British Historian And Royal Expert Launches A Full Colour Reworking Of Claud Lovat Fraser’s NURSERY RHYMES
It’s National Poetry Day in the UK
Nursery Rhymes With Pictures by Claud Lovat Fraser introduced by Robert Lacey adapted by Ben Coppin
At this book’s launch, Robert Lacey’s wife, Lady Jane (Rayne), read from J. K. Galbraith’s review of Ford: The Men and the Machine, a book that Lacey had gone to Detroit to write in the 1980s. When Lady Jane (not his wife at the time of the book’s publication) came to the end of the glowing conclusion to the review, Lacey joked she was gently pointing out that he was more than a collector of nursery rhymes.
What, then, persuaded a lauded 80-year-old historian, biographer and royal insider (he was a consultant on the Netflix series The Crown) to set up from scratch his own publishing enterprise (Paper Argosies) — drawing down on his pension pot to do so — to produce a close facsimile of a forgotten volume from 1919?
The answer, as we heard at the launch, is a Christmas card that he received two or three years ago depicting a ‘bouncy butler’ prancing along carrying a Christmas pudding on a dish. The back of the card gave a few tantalising details about the artist: name, Claud Lovat Fraser; stage…
