British children's writer and broadcaster 1906–1982
Barbara Grace de Riemer Sleigh (1906–1982) was an English children's writer and broadcaster. She is remembered most for her Carbonel series about a king of cats.
Barbara Sleigh was born on 9 January 1906[1]inBirmingham, the daughter of an artist, Bernard Sleigh, and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both parents came from a Methodist background, but she was brought up an Anglican. The family moved to Chesham for a time, then back to Birmingham. Their marriage broke up in about 1914.[2] Her older brother, Brocas Linwood Sleigh (1902–1965), would also become a writer.[3]
Having attended art college and teachers' training college, Sleigh taught in various schools before joining the teacher training department at Goldsmiths College in London in 1929. She went to work for the BBC programme Children's Hour in 1932.[4] There, in 1935, she married a colleague, David Davis (1908–1996) at Dunchurch, Warwickshire, but BBC house rules at the time would not allow husbands and wives to work in the same department. She therefore resigned and turned to freelance writing, film criticism and broadcasting. She and Davis had one son and two daughters.[5][6]
Sleigh's best-known novels for children are the three in the Carbonel series (1955–1978), about a king of cats. These Carbonel books are still in print.[7] Also centred on cats, but for a slightly older age group, is her 1962 novel No One Must Know, a realistic story of a group of neighbouring children attempting to evade a landlord's ban on pets. The Snowball (1969) is a fantasy, in which the snowball turns into a snow-child, causing some fun and chaos in the family.
The other writings by Sleigh include novels for older children, notably Jessamy, a realistic 1967 time-slip novel; collections of stories; large amounts of radio adaptation; several picture books for younger children; and some educational readers. Several of her books came out in Puffin, the Penguin imprint; she wrote an article in 1967 for the first number of the house magazine Puffin Post.[8] Sleigh was included in Uncle Mac's Children's Hour Book (Purnell, [c. 1950]), in the 1974 children's anthology of stories and poems Happy Families, edited by Barbara Willard,[9] and in the Puffin Annual (1974), edited by Kaye Webb and others. Her final work was as the editor of an anthology of stories about witches: Broomsticks and Beasticles (1981).[10]
