John Cunliffe
Teacher and writer who created the cherished television characters Postman Pat and Rosie and Jim
JOHN CUNLIFFE, who has died aged 85, created the children’s television favourites Postman Pat and Rosie and Jim. A primary schoolteacher based in Kendal, Cumbria, Cunliffe had succeeded in publishing a few stories about a Farmer Barnes, from which he had never earned much money, when in 1979 the BBC asked him to come up with a children’s series set in the countryside. He hit on the idea of a jovial postman as the central character, whose job would involve travelling around and meeting many different people.
Set in the fictional village of Greendale – based on the Cumbria valley of Longsleddale – Cunliffe created a whole villageful of characters, many of them inspired by real people: his wife’s mother became Mrs Thompson at Greendale Farm; other names – PC Selby, Reverend Timms, Ted Glen, Miss Hubbard, Granny Drysden, Mrs Goggins – were taken from the Westmoreland phone book; Mrs Goggins’s post office was inspired by Cunliffe’s local sub-post office in Kendal (since closed). He also used his own experience of running a mobile library in rural Northumberland.
Cunliffe started work on 13 different stories and by the time he had finished he had created a world of great charm and innocence in which everybody looks out for everybody else, families are always happy, crime is unknown, everyone is polite, and the sun is always shining. The BBC liked them and commissioned the leading animator Ivor Wood to make a series.
Postman Pat (and his black and white cat Jess) first hit the nation’s television screens in autumn 1981 and proved an instant hit with young children and their parents. The appeal, Cunliffe suggested in 2009, lay in the fact that “the postman to a child is someone who brings birthday cards and birthday presents – they are not aware that he also brings tax returns and bills.”
A second series was produced in the 1990s, but in the meantime Postman Pat had become international big business, with merchandising and tie-in books over which Cunliffe had little or no control.
Cunliffe had signed away his rights. He got nothing for repeats and only a small percentage of the income from the annuals, comics and the other spin-offs that the BBC were beginning to produce in the 1980s. When he wrote more books, he gave 50 per cent of the royalties to Ivor Wood.
Meanwhile, under the “merchandise” umbrella, other writers began churning out Postman Pat stories, some of them so badly written and so ignorant of rural life that it made Cunliffe feel embarrassed that people might think they were his.
On one occasion he attended a party at the BBC to celebrate the news that Postman Pat had won a Golden Cassette for sales of audio tapes and watched as Ivor Wood was presented with the award as the creator of the character. By then Woodland Animations had taken over from the BBC as the sole organisers of Postman Pat merchandising. In promotional literature they explained that while Cunliffe had provided the BBC with a draft “in which a postman was the link”, the “visuals and the concept were totally Ivor Wood’s.” Cunliffe felt upset, but there was little he could do, so he applied himself to a new project over which he would have more control, creating a new world in which two rag dolls called Rosie and Jim live on a narrow boat in Birmingham and come alive when nobody is looking. Rosie and Jim first aired on ITV in 1990 and ran for eight seasons. Symbolically, perhaps, the barge was steered by Cunliffe himself for the first 50 episodes.
In 2004, however, after a new company bought the rights to Postman Pat, Cunliffe was appointed a creative consultant on a new series commissioned by the BBC. It featured not only the familiar residents of Greendale, but also, as the producers explained, “to celebrate the diversity of multicultural Britain and reflect the world children now live in”, an Asian family, Ajay Bains, the Pencaster stationmaster, his wife Nisha and their two children.
Postman Pat, however, looked exactly the same as he had in 1981.
John Arthur Cunliffe was born at Colne, east Lancashire, on June 16 1933. His father disappeared some time around his birth (he never discovered why) and his mother, who worked in a shop, struggled to make ends meet. Eventually they had to board with an aunt and uncle in a small terraced house. It was his uncle who introduced young John to books and he grew up on the novels of Rider Haggard and Arthur Ransome, Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm stories and WE Johns’s Biggles books.
He was educated at a local school, where he became a victim of bullies – an experience which gave him a lifelong hatred of violence and a yearning for the sort of idyllic worlds he portrayed in his television series.
After leaving school he worked for many years as a librarian and as a primary schoolteacher, including several years at Castle Park School, Kendal, where he got the idea for Postman Pat and where he became something of a local celebrity. A room was dedicated to him at Kendal’s Museum of Lakeland Life.
Cunliffe wrote several other children’s books and collections of poetry.
In later life he moved to Ilkley, West Yorkshire, where he contributed to the town’s literary festival.
He is survived by his wife, Sylvia, and by a son.