Ronald Joseph Ridout (23 July 1916 – 5 December 1994)''Contemporary Authors Online'' (2003) Detroit, Gale was a prolific English writer of school textbooks. His textbooks include the hugely successful series ''English Today''.

Biography

Ronald Ridout was born in

Farnham Farnham ( /ˈfɑːnəm/) is a market town and civil parish in Surrey, England, around southwest of London. It is in the Borough of Waverley, close to the county border with Hampshire. The town is on the north branch of the River Wey, a trib ...

Surrey Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...

, on 23 July 1916. He was the son of Gilbert Harry Ridout, a schoolmaster, and Ethel Mary ''née'' Phillips. He married Betty Elsie Dolley on 10 February 1940, and had three children, Jessica, Simon and Veronica. He worked as a bank clerk at the

National Provincial Bank National Provincial Bank was a British retail bank which operated in England and Wales from 1833 until 1970 when it was merged into the National Westminster Bank. It continued to exist as a dormant non-trading company until 2016 when it was vo ...

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, from 1933 to 1935 and received his B.A. degree with honours from Oxford University in 1939. From 1939 to 1950 he worked as a teacher at schools in

Bolton Bolton (, locally ) is a large town in Greater Manchester in North West England, formerly a part of Lancashire. A former mill town, Bolton has been a production centre for textiles since Flemish people, Flemish weavers settled in the area i ...

Luton Luton () is a town and unitary authority with borough status, in Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 census, the Luton built-up area subdivision had a population of 211,228 and its built-up area, including the adjacent towns of Dunstable an ...

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and

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. He was dissatisfied with the available material for the teaching of English at the time that he started his teaching career, and as a result developed the ''English Today'' series of textbooks in the 1940s. He worked at Ginn & Co. Ltd., London, the publishers of ''English Today'', from 1946 to 1950, as a publisher's representative. The enormous success of the ''English Today'' books led to him leaving the classroom in 1950 to devote his time to writing. From 1950 until his death, he worked exclusively as a writer. Ridout collaborated with Phyllis Flowerdew on a number of primary school readers during the 1960s for the publishers Oliver and Boyd. He died in

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on 5 December 1994. So prolific was his output and huge his sales, exceeding seventy million, that he earned a place in ''The

Guinness Book of World Records ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a reference book published annually, listing world ...

''. His daughter Jessica lives in

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Quotations

"What we must do is to steer between these two extremes and develop a way of speaking that most effectively expresses what we want to say. We want a speech that will do its job well. Everything that does its job well has a beauty of its own. Hence we talk of a beautiful runner, a beautiful dancer, a beautiful engine. They all have functional beauty, the beauty of functioning perfectly, the beauty of being perfectly suited to the job they have to do. So with speech: we want an instrument that is beautiful, not because it puts on decorative airs, but because it does its work beautifully, perfectly."

From ''English Today'', Ronald Ridout, Ginn & Company, 1947, pp. 111–112

Bibliography

(selected bibliography) ''A. to Z. of English'', (with Michael Tristram, Neil Straker and Timothy Jaques),

Collins Collins may refer to: People Surname Given name * Collins O. Bright (1917–?), Sierra Leonean diplomat * Collins Chabane (1960–2015), South African Minister of Public Service and Administration * Collins Cheboi (born 1987), Kenyan middle- ...

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''Better English'' (1961) Ginn & Company, (reprinted 2000 by Heinemann )
''Book for Me to Read'' (with

Ruth Ainsworth Ruth Gallard Ainsworth (16 October 1908 – 16 May 1984) was a British writer, of over seventy children's books and numerous radio scripts. Life Ainsworth was born in Manchester, in 1908, the second child (and first daughter) of Methodist mini ...

), Series, Purnell Bancroft
''Children's Dictionary'' (1983)

''English Now'', Books 1 - 5, Ginn & Company
''English Today'', Books 1 - 5 (1947), Ginn & Company
''English Workbooks'', Books 1 - 8, Ginn & Company
''English Workbooks for the Caribbean'', Books 1 - 8, (1968) Ginn & Company
''Evans Graded Verse'' (with Michael Knight) (1978), Evans Bros.
''Facts of English'' (with Clifford Witting) (1973)

Macmillan Publishers Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the 'Big Five' English language publi ...

''Getting on with Dividing'' (with Michael Holt and Jon Miller) (1986)

''Getting on with Mathematics'' (with Michael Holt and Jon Miller) (1986)

''Getting on with Multiplying'' (with Michael Holt and Jon Miller) (1986),

''Getting on with Spelling'', Series, (with Michael Holt and Leon Baxter), (1986),

''The Life Cycle of Cats'' (with Michael Holt), illustrated by Tony Payne. Grosset & Dunlap, (1974)
''The Macmillan Dictionary of English Proverbs Explained'' (with Clifford Witting),

''Now I Can Spell'' (with Michael Holt) (1987)

''Now I Can Take Away'' (1985),

''Now I Can Write'', Series, (with Michael Holt) (1987),

''Picture Words'' (1975),

''Ridout pocket spelling dictionary'' (1979) Ginn & Company
''Self Help English'',

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''Word Perfect'' (with

George Adamson George Alexander Graham Adamson MBE (3 February 1906 – 20 August 1989), also known as the ''Baba ya Simba'' ("Father of Lions" in Swahili), was a Kenyan wildlife conservationist and author. He and his wife, Joy, were depicted in the film ''B ...

), Books 1 - 8, (1957–60) Ginn & Company
''Write in English'', Books 1 - 8, (1974) Ginn & Company

References

External links

Ronald Ridout at ISBNdb
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ridout, Ronald British textbook writers 1916 births 1994 deaths Booker authors' division People from Farnham Alumni of the University of Oxford