Meet the Makers - Letters To Michael
Between the spring of 1945 and the autumn of 1947 Charles Phillipson wrote a series of 150 illustrated letters to his young son Michael, who had just started school and was learning how to read. These letters were published by Slightly Foxed as Letters to Michael and quickly sold out. Now a second edition of the book is being reissued. Ahead of its launch, we had the pleasure of sitting down with the eponymous Michael and talking about growing up with the letters, the way they shaped his perspective on the adult world, and his father’s incredible commitment to his art.
Can you tell us a little about yourself and your father; where you grew up, what your father did for work – where did he find the opportunity to create these letters?
Well, I’m 86 years old, born in 1940. We lived, Marjorie my mother, Charles my father and I in Heald Green, which is a rather distant southern suburb of Manchester, close to Sale Moor where my father and mother had grown up. They married in 1937 and very soon after my father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a condition that disturbs the body’s resistance to all sorts of things. He very quickly had to learn to live with that while he was working for a chain company, Renold and Coventry Chain Co., in Manchester. It was sited in Burnage, an inner suburb of Manchester, to which he travelled every day via the local station in Heald Green, which appears in the letters showing people rushing down to catch the train. His familiar everyday experiences were built into the way the letters developed. Many of them focus too on little incidents at work. He drew the letters while he was at work. He would write and draw them very quickly in his lunch break. It was very much a part of his working day, once he’d started doing the letters, to fit them into the first available gap.
My father was totally committed to art as his life-defining activity, not only in the context of work, but outside it. As a young man leaving school and going to work at fourteen he was essentially self-trained through attendance at evening classes in Manchester. Whatever his subsequent work context his hope was to make art an essential constituent of his working life. Outside work, of course, he would invariably always want to be sketching or painting, irrespective of context, and this soon became clear to me as a little boy.
A year before he started the letters he’d made me a little booklet: ‘Michael’s Alphabet Book’. This has all the letters of the alphabet with little drawings attached to them, so I was already very aware that this is what my dad did. Whenever Marjorie and I had a birthday he’d always make a card, usually again with a drawing or a small painting. And he always did our annual Christmas card for family and friends every year, ever since I can remember.
I was surrounded by art in that sense, so the letters were a great complement to his need to make towards art. Art-making defined his own sense of what he needed to do. The birthday cards would invariably have a sharp sense of humour, which anybody could pick up and see, both in the text and in the little drawings. You could immediately see his sensibility towards the humorous in everyday life. Everything always had a double character. It was both terribly serious, but also quite humorous if you took a slightly different stance towards it. That’s present in the Alphabet book as well, where ‘Y for yawn’ is shown as a child having a big stretch. It was a brilliant learning aid, because not only were you getting the sense of the letter, but also the sense of how its very form has other signifying attributes alongside its use in words themselves. Particularly in the earliest group of letters too from 1945, he would bracket or underline letters that I might not know how to handle as I was learning to read – such as how to approach the ‘e’ at the end of a word when the ‘e’ was silent. So the underlining or the brackets were there to remind me of that as I was learning, steadily helping me to pick up on those letters that you wouldn’t hear but you would have to know about in order to pronounce it.
When would you receive the letters?
They were certainly, in the early days, almost a daily experience, particularly when he was at work.
In those early days he had to work on a Saturday morning, so there would almost always be some material there at the weekend too. I would receive them when he got home from work. I very quickly got used to receiving them and would always read them straight away. Of course, they were quite short, quite brief, so it didn’t take very long. I might then go off and have another look at the illustration later in the evening, and they would then steadily pile up.
As a young boy receiving these letters, how did you find them? Were they a window into the way that the adult world worked? Did they give you an idea of your father’s personality? How was it that they shaped your view of the world and your dad?
I think they were very important in that they very frequently, particularly in the earlier sequence of the letters, used material from his work-place or the journey to or from work. The illustration could be read as little humorous incidents, such as somebody coming to spray something on the telephone to keep it clean in the office. I can remember another one which was an early memory of his when he was working at a printer’s in the centre of Manchester, having just left school. In one letter he showed the office manager sitting at a huge desk just at the moment when a protective screen came crashing down on him. This was brilliant because you could see that work was a place where all sorts of things went on, not all of them formal and precise, far from it. In another he showed how an office chair on wheels could spin round and be fun.
In addition, each letter had a tiny, hand-drawn stamp. They were terrific because they usually showed animals or birds of one kind or another doing something not necessarily directly relevant to the letter on the opposite page, but always with that slightly humorous twist to it. So even on that scale, he was very busy trying to create something with a character to it; stamps that would normally have gone on a letter in those days would have been of the King’s crowned head, and so many of them feature little crowns. Again, he’s mimicking the world, but in the play of animals rather than humans.
Do you think the letters equipped you as you grew up and entered the adult world yourself?
I think probably that they did give me some kind of familiarity with many of the conventions of working in an office; that there was always a bit of give and take and you had to adapt to make yourself and other people feel comfortable. So, yes, they were a friendly, playful way of saying, look – this is how it is.
Many of the letters to me were actually done in a way as a kind of educational input. He would draw my attention to, for instance, the way people dressed. I remember one when he was writing about very cold weather and how everybody dressed up. But some people looked quite different from others, depending on what they were wearing in the freezing cold, or how men used to carry walking sticks or umbrellas – all the different postures which people had developed for handling umbrellas when they were walking along, either under their arm or swinging it. These were all very perceptive things that immediately drew your attention to the details of everyday life which nobody would normally think about.
Actually, I have to say that weather was also an important component in many of the letters. We lived through the very hard winter of 1947 – constant pouring rain and then snow that simply would not go away. It was exceptionally cold. That featured in the letters, too, as a fairly constant feature –how you get by in everyday life when the weather is as bad as this: either you’re miserable or you try to smile through it.
Do you think receiving the letters had an effect on your relationship with your father?
Undoubtedly! Not only did the letters continue over several years, but even after the ones that were produced in the book, he continued to write to me. He might have had to go off on a work trip down to London or the south coast for an exhibition, and he would write from there, often about an activity that he was involved in while he was away from home. I was used to seeing him drawing and painting a good part of the time. I can’t say that was the only thing he did, but it would have been the main focus of his spare time. If, in his younger days, he was on a walking trip to the Lake District or North Wales he would take his art equipment – you know, papers, sketchbooks, paints – and spend the time that he could drawing and painting. This provided a record of his life beyond work, as it were, and he continued to do so really for as long as he could and in spite of his energy-sapping MS. Right up until his death, he would rarely be without some form of drawing equipment to hand.
I was really used to seeing his approach of seeing and exploring things through all the other drawing and painting activities that he did. They complemented the letters in some ways, many of which would be what anybody who regarded themselves as an artist would take for granted. He did a lot of oil painting in his earlier years, and then later focused more on watercolour painting. He exhibited regularly in the Manchester Academy, which was an annual event for artists in the Manchester area, held in the city art gallery on Mosley Street. We would go up to look at the exhibition and see the wider context in which he was making art and following up his own interests, because those exhibitions had an enormous diversity of work on display, up to a hundred people exhibiting their work.
It was always wonderful to go and see his work in that vastly different context, because it had nothing to do with the work of his everyday life. That’s the main thing for me, that his letters were an important, integral part of the wider, artistic environment to which he was totally committed.
He allowed the letters to find a presence for that artistic voice somehow, even though his spare time in those days was fairly limited. Because, obviously, he had a full-time job – there was no question of him selling enough paintings to survive independently otherwise.
And to do it in such speed, you know, in the way the letters were produced – 20 minutes in an office break, perhaps having a cup of tea and a sandwich, and then suddenly whipping them off! He had that extraordinary facility where he could do it and bring it off in just a few lines. It’s a facility that he had only because he’d been doing it incessantly since his childhood. Drawing, drawing, drawing.
Can you tell us how Letters to Michael as a book came into existence?
Well, the book was really a response to Heather, our daughter’s ‘Sketches from Space’ account on Instagram, on which she shared one of Charles’ letters every day. The letters were picked up by Slightly Foxed as having potential for development into book form. As well as the letters she also shared some of Charles’s birthday cards and cartoons.
Before my father worked for Renold Chain Co., he had worked for an electrical company that made switchgear equipment. He was head of the publicity department and one of the things he did as humorous asides were cartoons for the industry journal. He’d take everyday terms used in the electrical industry for equipment or technical activities and turn them into humorous drawings which relied on the terms’ double meanings. The double meanings could be read and recognised in the cartoons while apparently having nothing to do with the world of electrical engineering.
Heather and I really loved those and we’d kept them and shared them as little sequences on ‘Sketches from Space’. I think Slightly Foxed had seen these accompaniments to my letters as a wider background to his interest in capturing all of life’s activities. If we hadn’t had the digital world in which we could mount this continuing sequence of his artwork in different contexts, the book would not exist.
How did you find the process of designing the book?
Well, it was always very encouraging because Slightly Foxed were clearly very interested in the letters. So that was a great starting-point. It was quite complicated because the paper that the letters were done on were just thin scraps of office paper from a pad lying on his table at work. You can often see through the paper to something on the other side, or you might get a bit of a blot on it and so on. And yet here are these rather special things somehow turning up as a record of history more than eighty years ago. I think that was preserved very effectively in the way the book was printed. One gets a very strong sense of the edgy quality of the writing and illustrating of the letters.
Do you have a favourite letter or perhaps a letter that provokes a specific memory for you?
Quite a lot of them do provoke a memory actually. One I can pick out had to do with that winter of 1947 when there was so much snow on the ground for a long period. One of our immediate neighbours, Mr Ward, had two boys of about my age who lived right opposite to us, and whom I knew very well. Their father had bought the boys a long sledge. So on one day he took us out with this long sledge and he lay down flat on it and we three boys climbed on his back sitting upright in a row, and we went down what was really quite a steep hill. So one of the letters, drawn on 26 February 1947, shows us on Mr Ward’s back, whizzing down that steep hill on the sledge between huge piles of snow.
There are many others, of course, as well.
I think they were an introduction to everyday life as a source of possible humour anddelight.
I think what the letters themselves emphasise is, even if you've got troubles they can be turned into something quite different if you look at them with different eyes.
What do you think your father would think of Letters to Michael, if he could see his work collected like this?
I think he would be absolutely amazed, actually. First of all, that the letters had been saved and kept and valued, and secondly that they were being reproduced in an utterly different world and in a different context. The digital world didn’t exist then, there was only radio and television. So yes, I think he would be astonished.
We also had the pleasure of sitting down with Gail Pirkis, Slightly Foxed’s publisher, and Tracey Thorne, owner of Smith Settle Printing and Bookbinding, to discuss the making of Letters to Michael and the detail behind crafting and publishing the book -
Can you tell us a little about yourselves? Your background in publishing at Slightly Foxed and Smith Settle Printing & Bookbinding?
Gail -
I’m the publisher at Slightly Foxed which has now been going for over 20 years. Before I founded Slightly Foxed I was an editor at John Murray’s. We started Slightly Foxed in the belief that there are lots of really good books on publishers’ backlists that are often overlooked. The reviews in most media tend to concentrate on what’s new, but we firmly believe that there are huge numbers of books published 10, 20, even 200 years ago which are still worth reading. So we launched the magazine in 2004 and are now on our 92nd issue. About four years after that we decided to reissue a series of classic memoirs as limited-edition hardbacks. We’ve also reissued some children’s books and the occasional new book, and that’s where Letters to Michael comes in. During the COVID-19 pandemic Jennie, who works at Slightly Foxed, came across Michael’s daughter’s Instagram account ‘Sketches from Space' on which she was posting one of Michael’s letters every day. Jennie rather brilliantly suggested that they would make a really good book.
Usually when publishing books, there’s a lot of editorial input required: editing, proofreading, design etc. But in this case, we wanted to reproduce the letters as facsimiles and that meant working very closely with our printers. Smith Settle have printed everything we’ve published over the past 20 years, and they’ve done so to a very high standard. So when it came to Letters to Michael I knew we’d be in good hands. Tracey and I had long discussions about the paper and the binding that we would use, and I had long conversations with the designer. The challenge was how to reproduce the facsimiles and retain the essence of them, and yet also make the book into a coherent whole.
The paper on which the letters were written was basically office notepaper torn from a rough pad. Each letter had a hole punched in the corner, but the holes weren’t uniform, and the paper wasn’t always exactly the same size. But of course the pages of the printed book had to be uniform. In the end, the designer had to trim some of the pages to fit the book’s format and clone the punch holes so that they sat on the page consistently.
We commissioned Michael to write a preface to the letters to explain how the book came about, which he did beautifully. Then we had a long discussion with Michael and his daughter Heather about the binding. Should the spine be round-backed or square-backed? What colour cloth were we going to use? What sort of design were we going to use on the cover? What would the title be? They were very closely involved at every stage in making those decisions.
And then Tracey mocked up a dummy for us, which led to more discussions about the detail. The resulting book has quite a large, square format and the spine is square-backed in keeping with the period of the letters. The duck-egg blue cloth happens to be Slightly Foxed’s signature colour but it also seemed fitting for letters written in the 1940s. As do the beige endpapers and the matching gold head- and tailband and ribbon marker.
Tracey -
Smith Settle Printing & Bookbinding have been established since 1987. I joined as an office junior in 1991 and didn’t initially have much involvement in the production of books. I was more office-based, dealing with the accounts. But then in 2006, by which time Slightly Foxed had been with Smith Settle for three years, my boss decided he was selling up. We bought the company and moved the premises, over 20 years ago now. Now, of course, I know a lot more about production and I’m very keen on quality control. We print and bind in a very traditional way, and much of the process is still done by hand – we’re not very automated. We’re proud of what we do and we love working so closely with Slightly Foxed. Itan absolute pleasure when a unique publication like Letters to Michael was an unusual challenge but a real pleasure to work on.
Gail -
There’s a film on our website - www.foxedquarterly.com - called ‘Birth of a Book' that shows exactly how a book is put together. One of the very distinctive things about Smith Settle is that they hand-bind books. Normally when a book is bound it’s done by machine, which can be quite brutal. The pages are bashed together, the spine whacked on, it’s crimped and cut. It’s a fascinating process to watch but it makes for a much less user-friendly product: the book won’t lie flat, and so you have to crack the spine to be able to open it properly. It’s a subtle difference and it’s probably something that most people don’t even notice, but a hand-bound book has got that slight ‘give’ to it that makes it easier to turn the pages. Binding by hand is an expensive way of doing things, but it makes a huge difference to the quality of the book and the experience of reading it.
Tracey -
The process of bookbinding by hand is quite involved. Slightly Foxed supplies the artwork which we proof and print 16 pages at a time. These flat sheets are then gathered by hand and folded into sections. Next we set the sections up on a bench. Each section has a little ‘plonker’ mark on the spine which runs diagonally down, so once you have collated all the sections, you should have a perfectly straight diagonal line down the spine. We call them plonker marks because if there’s one section missing or if you pick two up by mistake, you’re a plonker for not seeing it! Once they’re gathered, we have a semi-automatic sewing machine where each section has to be fed on to the saddle as it goes in and they are all sewn together - Letters to Michael has 20 sections. We do have some machines but they are very simple and human-operated, there’s no pressing a button and walking away. Once the sections are sewn together into a block, we have an amazing machine that’s got two jaws which nip all the air out of that block. Then the book blocks are put on to another semi-automatic machine that adds a cloth liner to the spine. This machine is operated by three people at a time, one feeding it, one taking the block off and one rubbing it down.
The case is made to size by hand, using blocking boards laid on to the cloth. Then the whole case is put on the blocking machine. Artwork is applied to the spine using a brass stamp with lettering that is then foil-blocked on to the cloth. Then the ribbon marker and head- and tailbands are attached by hand. Finally, the book is cased in, again by hand, making sure the pages and the case are exactly square. If they are even slightly out of line they just look wrong.
We've got a really good team of people with a lot of skill, and they take pride in what they do. Even though they know it could hold up a job, they will always come and tell me when they’re not happy with a detail and we’ll start again.
Is there a particular letter that stands out for you?
Gail -
I love the one with a picture of a man sitting on a modern office chair and whizzing around. The drawing captures both the motion and the joy of it perfectly. That’s one of the things I love about all the illustrations, they’re so full of life and movement. He had a genius for that, capturing magical moments in fairly everyday scenes. Michael must have been enchanted by them.
Also, every letter has a stamp on it and every single one is different. When we came to design the book, Michael and Heather wanted the address and the stamps to appear as well. We decided that the letter itself and the drawing should appear on the right-hand page, because it’s the right-hand page that you always automatically look at when you open a book. Then facing it, on the left-hand page, are the address and the stamp.
What was it like working with Michael and Heather to bring the book to life?
Gail -
Well, I think one of the nicest things about producing the book was actually just how closely we did work with Michael and Heather. We had several meetings and they were consulted at every stage. In fact they were really engaged throughout. Heather is an artist and so working with someone who’s got that sort of aesthetic sensibility was a real pleasure for us. Most of the books that we publish are predominantly all about words. To publish something that’s so visual was a lovely change from what we normally do.
The second edition of Letters to Michael will be launched at our Covent Garden Shop on the evening of Thursday, 19th November 2026, between 7pm and 9pm. Join us for drinks, nibbles and a conversation with Slightly Foxed publisher, Gail.
Reserve your place here.
