On the 60th anniversary of Camberwick Green, we go inside its famous musical box

In January 1966, children were first introduced to a green and pleasant corner of England where troubles were never serious ones – maybe the sails of Colley’s Mill stopped turning, Tripp's Dairy ran out of milk or the soldiers of Pippin Fort were left minding Mrs Honeyman’s baby – but they captured young hearts and minds.

Just 13 episodes of Camberwick Green were made, but the show’s afterlife, via repeats and in popular culture, means we still talk about it today. It was the creation of puppeteer Gordon Murray and animated by Bob Bura and John Hardwick. But a major key to its longevity is its happy, colourful soundtrack, from the musical-box introduction to all the individual character themes...

"One person said he thought the music was like little opera pieces," John Phillips, son of the composer Freddie, tells RT. "At the end of the day he was an absolutely brilliant classical guitarist and composer."

Freddie Phillips had worked for Gordon Murray previously, on A Rubovian Legend, and for German silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger in the 1950s. He would look for work by visiting a London pub frequented by the entertainment fraternity, nicknamed The Glue Pot. "Once you’d got your feet in, you couldn’t get out!" as John puts it.

Gordon Murray created the fictional village of Camberwick Green to exist within the county of Trumptonshire, along with the locations of the show's two sequels: the town of Trumpton (1967) and village of Chigley (1969). Asked by Radio 4 in the 1990s whether the places were all supposed to be in Kent or Sussex, Murray replied: "There are mountains in the background so I would think it's probably in the middle of the country somewhere."

Wherever it was, the gentle pastoral adventures were catnip to young tots, including the writer of this article. I loved seeing a different character emerge from the famous musical box, including go-ahead, hi-tech farmer Jonathan Bell, old-school Windy Miller and the ubiquitous Mrs Honeyman. For some reason, however, I would always fret at the sight of Windy Miller entering the front door of his mill and just missing the sails as they turned. I needn't have: he always timed it to perfection!

The first record I remember being bought as a child was the "Welcome to Camberwick Green" LP and escaping to that happy, smiling village by way of its soundscape, and its calling-card ditties including: "If you want a doctor/Get Dr Mopp/For he can stop/A sneeze or a wheeze", or "Here comes a policeman/A big, friendly policeman/PC McGarry number 452".

So how did Freddie go about writing their individual theme tunes? "He got a script of what was going on, and lengths of time, and then he'd write the music," says John. "In some cases he wrote the music first, then they made the puppets move to it. 'Riding along in a baker’s van, in a rackety tackety baker’s van…' You can just keep going [with the animation] till the music stops!"

He recorded it all at home in West Ewell, Surrey. "He did up one of the bedrooms as a studio, with egg boxes pinned to the wall to dampen the sound. He had three recording machines, reel to reel. They were top-quality machines, but the BBC were so fussy, and if it didn’t pass their quality control they simply wouldn’t use it. So it had to be absolutely bang on... But it was quite difficult because the flight path for Heathrow wasn’t far away!"

John, a teenager at the time, was a reluctant apprentice: "I used to have to help out by switching the machines on and off and making noises. And I’d be going, 'Oh Dad! Bloody hell, I’ve got to stay in!'" The noises John refers to are the show’s sound effects that Freddie also provided – for the sequels Trumpton and Chigley, too. "A great many of them were simply done." The Pippin Fort bugle? "A tuppeny-ha’penny plastic trumpet, a child’s toy." Windy Miller’s windmill? "There was a drum because it went ka-donk. That was a kid's drum.

"There was a bricklayer. That was me in the back garden with a pile of bricks and a trowel, scraping the bricks and the trowel together to make it sound like I was laying bricks. The sound of a crane was a vacuum cleaner slowed down. The dustcart was his car, which was a Sunbeam Talbot. All done in the garage. It was all simple, home-made things."

And the famous steam locomotive, Bessie, in Chigley? Freddie took a handheld recorder to the Bluebell Line when he was working at Glydebourne in East Sussex.

As for the lyrics, they were "a bit of Gordon but mainly my father". One notable intervention came with the Trumpton fire brigade: "Gordon had started to write that and he hadn’t put enough Pughs in. It was 'Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb'. But my father said no, it doesn’t scan and rewrote it, to 'Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb'!"

The calm and clear narration was provided by Play School presenter Brian Cant, who in a 1995 interview said, "I would do roughly three shows in a day. It was quite tiring work, especially the songs. Obviously we only ever recorded the songs once, but I wasn't a trained singer and so Freddie's range was limited when it came to composing them."

John Phillips remembers this causing some difficulty for his father, but they got there in the end: "Brian Cant was merely a session man. He had no say-so, he would just turn up at the house, be told, 'Here’s what you’re doing,' do it, then go away."

John says his father's musical gifts meant that he was very much in demand. Early television gigs included playing the guitar for Alan-a-Dale in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Also for the music of Coronation Street: "I think he got 30 shillings for it." As well as his radio and TV work he performed and recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the English National Opera and the Royal Ballet, and even went on tour to Czechoslovakia and Russia.

"He did a lot of Play for Today," adds John. "He was never not busy, he’d always have plenty of work on. And he wrote an awful lot of stuff which just went into a library for use as background music. We put all his music onto CD and split it up into categories – music in the English style, music in the Latin-American style, abstract – and I’ve got 13 CDs."

Freddie Phillips at one point worked with the war artist John Worsley: "They were looking to do another children’s programme, and it was going to be called Sly Boots and Twinkle Wits: two cats and church mice, and the unlikeable lawyers were going to be crows, LickPenny Crib and Co...

"I’ve got the original music that they sent off to the BBC but the BBC weren’t interested in it. The songs were fantastic. One of them was Bats in the Belfry, they did it as sort of RAF officers: 'We’re bats, we’re definitely bats, and we flit in and out of the belfry/We mop up the midges, mosquitos and gnats, and flit in and out of the belfry!'"

Freddie Phillips died in 2003, but his work on the Trumptonshire trilogy of programmes extends surprisingly far and wide in popular culture. There were homages by indie band Half Man Half Biscuit in the '80s, by Urban Hype in the '90s, more recently by Radiohead and in the loving tribute A Visit to Chiswick by Tiger Moth Tales (if you have any affection for the programmes, you won't regret checking that out).

On television, "Quaker Oats used the windmill in an advert [in 2005]. When I told dad, he wasn’t bothered. He said, 'As long as I get the money! As long as they’re paying me.'" The spirit of Trumptonshire was also evoked, surprisingly, in a 2007 episode of Life on Mars, and the programme features prominently in a popular BBC trailer from Christmas 1998.

As for why the programmes remain popular, Brian Cant once offered, "Maybe the shows were done with a bit more time and care and love than lots of programmes now, which are chucked on and shout at you..." And in a 1995 interview for Radio 4, Gordon Murray suggested, "There's no crime in Trumptonshire, it's a happy world."

"A lot of people say, 'Well you shouldn't encourage children to think that the world's like that.' Some people throw their children into the deep end of the swimming bath at an early age and say, 'Swim' – you know, that's the way to learn, life's hard. Hard things are coming to you. I don't believe in that. I believe that you must protect your children while they are children for as long as possible, from this dreadful world we're living in.

"I am very upset at the short length of childhood that children have. They don't have childhood for long and I think that's a wicked shame, because childhood is the most marvellous thing you've got to remember for the rest of your life."

What's clear is that Camberwick Green and its spin-offs were “world-building” decades before that was a phrase. And Freddie Phillips’s hummable themes were a crucial part of that. "If it’s popular today it would be down to the music," concludes John Phillips, "because every other kids’ programme is now quite sophisticated animation. And when you think that you’ve got a character there with a ping-pong ball for a head and things like that, it’s so old-fashioned... But the music is timeless."

Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley are available to stream on ITVX.

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