https://ladybirdflyawayhome.com/martin-aitchison-remembered/
Fascinating! Plenty of drawings - two show Schubert spilling ink on a composition and, another time, fleeing a room because he was too shy to meet Beethoven. Also, pictures from Gulliver's Travels.
He illustrated about 100 Ladybird books, of all different genres. I own The Story of Music - that was where I first heard of Cecil Sharp and how, in 1903, when visiting his vicar friend in Somerset, England, he heard a gardener singing "Seeds of Love" - "
one of the most beautiful songs he ever heard." He then traveled about on his bicycle, collecting folk songs that had never been written down - and later did the same in Appalachia. (I heard that often, families he met there would say, as he was about to
leave their houses, "surely you will spend the night"?)
You can hear "Seeds of Love" here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JKEsb8EcUaQ
From The Guardian, in 2011:
"The subject of Cecil Sharp has long divided folk-song scholars. The popular image is of a charming eccentric cycling around Somerset knocking on people's doors persuading old ladies to sing him their lovely old songs so he could save them from
extinction, and preserve them through his books and lectures to provide a formidable harvest for future generations to enjoy and plunder. The conflicting modernist view is of a controlling manipulator who presented a false idyll of rural England by
excluding anything that didn't fit his agenda, moulding himself as an untouchable icon of the folk-song movement in the process..."
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