John Cunliffe, who has died aged 85, said he was inspired to create Postman Pat by his work for Wooler mobile library in Northumberland. “Like Pat, I travelled around a rural area and met a great many farmers and other rural dwellers who were kind and generous in the way that the people of Greendale are,” he recalled. “It was all there, in my memory.”
Kindness and generosity, together with selflessness and community spirit, were virtues worth celebrating in the autumn of 1981 as the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, entered her second year in office. In the first episode, Postman Pat’s Finding Day, its hero was tasked with delivering birthday parcels to the twins Katie and Tom Pottage. So Pat set off in his red Royal Mail van (licence plate: PAT1) with his black and white cat, Jess, in the passenger seat. This was decades before the Royal Mail sell-off and long before British streets became clogged with rival FedEx, UPS and Amazon vans.
Continue reading...
