Belinda Lyon was a talented illustrator who created many designs for Oxfam during the late 1960’s and 1970’s.
Belinda was born in London where she lived all of her life and trained at a London art school before starting her career in advertising. Illustrators were in strong demand during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and advertising was where many young graduates of the era started their careers. Iconic illustrated adverts and posters of the early 1960’s are now highly collected and many talented and now sadly anonymous artists started out in advertising before television and photography took over during the later “swinging 60’s”.
Early Career
Belinda Lyon started her commercial freelance career circa 1965 with illustrations for short stories and books. Almost from the start of her career, her commissions were for books aimed at children and teenagers, featuring advice for young adults, crafts, sewing and fashion. Some of the books and articles she illustrated in the first few years of her career are fantastic retro time capsules.
Oxfam Designs – 1966 – 1981
Belinda is now well known to 1970s retro fans for her lovely fabric designs which became part of the massive Oxfam retail success story. Belinda’s first design for Oxfam was a colourful Christmas card illustration in 1966. In 1967 Oxfam introduced their first “own brand” products consisting of two tea towels designed by Belinda Lyon. The elephant and giraffe were initially produced in three colours and were selected for the London Design Centre – at this time still known as the Council for Industrial Design, prior to the opening of the Design Centre shop in 1971 which had people flocking in to buy the latest trend setting products. Belinda was a cat lover and a lot of her designs featured her pet cats over the years. Mice, birds and flowers were also recurring themes in her illustrations.
The elephant and giraffe tea towels were an instant hit and new designs were added to the range each year, most of which came in two different colourways. Oxfam were the very first UK charity to introduce a retail commercial model to their shops and as the number of shops grew so did their gift range. What started out as a very small Christmas card and gift range rapidly expanded. Oxfam selected new and exciting talent to design for their gift ranges and Belinda Lyon was a huge contributor to the Oxfam retail success story over a number of years.
Selection of Belinda Lyon Designs
Belinda produced very popular designs for Oxfam’s successful retail gift range throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s and her work very much reflected the colours, trends and themes popular at the time. Her designs were often highly detailed with humorous touches and were reproduced on all sorts of cards, fabric and some kitchen items by Oxfam. Belinda herself was unsure how many different designs she had produced for Oxfam during her long career but it was over 60 designs for Christmas cards, wrapping paper, tea towels, cut out dolls, pillow cases, cushions and toys which continued to be sold in Oxfam’s shops into the 1980’s. Sadly, the Oxfam archives (donated in 2012 to the Bodleian library) did not keep detailed sale records for the talented illustrators, artists and designers producing work for their gift ranges.
Some of Belinda Lyon’s designs also appeared on tea towels sold by other companies during the 1970’s including Old Bleach based in Ireland. You can read my blog post on Old Bleach here
Comic Illustrations
As a published children’s book illustrator, it seems a natural progression that Belinda Lyon went on to become a successful comic illustrator. Most of her later career during the 80’s and 90’s was spent illustrating for comics. Two of her lasting characters were Jenny Wren & Paula & Patch for Twinkle comic. Sadly, weekly comics started to decline during the 1990s and Twinkle stopped production in 1999.
One of Belinda’s last commissions before she retired from commercial work was for a lovely children’s book by Nicola Baxter, which contains many of her highly detailed humorous illustrations.
Belinda Lyon, like many other talented illustrators from her generation, remained largely anonymous until the growing retro interest in the 1970’s and the current sewing craft revival has brought her designs and illustrations “back on trend” . Jane Foster re-imagined two Belinda Lyon designs for Clothkits around ten years ago and Belinda’s designs continue to remain a reference source for today’s retro inspired designers.
Whilst it is Belinda’s playful fabric designs for Oxfam that most collectors talk about, her many drawings and illustrations for books and magazines are now also gaining recognition.
New Fans
Sadly, Belinda Lyon died in 2019 but I was pleased to discover that Kate at Handheld Press will be using one of Belinda’s illustrations as the cover for a book about Betty Bendell Belinda illustrated Betty’s humorous column she wrote for Good Housekeeping magazine for a number of years.
Belinda Lyon has left us with a large body of creative work that is still being discovered and loved by a new generation of fans.
This blog post was first published in 2012 but has been updated and re-published in 2022. It’s great to see that the forgotten story of Belinda Lyon unearthed over a decade ago continues to play a small part in bringing her lovely illustrations to the attention of a new generation. You can see more examples of Belinda’s illustrations on my Flickr Belinda Lyon archive
2 replies on “Belinda Lyon – Illustrator”
I was co-editor of Twinkle from its launch in January 1968 until I resigned from D.C.Thomson in 1972 to go freelance and I wrote many scripts for Twinkle which were beautifully illustrated by Belinda. I think at that time she was represented by Eva Morris of Associated Freelance Artists, and so unfortunately I never met her in person. I always wished I had kept a sample of her artwork, and am sad to learn from the above that she has passed away. An immensely talented artist.
How interesting! I know that Belinda did a number of commissions for D.C Thomson publications in the late 1960’s, but I had not realised her illustration work for Twinkle had also started during her early career.