Happy Christmas to all our readers!

Some objects in the Archive collection clamour to be heard. This year's Christmas tale features one such object. Dated 20 December 1951, it is a small school notice from the Headmaster, Canon A D James (Headmaster 1931-1956).

The slip of paper has none of the gravitas of many other documents in the Archive, but it opens a window onto more innocent times when ‘comic papers and cheap thrillers’ were seen as a real threat to the teenage brain. Curiously, the Headmaster specifically mentions the "Eagle" as an exception to what was an implied ban on other reading matter.

Founded by Marcus Morris and Frank Hampson, the first edition of the Eagle was published on 14 April 1950. It immediately captured the imaginations of young readers and became instantly popular, soon selling nearly a million copies a week. Writing in The Guardian (10 December 2010), Daniel Tatarsky explains,  

The quality of the printing, the amazing colour and the breathtaking imagination of the main story made it seem as if it was from out of this world. That first cover found the Earth in the middle of a food crisis, with the launch of a desperate mission to reach Venus and salvation – a storyline which spoke vividly to readers still living on food rations after the second world war.

Rev. Marcus Morris, the paper's editor, had been ordained in 1939 and was a Chaplain in the RAF during the war. The temptingly colourful stories of thrilling adventure in the Eagle were a deliberate antidote to the corrupting influence of what were regarded as immoral or overly-violent comics, particularly those being imported from the US. 

Its highly popular hero was Dan Dare, the Eagle’s pipe-smoking ‘Pilot of the Future’ who battled weekly with his arch-enemy, the Mekon. Brought to life with meticulous attention by Frank Hampson, the chisel jawed Dare was based on heroic Second World War RAF pilots and he showed the same loyalty and bravery in his own mission to keep the spaceways safe. 

We don’t know what prompted the notice in the first place. Perhaps it really was 'in the interests of general reading of sound literature', with an underlying fear of young minds being polluted by inappropriate reading matter. Or it may have been an oblique way of specifically promoting the Eagle in time for Christmas. It's even possible that the Headmaster's approval represented a different allegiance altogether: like Canon James, Dan Dare was a Rossallian!

Divided by space and time, the school career of Canon James could never have overlapped with the fictional hero of the Eagle: Canon James left Rossall to take up a place at Jesus College, Oxford in 1921 and Dan Dare joined Rossall in 1979. But it's easy to understand why Canon James approved of a comic paper that featured such a hero.

Jeremy Quartermain offers a Rossall context to the backstory Hampson carefully devised for Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.

[Born in 1967], Dan entered Rossall School at the age of 12. Initially, he struggled with the demands and rigors of a school which, at that period in its history, embraced a version of muscular Christianity well-suited to the development of courage and resourcefulness. Doubtless he benefited from his time in the CCF and, eventually, he became Head of School. He left Rossall in the mid-eighties and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge where he read natural science.

Whilst at Cambridge, he was fortunate enough to be invited to undertake research work in astrophysics at Harvard University. Upon completion of his studies, he joined the Interplanet Spacefleet as a trainee flight cadet. Dan built up flying experience on the Earth to Moon run and was soon promoted to Space Pilot One. In 1996 he was awarded the ‘Order of the United Nations’ for his leadership of the Venus Expedition. One of his finest achievements was when he freed the Treens from the tyranny of Mekon’s despotic rule.

To small boys shivering in dormitories during the austere post-war years of food rationing, the Eagle offered transport to more exciting worlds. Perhaps Canon James realised that too. 

If you were once gripped by the Eagle and the possibility of inter-planetary adventure, the cover of the Eagle from Christmas 1951 may prompt some recollections. Share a comment to tell us more, or contact Huw or Felicity if you have a longer story to tell. We’d love to hear from you. 

And if your preference was for other 'comic papers and cheap thrillers', we'd love to know more about that too! 

Eagle. 21 December 1951. Reproduced with the kind permisison of the Dan Dare Corporation Limited – www.dandare.com.