They were a GREAT inspiration to me in the late 60s and I went on to have more than FORTY years in the biz working all over Europe and I was billed as 'the ultimate party host'. I met Stews' parents in Kennersdene may years ago and they were SO lovely, they invited me in for tea to chat over all the good times, thank you to them. I STILL have copies of the singles, 'Movin' In' and 'Harry Faversham' and should any of the boys like to have them, PLEASE drop me a line or call 01302 789 846, I do hope that they go to a 'good cause'. I am retired now and living in Doncaster, PLEASE give me call! The new album contains a lovely version of ‘Something’ – I assume The Beatles were a great influence on Toby Twirl? There’s also a reggae influenced version of The Everly Brother’s ‘When Will I Be Loved’ – it works really well. Whose idea was this? Children's author, Sheila Hodgetts (born in 1924), is most famous for her stories about “Toby Twirl”, illustrated by Edward Jeffrey (1898-1978), a noted landscape artist and book and magazine illustrator.

In some later Toby Twirl stories, Hodgetts uses prose for the narrative, but most of her Toby Twirl stories rely on quatrains. We did a couple of sessions for the BBC 50 years ago like dozens of other groups at the time. The BBC had what they called ‘needle time’ restrictions imposed by the Musicians Union and were limited to the amount of records they could play. Nothing has come to light on any compilation to my knowledge. As we did not have any hits the recordings were probably wiped years ago. Fifty years is a long time!In 1946, when her husband was demobilised from the RAF, her family moved to the West Midlands where they have lived ever since.

There was a thriving live music scene in the late 60s – what were the most memorable venues and favourite groups you played on the bill with? Although Sheila Hodgetts’ writing career spanned far beyond Toby Twirl, it is Toby and his adventures she is remembered for, and will be, deservedly so, very ably brought to visual life by Edward Jeffrey. Toby Twirl is a young pig who walks upright. He has human hands and feet like Rupert Bear. The character is based upon a soft toy which was made by the wife of Edward Jeffrey. [2] Hi all at Manchesterbeat, the lads from Toby Twirl had a reunion recently in Gosforth. The banter was brilliant and the humour was still there after many years. Manchester was a topic of conversation, the clubs the digs and the great fans who made us geordies welcome in that area. This is a first; I can’t discover anything about Sheila Hodgetts at all. It’s as if she hid herself entirely.”

Through the 1920s and 1930s, it is unclear who was the creator of the verses used in Rupert's stories. For example, Caroline G. Bott's The Life and Works of Alfred Bestall: Illustrator of Rupert Bear, Bloomsbury, London, 2003, pp 71, 72, reports Alfred Bestall's recollections that, in 1935, “a lady … did Mary Tourtel’s late verse captions (not Hilda Coe)”, and also that her husband, H.B. Tourtel had “[written] the verse”. Similarly, when Bestall was assigned the task of replacing Tourtel after she retired, Bott quotes at length a Daily Express article by Hilda Coe, 7 November 1945, on the anniversary of Rupert's Silver Jubilee. According to Coe, when Bestall began on 28 June 1935, “he could not write verse, and the youngest readers demanded verse, not once but many times. And so, early in 1936, the Daily Express asked me [Coe] to translate Rupert into verse”: Bott p 27.)