THE tables are to be turned on one of Worcestershire’s most prolific children’s authors as she becomes the subject of a new biography.

The life of Ursula Moray Williams, who wrote 68 books during a career which spanned more than five decades, is detailed in a new book by Colin Davison which will be officially launched on Tuesday, April 19 – the day which would have been her 100th birthday.

But the author was probably better known around Beckford, near Evesham, as Mrs John – a magistrate, school governor and mother of four sons.

“She isn’t well known in Worcestershire for two reasons,”

Mr Davison explained. “First, she was known by her married name in the area.

“The second is that the name Ursula Moray Williams isn’t well known. When I was doing my research, I would mention the name and get no response.

“But mention Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse and Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat and you get a response.”

Mrs John’s books sold in their millions during her heyday – Mr Davison, of Ashton-under-Hill, near Evesham, was one of thousands of parents who read her tales to his own children.

But it wasn’t her success as a children’s author which drew Mr Davison, an ex-journalist, to pen a biography on her but rather the story of her life behind the typewriter, which he discovered through the anecdotes people told about Mrs John, who died in 2006.

Mr Davison said: “I didn’t want to write a showbiz memoir, I wanted to find someone about whom I could discover something interesting.”

And there is certainly a lot to say which is interesting about Mrs John.

There are not, for example, many pensioners who decide to take up flying around in a microlight – essentially, Mr Davison explained, a bicycle with a lawnmower engine on the back – at the age of 87.

It was a hobby which Mrs John would later give up, at the age of 91, because she felt she was getting a little too old.

There are also not many people who, when travelling down to see their book publishers, remember to not only bring posies for the publisher but also for the ladies who worked in the toilets at Paddington Station.

“One of the intriguing things when I started researching her life was the question of can someone live their life the way their characters do,” said Mr Davison.

“She wrote about characters in a fantastical world where anything could happen and provided you were brave and you were kind to other people all became well again.

Everyone got their happy ending.

“And that seems to be the way she lived her life.”

But, make no mistake, Mrs John was not a woman who simply spent her days baking pies for new neighbours and collecting bunches of flowers. She was also a woman who had to deal with many hardships in her life.

“Alongside bringing up a large family, she had to care for her infirm parents, lost the sight of one eye,” said Davison. “She also had what was thought of as terminal cancer and became only the third person to survive it.”

But probably one of the hardest things was her husband Peter’s death in 1974.

“He collapsed outside their home in Beckford in the snow,” said Mr Davison. “She had to carry him inside and set him down, where he died.”

It appears Mrs John was also not naive to the problems of the society which surrounded her.

A governor at the Vale of Evesham school in the 1970s, she discovered pupils not only struggled with reading but were bored by the subject matter of the books they were given.

Mr Davison said: “The books had babyish topics, while the students reading them were interested in the opposite sex, danger and living life on the edge.

“So she wrote a series of stories at the beginning of the 1970s. In one, a young girl is thinking about getting married and about sex, but they were written in language like a Janet and John book.

“She responded to a need.”

But all these tales would have stayed hidden if not for Mr Davison’s work.

“When I started looking into it and the fact she had the longest career of any children’s writer of her era it was her character, spirit of adventure and determination which stood out,” he said. “There is a whole generation of women who either read her books or read them to their children and I hope the book might appeal to them because they can find out what she was really like.”

􀁥 Through the Magic Door: Ursula Moray Williams, Gobbolino and the Little Wooden Horse by Colin Davison is published by Northumbria Press, an imprint of Northumbria University. It is priced at £18.99 and will be available to buy from Monday.