James Campbell has written a book of E H Shepard’s war drawings

Having looked after the E H Shepard artistic estate for some years, I’ve always been aware of the significance of his iconic illustrations for Winnie the Pooh and the Wind in the Willows.

Few illustrators reach global recognition, and Shepard has not one but two entries in the international top 10 children’s books of the last century – his characters even appeared at the opening of the London 2012 Olympics, as icons of Britishness!

But I was on a different mission, trying to piece together an intriguing mystery – what had happened to Shepard during the First World War, and why was there no artwork from this period?

Like attempting a blank jigsaw puzzle, I’d begun to look out for relevant pieces which might have been overlooked and gradually, as the months and years went by, I slowly put the puzzle together, piece by piece.

The problem was this – E H Shepard fought on the front-line on active service as an artillery officer from 1916-1918. He saw action on the Somme, at Arras, Ypres and Passchendaele and on the Italian frontline – his only brother was killed at the Somme, and he experienced the horrors of the ‘war to end all wars’.

When he returned home after that war he seemed to have packed up everything connected to the conflict – his drawings, paintings, cartoons, illustrations, maps, photographs, documents and his army uniform – and put them away – literally out of sight and out of mind.

I asked members of his family and those who remembered him whether he had ever spoken of his war experiences – and he had not. So I drew my own conclusion that this was his way of dealing with the trauma, the anguish, the regret and the experiences of his war.

And yet – I was convinced that somewhere this hidden cache could be found.

Sorting through an uncatalogued artist’s archive can be lonely work, and I was getting frustrated by a distinct lack of progress when an unexpected flash of colour caught my eye. It was a watercolour of a First World War biplane which had crashed nose-first into the ground and it was definitely by Shepard.

Like a bloodhound on the scent, I worked through a jumbled mass of papers, here and there identifying possibilities, in due course assembling a disordered mass of cartoons, sketches, drawings, annotated maps, photographs, pocket books and more.

Then I started the task of putting these into some order – requests to other archives, collections and potential sources started to come in, until before my eyes I began to see how this muddled collection could actually tell a fascinating and unique story of a soldier’s war – and not just a soldier, but a formidable artist and illustrator at the peak of his powers.

The resulting book – Shepard’s War (Michael O’Mara Books) – and a new exhibition – E H Shepard: an Illustrator’s War (at London’s House of Illustration from now until January 10) – tell, in my view, a quite extraordinary story.

So many books marking the centenary of the First World War have focused on the broad picture and the terrible casualties, but Shepard’s War tells one soldier’s story through the eyes of a talented artist.

We see humour in cartoons which still make me laugh 100 years later. Shepard mocks the stereotypes of the Germans, pricks the pretensions of British officers and highlights the laconic humour of the Tommies.

Ultimately I think it throws new light on what came afterwards – the essence of Shepard’s illustrations for children are of innocence, timelessness and the feeling of endless summer days, harking back, I believe, to the pre-war Edwardian days when Shepard was first married with a young family.

And finally, within the book I’ve been able to include the only known photograph of Shepard’s children with their teddy bear – the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh.