James Brian Jacques (known as Brian), was born in Liverpool, Lancashire on the 17th of June 1939. One of his earliest memories was of the Second World War, and his memories of the German bombing of Liverpool during the Second World War would go on to influence some of the battle scenes in his Redwall series.
Upon arriving at secondary school at the age of 10, one of his earliest assignments was to write a story involving animals, which foreshadowed his future career as the author of Redwall. His story about a bird that cleaned a crocodile’s teeth was so good that his teacher could not believe that a child of his age could possibly have written it, and he was caned for ‘lying’ when he continued to insist that he had not copied it elsewhere.
Despite this inauspicious start to his arrival at secondary school, he was engaged by some of his teachers. His favourite was Austin Thomas, whom he described as a ‘Lee Marvin lookalike’ who had been a captain during the war. Under his influence, he was inspired to purchase copies of Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey when most children of his age were spending what money they had on sweets and comic books. Thomas also inspired a love of poetry in young Brian, particularly those of Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Wordsworth.
It was, however, another of his teachers who would later go on to have the most profound impact on his life. Alan ‘Dusty’ Durband, who, as well as being an English teacher to Brian, and later to the future Beetles George Harrison and Paul McCartney, was to become a notable author and playwright in his own right, as well as an educationalist and theatre producer.
Brian Jacques left school at 15, which was typical at the time. Perhaps inspired by the adventure stories of some of his favourite authors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and others, he sought his own adventures by joining the merchant navy and travelling around the world, although he eventually became tired of this lonely life and left to seek work within his home city. In subsequent years, he took on a wide variety of jobs becoming variously a railway fireman, lorry (truck) driver, longshoreman, bus driver, boxer, police constable*, boxer and even a stand up comedian. By his late 40s, he was working as a milkman delivering milk to the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind in Liverpool, and had become a volunteer at the school, assisting with the school and there becoming re-acquainted with his old English teacher ‘Dusty’ Durband. Deeply unimpressed by the quality of children’s literature available to the children there, which he considered ‘far too full of teen angst’ and lacking in magic, decided to write the first book in what was to become the Redwall series. Durband read the novel, and was so impressed that, without his knowledge, sent the novel to a publisher, declaring that it was ‘the finest children’s tale I’ve ever read, and you would be foolish not to publish it’.
The publisher got in contact with Jacques, and as a result, a contract was signed for him to write a further five books in the series. The stories themselves consisted of anthropomorphic animals set around Redwall Abbey, consisting of ‘good’ animals such as mice, squirrels, hares, hedgehogs badgers etc, fighting against ‘bad’ animals such as rats, crows, ravens, stoats, weasels, foxes and other ‘verminous’ animals.
The series was a roaring success, and millions of copies were sold worldwide and translated into over many different languages, in a series published between 1986 and 2011 that eventually ran to over 22 books translated into 28 languages around the world. The first three books were adapted by PBS as an animated series which Jacques himself would introduce before each episode.
In addition to the Redwall series, Jacques also wrote a trilogy of books known as The Castaways of the Flying Dutchman, about an orphaned stowaway who ends up on the notorious phantom ship The Flying Dutchman, and along with the crew, becomes cursed with immortality and doomed to walk the earth forever, though he is eventually swept overboard along with his similarly immortal dog to walk the earth helping other people.
His other books included two compilations of short tales called The Ribbajack and Other Curious Yarns, and Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales, as well as several plays.
Brian Jacques resided in Liverpool for almost his entire life. His unusual surname (which is pronounced ‘jakes’) led him to believe at first that his paternal ancestors were French. However, after doing some research into the matter, he discovered that his ancestors were, in common with almost half of the people of Liverpool, Irish, and that they had originally emanated from County Cork.
He had two brothers, with whom he formed a band at the height of beetlemania in the 1960s, known as ‘The Liverpool Fishermen,’ until his brothers both emigrated to New Zealand. He and his wife, Maureen, had two sons, David and Marc, whom he often enlisted to provide voices for some of the characters in his audio adaptations of his novels.
Brian Jacques’ last book, The Rogue Crew (part of the Redwall series), was published posthumously in 2011 after Brian Jacques’ death from a heart attack following an Aortic aneurysm at the Royal Liverpool Hospital earlier in the latter year. His novels, however, remain popular throughout the world, and he is still regarded by many of his fans as one of the greatest children’s authors of all time, many of whom were introduced to the fantasy genre by the Redwall alongside JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series before moving on to more adult fantasy novels such as JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
*known affectionately as ‘bobbies’ and less affectionately in Liverpool as ‘bizzies’ by cynical Liverpudlians who suggested that the police were were always ‘too busy’ to answer their calls when they were needed in a city that was, and still is, somewhat unfairly stereotyped as a particularly crime ridden city full of thieves and muggers.