05/12/2010 by admin.

The old adage “never judge a book by it’s cover” certainly held true for two i recently read. Both of them were bought in Lincoln, where i went to university and recently had to return to to sort out some odds and ends. Lincoln has many great book shops but, unfortunatley, the best one is closed on Wednesdays and i completely forgot until i was about 5 steps from the door. I also discovered another good one has been replaced by a kitchen shop. Between that and the loss of BMC this recession hasn’t been a good time for old book lovers… but the show must go on!

The Fellow Who Won

This book is from “Nelson’s Travel Series” and has a cover depicting a Canadian mountie or Australian bushman…

“You forgot about the Kiwi’s, mate”

So obviously the story is about… a public school, in England. To be fair there is a small amount of “travelling” done in the first few chapters.  The heroes of the tale, kept in detention for not paying enough attention to their latin, escape from the window and ‘borrow’ a boat belonging to a nearby baronet, only to be left stranded on an island in the middle of a river that runs through his estate.

Not much enforcement of uniform rules at this school, clearly. And is that a beehive haircut?

The story mainly concerns the ups and downs of two boys at the school, John Richard Duncan - Ned to his friends - and Edwin Field. Ned is the adopted son of the headmaster, and expected to take over the school one day - a prospect that doesn’t fill him with joy, as he is no good at “books” and much prefers sport, being captain of all the school teams. Field on the other hand is distantly related to the head.

Over the course of the story’s fifty chapters, they- yes, fifty.

Though most of them are only a few pages long.

Anyway, over the course of the fifty chapters Field is determined to get his revenge for a prank Ned plays on him right at their very first meeting, when he and his friends throw Field into a tree. Soon field is overtaking everybody in their studies, annoying the headmaster even more with the contrast to Ned. Ned remains popular with the school in general, and nobody can touch him at sports, so Field resents him even more and tries various plans to ruin him… including throwing a sheet of notes with forged handwriting onto Ned’s desk at exam time, causing the teachers to think he is “cribbing”. Ned escapes this charge and narrowly passes the exam, however.

Most of the chapters deal with this rivalry between the two boys, but there are also some extra amusing short stories thrown in, such as Ned and a friend called Ranger getting lost during a “fox chase” (a fake hunt after human ‘foxes’ laying a trail with paper) and falling in a canal, Ned’s determination saves both their lives. There’s also a chapter about a young boy with toothache being too scared to see the dentist (the waiting room is described as having paintings of battles on the walls “to prepare the patients for the horrors to come”!), so some others attempt to extract his tooth themselves using home-made chloroform! But it is too diluted and has no effect, so he decided to go and see the real dentist after all.

The story then jumps forwards two years, and Field has become a terrible bully. Ned finally snaps and gives him the caning of his life… despite the fact Field is in fact in the form above! Ned escapes expulsion simply because he has nowhere to go, but a fake letter and other circumstances arranged by Field makes him decide to run away from the school and consider emigrating to Canada - which is as close as the story comes to what is on the cover!

The baronet from the beginning of the story steps in at the last minute and Ned returns to the school, in time to save Field’s life during a gale. After this he convinces the head to hand over the school to Field, who is much more intelligent, and let him start out on his own in the world. The tale ends with Ned and Field meeting again on a ship ten years afterwards… and that’s all i’ll say about the ending should anybody out there be interested enough to want to seek out this book for themselves.

Anyway i was actually originally going to blog about this book for an entirely different reason to the misleading cover. In fact for the reason i bought the book in the first place, just look at this:

Inscriptions from both world wars!

And people say those things “devalue” books!

The Schoolboy Speed Kings

After reading that book, i started on this one. As i read it i discovered that again the cover was barking up the wrong tree…

A speedy-looking aeroplane…

And a Mountie again, this time dropping by parachute!

So clearly the story is about… a public school in England. But with boys that are interested in… er, racing cars. Not a flying machine in sight! This time it is a school called Spandrels, located a few miles from the real-life racing track Brooklands (which is now, ironically, an air museum). Some senior boys, including the prefects and a boy called Slade, who figures heavily in the story to follow, break bounds and sneak into the circuit by an overhanging tree to watch the racing.

As they watch one of the cars flies off the track and right over them, to crash nearby. All pretence of secrecy forgotten they rush over to help the driver, but he is OK.

Nice soft heather to land on! The binding is still pretty good so i needed to hold the pages open with something.

To their horror they see the headmaster and some strangers in the milling crowd around the crashed car, but luckily they sneak away. However on the way back the strangers, in their fine sports car, stop and ask directions to the school.

One of the strangers turns out to be a new boy named Herman. He is of some sort of mixed race and doesn’t ‘think’ like a Briton, though most of this is down to the influence of his father and an Italian gangster named Mocatta who appears later. In one part, however, he laments the fact that he, a citizen of the empire, has been refused service in London resturants because of the colour of his skin.

Later various people, including a pair of adventurous junior boys and later on Slade, follow him as he sneaks out of the school at night. His father and Mocatta have hidden a racing car in a cave near the school and he test drives it around the local roads at night! The car is to be entered in “The Gold Cup”, an important upcoming race. Further inside the cave, as the juniors and later Slade discover, is a factory for dismantling stolen cars, printing fake money and various other illegal practices.

Slade is caught prowling around by Mocatta and is forced to join the gang eventually. They have built another car and enter both of them in the Gold Cup - Herman in the Speed King and Slade in the Speed Queen. The other boys break bounds to watch the race and all are caught by the headmaster this time. However Mocatta and Herman SR are on the scene and placate him. Then later Slade is asked by the gangsters to pick up and drop off ‘certian packages’. Another boy called Price is in on the secret (slipping in and out of the school and spending whole nights roaming around outdoors seems to be a common practice by this point!) and rides with him in the car. On the way back they are chased by a policeman for speeding, so Price throws the packages out, the larger one explodes with an earth-shattering roar and leaves a huge crater in the road!

Boom

At this point the story rather abruptly ends, as some Scotland Yard men show up at the school, and helped by some of the other boys who have decided to stay in bed and not prowl around the countryside (fancy that) round up the Mocatta gang and the Hermans, who they have “been watching for some time” and who prove to have their fingers in nearly every dirty pie.

The ending then briefly explains that Slade became the head prefect of the school (somehow escaping prosecution for speeding, handling stolen goods, drug trafficking and throwing a bomb at a policeman!). The headmaster retires and somebody else takes over the school, who puts Brooklands within bounds and introduces driving and motor engineering into the school’s lessons. Mocatta is deported and the Hermans leave the country voluntarily. A better ending might have been for Herman JR to stay at the school,  shake off the criminal ways he was bought up to follow, and become a decent member of society. Oh well, this was the 30’s! (well the book is undated but motor-cars seem commonplace in it, and it’s certainly pre-war, so that decade seems a good bet).

Posted in Sampson Low, Nelson, 1910's, 1930's | 3 Comments »

17/01/2009 by admin.

Announcement:

The British Comics Wiki is launched! Go to www.crystal-knights.co.uk/

The Post:

Having built up quite a collection of food, i was able to save some money recently. And, trying to ignore my need of new shoes (”the weather’s warming up anyway, it won’t rain much”) i decided to buy a Chums volume i’ve had my eye on. It was £45 (well, 40 as the woman very kindly gives a student discount), as opposed to £2.99 (and £10 delivery) for the 1906/7 volume… but then again that was from Ebay, which is often cheaper, and in horrendous condition. It even smells like it’s been near a fire at one point, my more adventruous nature would like to think it narrowly escaped the blitz, but more likely it was in an attic near where the chimney went up for many years.

Anyway, Chums was initially started by Cassell & Co. in 1892, pre-empting the perhaps better-remembered Boys’ Friend for a large-format story paper with serial instalments, in addition to a complete story of decent length, and the odd factual article. Then again Chums was most likely a penny when it started, whereas the Boys’ Friend was a halfpenny in the 1890’s, that would have accounted for sales success.

Following the style of the times, the size of the paper was what we’d today call arbitrary. Or perhaps “two thirds tabloid”.

Volumes of The Boys’ Friend 1903-4, Chums 1906-7 (the covers are only very slightly bigger than the comics within)  and a typical “half tabloid” (roughly A4 give or take a few mm’s - though older ones described as the same were actually a little bigger, especially in height, due to cheaper printing quality needing more ‘run off’ room.) comic.

The 1907 (i’ll call them by the later year now to save myself so much typing!) volume, despite being very rickety (it needed repairs i may cover in another post), contains a lot of fascinating material. The typical content of an issue seems to have been longish instalments of at least two serials, a complete story, sometimes a second complete story, as well as an “editors chat” (sometimes a page, sometimes two columns). At least one humourous comic strip, usually with it’s panels “scattered” on a text page and miscellaneous oddments of knowledge or snippets of interesting news and events.  A bit like a less-childish Chatterbox, really. Some issues would include a longer article in place of the second complete story, these articles usually profusely illustrated with photographs and related to some subject of direct interest to the readers, such as scouting.  Still more issues didn’t feature either, though, simply taking up the room with a lot of small articles or jokes.

The 1907 volume also reproduces the covers and adverts, in fact it’s just the same as the paper that was sold individually in the shops. There is, actually, the possibility that this is a bound volume of the paper that was bought every week by somebody and then bound together using the “official covers” that could probably be bought seperately. However the beginning of the book (mainly the bit of ‘tracing paper’ over the contents, as was the style of the times) suggests otherwise. I’m sure the advertisers and cover illustrators didn’t complain about the extra exposure anyway.

Two typical spreads from the 1907 volume. Note the comic strips (and the sometimes “scattered” layout of them), the short articles with bold headings and the adventure stories. Aside from the comic strips, covers and heading pictures for the stories (in a lot of serials this seems to have been the same each instalment) illustrations of the text stories are actually quite few and far between. The odd complete story seems to have quite a few, though. Perhaps it was just what would fit in once the story was done… or if the illustrators had time to provide any!

Photographs are actually a more common sight in the older volume than the new. Several articles on ships (this the HMS dreadnought, the insitigator of a whole era of naval warfare) and monarchs / heads of state feature them. The reproduction is actually quite good compared to the high-contrast, murky reproduction in some other papers. (It’s certainly better than the flash makes it look in this picture!)

Onto the newer volume now, covering 1932 to 1933 (the volumes start from roughly September). This one features no covers or adverts reproduced, and judging by the contents the quantity of factual articles, sage editorial advice, comic strips and amusing snippets had been reduced to almost nothing, a whole issue could seemingly pass without any of those. To make up for this, the quantity of exciting adventure stories was greatly increased. Serials were still the norm, with complete stories appearing in every issue. The number of illustrations, especially in the complete stories, was greatly increased too.

The reason for the apparent vanishing of the factual articles and such-like may be down to the fact this is a bound annual sold by the publisher, and not the individual issues. The articles may have been left out, providing only the stories. Or else the page count of the issues themselves may have been drastically reduced. The reasons for this are not too hard to work out - by this time Chums was published by the Amalgamated Press, presumably they had bought Cassell & co. out, and they wanted to run this “rival” into the ground. Or else sales were just dropping off anyway. That said the paper did seemingly continue into 1941 (so says a book i have), so perhaps it avoided “Graveyard week”. I bet the final volume, with inevitable war stories, makes fascinating reading! Another interesting note is that Chums’ seeming ‘main rival’, the Boys’ Friend, had actually vanished in 1927 (though if you ask me, from the limited exposure i have had to both, the Boys’ Friend was better!).

(Also - from the brief flick i had it appears that none of the AP staple characters of Bunter & co., Sexton Blake, Nelson Lee etc appared in Chums. I did notice the familiar styles of Eric Parker, illustrator to Sexton Blake’s golden age, illustrating a story though)

The spines. Actually a terrible pic but you can just make out the publisher’s names - as well as the shiny new card of my home-made repairs to the 1907 volume. The spine was just a sheet of cloth and some very crumbly 101-year-old card when i recieved it.

Two typical spreads, the short factual articles and anecdotes are now reduced to tiny box-outs that can be ignored. Comic strips are replaced by single “gag panels” too (not that the 1907 volume didn’t feature those in great number too, but in the 1933 one they are rarely seen at all). The rest of it is wall-to-wall swashbuckling adventure! The choice of these two spreads was actually not brilliant, as there’s hardly any pictures. They are a lot more common in this volume though - honestly!

Another thing that is a great deal more common in the 1933 volume is coloured plates. Some do appear in the 1907 volume though, and not in an “even pattern” either, so it’s probable that they were lost (i’m sure there’s the odd page missing too, i havent read a great deal of it yet. Despite immense quantites of PVA glue not all the pages are attached). In the 1933 volume though they are all present. I don’t know if they were sold with odd issues of the weekly paper (Chatterbox was apparently often sold with an optional plate - and only some of these plates appeared in the published annuals, meaning private-bound volumes had more) or just specific to the annuals. Photographs seem to only appear on the rear of the coloured plates too, and not in the actual comics. 

The content of the adventure stories in the 1933 volumes has two overriding themes when you turn to a random page. Flight is the first, the 20’s and early 30’s being a golden age of aerial navigation, without ground control or radar anybody who could afford a flying-machine could take to the skies whenever the fancy took them, and charge about at leisure. A close encounter with another aeronaut being the occasion for a friendly wave and maybe a little stunt display - and not terrified screams from air-traffic control, perhaps the scrambling of fighters and a front-page headline “NEAR MISS DEATH MANIAC! - It wouldn’t have happened if we all had ID cards” on every paper the following day.

The other common theme is war, most especially “The World War”. The stories are somewhere between later reflections on the horrors of the trenches, and the stories of “Let’s get ‘em! hurry up it’ll be over by christmas (notice we don’t say what christmas)!” that appeared during the conflict. So whilst the stories still provide the right amount of thrilling adventure and characters devoted to duty and doing everything they can to fight the enemy so long as they have breath in thier body, the tales still muse on the horrible toll, and the fact that not all of your friends, or you, will ever return home. Which if you ask me is the perfect balance - because if you want realism, go outside.

As an aside, just look at the picture below, taken from the very last complete story in the book - wouldn’t look out of place in Charley’s War, would it?

A final oft-seen theme in the book, primarily in serial form, is the boarding school story. This was, after all, the age of the Magnet and Gem. No obvious Charles Hamilton spotted… but he had his hands full writing for the Magnet, Gem, Penny Popular and who knows what else each week. So i doubt there is any.

Another interesting thing that appeared in the 1907 volume is this fold-out coloured plate, that was just tucked in near the back. It appears to be from the Boys’ Own Paper? I might frame it one day, even with that crease.

Posted in 1930's, Eric Parker, Chums, Cassell & co, Amalgamated Press, 1900's, Blog | 2 Comments »