Beryl Irving

Beryl Irene Irving earned her living with a pen. Her drawings appeared in The Nursery World, Farmers Weekly, the East Anglian Times and The Radio Times, the weekly and monthly work that kept an illustrator employed between the wars, and her line has the speed of someone used to a deadline. She broadcast as well: the local paper that reported her death in 1965 called her "the well-known writer, broadcaster and artist".

In 1926, not yet thirty, she published The Dawnchild with Faber and Gwyer in London, "with pictures by the author": eight colour plates and line drawings that run beside and through the text. Her figures have been compared with Jessie M. King's for their long lines and flying hair. The invention is her own: the Umpis, the Witch of Worum, a chariot going over a crag, a boat flying across the Midnight Sea. The children's writer Vivian French, who read it as a child, called it "a truly amazing fantasy story".

Six years later came Daffy Goes to Sea, from Nisbet in 1932, and it could hardly be more different: a real coast, a yacht, a treasure hunt, a rival. In November 1921, at Rushbrooke in County Cork, she had married John Irving, and they had four children. They separated when the children were young, and she brought them up in Essex.

In 1941 she wrote and drew The Family Week-End Book, a wartime household companion of cooking, gardens, family games, pets, etiquette, old herb recipes and party ideas, the kind of book a family kept on the kitchen shelf. Dawnchild is bringing it back. In 1947 she drew the cover and chapter pieces for Good Food, a cookbook written from memory by her brother Campbell Newington in the Singapore internment camps and printed at Ipoh.

The Dawnchild emblem is her drawing from the 1926 title page.