| CARVIEW |
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
>>London Life magazine covers 1965-66
>>Politics at London Life
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.
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Magazines like to give their readers a little something extra at Christmas and the last issue of The London Illustrated Standard 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 London Illustrated Standard‘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.
>>Profiles of general weekly magazines
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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.
>>List of Carlton Studios artists
>>Horatio Bottomley and John Bull magazine
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.
>>Lilliput magazine profile
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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.
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.
>>Bryden’s career as journalist and academic
>>Observer obituary for Stoppard
>>Stoppard bibliography
>>Stanley Price obituary
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.
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‘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.
>>General weekly magazines at Magforum
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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.
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.
>>BBC: Last coal plant closes
>>https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Edmund_Mills_Hann