COMICALLY

George Orwell, Great-Wilson

and the Tuppenny Bloods

BENNY GREEN

One of the first, and surely one of the most captivating exhibitions of 1971 will be Michael Kustow's tribute to the British comic, to be held at the Institute of Contem- porary Arts and entitled 'AAARGH'. To be pedantic about it, the most fascinating part of the show will not be the comics at all, but the tuppenny bloods. The distinction is quite clear. Comics use text to amplify the pic- tures; tuppenny bloods use pictures to amplify the text. One of the points which an exhibition of this kind cannot therefore help revealing is the steady increase in the last twenty years of the comic at the expense of the story paper, a tendency suggesting not only a general decline in juvenile literacy but a parallel increase of dependence by readers of the telly age on box pictures.

Issues of this kind are interesting enough, but by far the most intriguing feature of 'AAARGH' is the exhibits that will not be on show. Apart from Billy Bunter and com- pany, the most memorable boys' pulp litera- ture of the last fifty years has undoubtedly been the famous nap hand of tuppenny bloods, Hotspur, Wizard, Adventure, Rover and Skipper. These papers, particularly the first two, created a folklore of their own, through which there passed a constant stream of classic characters acting out classic plots, and if the whole business was out- rageously derivative, at least its literary ante- cedents were impeccable, from Strang the Terrible by kind permission of Edgar Rice Burroughs, to the school stories, in which for Red Circle read Greyfriars, for Pinky Farrell Harry Wharton. and for Mr Smugg Mr Quelch. -It seems inconceivable that any exhibition of British comics, or indeed any kind of treatise remotely connected with the subject, should dare to omit such material.

And yet Mr Kustow has had no choice, which brings us to the curious case of the publishing house of D. C. Thomson of Dun- dee, whose imprints include the five famous tuppenny bloods. Three times Mr Kustow approached Thomson's, and three times the firm reacted like Caesar being offered a crown. Kustow, of course, is not the first researcher to get the cold shoulder from Thomson's, nor will he be the last. As the vintage years of the five papers have steadily evolved into valuable sociological specimens, so has Thomson's obstinate refusal to grant facilities become a byword among journal-. ists and editors, until by now the company's intractability has become legendary. They always refuse, and they never say why. They have a perfect right to behave in this way, being under no obligation to anybody, not even to people like Kustow and myself, whose tuppences they were presumably once very pleased to collect. But it is all very odd, a genuine mystery, in fact. Let us recapitu- late.

Here we have an eminently respectable and highly successful publishing house which stumbled many years ago on to the fact that working-class children need a mythology expressed in terms they can understand. Other publishing houses grasped the same point at about the same time, but none of them proceeded to act on it with quite the same flair. It is usually assumed that the personalities of Thomson's five weeklies were interchangeable, which is grossly to under- estimate the cleverness with which the com- pany rang the changes. Indeed, the subtle gradations of emphasis in the five periodicals was one of Thomson's finest achievements. While Hotspur stayed closest to the Grey- friars myth at one end of the spectrum, Skipper went in for red-blooded, sub-Jack London adventure at the other, with the middle ground covered by detection, pro- fessional sport and any other theme likely to appeal to the young urban male. The result was that by my day these five papers had become the boyhood equivalent of the adult newspaper, an unshakable habit, an accoutrement of life as ingrained as ice-cream or homework. In other words, a brilliant suc- cess story, a publishing phenomenon, and yet whenever anyone has been seen approaching, like Kustow, carrying a laurel wreath, Thom- son's have slammed their gates, almost as though they were deeply ashamed of them- selves. Why?

Over the years two different theories have been suggested as reasons for the firm's bash- fulness. Both are untenable but perhaps worth mentioning. One is that Thomson's do not wish to be exposed for printing the same story twice. Working on the assumption that a generation of schoolboy readers lasts no more than seven years, Thomson's might republish the identical text for a new rising readership. I know they did this at least once, because I well remember the morning in 1939 when I compared my current edition of Adventure with a 1932 edition of the same paper brought along by a classmate. But who cared then, and who cares now? Not only is such a practice not illegal, but it is not even morally reprehensible, because seven years really does see all the old readers off the premises.

The other theory is more formidable but in the end just as absurd. It has often been remarked how closely some of the Thomson serials were linked to more respectable liter- ary sources. Almost every one of their best tales seems to have been the lovechild of a classic work embalmed between hard covers. Sometimes the ghost of plagiarism hovers so persistently round the :Thomson plotmaking department that the sources begin to blur into each other, forming an impossible melange which certainly includes Stevenson, Dumas, Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace. Anthony Hope and John Buchan. Even the Thomson stable's great masterpiece, The Truth About Wilson, has its roots in a much more exalted soil that the weekly pulp market. and because Wilson is the archetype of all the Thomson heroes, it is perhaps worth examining him a little more closely.

By the time he emerges from his Pennine fastness, Wilson is already a little long in the tooth for physical conquest. To be exact. he is one hundred an thirty eight years old, lives on grass and water, runs barefoot, and owes his success to a mysterious herbal brew whose ingredients he will reveal- to nobody. not even the writer of the story. From time to time he might run amok and indulge in the sybarite luxury of a peanut, but broadly speaking it would be accurate to describe him as clean-living. In one episode he takes a giant leap and breaks the world long jump record while in the act of running a three- minute mile, and in another he prepares to bowl at the Australian batsmen by placing lighted candles on each of the three stumps and then snuffing them out with bouncers travelling too fast for the eye to follow. No wonder that of the entire Thomson gallery it is Wilson who has remained the longest in the minds of his readers.

His most tangible legacy is a parlour game still played occasionally by grown men of my own vintage who ought to know better. The game is called 'Wilsonisms' and its aim is to arrive at the ultimate' absurdity in physical achievement:

Ist Player: Wilson climbed Mount Everest. 2nd Player: At night.

3rd Player: Barefoot.

4th Player: Without oxygen.

1st Player: With a twelve-stone man on his back.

2nd Player: In fifteen minutes.

3rd Player: Backwards.

4th Player: With a tray of drinks in each hand.

The antecedents of such a character are not hard to trace. The longevity, the stoicism, the sparse diet, the continence and the pro- digious strength evoke a formidable list of sources, from the Nietzschean Superman to the Elders of Back to Methuselah and Wells's experimentalists in The Food of the Gods. But what if Wilson does embody a few of the most popular intellectual myths of the nineteenth century? To the schoolboys of the 1930s he was just a great athlete who lied about his age, and it is ridiculous to pretend that any publishing house circulating his ad- ventures would give a thought to the possi- bility of a prosecution for plagiarism.

Having disposed of the only two theories offered for Thomson's coyness in the face of intellectual advances, I feel a moral responsi- bility to offer an explanation of my own. Now I admit that the story I am about to tell sounds far-fetched, and that the fact that I have kept it to myself for twenty years opens up a rather large credibility gap. But twenty years ago there was nothing like the same interest either in Thomson's publications or their attitude towards researchers, and it is only more recently that the full significance of the story has dawned on me. Having said that. I acknowledge that it is an improbable tale I have to tell, and that the frivolity of its background is justified only by its complete factual accuracy. Anyway, for what it is worth, here is the story.

In the autumn of 1950 I went to Dundee to play the saxophone in a waterfront dance- hall. Being a born grumbler I was surprised to find both the town and the job congenial, and decided to settle in for the winter. What attracted me was the liberated feeling that Dundee gave me, as though the overnight train journey and the nearby presence of the alien North Sea had magically erased my past. After all, I told myself, I was closer

now to Norway than I was to home, and the knowledge somehow made me more relaxed, more expansive, than I had ever been in my life before. I record all this, not to pump up my own ego, but to explain what happened to me. Overnight I had become the kind of man who inspires confidence, and it is that fact alone which is relevant to my story.

I had not been in the town for two days before 1 saw that what faint echoes of bohemianism existed there, revolved about the musicians, as they always did in such towns, and perhaps still do. I found that because I was a musician I was practically a .celebrity on arrival. Of course, no mere saxophonist could hope to challenge the town's real idols of that time, the great inside forward Billy Steele and a local bantam- weight called Bobby Boland, but there was still a certain status attached to my job. As I trotted down the Canongate- steps each evening on my way to work, the girls would nudge each other and giggle, while the more knowing men would smile and pass the time of day with me. Before long I knew every eccentric, every character, every screwball, male and female, in town.

One local I came to know quite well was a tall, skinny chap in his thirties whose name and face have melted away but whose starched white shirt collars and tiny tie-knots still stand before my eyes. Let us call him Tommy. At first I thought there was nothing out of the ordinary about him. You used to find dozens like him hanging round the band- stand of every dancehall in Britain, basking in the reflected glory, rolling their heads in time to 'Woodchopper's Ball', convinced that their behaviour practically made them musicians by proxy. Like all of them, Tommy was harmless. Like almost none of them, he kept his mouth shut most of the time.

He came into the hall at least once every week, sometimes twice. and because there was always a bottle of something concealed somewhere on his person, the musicians were perfectly willing to treat him just as though he were an equal. Long before my arrival he had discovered that sticking close to the musicians was a much more effective way of picking up girls than going through the strict- tempo ritual of the dance floor. He was in fact, a kind of honorary member of our crowd, which was frankly surprising. As I came to know him better I realised that he was not quite typical of the bandstand . hangers-on after all. Ours was the sort of ballroom where the management took the locks off the lavatory doors on Saturday nights, and Tommy, with his stiff collars and social pretensions, would have been much

better suited to the bourgeoisie at the local Palais up in the centre of the town. But he

always used to say that we played the best jazz in the county. Who was I to argue with him?

One night he and I found ourselves at the same party, and for the first time since I had known him, he became drunk enough to talk about himself. He told me he was a" junior executive in 'the comic factory', by which he must have meant Thomson's, although he never mentioned the name. I was immedi- ately interested. For years I had nurtured journalistic ambitions. and what more sale- able that an account of a comic factory? But when I suggested it. Tommy looked horrified.

'Out of the question. More than my job's worth.'

'But .why?'

'Ever hear of a chap called Orwell? He wrote about our place once. Kicked the shit out of it. he did. They still haven't got over it. Naturally they'll do what they can to stop it happening again'

I think in time I might have been able to bring him round, but that week our entire band was fired and I came home. I never thought of Tommy again till the other day when I read of Mr Kustow's troubles.

I did eventually read Orwell's 'Boys' Weeklies', and it struck me as one of the most ingenious. brilliant and wrongheaded essays of this century. Orwell, who I am certain made the deadly error of coming to the Thomson products for the first time as an adult, was convinced he had stumbled on a reactionary plot to dilute the revolutionary fervour of the working classes, and actually advocated the creation of a 'left-wing comic'. But then Orwell was rather prone to making political mountains out of literary molehills. Wodehouse once complained. 'He was apt to take some book I wrote in 1907 and draw all sorts of portentous conclusions from it. Dash it, in 1907 I was practically in swaddling clothes.' A much more deadly rebuttal came from another Orwell victim Frank Richards. who sank his persecutor without trace with the mild remark. 'Jolly good writer, Orwell'.

Whatever the truth, whether Tommy really was a junior executive in the comic factory or just a drunken fantasist I couldn't say, but if Thomson's really are hiding from the in- telligentsia because of a bee George Orwell got in his bonnet thirty years ago about Wil- son, Strang the Terrible and company being corrupters of socialist passion in the play- ground. then it is peculiarly appropriate that Michael Kustow's exhibition is called 'MARCH'.