came from a Methodist
Methodism
Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...

 background, but she was brought up an Anglican
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...

. The family moved to Chesham
Chesham
Chesham is a market town in the Chiltern Hills, Buckinghamshire, England. It is located 11 miles south-east of the county town of Aylesbury. Chesham is also a civil parish designated a town council within Chiltern district. It is situated in the Chess Valley and surrounded by farmland, as well as...

 for a time, then back to Birmingham. The marriage broke up in about 1914. Her older brother, Brocas Linwood Sleigh (1902–1965), was also a writer.

Having attended art college and teacher's training college, Sleigh taught in various schools before joining the teacher training department at Goldsmith's College in London in 1929. She went to work for the BBC programme Children's Hour
Children's Hour
Children's Hour—at first: "The Children's Hour", from a verse by Longfellow—was the name of the BBC's principal recreational service for children during the period when radio dominated broadcasting....

 in 1932. There in 1935 she married a colleague, David Davis
David Davis (broadcaster)
William Eric Davis , was a British radio executive and broadcaster. From 1953 to 1961 he was the head of the BBC's Children's Hour....

 (1908–1996) at Dunchurch
Dunchurch
Dunchurch is a civil parish and village on the south-western outskirts of Rugby in Warwickshire, England. The 2001 census recorded a population of 2,842 in the village.- History :...

, Warwickshire, but BBC house rules at the time would not allow husbands and wives to work in the same department. She resigned and turned to freelance writing, film criticism and broadcasting. She and Davis had one son and two daughters.

Writings

Sleigh's best known novels for children are the three in the Carbonel series
Carbonel series
Carbonel is a children's book series by Barbara Sleigh, first published by Puffin Books from 1955 to 1978. Also published in the US by Bobbs-Merrill from 1955. It has three novels, first Carbonel: the King of the Cats and two sequels, The Kingdom of Carbonel and Carbonel and Calidor: Being the...

 (1955–1978), about a king of cats. The Carbonel books are still in print.

The other writings by Sleigh include novels for older children, notably Jessamy
Jessamy
Jessamy by Barbara Sleigh is a children's book that sheds light on English life during World War I through a time slip narrative.-The setting:...

an intriguingly realistic 1967 time-slip novel; collections of stories; large amounts of radio adaptation; several picture books for younger children; and some educational readers. Several of her books came out in Puffin
Puffin Books
Puffin Books is the children's imprint of British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s it has been the largest publisher of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world.-Early history:...

, the Penguin imprint; she wrote an article in 1967 for the first number of the house magazine Puffin Post. Sleigh was included in Uncle Mac's Children's Hour Book (Purnell, undated, c. 1950), in the 1974 children's anthology of stories and poems Happy Families, edited by Barbara Willard
Barbara Willard
Barbara Mary Willard, a British historical/children's author, was born in Brighton, Sussex in 1909, the daughter of the Shakespearean actor Edmund Willard and the great-niece of Victorian era actor Edward Smith Willard....

, and in the Puffin Annual (1974), edited by Kaye Webb
Kaye Webb
Kaye Webb was a British journalist and publisher. She was editor of Puffin Books between 1961 and 1979, and in 1967 founded the Puffin Club, which she ran until 1981. As a journalist she worked on publications including Picture Post, Lilliput and the News Chronicle, and later edited the Young...

and others. Her final work was as editor of an anthology of stories about witches: Broomsticks and Beasticles (1981).
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