Barbara Euphan Todd
| Barbara Euphan Todd | |
|---|---|
| Born |
9 January 1890 Arksey |
| Died | 2 February 1976 (aged 86) Donnington, Berkshire |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Known for | Creator of Worzel Gummidge |
| Spouse(s) | John Graham Bower (1932–1940) (his death) |
| Children | Ursula Betts (step) |
| Parent(s) | Thomas Todd Alice Maud Bentham |
Barbara Euphan Todd (9 January 1890 – 2 February 1976) was an English writer well remembered for her ten books for children about a scarecrow called Worzel Gummidge. These were adapted for radio and television.
Todd was born at Arksey, near Doncaster, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the only child of an Anglican vicar, Thomas Todd, and Alice Maud Mary (née Bentham). She was brought up in the village of Soberton in Hampshire and was educated at St Catherine's School, Bramley, near Guildford in Surrey. She worked as a VAD during the First World War, then, after her father's retirement, lived with her parents in Surrey and began writing.
Much of her early work was published in magazines such as Punch and The Spectator, but she also wrote two volumes of poems about children, illustrated by Ernest Shepard: Hither and Thither (1927) and The Seventh Daughter (1935).
In the 1920s she started writing novels for children, some of them in collaboration with her husband, Commander John Graham Bower (1886–1940), whom she married in 1932. The couple moved to Blewbury near Oxford, where Bower, an officer in the Royal Navy, wrote fiction and essays under the pseudonym "Klaxon", and Todd, as "Barbara Euphan", South Country Secrets (1935). Together they wrote The Touchstone, in which observation of the countryside is combined with interest in its history, in much the same manner as Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. Commander Bower died in 1940.
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