Ruby Ferguson is undoubtedly best known as the author of the Jill series of pony books for girls, originally published between 1949 and 1960  Some readers will also know her A Paintbox for Pauline (1953), written in the same style, and many perhaps will be familiar with her ‘autobiography’, Children at the Shop (1967).  Of her adult fiction, the best known is probably the appallingly sentimental Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary (1937), but she was in fact the author of at least twenty novels.

‘Autobiography’ I have called Children at the Shop, and punctuated it deliberately, for although it is a first-person narrative with an authentic ring of truth about it (the ‘Shop’ in question, for those who have not read the book, is Woolwich Royal Academy) it becomes clear after only a little research that it does not tell the whole story, and further investigation proves it to be fiction.  Details of birth and parentage are not given, and though it is a superb account of a childhood in a military atmosphere, with Scottish interludes, the material is treated in a novelistic rather than an historical way, and in fact it does seem to have been pure imagination, complicated by the fact that the narrator-heroine’s name is the same as the author’s.  It ends with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, and the unstated implication is that the author’s dearly-loved elder brother, and perhaps also her younger cousin, will die in the conflict.  If there was to be a continuation, as we would have hoped, it was axed by Ruby Ferguson’s own death in 1966.  But I can hardly stress too strongly that virtually all of The Children at the Shop is fiction.

I managed to find something about Ruby Ferguson, but much more can be learned from Alison Haymonds’ excellent article on her in Children’s Book History Society Newsletter no 69, for April 2001.   As this is not readily available I am shamelessly making use of it here, but it must be made clear that the credit is due to Alison for having made contact with the Ferguson family and so discovering the truth behind Jill and The Children at the Shop and Ruby Ferguson.

She was born at Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire on 28 July 1899 - according to Children at the Shop while her Highlander mother was en route to Scotland for her confinement but actually, it seems, because that is where her parents were living.  Her father was the Rev. David Ashby, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, whose career has not been fully uncovered.  According to Children at the Shop he was of Danish origin, and his surname was originally Asbjerg, of which Ashby would clearly be an Anglicization, but an alternative version has him springing from “a long line of Norfolk farmers” (1) - this seems more likely.  As her mother’s maiden name was Ann Elizabeth Spencer one also wonders about the Highland ancestry on that side.  In the 1901 Census, when the infant Ruby was staying with her mother with her maternal grandfather, there is no trace of the Rev. David Ashby, and Ann Ashby’s father was Benjamin Spencer, a retired school-master of 64, born in Bradford.  It is perhaps possible that it was Ann’s mother who provided the Highland ancestry, but so far there is little trace of it.  And where was Ruby’s father in 1901?  Out of the country, by the look of it - can there be anything in the Danish allegation?

Be that as it may, and it remains a puzzle, by 1919 the family was living near Bolton, Lancashire:  in that year Ruby Constance Ashby went up to St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.  Her education is recorded as being at the Girls’ Grammar School, Bradford, so presumably the family had only moved to Bolton fairly recently.  Her academic career seems to have proceeded routinely, culminating in the gaining of a 3rd class Honours degree in English in June 1922.  Secretarial training “at home” followed, after which she did “private coaching from Pendleton High School”, and, it is fair to assume, began to write.  Later in life she said that “her jobs in her early days included teaching and political organisation, both of which she ‘heartily disliked’ and only used as a means for literary expression.” She later recorded her involvement with “journalistic, political, and publishing work,” which certainly involved being chief reader for Hodder & Stoughton, who were to be her chief publishers, though “her first break came when the editor of the Manchester City News took a series of her short detective stories”. (2).  In 1929 she was private secretary to Alderman Mallison, of Cressbrook Hall, Derbyshire, and from 1937 to 1947 edited the Woman’s Page of British Weekly.  For some of this period she was certainly living at various addresses in Manchester, and is said to have been on the staff of the Manchester Guardian, and to have worked as a reader for Hodder & Stoughton.  By 1934 she appears to have moved to London.

Ruby Ferguson (1899-1966)

Many thanks to Hilary Clare for allowing me to put her article up on the net, and to Sue Sims, editor of Folly, in which the article originally appeared, for permission to reprint it here.  Hilary Clare and Sue Sims are authors of The Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories - an excellent book, well worth getting hold of if you can, though it is now, sadly, out of print.  Hilary has written on Anne Bullen and Violet Needham for Girls Gone By, and Sue, besides being one of the props and mainstays of Folly is an expert on the girl’s school story, and on the sublime Antonia Forest.