The first time I saw the name Warwick Goble was very early in my public domain career. We were visiting Portobello Road Market in London in around 2010 and I'd stopped to look at a book stall in one of the inside lanes. Open on the table was a fairy tale book with beautiful illustrations and I was totally enthralled. It wasn't just the pictures that got me, it was the surname too - Goble, my surname!
Warwick Goble illustrations from The Water Babies, The Book of Fairy Poetry, The Fairy Book & Green Willow
Now I wasn't born a Goble, it's Andy my husband's name. When I got home, I looked up Warwick Goble to see if his work was out of copyright and to find out more about him. He wasn't quite there at the time but I didn't have that long to wait - he died in 1943 so I only had to wait until 2014 to be able to use his work.
I was already very familiar with Arthur Rackham's work then and although it is, of course, amazing, I found Goble's work to have a lighter touch and to be more colourful, perhaps a bit more feminine in contrast to Rackham's dark, heavy pen and ink work. I had to wonder why he didn't get to be as famous as Rackham, who was 5 years his junior. But that name; I had to look further into that, surely he must be related?
Andy's sister Rebecca had already done some work into the Goble family tree, so there had to be clues there. The Goble name came from their father's mother, Edna, who hadn't been married and was sadly forced to give up her baby son who she'd had when she was 18. Hence baby Edward (Ted or Eddie to family) was brought up in a Barnardo's children's home. He had only reconnected with his birth mother, who had gone on to marry and have a family, in the 1970s.
Through this reconnection, Rebecca managed to put together quite a family tree going back to the 1790s. We looked through everything she'd done but found no connection with any of the people she'd uncovered - and there our investigations stopped until recently.
Some of Warwick Goble's illustrations from War of the Worlds
For our new website I've revisited Warwick Goble and his work. Did you know he was the first illustrator of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds? You'd think that would have made him famous but sadly his pen and ink drawings were eclipsed by Alvim Correa's illustrations a few years later in 1906 for 'La Guerre des Monde', the French translation of the book. Yes, when you look at the small illustrations that were included in the book, you'd probably agree that they don't look much. Whilst I'm sure that the original full-size work looked so much better than the reproductions in the book, what these pictures did was give life to what was previously only in the imagination of H.G. Wells. Cars were only just on the road at this time so a large three-legged mechanical contraption from Mars that walked and shot lasers would have been a far-cry from the minds of illustrators of the day, but Goble did it; he paved the way for all that has been portrayed since in books, cartoons, film and theatre.
Some of Alvim Correa's War of the Worlds illustrations.
So I guess what I'm saying is that without him the rest might not have happened, so modern culture has a lot to thank him for. It's a shame he didn't get more famous for it.
As for the connection with the name? An anti-climax, perhaps, as there is no direct connection. I've traced the family tree back to the 1700s, to the Goble family of Rolvenden, Kent, England. Husband Andy is directly descended from John Goble who was born in 1710 via his son James, who was born in in 1748. Warwick Goble is descended from John via another of his sons, Thomas, who was born in 1749. I dare not even start to put a label of how many cousins, second-cousins and once-twice-three times removed this must be, all I can say for sure is that we share ancestry, however vague it is!
