Classics Teacher Mrs Jenkinson-Brown Illustrates New Book

Classics teacher Mrs Jenkinson-Brown explains how she came to illustrate a newly published book.

Between 2017 – 2019 I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Cambridge Schools Classics Project – the makers of the Cambridge Latin Course – on the Amarantus Project, a free ancient history course for schools, particularly KS3 students, that serves as a prequel to the story of Caecilius in the CLC. The Project is based on the research of Dr Sophie Hay, an archaeologist who worked on the excavation of Insula 1.9 in Pompeii, with Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, in which they discovered graffiti suggesting one of the houses in the block was lived in by a freedman called Amarantus, who possibly ran a bar, and also had a mule and a dog whose skeletons were found in one of the rooms. 

Dr Hay had contacted me on social media after seeing my Greek Myth Comix work posted there (a website of comics explaining ancient literature and Greek myth that I started to support my GCSE and A Level students) about the possibility of working together, and once she had approached CSCP about developing the project, they also suggested me as the illustrator! Finally, bestselling Historical children's author Caroline Lawrence came on board to write the story of Amarantus and his neighbourhood that would support the history course.  

Over the next two years we set out a plan for what illustrations were needed to accompany Caroline’s story, and every half term and holiday I would sit down to draw, research, discuss with the rest of the team, and redraw until each illustration was right. Luckily, my husband was happy to pose for me as nearly every character!

On one project meeting we even had fun at Caroline’s house on the Thames, feeding seagulls mid-air so I could photograph them for the dock scene!

But every illustration of the city had to be based on historical fact – archaeological sites, evidence for clothing, existing graffiti. I spent a lot of time combing through my photos from our previous school trips to Pompeii, and online photo archives.  Most of the buildings in the story are just ruins now, so I needed to ‘rebuild’ them, sometimes even physically building models of how they would have looked so I could get accuracy in my backgrounds. Sometimes the research for my illustrations would impact Caroline’s story, such as working out how many people could fit in a 1m wide kitchen, or how big exactly might a wheel of cheese have been. She and Sophie would get excited and go off and find even more evidence to help get the story and the pictures exactly right. I’m proud to say that you could take my illustrations to Pompeii and hold them up and recognise the setting!  

In total, I produced 60 illustrations for the book and website. The course and story will be free on the internet, but all proceeds from the sale of the book go towards CSCP’s funding and keeping the course online. 

Mrs Jenkinson-Brown, Classics Teacher