Helen Strickland has left little detail of her life and accomplishments. She studied at the Westminster School of Art under Walter Bayes and was also known as a flower painter. Her book Shadow Birds (1930) was published by the Trinity Press Worcester, using the pochoir process. Peppin/Micklethwait records her living in Dartford and a member of the South London Group. In 1927 she exhibited a work (her sole contribution) to the Royal Academy Summer show The Golden Fuchsias. Not to be confused with Helen Strickland, the Thunder Bay artist.

Her visualisations of The Bargerys are of a high order, sensitive to family locations, physical identities and interaction. Surely she discussed the text with the author whose childhood she was illustrating, both of them working for the University of London Press.

The author of these autobiographical studies of family life was Philip Boswood Ballard, psychologist and educationalist (and not, as some have noted, the artist herself). Ballard was a prolific writer about educational methods, many of whose texts are still valued today.

Significantly he was born in Glamorgan in 1865 the second of four children to Evan Ballard grocer and his wife Mary, daughter of a local doctor. Ballard pere was a grocer and draper, later manager of a tin plate works. See also PBS's Things I cannot forget of 1937 also published by the University of London Press. His books include Oblivescence and reminiscence, (Cambridge University Press 1913 ) a study of how children commit texts to memory ; Handwork as an educational medium (Macmillan 1915); Teaching the Mother Tongue (Hodder and Stoughton 1921); Group Tests of Intelligence (1922) ; The New Examiner (1927) . His Thought and Language went into 25 editions between 1934 and 1979. He was awarded a Doctor of Literature by the University of London as a private student in 1914.

The Bargerys was written after he had retired from the London County Council at the age of 65 in 1930. Details can be found on the UK Ballard pedigree site written and researched by Wendy Robinson. Ballard died at Hazel Cottage , Pewsey, Wiltshire in 1950 aged 85.