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NLA News - home August 2004 Volume XIV Number 11

Russell Doust has a boy’s own adventure revisiting one of the popular magazines of his youth

Cover of The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39

Cover of The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39

‘A periodical which has become almost an institution. If any magazine for youth has kept the flag of romance and gallant endeavour flying, it is surely the “BOP"’. So said The Morning Post on the front endpaper of the Boy’s Own Annual, with Special Diamond Jubilee Supplement, vol. 61, 1938–39, the annual edition of the popular Boy’s Own Paper which was eagerly devoured, month after month, by thousands of adolescent boys in Britain and her overseas dominions,  from 1879 to 1967. Among them was this writer, growing up in Albury, New South Wales in the darkening days before World War II, where the BOP could be read free of charge in the School of Arts Library.

The National Library does not have a complete set, and indeed, as far as can be established, nor does any other Australian library, but it does have a substantial number of the individual Christmas and Summer issues from 1886 to 1902, as well as almost 60 of the annuals—from the first in 1879 to that for 1938–39. The National Library’s catalogue entry notes that ‘the annual volumes are cumulated editions of most issues of the Boy’s Own Paper’.

Complete or not, in the run lies a treasure trove of eclectic articles. On his Collecting Books and Magazines website in 2001, Jim Cameron reminds us that ‘the idea for BOP was first raised in 1878 by the Religious Tract Society’, so it is hardly surprising that there is an air of wholesome goodness about the articles. The baddies always get their just deserts, the goodies survive covered, if not necessarily with glory, at least with righteousness. There are naughty boys, indeed, although they seem later to turn into respectable young men who often encounter girls of nubile age and appearance. Both behave with impeccable propriety.

The 1938–39 Annual is as good a place as any to start an investigation of the magazine’s contents that must surely have influenced many youngsters, second only in this writer’s case to Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. A random delve into the index brings up ‘Holiday in the Italian Alps’, ‘A Night in a Light-House’, ‘Toboggan, Make Your Own’, ‘The General Gingers ’Em Up!’ (a short story).

Cover of The Boy’s Own Paper, Summer number, 1887
Cover of The Boy’s Own Paper,
Summer number, 1887

‘A Holiday in the Italian Alps’ turns out to be a half-page contribution from N. Zervadachy, from Alexandria, Egypt (for which he was paid 5/-). ‘Night in a Light-House’ is clearly by the hand of a professional, although it is no more than a full page with a line drawing of a lighthouse lashed by the sea. ‘Make Your Own Toboggan’ is a practical do-it-yourself project which a clever, handy boy (no doubt with a good deal of parental assistance) could undertake. All that would be needed was enough snow (the article comments that snow falls are infrequent and of short duration, even in England, so perhaps not many Australian boys made toboggans rather than billycarts).

As for the short story: they don’t (I hope) write them like this any more!

‘Can you raise a gun, Collet?’ inquired the Head, as he stopped the tutor of the Upper Fourth outside the gym. ‘Sir Hugh Roddy has asked me to bring another man and help him shoot his pheasants on Saturday. He is an old Bradling boy and tremendously  enthusiastic about the O.T.C. He is very anxious to meet you as Commanding Officer, and has suggested that you might hold a field-day in his park.’ ‘By Jove!’ [Does anyone still say this?] ‘We could do with a bit of new ground for our battles,’ exclaimed the O.T.C. commander, ‘but won’t we panic the old boy’s pheasants?’

Needless to say, Sir Hugh managed to pepper two of the boys with Number Six shot, by mistake of course, but all was smoothed over with a present of ‘a couple of Treasury notes’.

This is the well-known English minor public school sort of stuff, a genre which lasted until World War II, perhaps, and even now lives on in Harry Potter. But clearly the boys of the 1930s thrived on it, and some, no doubt, went on to fly Spitfires or joined the Navy, or the Army.

‘In Days of Old, When Knights Were Bo(w)led’. Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Paper, Summer number, 1897
‘In Days of Old, When Knights Were Bo(w)led’
Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Paper,
Summer number, 1897

But what about the early days? Let us go back to, say, 1886, and see what youngsters were being given then. After one gets past the advertisements, for Pears Soap, and Bird’s Custard Powder, and Jewsbury & Brown’s Oriental Tooth Paste (all surely aimed at adults), one finds, embedded in an engraved posy on the verso of the title page, a verse which shows the influence of the Religious Tract Society:

Where’er thy fields of pleasure lie,
Where’er thy lot of labour fall,
Raise thou an altar in the midst,
And offer there a sheaf of all.
For now, since once the Lamb hath died,
Whose blood doth sprinkle every shrine,
Our common things may there be laid,
All hallowed unto use divine.

There is no apparent fiction, although there is plenty of adventure—‘Hide-and-Seek in a Buried City’, ‘A Half-Holiday on the Otonabee River’, ‘Ten Days’ Cruise in the Sailing Canoe Winifred’. There are lots of line engravings, even one of a Group of Thames Swans ‘from an Instantaneous Photograph’, but of course not in colour.

Ten years later the recipe hadn’t changed much, except that humour had started to creep in (to sugar-coat the religious pill?)—humour that is pitched at the schoolboy level, just like the rest of the magazine.

‘Christmas Fun’: drawing by Cecil Aldin. Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39
‘Christmas Fun’: drawing by Cecil Aldin
Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39
‘Famous English Cricketers—1880’. Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39
‘Famous English Cricketers—1880’
Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39
‘Charge! The Bengal Lancers in Action: An Incident on the Western Front’. Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39
‘Charge! The Bengal Lancers in Action:
An Incident on the Western Front’
Reproduced from The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 61, 1938–39

By 1938, of course, the religious tracts had long since gone (but not the uplifting ‘Padre’s Talk’, prominent in each issue in a mid-page box), to be replaced by worthy doggerel like ‘Brown’:

He isn’t much to look at,
Isn’t Brown—
Five feet five or six, no more,
From toe to crown;
Seldom known to win a prize,
Though he does his best and tries,
But—he’s clear and steadfast eyes,
Has young Brown.
Clean in mind as well as heart
Is young Brown,
E’er a trier from the start,
Plucky Brown;
He’ll be always on his toes,
In life’s game to face his foes,
Till the final whistle blows—
Good man, Brown.

Probably most mid-century boys preferred ‘The Mystery of the Sempione’ which ran as a serial through the year, with rather more sophisticated illustrations, or ‘Hints for the Handyman—Drills and Drilling, A Handy Home-Made Brush, How to Make a Small Spirit Blow-Lamp’, or maybe ‘Hundred to One Chance: The Motor Race for the Saorstat Cup of 1930’, complete with pictures of Rileys and Aston-Martins and Alfa-Romeos. Indeed, technology plays a big part—new airliners for Imperial Airways, the old and the new ocean liners Mauretania, building Ford cars at Dagenham, modern military aircraft and so on. As well, there is plenty of sport—cricket, ice hockey, even golf.

Colour took a while to arrive, but when it did, by the late 1930s, it is of a remarkably high standard. The 1938–39 album boasts four colour plates, printed on super-calandered white paper and a dramatic frontispiece of a trimotored high-wing monoplane (red fuselage and yellow wing) entitled ‘Through the Blizzard’. There is a reproduction from the 1881 volume of a lithograph called ‘Famous English Cricketers—1880’; a reproduction of ‘Christmas Fun’, specially drawn for the Boy’s Own Paper by Cecil Aldin, RBA, first published in 1903 and also a lithograph; and ‘ Charge! The Bengal Lancers in Action: An Incident on the Western Front’, a reproduction in shades of blue that may have originally been a photograph but is more probably a painting intended to give the impression of a photograph.

Through the life of the Boy’s Own Paper there is a strong strain of manliness and clean living, and if there is not much mention of Godliness in its later years, it’s there in the sub-text. I suspect that for its many readers (and after all, there was no compulsion to read it) a bit stays with them. Rather like Sunday School, one can disown or disbelieve but not escape entirely.

RUSSELL DOUST is a former state librarian of New South Wales and the immediate past chairman of the Friends of the National Library

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