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McKee’s stories of Elmer the Elephant
and, below, Mr Benn are modern fablesbeing different, celebrate the fact that
the world is not monochrome and good
things will happen. The books are still
on the national curriculum for primary
schools and used to promote discus-
sions with children about inclusivity
and diversity.
The series, with McKee’s illustrations
inspired by the cubist art of Paul Klee,
has sold more than ten million copies
and been translated into 60 languages.
His 30th Elmer book, Elmer and the
Gift, will be published in September.
David John McKee was born in 1935
and brought up in a tithed house in the
Devon town of Tavistock, one of three
sons of Richard McKee, who ran a farm
machinery repair business, and his
wife, Violet (née Easton). David had the
sort of childhood that made him believe
in magic. “When a horse had ringworm,
you didn’t take it to the vet, you went tothat also included two Irishmen: the
hooker Keith Wood and the tighthead
prop Paul Wallace.
It was a bold selection as South Africa
were reigning world champions and
had a massive pack, but it came off
beautifully for the Lions. Their squat
trio scrummaged as low as they could,
effectively nullifying the Springboks’
size and power advantage. It was per-
fectly fitting that the Lions’ decisive try,
famously delivered when Matt Dawson
sold the South African defence an out-
rageous dummy, came from a solid
Lions scrum near the Springboks’ 22.
Smith would go on to start the two
remaining Tests, helping the Lions to
clinch the series in Durban the follow-Obituaries
David McKee
Popular children’s author best known for Mr Benn and Elmer the Elephant
reputation as an off-the-cuff storyteller.
One of his tales was about Two Can
Toucan, a bird who can carry two cans
of paint on its enormous bill. It was
made into a children’s book in 1964 and
confirmed McKee in the career that
would become lucrative enough for
him to spend as much time as possible
on his great love of painting.
In 1960 McKee married Barbara
Ennuss with whom he had a daughter,
Chantel, and two sons, Chuck and Brett,
who have both published children’s
books illustrated by their father. They
survive him along with his partner,
Bakhta, a French-Algerian art-dealer
with whom he built up a collection of
African and tribal art.
McKee was unapologetic about writ-
ing what were in effect modern fables.
One of his later works, Not Now Bernard
(1980), was about a child who finds a
monster in the garden but when he tries
to tell his parents they are too busy to
pay attention. A more recent book,
Denver (2010), is about a rich man who
is known for random acts of generosity
in his community, but is later persuaded
by a visiting busybody to distribute his
money equally to everyone, only to
find that this breeds discontent. The
Guardian journalist and writer Polly
Toynbee found her granddaughter
reading it and wrote a column excoriat-
ing Denver for its anti-socialist allegory.
An unapologetic McKee said he was in-
spired by the munificence of a local
squire during his childhood, fromwhom he earned pocket money garden-
ing. When he wrote the book McKee
was also smarting from a French wealth
tax on his properties in Provence and
Paris. “People shouldn’t be so poor they
sleep in the streets, but they can’t be
equal,” McKee said. “Wealth doesn’t
make you happy, though people think it
will.” Toynbee was not mollified.
If his stories contained a serious mes-
sage, McKee never forgot to make them
fun. Like all the best children’s authors,
he retained a childlike quality. “I enjoy
writing for the adult the child will be
and the child the adult still is,” he liked
to say. “Children’s books are the most
important because they’re the ones
that generate that passion for reading.”
An unashamed Luddite who never
used a computer, McKee generally
spread good cheer but was outspoken in
his hatred of one project for the BBC.
He had formed a production company
to make Mr Benn and on the back of its
success he was asked to create an
animation of The Adventures of Rupert
the Bear. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever
done,” he lamented. “I used to have a
couple of pints before filming it, to numb
my brain for his terrible rhymes. If you
see an old Rupert book in a charity shop,
you can be sure no kid has touched it.
He’s such a stupid little character.”David McKee, children’s author and
illustrator, was born on January 2, 1935.
He died after a short illness on April 7,
2022, aged 87The BBC persuaded him
not to include repeat fees
in his Mr Benn contract
Tom Smith
Unassuming Scotland and Lions rugby player
hailed as his nation’s ‘greatest ever prop forward’
When rugby’s armchair selectors
began to speculate on the make-up of
the British & Irish Lions’ squad for the
1997 tour to South Africa, few if any
included the prop Tom Smith in their
reckonings. Smith’s Scotland side had
won one game in that year’s Five
Nations, their scrum had not been par-
ticularly impressive, and, with three
caps, he was a relative newcomer to the
international scene.
Many assumed that English players
would dominate the squad, the Test
team and the forward pack in parti-
cular. Yet Smith was picked to travel,
and when the Lions opened the Test
series against the Springboks in Cape
Town he took his place in a front rowAs a young man David McKee was
browsing in a junk shop when “as if by
magic” an eccentric shopkeeper
appeared at his side. Years later and
working as a children’s author, he wrote
and illustrated a story about an
ordinary man in a bowler hat called Mr
Benn who escapes from his dreary life
by frequenting a fancy dress shop. Once
inside, as if by magic, a shopkeeper
wearing a fez appears and invites Mr
Benn to try on a costume.
Mr Benn enters the changing room
and once dressed as a cowboy, for
example, walks through a door to find
himself in the Wild West. He proceeds
to have an adventure and plays his part
in righting a wrong before he finds
himself back in the changing room. As
a knight, Mr Benn helps a dragon
suffering from depression to rediscover
its appetite for life and fire breathing.
On safari he persuades a big game
hunter to shoot animals with a camera
rather than a gun.
McKee’s Mr Benn books were made
into an animated series for the BBC’s
Watch with Mother in 1971-72; 13 epi-
sodes were recorded, narrated by Ray
Brooks. The series would be repeated at
lunchtimes for the next 21 years and a
generation of children loved it enough
to feign sickness from school so as to re-
watch it. Each 13-minute episode ends
with Mr Benn walking home along a
suburban street, based on where
McKee then lived in Putney, southwest
London. As children play football and
mothers push their babies along in
prams, he muses on his adventure,
wondering if it has all been a dream,
until he realises that he still has a
souvenir, “just to help him remember”
the edifying lesson he has learnt. The
author emphasised that real life can be
an exciting adventure, as well as an
opportunity to do good, if you want to
make it that way.
“My theory is that it’s security,” said
McKee, a gentle and slightly offbeat
character with a softly spoken West
Country accent. “They know what’s
coming next and they feel safe with it.”
Unluckily for him he took the BBC’s
advice not to include a clause for repeat
fees in his contract. Luckily for him,
McKee had already made a name for
himself as the creator of the book series
Elmer the Patchwork Elephant in 1968.
He decided to write about a multi-
coloured elephant who has to learn to
cope with being different after his
daughter, Chantel, who had Indian
heritage, was pointed at
in the street by a little
boy who exclaimed,
“Look mummy, there’s a
n***er.”
In the original book
Elmer is so determined
to be the same as all the
other elephants that he
paints himself grey, but they do
not recognise him and he’s
rejected by the group. Then
rain washes away the paint and
the multicoloured Elmer is
revealed to the other elephants
who realise how much they have
missed him and perhaps even
feel a bit remorseful for having
teased him so much; the moral
being: accept yourself, embrace
an old lady who charmed it. The guy
across the road from us was bald, he
went to her and grew a fantastic head of
hair. My mother also had a sort of
telepathy. Once the phone rang and she
leapt up and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s my
brother Bill.’ It was news that he had a
burst appendix.”
McKee’s extended family abounded
with storytellers (including an uncle
who was a ventriloquist). Stories of
ghosts roaming nearby Dartmoor in the
mist were among his favourites. When
he was old enough to read for himself he
particularly loved Aesop’s Fables and
parables from the Bible. He said
that his creativity was enhanced
by the absence of computer games
and television. “I learnt to be happy
with my imagination. It was a
world of storytellers: mothers
told stories, teachers told
stories, and it was then that I
learnt that the world is full of
stories and you have to let
them come to you.”
McKee attended a local
grammar school before
studying at the Plymouth
College of Art, where he began
to make money by selling cartoons
to national newspapers, Punch
and Reader’s Digest.
As a student he developed a