Ian Whybrow has written over a hundred books including the much loved series Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs.
This collection of books is based on a little boy called Harry who takes his bucket of toy dinosaurs with him wherever he goes. The dinosaurs talk to Harry and the books tend to be based on new experiences such as going to school and his Nan being ill in hospital. The stories were later made into an animated TV series making Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs a household name.
daynurseries.co.uk spoke to Mr Whybrow about his books and the inspiration behind them.
His first book in the series is called Harry and the Snow King which interestingly doesn’t feature the dinosaurs. It is a tale of Harry who builds a little king out of the snow. But then his snow king disappears and Harry is sure it has been kidnapped. Mr Oakley, the farmer, tells Harry not to give up hope and when Harry looks out of his window the next day, he finds lots of snow people standing in the back garden.
Encounter with real-life Harry
After writing that book, Mr Whybrow was visiting a garden centre, when he saw a boy with a little bucket full of dinosaurs.
Intrigued, he spoke to the boy’s mum who told him ‘he takes the bucket everywhere’.
Mr Whybrow watched as “he took the dinosaurs out and put them under the plants and played with them creating this whole world for them”. From this chance encounter came the charismatic Harry and his collection of dinosaurs.
He deliberately chose seminal moments in a child’s life to write about, such as their first day in school, as he recognised that books can be very powerful and can play a huge role in reassuring children.
Conversation starters
“I wanted the Harry books to open up conversations with parents. In Harry and the Robots, I wanted to write about illness so I wrote about Nan going into hospital and coming close to dying. I thought this would give parents the opportunity to talk to children about death and people getting ill. I have had a lot of very touching comments about that, some of these have been really painful. In one case, a mum had been dying of cancer and the child had made a robot just like Harry did to blast the cancer away.”
Mr Whybrow also transfers some of the emotions onto the other characters in the books. So it is not Harry who is scared of going to school, it is the dinosaurs. It is not just Harry who is really scared of going swimming but the dinosaurs, too – as well as his Nan who is too at first self-conscious to put on a swimming costume.”
Harry regularly falls out with his bossy, older sister Sam who often tells him off. Mr Whybrow reveals “Sam is very much all of my three sisters rolled into one as she is very dangerous! There is a lot of sibling rivalry in the Harry books and that reflects real life as it can be a constant battle between brothers and sisters. Sam provides a morality message in the book as she is forever watching TV and missing out on things.”
Fascination with dinosaurs
He believes children are partly attracted to Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs because of their fascination with dinosaurs, which is especially true for boys.
He also attributes the books’ success to the fact that “children love things that their parents don’t know so much about. They like to learn all the names of the dinosaurs.
“In addition to this, dinosaurs are fascinating as they are dangerous but children know they won’t be able to attack them as they are extinct. They give children a sense of control in that they know more about them than parents who are in general very powerful and controlling. Books in general can take children away to another world beyond the control of their parents.”
TV series
When Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs was made into a TV series, people were quick to notice the difference, with the TV animated characters jumping into the bucket into a Dino World, where they went on lots of adventures.
Mr Whybrow says that this difference was inevitable, adding “it was out of my hands pretty much although they did consult with me along the way.
“There were 104 TV episodes so in order for it to work they had to introduce a lot of characters and so each of the dinosaurs had to became a character in itself.
“The way you interact with a book is very much mediated by the reader. So if a child has a question you can have a conversation about it. But if you sit a three or four-year-old in front of a TV, there is no mediation. The TV company was concerned that if unattended children saw Harry doing dangerous things, they may try and imitate him. However if he enters Dino World, children - even little children - can make the jump and will recognise that this is not real life and will know not to imitate him.”
Whole range of children's books
As well as his most successful series Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs, Mr Whybrow has written a whole range of books for children including The Little Wolf series which has been translated into many different languages.
Ian Whybrow
This year saw another of his collaborations with the illustrator Axel Sheffler, with The Tickle Book.
He has also written for older children inspired at the time by the popular book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.
“I was really interested in the fact it had first person narrative, fish-finger sized chapters and lots of English jokes and references. So I wrote a series about a dog called Sniff who was really disobedient with a ten-year-old boy as narrator.”
Mr Whybrow often has parents coming up to him saying their sons aren’t interested in reading. This problem seems to be growing with the reading gap between boys and girls already evident from the age they start school.
He also would like to see more fathers acting as a role model for their sons when it comes to reading, saying: “I also think that if boys see their dads reading that can make a big difference”.
“Reading isn’t easy. You can’t just flick a switch like you can with the TV or on a screen. When you read you have to do all the work.”
Ian Whybrow does visits to nurseries to talk about his books. To contact him, go to http://www.ianwhybrow.com/