At some point in the 1950s the
London publisher Blandford issued a series of colouring books devoted to
European national costume (North-West, Southern, Central, and South-East
Europe). Each country has a coloured
picture of a couple in traditional dress on one page, accompanied by some text
describing the costumes, and opposite it a black-and-white version of the same
picture the reader can colour in. The
books are unpriced but my two examples have 2/- (10p) in pencil on the cover.
Book no. 4, South-East Europe,
was illustrated by S Horne Shepherd. It
comprises Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Sardinia and
Turkey. The Romanian picture is unusual
in having a child with the man and woman, most only featuring adults. The descriptions are rich in stereotype – the
Romanian girl likes to run about barefoot in summer, the Bulgarian man is armed
to the teeth with a long dagger, a pair of old pistols and ‘an ancient
flintlock muzzle loader.’ There is
nothing political of course, and the map on the back of the fourth book is
based on the 1938 configuration of countries, showing Germany as a single
entity.
The emphasis is very much on the
peasant picturesque and it seems unlikely that by the 1950s costumes like those
depicted in the books would have been much seen outside festivals. The drawings play to an agrarian image of
life in Continental Europe which may have shaped the attitudes of British
children but was removed from the reality.
They evoke a place of bucolic contentment where little girls run about
barefoot; exotic and colourful in contrast to grey post-war Britain.
