Daughter who defended Enid Blyton, her mother; Born July 15, 1931; Died July 24, 2007.
Gillian Baverstock, who has died aged 75, spent her life vigorously defending her mother Enid Blyton, best-selling children's author and a woman described as "imperious" and "without a trace of maternal instinct" by Gillian's younger sister Imogen.
The sisters had such divergent views of their mother that by the time Gillian died, the pair had been barely on speaking terms, conducting their lives in a manner that certainly never appeared in the pages of the adventures of the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, or Noddy.
Gillian, a writer and trained Montessori teacher like her mother, shared little else with the best-selling writer, but spent her own life promoting her mother out of habit learned in early childhood.
A genuine mother-daughter relationship seems to have existed in the very beginning, but as Blyton's writing career took off, her utter absorption in her characters and increasingly profitable work led to the infant Gillian seeing her mother only "after breakfast and before tea".
Years later Gillian without any apparent irony recorded her enjoyment of the "privilege in having dinner with my mother each evening".
Gillian Mary Pollock, born and brought up in Buckinghamshire, doted on her parents Enid Blyton and Hugh Pollock. When they divorced and Blyton married her lover Kenneth Walters, Gillian was forbidden further contact with her father.
Educated like the later Princess Anne at Benenden in Kent and a history graduate of St Andrews, the young Gillian worked in publishing, at one point editing Enid Blyton's Magazine until moving to Yorkshire as a teacher. There she met and married Donald Baverstock, a director of Yorkshire Television. At her wedding in 1957, her father was merely a silent witness. It was typical of Gillian that she blamed no one, least of all her mother.
The cosy image fostered by Enid Blyton of a close harmonious family - a picture exists of the writer sitting in a deck chair, typewriter balanced on her knees and the children at her feet - was not the reality. Imogen, less amenable than forgiving Gillian, never forgot the bitter regime of her childhood, once describing her mother as "arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind".
By comparison, Gillian talked and lectured at literary festivals, proving a popular at meetings of the Enid Blyton Society, a warm and charming woman, whose courtesy never failed even when confronting questions about her mother's reputation.
A decade ago, Gillian wrote the little Enid Blyton (Tell Me About), followed in 2000 by Gillian Baverstock Remembers Enid Blyton. Both said more about Gillian's gentle and forgiving nature than her mother, each book being unashamedly uncritical - aimed at securing Blyton's place as an incomparable story teller.
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