'BB' was the pen name of Denys James Watkins-Pitchford, the English naturalist, author and illustrator, whose tales of the countryside and its vanishing wild places enchanted generations of children. The initials came from the size of lead shot he used for wildfowling; he signed his books as BB the author and Watkins-Pitchford the illustrator, the same man twice over.
Born in Northamptonshire in 1905, kept from school by ill health and left to roam the fields instead, he trained as an artist in Paris and at the Royal College of Art, then taught art at Rugby School for seventeen years before writing and illustrating full time. Over a long career he wrote more than fifty books and illustrated dozens more, working in scraperboard and delicate colour.
His masterpiece is The Little Grey Men (1942), the story of the last four gnomes left in England and their journey upstream to find a lost brother; a quietly magical elegy for wild Britain, it won the Carnegie Medal as the outstanding children's book of its year. Its sequel, Down the Bright Stream, followed in 1948, alongside the woodland adventure Brendon Chase and the whimsical Forest of Boland Light Railway.
He was appointed MBE in 1989 and died the following year, having done as much as any writer to teach children to love the natural world.
