Early colour magazine cover: Illustrated London News of 1855
This is one of the earliest colour magazine covers. The Illustrated London News dated Saturday 22 December 1855 is also regarded as having set an trend for using colour at Christmas and for special issues, an idea later copied by magazines as varied as John Bull and the Radio Times.
The image comes with the caption ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night — All seated on the ground’, from a carol dating back to the 18th century. The drawing of the angel appearing before the shepherds is by [Sir] John Gilbert, who did thousands of images for the Illustrated London News.
Colour printing using wooden blocks: yellow, blue, red and black
The printing was by George C Leighton of Red Lion Square. The Leighton Brothers – Charles, George and Steven – were pioneers of colour printing using wooden blocks; yellow, blue, red and black were used for this illustration.
Fireworks at Versailles for Victoria’s visit to France
The issue carried several other coloured images and some double-page engravings, including this one of fireworks at Versailles for Queen Victoria’s visit to France.
Bring on the clowns: Christmas for London Life (24 December 1966)
The cover line for London Life – ‘A last-minute look at Christmas’ – was probably inspired by the fact that this 1966 issue was published on Christmas Eve. This weekly listings magazine was – incredibly – a 1965 relaunch of Tatler under magazine wunderkind Mark Boxer, who had made his name on Queen and then by launching the Sunday Times Colour Section, which evolved into the Sunday Times Magazine. London Life did not survive long, however, like two other famous Swinging Sixties magazines, Town and Nova, it thought money grew on trees. The following issue was the last.
Peter Cook as a cobbler elf and Dudley Moore as his bitchy fairy wife
A photograph inside showed satirists Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in costume for a charity event. They were kitted out for a grown-up take on fairy tales as ‘a cobbling elf married to a bitchy little fairy wife.’ Their dialogue included the lines:
And Tinker Bell told me about that pathetic pass you made at her down at the fairy-ring last Midsummer’s Eve when you asked her back here to see your last. She laughed so much she broke her bell and couldn’t tinkle for six months.
Notice the line ‘… you asked her back here to see your last’. Another reference to ‘last’ after the cover line. Was this a reference to the last issue of the magazine?
A self-referential Christmas cover from Nova magazine in December 1971
Nova was a woman’s monthly launched in the Swinging Sixties that liked to do things differently, as can be guessed from the cover line – ‘Adultery, rape, eroticism, extortion – another jolly Christmas issue!’ It’s also a self-referential cover, an idea with a strong tradition in British magazines, including at Christmas.
Magazines like to give their readers a little something extra at Christmas and the last issue of The LondonIllustratedStandard before Christmas 1895 was no exception. The photograph shows ‘Clever ballet dancers of great ability who have recently come from Vienna’ who are having ‘a quiet chat during the “waits” at a london music-hall’. Taking and printing such photographs was still a challenge and if you look closely, you’ll see that the image has been heavily touched up in places. This includes the smoke swirling up from the women’s cigarettes.
To add to the Christmas cheer, the LondonIllustratedStandard‘s cover lines promote ‘More than one hundred pretty girls in this number’, and features about women card players, and Miss Ellaline Terriss.
Terriss was a popular singer and actress. She was interviewed by Roy Plomley on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs in 1952. Although you can’t listen to the episode, you can see her choice of eight pieces of music. The Grim’s Dyke Hotel, former home of the dramatist and librettist WS Gilbert who changed the face of popular opera with Arthur Sullivan, has a colourful profile of her.
British and French generals respond to John Bull’s toast in 1914
At Christmas 1914, the First World War was into just its fourth month and the popular weekly magazine John Bull took a jingoistic tone with this colour cover illustration. It shows the John Bull character – long recognised as a personification of Great Britain itself – raising a champagne toast of ‘Gentlemen! Vive l’entente!’ at a military gathering. Lord Kitchener is at his right hand.
Note the cover line above the masthead: ‘Mice and Men – some reminiscences by Horatio Bottomley’. This was by the bombastic editor of the magazine. He was one of the most famous people at the time through John Bull – which was claiming to sell a million copies a week – his popular speeches, articles in various newspapers and his two stints as an Member of Parliament. However, he was also proven to be a swindler eight years later and sentenced to seven years’ hard labour.
The phrase ‘Mice and Men’, coined back in 1785 by Robert Burns, had been popularised by the play of that name by Madeleine Lucette Ryley. It had been staged at The Lyric Theatre in London in 1902 and in New York before being made into a film in 1916 starring Marguerite Clark. Ryley wrote 27 plays and her 1934 obituary in the New York Times quoted a 1901 report that ‘as far as women playwrights are concerned, she now has the field almost to herself’. She produced many of her own played and performed as an actress, including playing Ophelia in WS Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 1904.
The cover artwork was by what looks like ‘T Gerber’ of the Carlton Studio, an art agency. Carlton was founded in 1902 by four London-based Canadian artists. Its artists did a lot of advertising and magazine work, such as the cover of Organiser in 1920, and a double page for Woman’s Own in February 1945.
Ronald Searle’s devilish schoolgirls grace a 1949 cover of Lilliput
Ronald Searle had cartoons published in magazines such as London Opinion from 1940 and came to fame with his St Trinian’s characters after the war. This December 1949 cover for Lilliput was one of his earliest in colour. It was only the third Lilliput cover not drawn by Walter Trier, who had illustrated the covers with his man, woman and dog cartoons since the first issue in July 1937.
Searle married Kaye Webb, the magazine’s assistant editor, in 1947, though they divorced twenty years later after he left the family and moved to Paris. She compiled The St Trinian’s Story: The whole ghastly dossier in 1959. Two years later she became editor of Puffin Books, a post she held until 1979.
Tom Stoppard article in Town magazine – Ronald Bryden was editor
The recent obituaries for Tom Stoppard have referenced his early career as a newspaper journalist on the Western Daily Press and then theatre critic on Scene, a weekly magazine about the world of entertainment (1962-63). During this time he also wrote freelance articles, an early one of these being a 1960 profile of John Steinbeck for Men Only (‘The articulate peasant, November, pp 72-75). However, one article he wrote that was fundamental to his future career as a playwright has been overlooked, and is not even listed in some Stoppard bibliographies.
That article was a two-page humorous piece in the January 1964 issue of Town magazine called ‘I say I’m a writer’. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was two years away.
Town was a top-notch men’s monthly. It had been launched in 1952 as a spin-off fashion quarterly from trade weekly Tailor & Cutter by John Taylor. By 1964 it was published by Michael Heseltine (who would become a Conservative MP in 1966) and Clive Labovitch at Cornmarket Press. Alongside Stoppard, the January issue carried articles by bestselling adventure writer Hammond Innes; English-American writer and critic Anthony Haden-Guest; and Clement Freud, the chef and food writer. The art director was Roy Carruthers who went on to greater fame as an artist. Stanley Price, the features editor, had been a reporter for Life magazine in New York and became a playwright and screenwriter.
None of this justifies my claim for the importance of this article to Stoppard’s career; it is the name of Town‘s editor that is the key. It was Ronald Bryden (though by his obituaries and profiles you would never know it; Town is never mentioned). However, two years later he was The Observer‘s theatre critic and kickstarted Stoppard’s career as a playwright by lauding Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead when it was first staged at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival by a student group, the Oxford Players. His review, headlined ‘Wyndy excitements’ (August 29, p15), was illustrated with a photograph of Stoppard and the caption ‘The most brilliant debut since John Arden’s’.
Bryden had joined the staff of Town as as features editor in the autumn of 1962, replacing Michael Parkinson (who would go on to do the first Parkinson show on the BBC in 1971). Bryden took the editor’s chair a year later after Nicholas Tomalin left. Tomalin become one of the great foreign correspondents but was killed, aged 42, in the Golan Heights in 1973 while reporting on the Arab–Israeli war for the Sunday Times.
Three Town covers under Ronald Bryden: Dec 1963; Jan and Feb 1964
the December 1963 issue with Bryden as editor included features by travel writer Eric Newby and jazz singer and critic George Melly. In the January 1964 issue that featured the Stoppard article, Bryden wrote a nine-page feature, ‘The Shakespeare world’ on the Bard’s quatercentenary. The next issue was on firmer men’s magazine ground with a ‘The British and sex’ cover heading up a ‘predictions’ issue for twenty years hence: Malcolm Muggeridge on George Orwell’s 1984; suggestions for the next generation of movers and shakers; and the prospects for immortality. By the April issue, Bryden (1927–2004) was gone however. He had left to become theatre critic at the New Statesman and then the Observer.
Michael Billington in the Guardian described Bryden in an obituary as ‘one of those rare theatre critics who influences the art he writes about’. Billington wrote:
In the summer of 1966, as drama critic of the Observer, Bryden went to see a student production of a new play by an unknown writer on the Edinburgh Fringe. The play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which Bryden rapturously described as an ‘erudite comedy, punning, far-fetched, leaping from depth to dizziness’. Within minutes of reading Bryden’s review, Kenneth Tynan, in his role as literary manager of the National Theatre, cabled the play’s author requesting a script.
Tynan was Bryden’s predecessor as Observer theatre critic. The London premiere of Rosencrantz was staged the next year at the Old Vic, and Stoppard’s career took off.
But that January 1964 article in Town demonstrates that Stoppard was not ‘an unknown writer’ to Bryden.
John Taylor was a name with global cachet in the 1950s and the Swinging Sixties. As the editor of the tailoring trade weekly Tailor & Cutter his word was law in men’s fashion, from London to Paris to New York. In 1952, he launched Man About Town as a consumer fashion quarterly. By 1963, when this advert was published in Town, the magazine was in the hands of Michael Heseltine’s Cornmarket Press.
Heseltine was not very kind about Man About Town after he took over the title. In interviews 30 years later, he told advertising trade weekly Campaign (a Haymarket title): ‘It … had little to commend itself … Clive [Labovitch] recruited a team that was to turn this tatty quarterly into a glossy monthly for men.’ This floccinaucinihilipilification (not often I get a chance to use that word) glosses over the fact that men’s magazines were hard work and very difficult to make money from. US title Esquire had already failed to take off in Britain and it would be 1988 before GQ arrived. In fact, Cornmarket never made money from Town – it became Haymarket after the company nearly went bust and had to be rescued by the printers Hazell, Watson & Viney.
So this advert from ICI for Terylene has a certain irony because Britain’s biggest chemicals company turned to John Taylor when marketing its polyester fibre in Town:
Helped by John Taylor*, we have devised a series of advertisements for four issues of Town. In these advertisements he will examine the new cloths, look at particular midweight suits, talk to tailors who made them, and find out the effect they have on girls. Read them. *Editor of The Tailor and Cutter
After being demobbed from the RAF in 1945. Taylor spent a quarter century in charge of Tailor and Cutter. He made it ‘the most quoted trade paper in the world’, said The Times. According to the Daily Mail: ‘no man nowadays may be regarded as having achieved celebrity until his clothes have been criticised by The Tailor & Cutter.’ And it was the same in the left-leading side of the press: The Guardian said: ‘The considerable increase in the public interest in men’s wear fashion in recent years must be largely attributed to the writings of the editor of The Tailor & Cutter.’ For US magazine Time, Tailor & Cutter was ‘the bible of the British needle trades’ and ‘dictatorial but often waggish’; while round the corner in Manhattan the New Yorker labelled it ‘the leading men’s fashion industry journal’.
Town carried on with some great staff, amazing articles and advertising-influenced design until January 1968.
‘Bargains in everything and anything are readily secured through … which is used by private persons for disposing of things they no longer require.’ That copy could describe eBay or Etsy today, but in 1898 it was from an advert in The Longbow, a penny weekly, for The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart newspaper. It was ‘THE paper for Buying, Selling, and Exchanging by Private Persons.’
However, the paper offered far more than you’ll get from eBay today, because: ‘Advice on every possible subject may be obtained on application to The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart newspaper, which has the largest staff of Eminent Experts of any paper in the Kingdom, and these Experts freely advise its readers. THE paper par excellence for Amateurs.’ Try getting any kind of advice from eBay; its staff are only expert in how to avoid talking to their customers.’
The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart was founded by lawyer and magazine entrepreneur William Cox and celebrated 100 years of publication in 1968. Back in 1898, it appeared three times a week, on Monday Wednesday and Friday. Cox died in 1879, but Exchange and Mart pioneered classified advertising and became one of the biggest-selling weekly magazines. Although the magazine closed in 2009, the website exchangeandmart.co.uk today offers 100,485 cars and vehicles for sale.
Cox also bought The Queen from Samuel Beeton, which was published by his nephew Horace Cox. Horace ran his Field Press from Windsor House in Bream’s Buildings (the name of a street off Fetter Lane north of Fleet St) where he printed magazines for Pearson including Pearson’s Monthly and The Royal, and other titles such as Pick Me Up.
Advert for Powell Duffryn coal from Organiser magazine in 1920
How times change. This advert is from a century ago at a time when coal was vital to Britain, and the industrialised world. The Powell Duffryn Steam Coal Company in Cardiff was producing four million tons of coal annually. Now, It’s just over a year since Britain’s last coal-fired electricity power station closed down. It was quite a moment when the 57-year-old plant, in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, finished operations. It marked the end of Britain’s 142-year reliance on coal for power.
The manager, WR Hann, has his name at the top of the advert, which is from the Organiser magazine dated July 1920. Hann was no doubt proud of mining so much coal. In fact, Powell Duffryn was the greatest coal-producing company in the world. Notice the range of coals it produced: smokeless steam large, large, small, washed nuts, beans, peas, grains and duff (a fine, dry coal used in boilers for generating electricity, and by refineries), foundry and furnace coke – no cheap nutty slack there!
There’s also the line ‘contractors to the British Admiralty’. The British Navy had begun building ships powered by steam boilers fulled with coal in the early 1820s. Those ships still had sails, but coal alone powered Britain’s dreadnoughts in the first decade of the 20th century, though these were replaced with a combination of oil and coal, and then oil alone during the First World War.
Organiser magazine cover, July 1920
As well as actual coal the advert lists other products: national benzole (motor spirit), sulphate of ammonia, solvent naphtha, heavy naphtha, naphthalene, salts, anthracene paste, anthracene oil pure benzole, tollole, creosote and pitch. Some of these were produced from coal tar, or as a byproduct of coal processing. An example is naphtha, a highly flammable liquid hydrocarbon produced when making coke for steel foundries. The use of some of these is now restricted; creosote, once a familiar sight (and smell) as a waterproof paint for garden sheds and railway sleepers has been found to cause cancer. It is still used for telegraph poles.
Popular Flying in 1934 when it was edited by Biggles creator WE Johns
A Heartfield montage on the cover of Picture Post dated 9 September 1939
Hand-drawn title for Drawing magazine, February 1916
José Ferrer as Cyrano de Bergerac on this Everybody’s magazine cover from 10 October 1951. The design has a 3D effect, with the nose appearing to stand proud of the page
The first issue cover for Carlos, an inflight magazine for Virgin in 2003
Detail of Helena Christiansen’s face from the Vogue cover
Adrian Flowers took this Nova cover (July 1971)
Last issue of Rupert Murdoch’s Today newspaper (17 November 1995)
Home Chat, a leading women’s popular weekly, from 14 May
53 Bedford Square in London’s Bloomsbury. This Georgian building is up for sale at £12 million
A different look for the cover of Smash Hits, also in February 1984
The Kitchener poster shown in the third part of the Great War partwork in 1933
Chilprufe advert from Queen magazine in 1961
Racy illustration by Oldham for the weekly magazine Woman
This is the cover for the relaunch of Woman’s Own in 1937 as a colour weekly. Note this is a true self referential cover because the woman is holding a copy of the magazine she appears on!
Marion Jean Lyon in 1923
Blighty pin-up cover for the popular men’s weekly by MB Tompkins in 1958 (16 August)
The Penny Magazine shows itself being sold from what looks like a railway station stall in 1904
Bovril advert of Hercules fighting a lion by Stanley Berkeley from Young Gentlewoman magazine of 1892
Leader magazine led the world in putting Marilyn Monroe on its cover in April 1946
Girl Illustrated front cover with Dr Who girl Katy Manning and a Dalek
A colour cover for Crusoe magazine of January 1925
Tom Browne’s drawing shoe incredible attention to detail; he could do so much with so little
New Illustrated starts to change its name to Record Weekly in 1920 (January 17 issue)
Billy Fury? James Dean?
Tatler magazine’s front cover in 1901
Ronald Searle’s cartoon glossary to printers’ jargon
A whacky contrast in all senses of the word from the previous week
Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Blighty from 1956
Woman’s Own liked clean cover designs in the 1930s with few cover lines – but notice Ursula Bloom promoted her for a special article (30 July 1938)
Margaret Banks drew this charmer for Home Chat magazine in 1938. Note the baby is wearing reins
Look, spring 2009
Acorn User magazine cover from December 1982. This issue would have been edited from the Bedford Square offices
One of Miss Fish’s drawings of Eve, from the popular Tatler column
FHM June 2004. But what’s happened to the nipples on Abi Titmuss?
Racy French weekly Vie Parisienne from 1926
HMS Queen Elizabeth super dreadnought by Harry Hudson Rodmell on the cover of New Illustrated magazine (18 October 1919)
Beautiful Britons glamour magazine first issue cover from November 1955
John Gwynn’s poem ‘A Death Mask’ in the Strand magazine appears to have been inspired by a drowned woman in Paris
Winnie the Pooh appeared exclusively in colour in six 1928 issues of Home Chat
Karl Marx as the Uncle Sam derivative of Kitchener
Madonna on the front cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in the US for May 1990
Eddie Hapgood, the England and Arsenal captain, on the cover of Weekly Illustrated in 1934 with his son, Tony
Raphael Sabatini’s Captain Blood brought to visual life on the cover of Pearson’s Magazine (1930) by Joseph Greenup
Marc Jacobs 2014 Playboy special issue in perspex box
Je Suis Charlie – Charlie Hebdo’s website after the murderous attack on its Paris office
Home Chat cover from 19 September 1914 with a front cover story about supporting the Queen’s Guild, which had been set up as a way for women to back the war effort
The pointing man from an advert in London Opinion magazine, 17 September 1910
The Observer Magazine cover shows Alexei Sayle as the Hitler diaries forger in the 1991 TV series Selling Hitler
The return of the Daleks to Dr Who in 2005 sparked this gatefold cover for the Radio Times
‘K of K’ – Kitchener of Khartoum – caricature by Will Scott on the cover of Drawing magazine in February 1916
Strand magazine front cover from March 1891 by George Charles Haité
Woman’s Fair from January 1940 filled with content from the US, including a Jon Whitcomb cover illustration
Town magazine and the`Girl in Red Water up to her Charlies’ cover from September 1965
The first Sunday Times colour section from 4 February 1962 (though the cover is not dated)
Debbie Harry and Blondie on the first issue cover of Smash Hits from November 1978
Madonna rides again on the cover of Cosmopolitan with its May 2015 issue
Evil victim: Diana Rigg on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, 28 February 1982
Peter Hack-Brookes cover for Oz from September 1971 – a copy from a US magazine cover by Peter Driben from 1949
Cover of BOAC’s inflight magazine Welcome Aboard in 1970
Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm, with his flamboyant moustache and military uniform, at the start of World War I. He is described as ‘The Ravager’
Madonna cover from i-D dated March/April 1984
Front cover title from Woman’s Own from 19 May 1955
This logo from the Daily Mail echoes the original masthead for Answers Magazine
This cat with its amazing, lip-licking tongue is from a Whiskas advert of 1964
The first issue cover of John Bull from 1 April 1903
Opening of 5-page article on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey with sketches by Clive Arrowsmith in Town magazine
A letterpress flyer for the latest serial in Pictorial Magazine – could this 1902 image have sparked Alfred Leete’s imagination?
The glossy monthly Queen occupied the old Tit-Bits office in 1947
Cover of Le Petit Journal of 25 June 1916
Anna Wintour was told this Madonna cover would not sell
Vivian Blaine from the London stage adaption of the musical Guys and Dolls on the cover of Picture Post in 1953
Kate Moss in Corinne Day photograph on cover of the Face in July 1990
Lilian Hocknell artwork revived for Christmas 2014 Vintage View from Woman’s Weekly magazine cover
John Bull in 1917 – the magazine was used as a promotional tool for Horatio Bottomley’s financial schemes
Diana Rigg as The Avengers’ Mrs Peel on the cover of TV World in 1965
The first Daleks cover for Radio Times in November 1964
‘Mother Christmas’ cover for Needlewoman magazine from December 1925
Weekly Illustrated magazine pioneered photojournalism (3 March 1936)
Cute cover-up: Naomi Campbell on the cover of GQ in April 2000
This 1946 holiday season cover from John Bull forecasts a web fate for the slumbering gent
An in-your-face spread from Loaded in May 1995
Kate Greenaway painting called ‘Darby and Joan’ on Illustrated London News – or is this a pair of radical printers?
Mussolini writes for the right-wing Britannia magazine in 1927
New Statesman 1993 jan 29 John Major Clare Latimer
Magforum blog 