Barbara Euphan Todd Biography

Barbara Euphan Todd's reputation in children's literature rests primarily on her creation of one striking character, the animated scarecrow Worzel Gummidge. Though Todd published more than thirty-five works--novels, stories, games, poems, and plays--under three different names, the Scarecrow of Scatterbrook and his rural friends brought her modest recognition during her lifetime and considerable fame as television characters after her death.

Born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, to Anglican minister Thomas Todd and Alice Maud Mary (Bentham) Todd, Barbara Euphan Todd spent her youth in the rural Hampshire village of Soberton. Educated at a girls' school in Guildford, Surrey, she published during the 1920s many children's stories in collaboration with other writers. Her stepdaughter, Mrs. U. V. G. Betts, recalls enjoying one of these tales, The Very Good Walkers (1925), before becoming acquainted with Barbara Todd as her stepmother. Todd married John Graham Bower in 1932.

The couple moved to Blewbury, a rural literary and artistic colony south of Oxford, where Bower, a naval officer, wrote fiction and essays under the pseudonym Klaxon. As Barbara Euphan, Todd collaborated with her husband on South Country Secrets and The Touchstone, both published in 1935. In 1946, as Barbara Bower, Todd published her only adult novel, Miss Ranskill Comes Home. Perhaps because it was published after World War II, the novel enjoyed more success in the United States than in England. Throughout what was to be a long career, Todd continued to write other material--folktales adapted for radio, more plays and stories written in collaboration with others, and two volumes of poetry, Hither and Thither (1927) and The Seventh Daughter (1935).

In a 1980 letter to Todd's agent at A. M. Heath, Betts recalled that Barbara Todd "seems first to have had the idea of a walking talking scarecrow called Worzel Gummidge" in the 1930s. Between 1936 and 1963 she published the ten Worzel Gummidge novels on which her fame rests today. Betts notes that at first these books "made no very great impact," but for Todd they were labors of love: she named her own pets after characters in Worzel Gummidge country.

Most of the Worzel Gummidge novels render in closely observed detail the rural setting that Todd knew and loved. Clear sensory evocation of country scenes provides background for the adventures of John and Susan, visiting city children privy to a lively community of scarecrows unknown to the adult world. The opening chapter of Worzel Gummidge Again (1937) characterizes Todd's attention to seasonal details of rural life: John and Susan's "last visit had been made in the spring when moss and bricks were damp, and hens walked in a finicking way through the mud, and even the hay in the lofts had a faint musty tang about it. Now the lavender was dry on the hedge and the straw smelled hot and summery." Todd describes closely the "white scuts" on her rabbits, and the November garden has "blackened dahlias."

Todd's scarecrow characters grow literally out of their agricultural milieu. The mangel-wurzel, a cross between a white and a red beet, supplies the scarecrows' carved, wrinkled faces. Worzel (a dialect form of wurzel) and Eartha Mangold (an obsolete form of mangel) marry to become the Gummidges. (Gummage itself designates a resiny product of orchard trees.) Hannah Harrow (whose surname denotes the rake that breaks soil behind a plow), "sad because she was stuffed with sawdust," suffers not from rheumatism but from "the mice." "It's all along of sleeping in the haystack," explains her friend Eartha.

Such dialect jokes and wordplay, as well as Worzel Gummidge's mad logic and Todd's gentle satire of pretentiousness, comprise Todd's humor. Some of Worzel's dialect makes reading hard for modern child audiences, but contexts keep parodies such as this one amusing and appealing:

Christmas comes but once a year,
Rabbits wants new scuts to weer.
Robins what've got no vests
Needs some flannel for their chests.

Worzel teaches young scarecrows their job with his own homespun verse:

One rook's same as t'other--
If it isn't ask your mother.
 
Two rooks never matter.
Three rooks is much more fatter.
Six rooks'll make their double.
Eight rooks means lots of trouble.
 
Ten rooks is past all bearing
Twelve rooks means scarecrows scaring.
Flap! FLAP! FLAP! FLAP! FLAP!

The scarecrow's literal-mindedness produces more verbal humor. When Worzel says to Susan that he has "taken on [a] job," she asks, "Who gave it to you"" Indignant, Worzel retorts, "I took it. That's what I said, didn't I? Nobody gave it to me." As gardener to nearsighted Miss Duffy, Worzel plants nettles and weeds and neglects the vegetables: "When I wants to take care of the lettuces, I moves the slugs back to the cabbages. They all gets their turns."

Todd directs her mild social satire not at a class system, but at pretension and lack of imagination. Ridiculously self-important, Mrs. Bloomsbury-Barton and Lady Piddingfold are foiled repeatedly by Worzel's forthright contrariness. When John and Susan arrive at a costume party dressed as scarecrows, two pompous gentlemen take them for real, poking at their straw with canes. The men ignore John's "OW!" and walk away "talking very determinedly about the British Empire because they were the sort of people who couldn't see jokes or believe in anything unlikely."

Todd observes the world accurately, with sympathy for a child's perception. Susan notices "that when ants are carrying their grubs about, they look awfully like washerwomen with big bundles of clothes." When Lady Lippindore loses her pearls, Worzel Gummidge finds them and thinks they are "a string of tapioca pudding."

In the 1950s Mabel and Denis Constanduros collaborated with Barbara Todd on a series of radio plays for children. For the Constanduroses she wrote scripts of the Worzel Gummidge stories. She continued to produce novels into the 1960s and into the 1970s, but her best work was by then behind her. She died in 1976, just as negotiations were in progress for television rights to the Worzel Gummidge books. Her stepdaughter remembers her as "warm and kind" but recalls chiefly her "dry--and sometimes wry--sense of humor," the earmark of her Worzel Gummidge books.