This is a commentary about five generations of the Postgate family: P#1 = John Postgate (1820-1881); P#2 = John Percival Postgate (1853 – 1926); P#3A = Margaret Cole nee Postgate (1893 – 1980); P#3B = Raymond Postgate (1896 – 1971); P#4A = John Postgate (1922–2014); P#4B = Oliver Postgate (1925 – 2008); P#5A Daniel Postgate (1964-2025). Each of them can be regarded as a public figure. Of interest is how one generation manifests itself in subsequent generations. This is far from a biography, for it only looks at some social aspects of their lives.
P#1 was from Scarborough. His working life began as a grocer’s boy at age eleven. He discovered common deceptions in the trade, including the adding of sand to sugar, and plaster of Paris to flour. He subsequently apprenticed himself to two Scarborough doctors. He had taught himself chemistry and botany and went on to become a licensed apothecary in London where he discovered that drugs could often be dangerously impure. He attended lectures at the Leeds school of medicine.
After studying medicine in London, he set up a practice in Driffield, Yorkshire, then Birmingham. He became a fellow of the College of Surgeons in 1854. In Birmingham Postgate was concerned about pollution: 176 industrial chimneys spewed smoke, many streets were open sewers. He published his first reformist pamphlet and called for municipal action, on Birmingham’s sanatary aspects. He also addressed his major preoccupation of his life, food and drug adulteration, proposing a system of public analysts to monitor samples of food and drugs, with magistrates able to levy fines on fraudsters.
A Select Committee of Inquiry in the House of Commons was established, issuing a final report that mimmiced P#1’s proposal. Attempts to enact suitable legislation were postponed, because of opposition from retailers, until the Sale of Food and Drugs Act 1875 was passed.
P#2
P#2 was a very different person, in part because of an austere upbringing. Travel, pamphlets, postage and other expenses absorbed almost all of P#1’s income. His mother, born Mary Horwood (1819–1889), was an educated woman, who was perpetually short of money to feed, clothe and bring up a large family. Thus, there were tensions between the children and their parsimonious = stingy and (apparently) uncaring father. P#2 became a classical (Latin) scholar.
P#3
John Percival Postgate’s daughter Margaret Cole (1893–1980) is P#3A.
In order to understand Margaret, one should also look at her husband, the socialist economist and writer George Douglas Howard Cole (1889 – 1959). G. D. H. believed in common ownership of the means of production, and theorized about guild socialism = production organized through worker guilds. He belonged to the Fabian Society and was an advocate for the co-operative movement.
As a pacifist, Cole took a pragmatic approach to the 1914-18 war. In 1915, he became an unpaid research officer at the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, where he advised the union on how to respond to wartime legislation including the Munitions of War Act of 1915. This role enabled him to escape conscription on the grounds that he was conducting work of national importance.
Cole’s involvement in the campaign against conscription introduced him to a co-worker, Margaret Cole. They were married in 1918.
Together, G. D. H. and Margaret wrote over 30 detective novels between 1925 and 1948. She went into London politics and received a DBE.
P#3B was Margaret’s brother Raymond Postgate (1896 –1971) who was notable as a socialist, journalist and editor, social historian, mystery novelist and gourmet. He founded The Good Food Guide in 1951, which was ahead of its time in being largely based on volunteer reports on restaurants. He married Daisy Lansbury (1892–1971), daughter of, and secretary to, the politician George Lansbury (1859–1940) who led the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935, and whose biography was among Raymond’s books.
P#3C was another son of John Percival Postgate, Ormond Oliver Postgate (1905–1989), a teacher of Latin and history at Peter Symonds School in Winchester, who retired in 1970.
P#4
In the next generation, Raymond’s children include: P#4A, the microbiologist John Postgate FRS (1922–2014), Professor of Microbiology at the University of Sussex, who was also a writer on, and sometime performer of, jazz. His brother, P#4B, Richard Oliver Postgate (1925–2008), was an animator, puppeteer and writer, who created television series including Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, and Clangers from the 1950s to the 1980s. P#4C Nicholas Postgate,[8] FBA (1945 – ) is a British academic and Assyriologist. He is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
P#5
Oliver Postgate had three sons: Stephen, Simon and P#5A Daniel Postgate (1964-2025). Daniel, his youngest son, was a children’s book writer and illustrator; he inherited Oliver’s company Smallfilms and created a new series of Clangers on CBeebies.
F#1
Peter Arthur Firmin (1928 – 2018) was an English artist and puppet maker. He founded Smallfilms, with Oliver Postgate. The production company was active from 1958 to the late 1980s. Most of Smallfilms’ animation work was produced in a barn on Firmin’s land in Blean near Canterbury in Kent. Firmin made the sets, puppets and backdrops for the programmes, often also contributing sound and visual effects during filming. Between them they created a number of popular children’s TV programmes: The Saga of Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers, Bagpuss and Pogles’ Wood.
In addition to his work with Oliver Postgate, Firmin made other puppets and children’s programmes. In 1959, with his wife Joan, he devised a programme of nursery rhymes for Associated-Rediffusion, called The Musical Box, which used live cardboard animation and puppets. After retiring from TV production, Firmin produced engravings and linocuts.
Literary connections
John Postgate = P#4B (2001) Lethal Lozenges and Tainted Tea: A Biography of John Postgate (1820–1881); (2013), Microbes, Music and Me. John & Mary Postgate, (1994) A Stomach For Dissent: The Life Of Raymond Postgate,
Margaret Cole (1949) Growing up into Revolution; (1971) The Life of G. D. H. Cole.
Naomi Mitchison (1982) Margaret Cole, 1893–1980. Note: Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, (née Haldane; 1897 – 1999) Scottish novelist and poet. She wrote more than 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography.
B. D. Vernon (1986) Margaret Cole, 1893–1980: A Political Biography.
Oliver Postgate (2000) Seeing Things: An Autobiography, illustrated by Peter Firmin.
Note: P#5A was the starting point of this weblog post. Then I discovered that he had an interesting ancestry. The post has had a long development time, more than four years. It was originally worked on: 2021-06-05, being saved at 10:20. It was subsequently worked on 2024-05-05, saved at 08:00. Work again resumed on 2025-10-07 at 11:00, knowing that publication was less than two weeks away.