Jane ……. VE Day ….. and what I found in the cupboard

 It will be over 66 years ago that I came across a copy of the Daily Mirror, which was dated May 8th 1945.

Front cover, May 8th 1945

It had lain at the back of a cupboard drawer in my grandparents’ house carefully stowed away as a souvenir of the end of the last world war.

Like many they had endured the deprivations of six years of war, lost their only son and had lived through the hard peace which followed the Great War.

That copy still exists but is now very fragile and rarely comes out in the daylight.

And today I have been thinking about it and in particular the Zec cartoon which appears on page two and has the caption, “Here You Are Don’t Lose It Again”.

What prompted me to think about the cartoon and the VE Day edition was less the end of the war and instead the Jane cartoon.

Jane was a young woman who often got into scrapes which invariably resulted in her losing her clothes.  She was drawn by the artist Norman Pett and first appeared in 1932 and continued in the Daily Mirror until 1959.

Thinking back to the young 8-year-old who leafed through the pages of the VE Day edition, I can still remember being drawn to Jane.

The May 8th Jane strip was reproduced in Picture Post in the September of 1949 which looked back at the war years and given that this copy was less fragile it was the one I chose to scan, which had the extra bonus of another story.

I can’t date the second one but like the first it follows the unfortunate accidents that come Jane’s way.

In reproducing the first strip all I have done is represent the three frames separately so that the detail is clearer.

Alas the Daily Mirror was not dad and mum’s chosen newspaper, and so I never got to follow Jane, and just before my 10th birthday, she got married to a chap called George and left the paper for a new life.

Leaving me to reflect that despite all the celebrations on that May 8th, the war against Japan continued.

And in a telling addition to the Zec cartoon the paper carried an account with the headline “The war that is still to be won” which went on to describe the work of “analysing cipher telegrams that told of troop movements, campaign plans and battles in the swamps”.

All of which made grim reading along side the news of “the rejoicing floating through the half bricked windows from Whitehall …..to the operational nerve centre of the war that has yet to be won – the war of the million in South East Asia Command”.

More so for my grandparents and my mother whose thoughts were of my Uncle Roger who had been captured by the Japanese in 1942 and whose death would not be made official until the November of 1945.

“Here You Are Don’t Lose It Again”.

Location; May 8th, 1945 

Pictures; Jane in two strips, from Picture Post, September 3rd 1949 and Zec’s cartoon from the souvenir edition of the Daily Mirror, VE Day:  published on May 8, 1945, reproduced with story by Peter Willis, May 2nd 2015, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ve-day-full-edition-daily-5619141