Wanklyn, Joan

About

The Pony Club Magazine Annual used to publish an Equestrian Who’s Who as its last section up until 1973. Although not a riveting read for me at the time, it’s now a goldmine of information over 30 years later as I research the development of the pony book. Joan Wanklyn featured in the Who’s Who, and it is from her entries there that I have taken this biographical information.

Joan Wanklyn was born on 7th March, 1924 at Benington, near Stevenage – her mother was “mad on horses”. She was educated at a private school in Cheltenham from 1938-1939, which suggests that the rest of her education was either sketchy or at home. She studied at the Royal Drawing Society Studios and Chelsea Polytechnic before the war. With the outbreak of war she stopped studying and worked as a shorthand-typist, returning to her studies after the war at the Central School of Art.

Joan Wanklyn was commissioned to illustrate the I-Spy Daily Mail series in 1949. The titles ranged from the expected horses and ponies to zoo animals and circuses, perhaps giving Joan some inspiration for the children’s books on animal subjects she produced in the 1950s for Frederick Warne. One, Bobtail Shawn, is a pony book – the biography of a pony. In 1986 she produced a book Drawn for Friends, which collected together drawings she had sent friends as cards. Besides her own works, she also illustrated pony books, most notably three of Monica Edwards’ Punchbowl Farm series (The Wanderer, Punchbowl Harvest and Spirit of Punchbowl Farm). She illustrated many other children’s books, mostly on animal and equestrian subjects.

Joan Wanklyn was a regular figure in the early Pony Club Annuals and Pony Club Books, and illustrated some stories in Pony Magazine Annuals in the 1960s. She wrote an article for the very first Pony Magazine Annual Percy’s Pony Annual in 1953: Drawing Horses in Action, which is far superior to some of its successors as it actually gives you a realistic idea of what you were to do.

She painted portraits of many famous horses of the day, including Kilbarry, Tramella, Laurien, High and Mighty, Craven A, Workboy and Pegasus. Her largest work (as at 1972) was two murals of Foxhunter for Colonel Harry Llewellyn: these were 17’ x 3’ 9” and 13’ x 3’ 9”.

Towards the end of her career, she concentrated on military subjects. Her hobbies, she said, were painting, reading and motoring, and she liked “meeting interesting characters, human and animal.” Her chief loathing varied: it was mostly “those who try to stop others doing things,” whereas in 1968 it was complacency. It’s interesting to speculate what event brought that change about.

Links and sources
Pony Magazine Annuals 1962-1968
I-Spy, part of the Easy on the Eye site