Father Christmas in "Punch", reproduced here. The caption reads: In 1951 an editorial in "The Times" opined that while most adults may be under the impression that [the English] Father Christmas is home-bred, and is "a good insular John Bull old gentleman", many children, "led away ... by the false romanticism of sledges and reindeer", post letters to Norway addressed simply to Father Christmas or, "giving him a foreign veneer, Santa Claus". Differences between the English and US representations were discussed in "The Illustrated London News" of 1985. The classic illustration by the US artist Thomas Nast was held to be "the
Thomas the Tank Engine and connecting rods are therefore not externally visible. Awdry was unsatisfied with one detail of the illustration — the fact that the front end of his footplate featured a downward slope, which meant that his front and back buffers were at different levels. This was an illustrator's mistake that was perpetuated in subsequent books. The accident, in "Thomas Comes to Breakfast" was partly devised as a means of correcting this. Thomas has always been shown with a curved front buffer beam in the television series. Unfortunately, despite creating the visual image of such an iconic character, Payne did not receive