Doncaster Times Issue 2 - November 2016

a very handsome case of silver cutlery, with a
suitable inscription and also a case of pipes.
Todd with his wife Alice and daughter Barbara
quit Yorkshire for Droxford, Hampshire in the
sunny South of England. It was here in 1932
that Barbara married retired Naval Commander
John Graham Bower (1886-1940), an officer in
the Royal Navy. The couple moved to Blewbury
near Oxford. They had no children, but from a
previous marriage John had a daughter, Ursula
Graham Betts (1914-1988), who later became a
pioneer anthropologist and played her part in the
Second World War as a guerrilla fighter in Burma.
Barbara’s first Worzel Gummidge novel, Worzel
Gummidge or The Scarecrow of Scatterbrook,
was published in 1936 and became a very
popular children’s book at an early date,
probably because the characters were so
different from those of other 1930s children’s
fiction. Between 1936 and 1963 a further nine
Worzel Gummidge novels were published.
One can only imagine how the local characters she
encountered and the rural way of life in Kirk Sandall
in the early part of the 19th century influenced her
writing. Did it help to develop her ideas as regards
the kind-hearted, rude, reliable and sulky scarecrow
creation Worzel Gummidge and the characters of
Aunt Sally, Dolly Clothes-Peg and the Crowman?
The popularity of Barbara’s books continued in
popularity and in the 1950s she collaborated
with the author and actress Mabel Constanduros
on a series of radio plays about Worzel. In 1967
Worzel was the subject of five episodes of the BBC
children’s television series Jackanory, which were
narrated by the actor Gordon Rollings. From 1979–
1981 Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall adapted
four series of Worzel Gummidge for television,
starring John Pertwee, Una Stubbs and Lorriane
Chase. A second T.V. series, Worzel Goes Down
Under, in which the main characters moved to New
Zealand, ran for 22 episodes from 1987–1989.
Barbara Euphan Todd died aged 79 on February 2nd
1976 at a nursing home at Donnington in Berkshire.
Her step-daughter the anthropologist Ursula
Graham Betts remembered “her dry and sometimes
wry sense of humour which was always warm
and kind” - doubtless developed from her early life
living in the parish of Kirk Sandall, which remained
the hallmark of her Worzel Gummidge books.
Mark Bond
Belgian
Refugees come
to Doncaster
During the course of the First World War,
some 250,000 Belgians became refugees
in Great Britain. Yet by 1919 the vast
majority had returned to Belgium, leaving few
traces and little public memorialisation. However,
contemporary newspaper reports from across
the country, including Doncaster, provide valuable
information about their reception and treatment.
Media coverage, both locally and nationally,
was broadly sympathetic, contrasting Belgian
victimhood and heroism with German atrocities.
As early as 4 September 1914, Mr R E MacDonald,
a Doncaster Quaker, appealed in the Doncaster
Chronicle to ‘Doncaster sympathisers’ to donate
money to a central Belgian Relief Fund. Mr
MacDonald, whose wife was Belgian, described the
Belgians as ‘brave little allies’ to whom the British
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people owed a debt for their ‘heroic resistance’
against the Germans. In its editorial, the paper
identified the violation of Belgian neutrality as
the cause which had brought Britain into the war.
It called on its readers to defend the honour of
‘brave little Belgium’, who lies ‘crushed, bleeding,
ravaged, beneath the heel of the Prussian Huns’,
and to resist the imposition of German culture
on humanity by the power of the sword 1 . The
Belgian refugees functioned as vehicles for the
dissemination of images of brutality and suffering.
To begin with, the government seems to have
been content to leave the succour of the refugees
to private enterprise. Britain already had a
variety of philanthropic committees, of diverse
ideological positions, which readily channelled
efforts to the practical relief of those seeking
refuge – opening hostels, teaching English, finding
employment and raising money. As the numbers
of refugees increased, the task of coordination
was given to the Local Government Board, under
the direction of Herbert Samuel, who was given
a Cabinet-level position. He established an
official War Relief Committee, though most of
the work continued to be done by volunteers.