Remembering with affection Look and Learn …………

Today I discovered my old collection of Look and Learn, although strictly speaking these belonged to our Stella.

She began collecting them in the late 1960s, just a few years after I had first come across a copy in the winter of 1962.

I can still remember walking home from the tiny newsagents shop on Mona Road, having nipped out just before tea.  It was dark and cold and the walk home should have taken just a few minutes, but it didn’t because I was so preoccupied with reading the magazine that I was nearly late back.

And I won’t be the only one who looked forward to the 40 pages of “stuff” ranging from history and science to descriptions of natural events and much more.

Contained in those 40 pages were heaps of “interesting things” to keep an inquisitive young 12-year-old entranced for hours.  And long after you had read through all the articles there were the pictures to gaze at all over again, marveling at the vividness of the art work and lost in the detail.

In my case it was always the history ones, and if I am honest some of the science stories were relegated to a wet cold day.

My Wikipedia tells me that “Look and Learn was a British weekly educational magazine for children published by Fleetway Publications Ltd from 1962 until 1982. 

It contained educational text articles that covered a wide variety of topics from volcanoes to the Loch Ness Monster; a long running science fiction comic strip, The Trigan Empire; adaptations of famous works of literature into comic-strip form, such as Lorna Doone; and serialized works of fiction such as The First Men in the Moon.

The illustrators who worked on the magazine included Fortunino Matania, John Millar Watt, Peter Jackson, John Worsley, Ron Embleton, Gerry Embleton, C. L. Doughty, Wilf Hardy, Dan Escott, Angus McBride, Oliver Frey, James E. McConnell, Kenneth Lilly, R. B. Davis and Clive Uptton.

Among other things, it featured the Pen-Friends pages, a popular section where readers could make new friends overseas”.*

And along with Eagle, Girl, Swift and Robin it was one of the best magazines for children published in the middle decades of the last century.

Like Eagle and Girl it never patronized young people, but instead recognised what interested them  and above all how to deliver those “bits of knowledge" in a way which was understandable, informative and fun.

I think my interest must have waned sometime around 1964, when pop music, girls, and clothes began to exercise a greater sway, but on visits home in the early 1970s I was always drawn back to my sister’s collection, and despite having crossed into my 20s, I would devour copies.

Nor was I alone because Dad did too, and I have a sneaky feeling he missed the old Eagle comic which he would sit and read in the long winter evenings accompanied by the wireless and the hiss and bubbly sound of the back boiler.

Sadly, my copies from the early 60s, didn’t survive but we still have Stella’s and they are a fascinating study in how the past, the future and what was then the present were delivered. And while it might be a tad unfair I sometimes ponder on the bits of the future they got right and the bits that have yet to materialize.

Likewise, the historian in me can be critical of the history pieces, but it never stops me going back to look them up.

All of which means Look and Learn did plenty that was good.

Location, 1962-82 in Peckham and Well Hall.

Pictures; Look and Lear, no. 449, August 22nd 1970, no. 470, January18th, 1971, and No.473 January 30th, 1971, from the collection of Stella Simpson

*Look and Learn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_Learn