Make Good Use Of Bad Rubbish

Kate Robertson has written a moving biography about her mother, her friend and the genius behind the Wombles, Elisabeth Beresford. She tells Sara Whatley the story.

When the new biography of Elisabeth Beresford, the creator of the Wombles, landed on the Sussex Living editorial desk we knew we had to tell the story. Such iconic creatures who womble around the parks of London, Wimbledon Common in particular, are welcome to womble onto our pages anytime!

Written by her daughter, Kate Robertson, this biography tells the story of Elisabeth’s family history, from her birth is Paris in 1926 to her passing on Alderney in the Channel Islands on Christmas Eve 2010.

The book explores Elisabeth’s childhood with her mischievous brothers, the motivation behind her writing, and her prolific career including over 140 children’s books, romantic fiction for women’s magazines, as well as regular contributions to the Today programme, and Woman’s Hour. Its pages are packed with first hand accounts of family life, unheard anecdotes and unseen photos.

“I was very pleased to be asked,” said Kate when she told me about being approached by the publishers to write the biography. “When this opportunity came along to write about my mother I can’t say I enjoyed all of it, but I had all the source material; her diaries, her letters, the notes she made for her autobiography.” It was just before Covid hit in 2020 and Kate said that a combination of a “terrible lack of discipline” followed by the “jittery and unsettled” feelings the pandemic evoked made it a tricky start, but she soon “buckled down to it” and got the job done. 

Kate, who lives in West Sussex, writes in the book that her mother was a compulsive writer, taking any paid writing job available. Kate is also a writer and has enjoyed a successful career living in London and working in publishing and trade journalism before moving to “Sussex 15 years ago for the country air. And I do love the garden! I grow veg like my mum.” Writing was not her childhood passion however: Kate dreamed of the bright lights of the acting world, but said, “unfortunately I never had the leather hide you need for that sort of job. I’ve done a lot of am-dram since, but it’s always been a question of words. I did a short spell at the BBC but realised what I really wanted to do was publishing and writing.”

Back in the early 80s Kate was working for a niche publishing company who looked after British Airways, producing their on-board literature for first class passengers on the 747s. “They had a children’s magazine, and there was a little round jumbo called Dilbert. I wrote a few books about Dilbert’s adventures, which was quite difficult because you can’t have scary adventures for an aeroplane! A publisher picked those up,” said Kate.

Many successful years of writing followed for Kate, and then this opportunity came along to delve deeply into her family history. “But I tell you,” she said, “no daughter should read their mother’s diaries…

“She didn’t really start on a regular basis until 1956, but then it was one A5 page a day of handwriting and sometimes she bared her soul. It was really awful; you felt such sympathy for her. She was always so uncertain about what was going to happen, about whether anything was good enough.” These ups and downs were in her personal life as well as her work life. Elisabeth had a tumultuous relationship with her husband, Max Robertson, whom she married in 1949 and divorced in 1984. Max was a BBC sports commentator and television personality, best remembered for his 40 years of tennis coverage on the radio.

Despite the amount of work she produced Elisabeth was also uncertain in her writing. One of her older brothers was a writer as well – Hollywood scriptwriter Marc Brandel who worked on Cleopatra, wrote a lot of books and lived in America. “He would swan in from America and say ‘that’s not bad Elisabeth, you’re doing quite well,’ and she just wanted the approbation of knowing her work was OK. Which of course it was – she wrote nearly 150 books!” said Kate.

Even when she had found fame and success with the Wombles, Elisabeth still never found true conviction in her abilities. “She would say, ‘it’s good, I’ve done it, it really is quite good,’ but then the uncertainty would creep back in again,” explained Kate. In her diaries Elisabeth would often do a year’s summary, and Kate said she never read anywhere her mother recording that she had made it, that this was it. “But she was close to that,” said Kate. “I think she thought this was the best she would have ever done and maybe they \[the Wombles] would last beyond her, and of course they have.”

Elisabeth’s compulsion to write stemmed from her fear of poverty, something she had experienced as a child. Her father was a ‘successful but sometimes impecunious author, leading a peripatetic life in France and England; her father left the marital home in 1939 and her redoubtable mother was forced to take in paying guests to make ends meet’ wrote Kate in the book. Growing up with a mother who felt duty bound to take any and every writing job that came her way meant that Kate and her brother Marcus knew that when their mother was in her study, she was not to be disturbed. “Once we started going to Alderney \[an island off Guernsey] for holidays she was very good about leaving her work behind and doing things together – picnic on the beach virtually every day if the weather was nice,” remembered Kate.

Elisabeth was like any working mother nowadays, doing what she needed to do to make ends meet and enlisting the help of others when needs be. “In our house we had my grandmother there doing the cooking, we had dad’s secretary sometimes staying, we had a cleaning lady and Marcus my younger brother had a nanny for a bit, so the house was always full of people. I wasn’t relegated to my room!” laughed Kate.

Two days before Christmas when Kate was about 14 or 15 the family went for a walk on Wimbledon Common so Kate and her brother Marcus could burn off some energy and get away from the elderly relatives for a bit. At the time they lived by Wandsworth Common which was very manicured and proper, whereas Wimbledon Common was wild and free; “we used to love it there, it was a special treat to go,” said Kate. Kate was in her element and in her excitement said to her mother, “Ma, isn’t it great on Wombledon Common?”

This sparked an idea in her mother’s mind and Elisabeth immediately began making notes and mapping out the stories of the Wombles. In 1968 the first books were published and by the mid 1970s the popular television series was a hit.

By the time Elisabeth had found fame with the Wombles Kate had left university and had started working. “My brother, who is five years younger, would meet all the famous people and go to the filming but I couldn’t do it because I was at work,” said Kate. She doesn’t remember the fame making a huge amount of difference to their life, apart from the influx of people it bough into their home. “I was jolly proud of mum and worried she would overwork herself, because once you get going like that everybody wants a piece of you and it was hard work for her. She was always cooking lunch for journalists, cameramen, you name it.”

Despite suffering from a sometimes crippling self-doubt and depression, Elisabeth still maintained a playful nature, perhaps learned from her elder brothers and being enlisted in their many hair-raising scrapes as a child. ‘No one was safe from her mischievous characterisations. \[…] Liza never stopped observing and filing away characters for her next book. Her family was not exempt, they all became Wombles’ wrote Kate in her book. 
 
“My brother and I watched the first episode again the other day and we were saying ‘oh look, there is so and so…. “Great Uncle Bulgaria is my favourite, he was my grandfather. Not mum’s father but dad’s father, who was quite strict but twinkly eyed. He was an apple farmer and used to wear a three-piece suit in the orchard, gumboots and a trilby,” said Kate. He would stomp along amongst his apples and take Kate with him to inspect them. As head of the clan, he was powerful but gentle, like Great Uncle Bulgaria.

“Madame Cholet was named after Cholet in France where I went on my French exchange. She was my granny, mum’s mum, who was a very good cook,” explained Kate. “Then there was Bungo who was me, the bossy one. Orinoco, who everybody loved, is my brother Marcus. He was the fat lazy one who always got his own way and it was absolutely him.

“Then there was Wellington who was my cousin John, who was quiet and bookish. Tobermory who made good use of the rubbish they found, recycling and so on, that was my uncle Aden, my mother’s middle brother who she was most fond of,” said Kate. Aden was of a very scientific mind and after all his exploratory experiments as a child he went on to work on radar with Sir Watson Watt during the war. “He was very naughty as well!” added Kate.
There was also “Tomsk, who is the daughter of my godmother, very athletic. She is now a granny,” and “Alderney, based on my sister in law, Mary-Ann, who is a gardener. 

Alderney gardens and is very ecologically sound and is quite feisty, which is exactly my sister-in-law.”
As we all know a huge part of the Wombles’ focus is picking up rubbish and recycling it, but was Elisabeth ahead of her time with this message, which is more relevant today than it has ever been? “I think you would probably find that anybody of her age would never have put it into words but would have put it to practice in the house because of the war. Mum was bombed out twice in Brighton. Everything was of huge value; if a plate broke you mended it,” said Kate. She wasn’t out on a planet saving mission then, but she was quietly doing her own bit.

“I think the Wombles’ message is terrific from that point of view in that they make it interesting and exciting for children. The legacy is there are Wombling groups in lots of towns and villages, including mine. Tomorrow morning we will be going out litter picking. We do it every week.”
With that in mind, let’s all channel our inner Womble and join Kate and millions of others in tiding our beautiful country. You never know, you might even find some new treasures while you are there. Happy Wombling!