Mary Treadgold (1910–2005)

Mary Treadgold was born in London to the family of a prosperous stockbroker. As a child, she attended the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama and was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School. In 1936, she graduated from Bedford College, London with a master's degree in English literature. She went to work in publishing, first for Raphael Tuck & Sons and later at Heinemann's as their first children's editor. In her position, she frequently read stories about ponies and pony clubs, and, convinced that she could do better, resigned in order to concentrate on her own writing. She began her book We Couldn't Leave Dinah (1941) in an air raid shelter during the Battle of Britain near the start of World War II. At the end of 1940, she moved over to the BBC as a literary editor and producer in various sections of the General Overseas Service, sharing an office with Eric Blair (George Orwell) and becoming friends with Una Marson, a Jamaican writer, editor and feminist. We Couldn't Leave Dinah, about children who miss the evacuation of a fictional Channel island because they can't leave their horse behind, and end up aiding the resistance against the Nazis, won the Carnegie Medal and is considered a classic of World War II fiction and children's fiction. It was published in the USA in 1942 as Left Till Called For. A sequel, The Polly Harris (1948), followed the children to postwar London. No Ponies (1946) was set in France just after the war and tackled the very sensitive issue of Nazi collaboration. Her later works included The Running Child (1951) and The Winter Princess (1962).