Comics
Although the books were important to me, and taught me much, I had another overriding passion, shared with previous generations of boys, and sometimes, girls. Comics were an integral part of our lives, although I suspect I was a more obsessive reader than most of my friends. We had such a cornucopia of words and pictures to choose from that most of us would pick comics or stories at random according to taste, a natural way to handle this deluge of delight. As always however, I became immersed in this world, and had to have and read everything; a trait that has remained constant all through my life, and which has led to my becoming a collector, and finally, dealer.
I was lucky to be around while the golden age of British comics still flourished, although the war had diminished the market to some extent. British comics had taken a different route to the great American comic book industry, although for some years in the forties and fifties the two traditions existed side by side. From the early years of the century America had developed comic strips into a unique art form, usually printed in newspaper "funnies" sections, but later to be printed as stand alone "comic books" that had no equivalent in this country. British readers had no access to this extraordinary art form until the war, when American servicemen brought them into this country, and they slowly seeped into the mainstream, eventually changing the comic culture in this country for ever.
Before that change however, I was lucky enough to grow up in an era when the great British story paper comics still flourished. They had begun before the First World War in the form of "The Gem" and then "The Magnet". They were closely printed, densely written story papers, with few illustrations, and the Magnet especially had a great influence due to the legendary stories of Greyfriars school, written by Frank Richards, and featuring Billy Bunter. These essentially middle class stories featuring public schoolboys were devoured by myself and countless other working class slum dwellers, living and playing among the shattered detritus of our neighbourhoods, and yet we accepted this privileged world as easily as our own mean streets. I was as familiar with the idea of Latin prep, quadrangles, ivy covered walls and mortar boards, as any Eton alumni, which gave my first introduction to grammar school some years later a pleasing shock of the familiar, when I first cycled through the imposing gates of the City of Norwich school. These two seminal publications had already ceased printing by the time of my first comics, but I was lucky in that Billy Bunter continued his exploits in a series of books which I read obsessively, to augment the old copies of The Magnet which would be provided by various uncles, mainly I suspect for my father to read. Although I was born too late for the Magnet and Gem, I was just in time to absorb the last great flourish of the DC Thomson story paper empire.
Before the war DC Thomson had published, among many other titles, what came to be known as "The Big Five", the best selling story papers in the country. The first comic was The Adventure, first published in 1921, followed by The Rover and The Wizard in 1922, and some years later The Skipper in 1930, and finally The Hotspur in 1933. The Skipper died with the advent of the war, and so I had the remaining four titles to occupy me in the forties when my reading began in earnest.
I had read odd copies of these, discarded by my brother, until one day, walking home down Dereham road with my mother, just before Midland Street and the Baptist Church, we passed Smiths the tobacconist, and I spotted newspapers and comics inside. I dragged her in, and we were told that they would happily supply a weekly comic order. I went back later alone, having been told to pick my favourite comic, which I could have every week. Once inside the dark, exotically smelling interior though, and being confronted with so many colourful, exciting covers, there was obviously no way I could make a choice, and so I airily ordered one of each. When I told my Mother she rather bemusedly said "I didn't expect you to buy them all", but said no more, indulged my need, and so allowed my four 3d comics to add another shilling to a frugal household budget. I probably read every story of every issue for the next five years or more, and no shilling was ever better spent, than absorbed in those 60 closely printed pages featuring characters, worlds and exploits that have stayed with me to this day.
"The Adventure"
The Adventure had science fiction, thrillers and war, but also a staple of the genre, a football story, in this case " Baldy Hogan - the brains behind the team". Baldy Hogan was the player manager of Third Division Burhill United, a down to earth, working-class environment that frequently appeared in these comics, and that we knew intimately from our own experience.
"The Rover"
The Rover had more school stories than The Adventure, but also one of the most memorable characters of english literature: "Alf Tupper - The Tough of the Track". Alf Tupper first appeared in 1949, about the time I began reading the comic, and is one of the great working class heroes of the post-war years. Alf lived with his Aunt Meg in Anchor Alley, slept on the kitchen floor, and worked in a welder's shop for 25 shillings a week; his staple diet being fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. Despite his environmental disadvantages and his truculent working class temperament, he joined the essentially middle class Greystone Harriers Athletics Club, and by sheer will he forced them to accept him and became a success. Alf was a far cry from the hallowed halls of Greyfriars or Red Circle, but he was rooted in the working class life that we all knew, and was one of the first of the angry young men that flourished in mainstream fiction over the next ten years, and is not a million miles from Alan Sillitoe's " The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner". My other favourite in The Rover was a fanciful character called "Morgyn the Mighty, The World's Strongest Man", a loin-cloth clad figure who lived on a jungle island. I was especially impressed by him because I had somehow acquired a hard back book, with a glorious coloured dust jacket that featured him in a full length adventure story, illustrated by the wonderful Dudley Watkins, better known for his work on the DC Thomson comic strips including The Beano. The images from that book never left me, and many years later I tracked down another copy which is now one of my proudest possessions.
"The Wizard"
The Wizard had lots of adventure stories, not many school, but a good selection of sports stories, one of which, "Wilson", has become a legend. Wilson was "The Man in Black" who was already 150 years old when he first appeared in the comic, and was essentially a supernatural being with astonishing athletic abilities, who figured in real life events like the 1948 London Olympics, and the ascent on Everest, but also in remote regions of the world where his he pits his physical attributes against exotic adversaries. I recently had an old man totter into the shop, and ask if I had a Wizard comic with a Wilson story in it - he wanted to show his family who this exotic character was, that he obviously still talked about, to an increasingly sceptical audience, 70 years after he had first encountered him. I think he was beginning to wonder if his memories of Wilson were all a dream, but luckily I found him a copy and sent him away happy, clutching his prize, the memories of his childhood secured.
The Skipper ceased publication in 1941 due to war time paper shortages, and so I never had the opportunity to add it to my reading list. It had the lowest circulation of "The Big Five", and featured mainly adventure stories, but no outstanding characters, although it is still fondly remembered by a dwindling band of loyal ex-readers.
The Hotspur
The Hotspur was the last of "The Big Five" to appear, in 1933, and had a miscellaneous collection of adventure stories, but was held together by the core story of "Red Circle School", which was the mainstay from the first issue. Red Circle was a public school after the Greyfriars model, and for some years in the thirties competed head to head with it on a weekly basis. Although it was as important to me as the much more famous Magnet stories, it has largely faded from most peoples's memory, and never achieved the afterlife that Greyfriars did, when its parent publication expired.
Although the story papers had been predominant for thirty years, and would survive for another twenty, by the end of the thirties other influences had begun to take hold, and the comic strip reared its inventive head. DC Thomson, publishers of The Big Five, had had comic strips published in Scotland for some years, but in 1937 introduced The Dandy, followed the next year by The Beano. These early issues still had text stories, but comic strips dominated, and over time took over the whole comic. Film Fun and Radio Fun were also being published at this time, and again, comic strips dominated. The impact of these comics was strengthened by the publication of annuals, a uniquely British concept, released for Christmas, and one of the highlights of Christmas day for me, and thousands of others. I read all these comics as they came my way, with the annuals especially prized, and their images burned into our imagination in that grey post war environment. The art work brilliantly captured our world, or our world as we would wish it to be: especially the images of food, displayed in such abundance that it should have seemed cruel in our miserably rationed post war reality; but we loved the tottering edifices of cakes and ice cream, the steaming drum sticks and piles of creamy mashed potato studded with fat sausages, that seemed to be the inevitable component of so many stories. We never starved, even in those bleak days, and I don't remember even being particularly hungry; but we feasted vicariously in the pages of our favourite comics, so much so that real food, even in these plentiful days, has to be very special to match the magnificence of those wonderfully laden tables in the comic book world.