Raymond Briggs's letters, diaries and sketchbooks can now be read at The Keep

The personal archive of Raymond Briggs, who wrote and drew Father Christmas, Fungus the Bogeyman, The Snowman and When the Wind Blows, can now be ordered and read at The Keep^1,2,3,4,5,6, the archive centre near Falmer. The Keep said in its November newsletter that the collection is live.

Briggs died in 2022. He taught illustration at Brighton College of Art, now the University of Brighton, and his papers came from his home and studio in East Sussex. They cover his whole life, from his early years in Wimbledon. There are letters, diaries, sketchbooks, notebooks, photographs, fan mail and press cuttings, with working papers for the four books and his letters with his parents, Ethel and Ernest Briggs. Steve Bell, Chris Riddell and other artists gave him original cartoons and paintings, and those are in the collection too.

Volunteers who catalogued it have written about what they found. Briggs seems to have kept everything, wrote Stevie Russell, and because he liked to reply by fax, many of his answers survive as well. Russell turned over one ordinary letter from a publisher and found Briggs’s sketches on the back. There are spoof letters he wrote to amuse himself and his friends, and a 1979 letter from the Oxford academic Terry Eagleton, who wanted to write a study of Fungus the Bogeyman and called it “one of the most fascinating texts to have appeared for some years”. The study never got written.

Keira Grant went through three boxes on When the Wind Blows, his 1982 book about a retired Sussex couple facing a nuclear attack. Many readers praised it, and others dismissed it as a “pernicious piece of CND propaganda”. She found what looked like hundreds of requests to adapt it for stage, film and radio.

The project archivist, Chris Olver, found a file Briggs labelled “Strip Cartoons”, with his drawn layouts of French comics and notes on how the artists played with the form. Olver thinks they were very likely research for his illustration classes in Brighton, as a set of his teaching slides shows strips of continental comics.

The project began in January, paid for by a grant from The National Archives. Viewing is free, but you need a reader’s card, and you can’t copy anything from this collection. The Keep closes from 25 December to 1 January.