The children’s writer Allan Ahlberg, who has died aged 87, could turn his hand to most genres, including fiction, poetry, picture books, fairy tales and comic-strip humour. He was the author of more than 150 books, including the hugely popular Each Peach Pear Plum and The Jolly Postman.
Ahlberg had been working as a primary teacher for 10 years when his wife, Janet, an artist, asked him to write a children’s story for her to illustrate. Later he described that moment as feeling as if he were a clockwork toy and “she had turned the key”. Their first book together, Here Are the Brick Street Boys, was published in 1975, and the Ahlbergs went on to become one of the most successful writer/illustrator partnerships in children’s literature.
A very close couple, they enjoyed an intimacy that also characterised their working lives. One secret of their success lay in the dynamic relationship they created between word and picture; another was their joint ability to view the world as if through the eyes of a child. They shared a gentle, quirky sense of humour that was conveyed with great warmth. When their daughter, Jessica, was born in 1980, her various stages of growing up provided further inspiration for their work. Perhaps the most memorable volume from this period was The Baby’s Catalogue (1982), a simple but brilliant idea based on the fact that babies loved spotting other babies in catalogues and magazines.
Each Peach Pear Plum (1978) was about as perfect as a picturebook could be, and the deserving winner of their first Kate Greenaway medal, with its simple “I spy” game and a rhyme based on playground skipping games and nursery rhyme characters. Peepo! (1981) was a book to accompany the familiar “peek-a-boo” that adults play with babies. The Ahlbergs raised the game a notch or two by adding a hole to literally peep through, running throughout the book, and setting it during the second world war, with fascinating period detail.
Ahlberg described the visual aspect of this book as being based on his memories of his own poor, Black Country childhood, in a small house with tin bath and outside privy. “I am the Peepo baby,” as he put it. He would return to that world in 2013 in the prose and poetry recollections of The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood.
The Jolly Postman (1986, followed by The Jolly Christmas Postman and The Jolly Pocket Postman) was the Ahlbergs’ masterpiece, and the Postman series as a whole their biggest commercial success, winning the couple their second Kate Greenaway medal and the Emil/Kurt Maschler award, with sales of over 6m copies worldwide. Children, teachers and critics alike were mesmerised by the book’s originality; this wonderfully playful text changed forever the scope of what picturebooks could aspire to.
Although sophisticated paper engineering was nothing new, no one had come up with such imaginative “props” within a picturebook before. It required active reading from the book’s young audience, as it not only demanded physical interaction, but also expected them to draw on knowledge of traditional nursery rhymes and fairy tales. It used the widest and most inventive range of text-types up to that point – from letters, postcards, invitations and catalogues to tiny books, newspapers, recipes and advertisements. While children were delighting in the book, they were simultaneously embracing the wider culture of the society they lived in.
Among the TV adaptations of the books were Happy Families (BBC, 1989-90); Woof! (Central, 1989-97), about a boy able to turn into a dog; and Funnybones (S4C in Welsh and BBC, 1992), the adventures of a skeleton couple with a skeleton dog.
Ahlberg’s time working in primary schools had given him the opportunity to observe children, and he put this knowledge to good use in all his books, especially his poetry, where one can detect the viewpoint of the benevolent teacher. Please Mrs Butler (1983) was his earliest collection and is still the most popular, though he wrote excellent further volumes, illustrated by Fritz Wegner and Charlotte Voake. His Collected Poems was published in 2008.
Born in Croydon, south London, Allan was the son of a single mother. After being adopted by a working-class family – his adoptive parents worked as an office cleaner and a labourer – he grew up in Oldbury, near Birmingham, and, he said, “scraped” in to the local grammar school. A lifelong supporter of West Bromwich Albion, he initially hoped to play football as a career. He met Janet Hall at teacher training college in Sunderland and they married in 1969.
Despite living most of his life elsewhere (for many years near Bath), Ahlberg was always happy to drop into Black Country dialect. He was very proud of the 2011 exhibition of the couple’s work at the Public arts centre in Sandwell, near Oldbury, which included children’s responses to their books. What’s in the Book? (2006), a show for Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle, described the Ahlbergs’ working method: “I do the words (takes me about a day) and Janet does the pictures (takes her about six months). Then we send the words and the pictures to the publisher and the publisher sends us some money. And I get half for my day’s work, and Janet gets half for her six months’ work: the basis of a happy marriage …”
Allan was devastated when Janet died of cancer in 1994, but found a therapeutic way of addressing the terrible loss by putting together a tribute volume as a private publication, Janet’s Last Book (1997), based on his personal selection of her work.
The Adventures of Bert (2001) and A Bit More Bert (2002) were illustrated by Raymond Briggs, and The Runaway Dinner (2006) and The Pencil (2013) by Bruce Ingman. Jessica went on to become a successful author in her own right, and father and daughter collaborated on several books, including The Goldilocks Variations (2012).
In 2014, Ahlberg was set to receive the Booktrust lifetime achievement award, but turned it down because sponsorship came from Amazon, whose tax arrangements he was critical of. When his fellow authors Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon heard about this, they decided to create an alternative, a compilation of tributes from other writers and illustrators which they called the Shoestring award, in appreciation of the Ahlbergs’ work.
Ahlberg married for a second time, to Vanessa Clarke, his editor at Walker Books, and became stepfather to her two daughters, Saskia and Johanna. They, and Jessica, survive him.
• Allan Ahlberg, children’s writer, born 5 June 1938; died 29 July 2025
• Morag Styles died in January 2025.
