In every Saville and Blyton, the format, like the countryside, was reassuringly constant. Everyone would converge for the hols, with aunties that only ever baked or knitted, hoping that their charges weren’t going to get into any scrapes this time, before some funny-looking, funny-sounding strangers arrived in the area to cause mayhem and a minor crime wave that only a gang of hoity-toity children could possibly solve. I, and millions of other small children cooped up in suburban bedrooms, longed for a life as action-packed and exciting, but it never came. Not for want of trying: I went through a phase of combing our local weekly paper, the Kidderminster Shuttle, for crimes to which I could turn my well-read investigative powers. (The Shuttle’s fine name, by the way, comes from the moving part of a carpet loom, in honour of the local industry. The acrid tang of carpet dye hung over the town for most of the year, beaten only in the winter months by the sickly smell from the sugar-beet refinery. It was a long way from breezy Dorset, or even the gloomy heights of the Long Mynd, just thirty-five miles down the road.)
One week, the Shuttle reported a break-in at a coach depot a few streets away. I persuaded my step-brother to join me on a nocturnal raid on the place, to look for ‘clues’. It was only when we hoiked ourselves over the gate and landed in the depot yard that it dawned on me that I wasn’t too sure what a ‘clue’ actually looked like, so we picked up everything, just in case. Weeks later, I found the soggy ball of old bus tickets and fag ends in my coat pocket and realised that we hadn’t managed to solve the crime, despite the bundle of crucial evidence. But at least we’d given the depot yard a nice tidy.
Malcolm Saville’s frontispiece maps were always purportedly drawn by David Morton, the leader of the Lone Piners. Sixteen-year-old David didn’t speak much, but when he did, everyone listened and invariably agreed with him. He was strong of jaw and firm of friendship. And he could draw a great map. Whether I was aching to be him, or be with him, I’m not quite sure, but I took to drawing my own maps that, like David’s, were a hybrid of the real and the imaginary. It was fun improving upon landscapes that I knew, adding in a haunted mansion to replace the golf club, putting in a new railway line, upgrading the parish church to a cathedral, spitefully taking out streets that I found depressing or ugly: there was plenty of choice in 1970s Kiddy.
Logically, I should have ended up as a dorkish (or perhaps Orcish) devotee of J. R. R. Tolkien, for the maps of his vast fantasy landscapes were an essential part of their appeal. Furthermore, Tolkien was a fellow Midlander who’d loved his maps, drawn his own and become fascinated by the otherness of nearby Wales: it was seeing the coal trains, emblazoned with the names of Welsh mines, rumbling through his Birmingham suburb that had first inspired him to enter the world of linguistics, and, to this day, there are those who are convinced that the ethereal gobbledegook of Elvish was based on the Welsh language. Some claim too that his maps of Middle Earth were inspired by the topography of mid and north Wales, fuelling a popular insinuation, best expressed by A. A. Gill, arch-cynic about all things Welsh, that ‘everything [in Wales] that wasn’t designed by God looks as if it was built by a hobbit’. But Tolkien left me colder than a Mordor winter: why invent such elaborate landscapes with such daft names when there were so many fine ones to be had in the real world?
This peculiarly British habit of drawing elaborate maps of fantasy landscapes is perhaps one element of our colonial hangover, for it’s not dissimilar to the way in which we first mapped the real world. Almost all advances in cartography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came as a result of our imperial adventures, when British ships plied the four oceans and brought back news—and beautiful new maps—of far-off lands to a wide-eyed population. Although many of the voyages were for trade or for battle, the public interest was more sensationally stoked by the expeditions that set out to fill in the blank parts of the globe, a globe over which Britons were becoming ever more confident of their supremacy. So much of the world was known by now, and it was the bits that remained a mystery—particularly the polar regions and the ‘dark heart’ of Africa—that inspired most fervour, among the public as much as the participants.
It was all done in a joyously British way: with bags of enthusiasm, a smattering of snobbery, a conviction that we knew best and a healthy dose of hit-and-hope optimism. There were many notable victories, but rather more ignoble defeats, to punishing climates, unheard-of diseases and locals who were not as pleased to see the explorers as the latter rather thought they should be. Along the way, the explorers would draw their charts and maps, loyally naming rivers, mountains, creeks and even delirious optical illusions after minor royalty and government officials back home. It wasn’t so far in spirit from those of us who mapped and named our imaginary towns a century and a half later.
Public hunger for news of these expeditions was nigh-on insatiable, and newspaper and periodical editors swiftly realised that an accompanying map of distant conquests was worth a thousand words and produced a sizeable hike in sales. Although the Ordnance Survey had been in existence since 1791, it was run solely as a military arm of the government—quite literally, a Survey for the Board of Ordnance, forerunner of the Ministry of Defence. Their starchy approach was of little interest to the general public and the press, who far preferred the maps of commercial cartographers. The finest ever seen in Britain were by John Bartholomew & Son of Edinburgh.
There’s always a tendency to conflate British and English achievements, though it should be even more stridently avoided than usual in terms of mapping, for both Wales and, to a far greater extent, Scotland had cartographic ambition of their own. Edinburgh, especially, became one of the great centres of map-making during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bartholomew’s, with its distinctive, blue-covered maps, was the ultimate traditional Edinburgh family firm. Founded by the first John Bartholomew in 1826, the baton was passed down from father to son, each one also called John, until the death of the fifth John in 2008 finally ended the distinguished line. Although the Bartholomew name continues in the mapping division of Collins Bartholomew, it is not as a company that any of the Johns would much recognise. In the 1970s, John the Fifth, together with his brothers Peter and Robert, had, for the first time in a century and a half, brought new blood from outside the family into the company’s management structure. The new blood rather turned on them, forcing the sale of the company to Reader’s Digest in 1985, and thence to News International. It was a terminal move. In truth, though, the end had been steaming towards Bartholomew’s at great speed, for it had slightly lost its path and was in no state to survive the tidal waves of the Thatcher revolution.
It was a long way from the glory years. John the First (1805-61), like his father a jobbing engraver of exceptional ability, had begun to specialise in maps. His were quite gorgeous: the precision of his engraving on the copper sheets created maps of unprecedented accuracy and detail, far better than anything the Ordnance Survey were producing at the time. His first published map, the 1826 Directory Plan of Edinburgh, was lavish and lovely. Looking at it now, what is most remarkable is how little this monumental city has changed in nearly two centuries; aside from the markets and narrow closes cleared for the building of Waverley station, you could easily use it to steer yourself around today.
John the First’s Edinburgh was a cauldron of high artistic and scientific specialism, producing the best reference materials in the world. Out of it came not just Bartholomew’s, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Scotsman and the publishing houses of Constable and A. & C. Black. Just around the corner from John’s first works was the printing shop of brothers William and Robert (W. & R.) Chambers, later to become mighty publishers of dictionaries and other reference works. Edinburgh was a hotbed of all kinds: the Chambers brothers habitually slept under the counter of the shop, in order to fight off the regular nocturnal raiders.
The firm grew in a typically modest, rather Scottish way; steadily nonetheless. In his first year of business, John earned a total of £78 16s 6d, and by the time of his death in 1861, when John Junior took over the reins, they had about twenty employees and an annual wage bill of over a thousand pounds. John Junior, and his son, John George, combined cartographic excellence with canny business