Page 25 - Great Elizabethans

THE TIGER ARRIVES
During the Second World War, Judith left school and volunteered with the Red Cross, sorting bandages for wounded soldiers. When the war was over, she went back to her drawing, winning a scholarship to the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and then teaching art
at a school. After that, she joined the BBC as a scriptwriter and met another scriptwriter called Nigel Kneale, whom she married in 1954. When they
moved into a house with a garden, Judith immediately got a cat – something she’d wanted to do for years!
Judith and Nigel had two children, Tacy and Matthew. Judith gave up her job to look after them, which she sometimes found boring. But Tacy and Judith loved the tigers in the zoo, which they often went to visit. To entertain Tacy at bedtime one day, Judith
made up a story about a little girl, her mother and a visiting tiger who ate up all the food in the house. Five years later, when Tacy was at school, she began to
turn it into a book, drawing the pictures herself. She remembered all the words easily, because Tacy had made her tell it so many times! In 1968, The Tiger Who Came to Tea was published for the first time and became an instant success. It has now sold more than five million copies.
There was usually a cat sitting on Judith’s lap while she was working. Her ninth cat, Katinka, also featured in one of her books, Katinka’s Tail.
THE STORY OF MOG
Judith went on to write many more books, usually based on her day-to-day family life. One was the story of Mog the
Forgetful Cat, about a cat who forgets how to get into her house and catches a burglar by mistake – this was based on Judith’s naughty tabby
cat, who wouldn’t use the cat flap. This book, and many other stories about Mog
– including one in which Mog dies, Goodbye Mog, which Judith wrote to help children say goodbye to loved pets – became very popular too. Their gentle humour delighted both young children and grown-ups, and her rounded, colourful pictures were warm and cosy enough to sink into.
When Judith died in 2019, at the age of 95, she had written more than 30 books, selling over 10 million copies around the world. She was still
working and talking about her books, and had just published a new one, The Curse of the School Rabbit. The little girl who narrowly escaped the Nazis had become one of the best-loved British children’s
authors of all time, bringing joy to families everywhere.
When Nigel wrote his most famous show, The Quatermass Experiment, Judith helped him create special effects for the monster in the show by gluing leaves onto gloves!
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