Shirley Hughes, who has died aged 94, was an award-winning author of more than 50 children’s books, and illustrator of some 200 more, with worldwide sales of more than 11m. She had an exceptional talent for drawing children. Through her warm-hearted observation, particularly of pre-school children, she created a distinctive and affectionate visual image of childhood that has been instantly recognisable for more than 60 years.
In 1977 she published Dogger, one of her best-loved books, and the first to bring her a mass readership.
It tells the story of a small boy called Dave, whose battered toy dog gets lost on the trip to pick up his sister, Bella, from school. After an anxious evening Dogger turns up on the toy stall at the school fair the next day, but Dave has no money to buy it. Disaster strikes when the beloved animal is sold to a little girl. But with the help of Bella, the drama is resolved and Dave and Dogger are reunited. The book won Hughes her first CILIP Kate Greenaway medal, and 30 years later Dogger was voted the “Greenaway of Greenaways” in a 2007 poll of the country’s favourite picture books.
The appeal of Shirley’s books is obvious: her engaging characters have immediacy and vigour that come from her skilful and distinctive illustrations, using pen and ink, watercolour and gouache. She kept them up to date by being a passionate user of a sketchbook in which she made quick drawings – “almost at the speed of seeing” – capturing children and settings for her stories, from which she would then create characters who are attractively wholesome without being overly sentimental.
Shirley’s ability to draw children was spotted by a children’s books editor while she was still a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford. Initially, she mainly illustrated other people’s stories, starting with Noel Streatfeild’s The Bell Family in 1954, and including most notably Dorothy Edwards’s My Naughty Little Sister books when they were republished in the late 1960s. She also illustrated books by Alison Uttley, Ian Serraillier and Margaret Mahy.
Shirley quickly moved on to writing and illustrating her own books. Lucy and Tom’s Day (1960) was the first of many that drew on the everyday experiences of her own young children for the kind of simple domestic incidents that would be familiar to many.
She could create a sense of drama out of the smallest thing and resolve it without ever needing to deliver a message. Instead, she relied on children and their parents being largely sensible and so able to solve problems for themselves.
In Alfie Gets in First (1981), the first of her celebrated Alfie series, the eponymous hero runs to be home first from a shopping trip and slams the door shut, inadvertently locking everyone else outside. He cannot reach the door catch and one neighbour after another gets involved in trying to help. There is no moralising about an unruly child or a careless mother: instead, Alfie works out a way to unlock the door and all is well again.
Alfie starred in many subsequent stories, along with his little sister Annie Rose, including An Evening at Alfie’s, Alfie Gives a Hand and Alfie Wins a Prize. Their simple childhood adventures, set in a British urban world of birthday parties, park visits and local fairs, were fittingly modernised over the years and continued to delight generations of children and their parents, with the most recent book in the series, Alfie on Holiday, published in 2019.
While the premise of many of Shirley’s books remained constant, she was innovative in the ways of telling them. A wordless picture book, Up and Up (1979), was followed by Chips and Jessie (1985), the first in a series of titles told in comic strip format as a way of helping emerging readers move from just pictures to words.
Much later, she wrote fiction: The Lion and the Unicorn (2000), a short novel with many illustrations for six- to eight-year-olds, and two wartime adventures, Hero on a Bicycle (2012) and Whistling in the Dark (2016). In 2012 she published Dixie O’Day: In The Fast Lane!, the first in an illustrated series created jointly with her daughter, Clara Vulliamy. For her last book, written at the age of 92, she returned to the story of the lost toy dog with a seasonal sequel, Dogger’s Christmas, published in 2020.
Shirley grew up in West Kirby, Wirral, the daughter of TJ Hughes, who owned the Liverpool department store of the same name, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Dowling); her father died when she was five, and Shirley was brought up by her mother. In a childhood with a lot of leisure time, she spent hours sketching, drawing and writing stories and plays with her two sisters. From early on, she was influenced by the illustrations of Arthur Rackham and William Heath Robinson and by comics, especially those from the US that the GIs left behind.
After West Kirby high school for girls, which she left at 16, Shirley studied at Liverpool College of Art and, with an ambition to join the theatrical world, went to Birmingham Rep, where she made sets and designed costumes. She quickly decided that the theatre world was not for her but she found the experience provided a useful background to her later illustrative work.
She then studied at the Ruskin in Oxford. According to her autobiography, A Life Drawing (2002), her application to Oxford was based on the misinformation that the city had an ice rink and she “rather fancied myself on ice”. At Ruskin, she studied life drawing, laying the foundation for so much of her later illustrations.
Shirley was just the person that those who loved her illustrations would expect her to be. Usually in a hat, she was effortlessly elegant and graceful, and wonderful company: funny, insightful and kind with a laugh that was both loud and heartfelt.
Her exceptional contribution to children’s books was widely recognised, with awards for individual titles including the Children’s Rights Workshop Other award, a prize that celebrated diversity in children’s books, for Helpers (1975); and a second Kate Greenaway medal, for Ella’s Big Chance (2003). She received the Eleanor Farjeon award for services to children’s literature in 1984, and was the first winner of the BookTrust lifetime achievement award, in 2015. She was appointed OBE in 1999 and CBE in 2017.
In addition to her own work, Shirley battled hard for the cause of illustrators and authors, serving on the management committees of the Society of Authors, Public Lending Right and the Library and Information Services Council.
In 1952 she married John Vulliamy; he died in 2007. She is survived by their three children, Ed, a journalist, Clara, an author and illustrator, and Tom, a research scientist.
• Shirley Hughes, author and illustrator, born 16 July 1927; died 25 February 2022
