Oliver Postgate

Richard Oliver Postgate (12 April 1925 – 8 December 2008) was an English animator, puppeteer, and writer.

Education Postgate was educated at the private Woodstock School on Golders Green Road in Finchley in northwest London and Woodhouse Secondary School, formerly known from 1923 onwards as Woodhouse Grammar School, also in Finchley (and now renamed Woodhouse College), followed by Dartington Hall School, a progressive private boarding school in Devon.

In the 1970s and 1980s Postgate was active in the anti-nuclear campaign, addressing meetings and writing several pamphlets including The Writing on the Sky.

In 1986, in collaboration with the historian Naomi Linnell, Postgate painted a Illumination of the Life and Death of Thomas Becket for a book of the same name, which is now in the archive of the Royal Museum and Art Gallery, Canterbury. In 1990 he painted a similar work on Christopher Columbus for a book entitled The Triumphant Failure. A Canterbury Chronicle, a triptych by Postgate commissioned in 1990 hangs in the Great Hall of Eliot College on the University of Kent's Canterbury campus.

In his later years, he blogged for the New Statesman.

Publications The Burglarproof Bath Plug – A Collection of Memories, Thoughts and Small Stories Including "The Trouble with Magic", Oliver Postgate 2008 foreword by Stephen Fry Seeing Things: An Autobiography, Oliver Postgate; illustrated by Peter Firmin, 2000 – ; republished in 2009 – The Writing on the Sky, Oliver Postgate 1982 – BECKET, Oliver Postgate & Naomi Linnell 1989 – Columbus, the Triumphant Failure, Oliver Postgate & Naomi Linnell 1991 The Sagas of Noggin the Nog Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin; illustrated by Peter Firmin, 2001 – Thinking It Through: The Plain Man's Guide to the Bomb, Oliver Postgate 1981