J. P. Martin

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John Percival Martin (1879 – 24 March 1966) was an English author best known for his Uncle series of children's stories.

Life

Martin was the son of John Martin, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and his wife Ellen Fowler, daughter of the Rev. Philip Fowler, another Wesleyan, and his wife Mary. Philip Fowler was the brother of Mary Fowler, wife of the Pacific missionary James Calvert.[1]

John Percival, known in the family as Percy, was born in

Scarborough in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the summer of 1879, the fifth of seven children of whom one died before he was born.[1] His younger sister Dora (Theodora Fowler Martin, 1882–1961) is also known as a writer, under the name Dora Fowler Martin.[2] While his two elder brothers were sent to Kingswood School, founded by John Wesley, John was not. His elder sister Mary Calvert (May) went to Trinity Hall School, Southport, and then university. His parents feeling he was not suited to boarding school, he attended local day schools in the northern cities and towns where his father ministered to Methodist circuits.[3]

In 1898, the Martin family was based in Dewsbury, and John was working in the accounts department of the local steel works. He was asked to join the Wesleyan Leeds mission, which for some years had been reconstructed with the ministry of Samuel Chadwick. Shortly he became a candidate for the ministry, and was given a district missionary responsibility in Halifax and Bradford.[4][5]

Martin became a

Pilgrim's Rest and Sabie, a gold-mining area, living first at Lydenburg since the Pilgrim's Rest church had been destroyed in the war.[7]

Now married, John and Nancy Martin moved to

Mafeking in 1910.[8]

Returning with his family to England in 1913, Martin became a Wesleyan chaplain at Wycliffe College, Gloucestershire.[9] He was an army chaplain in Palestine during the World War I. After World War II he lived in the village of Timberscombe in Somerset, where he died in March 1966.

The Uncle series

The Uncle books are:

The Uncle of the six books in the series is a very rich elephant living in a very large house called Homeward. He is plagued by a group of enemies concerned with puncturing his pretensions, and driving home the charge, true enough, that he once stole a bicycle.[10]

Homeward is hard to describe, but try to think of about a hundred skyscrapers all joined together and surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge over it, and you'll get some idea. The towers are of many colours, and there are bathing pools and gardens amongst them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom.[11]

Uncle has friends and supporters, including the Old Monkey, the One-Armed Badger, the cat Goodman, Noddy Ninety, Cloutman, the King of the Badgers, and Butterskin Mute. He is the sworn enemy of the inhabitants of Badfort, an enormous derelict fortress that blights the landscape in front of Homeward. Living in there are the Badfort gang, nominally headed by the Hateman family, Beaver, Nailrod Snr, Nailrod Jnr, Filljug, and Sigismund, with the support of Flabskin, Oily Joe, the dwarvish, cowardly, skewer-throwing Isidore Hitmouse, the scheming ghost Hootman, and Jellytussle, an animated mound of bluish jelly.

Reception

Initial reviews of the series in the 1960s by Penelope Mortimer and Geoffrey Moorhouse were favorable.[12] In 1977 John Rowe Townsend wrote in 25 Years of British Children's Books "There are several Uncle books , all inconsequentially episodic and hilariously illustrated by Quentin Blake".[13] The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984) commented on its "wildest schoolboy-style inventions and implausibilities, narrated with dead-pan humour."[10]

The Economist noted in 2005 that the stories "which focus on the doings of the eponymous hero, an elephant and benevolent dictator, were first published in the 1960s, and still enjoy a cult following."[14] Imogen Russell Williams wrote in 2007 "If there was ever a children's series generating fanatical, "cult" adoration, this is it."[15]

Reprints

The first book was reprinted in paperback in 2000 by Red Fox:

ISBN 1-59017-276-0
).

In March 2013, a

ISBN 978-1783062836
.

Family

In 1906 Martin married Annie "Nancy" Mann (died 1944), daughter of Michael Urwin Mann, in Johannesburg. He later married as his second wife Jane Jenny Sowerbutts née Mann, in 1947. He had four children, two girls and two boys, from his first marriage.[2][19] Martin's Uncle stories were first told to his children before he wrote them down for a wider audience.

The eldest child was Helen Estella Martin (1907–1994), known as Stella Martin. She was to 1984 her father's official biographer, her work appearing in 2017 as Stella Martin Currey edited by James Martin Currey, under the title J.P. Martin: Father of Uncle: A Master in the Great English Nonsense Tradition 1879–1966;[20] and also editor of the three Uncle books that appeared after his death.[21]

Stella Martin worked from the early 1920s as a journalist on the Bristol Times and Mirror.

Ralph Nixon Currey, a friend of the family.[23][24] In 1934 the couple encouraged J. P. Martin to write down the "Uncle" stories.[25]

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  3. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  4. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  5. ^ "DMBI: A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland: Samuel Chadwick". dmbi.online.
  6. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  7. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  8. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  9. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  10. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-211582-9
    .
  11. ISBN 978-1-4481-7291-7
    .
  12. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  13. ISBN 978-0-85353-278-1
    .
  14. ^ "Whatever happened to Uncle?". The Economist. 20 December 2005.
  15. ^ Imogen Russell Williams (20 June 2007). "The elephant not in the room: what happened to Uncle?". The Guardian. London.
  16. ^ "The Complete Uncle, by J.P. Martin & Quentin Blake by Marcus Gipps — Kickstarter". Kickstarter. 27 March 2013. Retrieved 27 March 2013.
  17. ^ Flood, Alison (27 March 2013). "JP Martin's elephant Uncle unforgotten in fan's republishing plan". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 27 March 2013.
  18. ^ "The Complete Uncle, by J.P. Martin & Quentin Blake by Marcus Gipps » Unbelievable — Kickstarter". 27 March 2013. Retrieved 27 March 2013.
  19. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  20. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .
  21. ^ "Authors : Martin, J P : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia". www.sf-encyclopedia.com.
  22. ISBN 978-1-5261-3711-1
    .
  23. ISBN 978-1-5261-3711-1
    .
  24. ^ "obituary - R N Currey". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 29 June 2010.
  25. ISBN 978-1-78803-106-6
    .

External links
Library resources
By J. P. Martin
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