Ladybird, ladybird…

My daughter has always loved ladybirds, from being tiny; I think it may have been the jolly red colour, or maybe it was the spots, but they have always featured in her life, on birthday cakes, on cards, on clothes, and dozens of other little things. She even did a rather good project on them when she was at junior school.

Apparently they are technically beetles, Coccinellidae and they can be a variety of different colours as well as red, you often can see  yellow and  orange ladybirds with black spots  or black ones with yellow, orange or red spots. They are so pretty and are useful too, eating aphids in the garden. They can be a pest if they swarm in great numbers  it has happened a couple of times in Weston  where the promenade along the seafront has been covered in them so you can’t walk without  crunching hundreds beneath your feet – horrid!

They have been used as a trademark for a number of things, of course the wonderful ladybird books, so loved and so marvellous for helping reading and educating children; some of the older books are very, very dated, but then the first one were published in 1915 so it’s not surprising! Woolworths, the now gone but not forgotten Woolies, used to have a great range of children’s clothing which was the ladybird brand; my two children had many reasonably priced hard-wearing clothes from Woolies.

I wonder if anyone else remembers the Ladybird Adventurers in the children’s comic Swift (part of the same group that published Eagle, Girl and Robin); I think they must have been an advertising campaign by Woolworth’s ladybird clothing, because their secret sign was the label in the back of their shirts. There were the twins Bill and Brenda and a friend called Johnny, who I always thought was very dashing and handsome. Their enemies were the Woffledoffers… How do I remember such things?