“The Irish are very conscious of clan and history,” Elizabeth Shaw writes in her fascinating memoir, published in English for the first time by Lilliput. A famous children’s author in Germany, Shaw’s work is not well known in Ireland, the country of her birth, which she left for England in early adolescence and would not return to until the 1960s, when she visited as a journalist covering the Troubles.
Indeed, Shaw’s own version of her life positions her as a European, politically and geographically. Leaving Belfast, she quickly forgets “about dreamy Irish nationalism and [is] fired instead by the ideals and hopes of a generation that aimed at an international society, which would put an end to war and social injustice”.
Shaw attended the prestigious Chelsea Arts School, and under the mentorship of Henry Moore, who would go on to be an official war artist, she found her niche: vivid caricature and signwriting. With the arrival of the war to British shores, she put her steady hand to use when she was posted to “paint telephone numbers on switchboards, or ‘This way to the air-raid shelter’...
“Once I was sent to an underground bunker in northwest London, which was designed to be a refuge for the government should the Nazis invade, and painted a telephone number beside Churchill’s bed.”
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One of the joys of this publication is the inclusion of many of Shaw’s newspaper cartoons, which capture the political climate in the “grim ruins” of postwar Berlin, where she settled with her German husband. Another highlight is Shaw’s incidental encounters with other leading artists, including Bertolt Brecht, who she was invited to draw. Too shy to accept, she did go on to illustrate a posthumous children’s version of Brecht’s work. This publication became the catalyst for a new career in children’s illustration, with commissions to illustrate work by Mark Twain, Hans Fallada and Astrid Lindgren, among others.
[ Elizabeth Shaw: unknown in Ireland but fondly remembered in GermanyOpens in new window ]
Eventually, Shaw wrote her own children’s books, including the gently moral The Timid Rabbit, which remains much beloved in the German canon, and one of only three titles to be translated into English, all of which are out of print. However, the curious reader might seek out The Little Black Sheep of Connemara, the single picture book penned in her native tongue after a holiday in Connemara in the 1980s, which is published by O’Brien Press.
