Christmas Eve with the Eagle

Christmas Eve with the Eagle

The Eagle always celebrated Christmas by decorating the main panel.



Location; Christmas



Picture, Eagle, Vol 6. No. 51 December 23, 1955, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A happy Christmas from the 1950s

It's not often you get a Christmas card from the 1950s dropping through the letter box.

Anyone who regularly read the Eagle comic will recognise the rocket ship and the names Digby and the Meakon.*

At which point l shall not say any more about the two or the Christmas decorated ship hurtling through space.

Instead l will just confess that the card was no time travelling bit of Christmas cheer, instead it came from The Eagle Society that society of like minded happy bunch dedicated to keeping the memory of the Eagle alive.**

It was this years contribution.

And of course l have been one of those happy members for four decades and an "Eagler" since 1957.

Picture; Christmas card from the Eagle Society, from the front page of the Eagle comic, December 22, 1950, No. 37

*The Eagle, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Eagle

**The Eagle Society, https://eagle-times.blogspot.com/

I have seen the future …… and its not that different from 1960 ……… stories from Dan Dare

Now I am a child of the 1950s.

Page 1

I may have grown into a teenager and left school in the 60s, but my formative years were set in the decade before, when the country was coming out of rationing, television was still for a few and bombsites vied with parks as places to play.

And for  my generation …. both boy and girl, Christmas meant a comic annual.

Page 2

Mine was and remained the Eagle.

The comic had first appeared in 1950, and its first companion annual was published in 1951.

Each annual was a mix of articles, hobby activities and stories, with a fair share of those stories turned over to picture strips featuring characters from the comic.

And foremost amongst the heroes was Dan Dare.

I can’t remember when I got my first annual, but it will have been around 1957, and from then on till I “put away such things” six years later the books were always part of my Christmas.

Dan Dare in the Vanishing Scientists was from vol 9 which was published in 1960, and told the story of Strombold “a renegade scientist” who has kidnapped a group of fellow scientists to use them to attack Earth.

Of course, he is defeated, but not before we have been given a glimpse of how the author thought the future would be like.

Page 8

And not unsurprisingly amongst all the rockets, and advanced technology, there was much that was just 1950s Britain, including a “midnight feast” by students at Astral College, and a  professor dressed in gown and hat.

But above all it was that good triumphed over bad, and criminals were defeated, prompting Sir Hubert Guest, head of Space Fleet to comment  that men like Strombold “try to make science work for their own power instead of humanity – and that will never do!”

And you can’t say fairer than that.

Location; the Future

Pictures; from Dan Dare in the Vanishing Scientists, Eagle Annual 9, 1960

Moments in history ……….

Well perhaps a moment in my personal history.

It was May 13th 1955 when I came across Dan Dare and Eagle.

And the rest as they say was a journey which I share with many others who were born in the first half of the last century.

And my justification for featuring it ….. simply that I can.

Location; Childhood memories in 1955

Picture; cover of Eagle Vol 6 No. 19 May 13th 1955, and Modern Coal Mine

One exhibition ….. a spaceship ….. and my hero ….. at the Craft Centre

It will have been sometime in the early 1990s, or perhaps earlier, and I can’t quite now remember how I came across the Eagle exhibition at the Craft Centre on Oak Street.

It had originally be seen in Southport and landed in Manchester to the pleasure of heaps of those of us who remember Dan Dare, Luck of the Legion, and those wonderful cut away pictures of planes, ships, and locomotives.

For years the small A5 poster adorned a wall, having already suffered from several stains and even an attempt by one of the lads to make it into a paper dart.

And then like so many other silly bits that have caught my interest over the years it was stored away and only for me to rediscover it this morning.

At which point it could just have disappeared again, but where would the fun be in that?

Instead, I decided to indulge myself and perhaps all those other old buffers who paid their 4½d every Wednesday to roam across the pages of the Eagle, thrilling to the adventures of Dan Dare Pilot of the Future, the other comic strips and those cut away pictures.

Back in 1950, the Eagle was new, combining stirring stories with detailed and excellent art work along with news and factual articles which made ita cut above the other comics of the period.

Within a year it had three companion papers, aimed at girls and younger readers.*

Over the years I have written about all four and never tire of going back and writing more.**

At which point I could slide in to the story of the Craft Centre but you can find that at their site.***

So that is it.

Location Space

Pictures; poster advertising The Eagle Has Landed, circa early 1990 and Terra Nova, The Eagle, May 30, 1959, Vol 10, No 22, and The Red Moon Mystery , Eagle, January 11, 1952, Vol 2 No 40

*Eagle, Girl, Swift and Robin

**Comics of the 1950s, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=comics+of+the+1950s&updated-max=2023-03-19T03:30:00Z&max-results=20&start=18&by-date=false 

***Manchester Craft Centre, https://www.craftanddesign.com/about-us/

Travels across the Universe with a good guy .......... Dan Dare Pilot of the Future with that gentle optimism that was the 1950s

Now you can either face the world with the simple philosophy that the bottle is always half full or retreat into a dismal dark place, where it is always half empty, the sun never shines and the number 86 will always be late.

Of course in the real world there are plenty of awful things which no matter how many half full bottles you have they will never make it any better.

But the optimist in me always wins through and it is how I like my science fiction.

I have never been one for the disaster movie, the bug eyed monster or the evil supernatural beings, and I think that must be in part because I grew up with the Eagle Comic and in particular the exploits of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.

He was simply the best.

A clean cut brave chap who put loyalty and truth and fair play above all else and when faced with evil dealt with it in an honourable way.

Today those attributes wouldn’t count for much in many films but back in the 1950s with the backdrop of the Second World War that sort of hero could still be presented to young boys who lapped it up.

Dan Dare was the chief Space Pilot of Space Fleet, had been born in Manchester in 1967 and in his travels across space encountered a whole range of people most of whom shared his belief that peace and co-operation were better ways of doing things.

Of course he encountered the not so nice aliens but even these could be won over and usually their defeat was at the hands of a mixed bag of races from across the Galaxy.

He was created by Frank Hampson and appeared in the Eagle Comic from 1950 into the 1960s.

And while the world Mr Hampson created looks decidedly old fashioned today it was one that fitted that post war period of optimism and filled me with that simple belief that no matter what planet you were from or what you looked like you were bound to be decent, trustworthy and above all much the same as the people of Earth, which was and is a fine start to the day.

Nor is that all for I should have added that these models were made by Howard Love who like me has a long held fashion for all things Eagle.

His wife Ann, "Howard made them a few years ago from clay, air dried and painted.  He remembers getting the first magazine, and it was by copying the drawings of Frank Hampson that he became interested in drawing. this lead him into studying Art at College, and working in a design studio, before going into teaching"

Now you can't saying fairer than that, .......... not only did Dan Dare save the world umpteen times but set Howard off on his successful artistic career

Pictures; models of some of the people featured in the Dan Dare stories, courtesy of Howard Love.

Making history of the future...

“No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet.  But of conceptions of the past, we make a future.”*

I often come back to what Thomas Hobbs said whenever I indulge my interest in science fiction because most of it is rooted in the present no matter how fantastical it might appear which makes the science fiction of the past a wonderful way of looking at the period it was produced.

It starts with the technology.  Look at any science fiction film from the 1950s and while the rockets are there the mechanisms to control them are more often than not switches and dials.

And even when the writer makes that leap of imagination like the hand held communicator it is less a bold flight of fancy and more just a logical next step.

So to with the futurestic transport networks which whizzed people above the streets in slim slender tubes of plastic and glass.

Leave out tubes of plastic and glass and substitute steel and iron viaducts and you have New York’s elevated railway which opened in 1868 using cable power and later steam locomotives transporting New Yorkers on tracks which ran almost three stories above the city streets.

In much the same way the stories often reflect the issues of the day.  In The Shape of Things to Come written in 1933 H.G. Wells projected the horror and destruction of the Great War into a future conflict between two unnamed countries which lasts a decade leading  to a major economic crisis,  global chaos, and the collapse of most governments and a devastating  plague which almost eliminates humanity.

The situation is saved by a benevolent dictatorship which in turn after a century of reconstruction is overthrown in a bloodless coup leading eventually to a withering away of the state and a society which has the material means to provide for all enabling the population  to concentrate on bettering itself.

It is a story that brings together so much of the political and social history of the 19th and 20th centuries as does another favourite of mine which is Star Trek.

The orginial  was a television series running in the late 60s it caught for me something of the excitement and optimism of the period.

Now I am the first to admit that  the period was not all good. The bright new decade full of promise has to be set against the Cold War, some pretty nasty conflicts around the world and that nagging thought that the millions spent on the “space race” could have been devoted to solving the issues of world hunger, drought and poverty.

But in its way the continuing story of Star Trek has done something to challenge the darker side of the mid 20th century.

It was set three hundred years into the future and like Well's future  all the material needs of humanity had been met and individuals were free to pursue their interests “in a quest to better themselves.”

So the Starship Enterprise was a vessel of exploration whose five year mission was about “exploring strange new worlds” meeting new races and contributing to the sum total of knowledge.

And in that respect the very fact that the space craft’s were referred to as ships and the crew took on a naval character underlined the theme of exploration.

But like all science fiction Star Trek was as much a comment on the 1960s as it was a vision of the future.

And so the themes of the television series featured racial intolerance, the conflicts between super powers and that still very relevant conundrum of non interference with other peoples and cultures.

All of which could lead to real controversy like the moment Captain Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura cited as the first interracial kiss on US television which also led to the episode being withdrawn by networks in the southern states.

But even so the programme never quite broke from the fact that it was a US production and when the Cold War was still very dangerous.

So depsite the Prime Directive of Non Interference there were plenty of times when the principle  was broken.

Often this happened with   the appearance of the other galactic super power in the form of the Klingons which resulted in a necessary battle to save a planet from being conquered by the totalitarian and militaristic Klingon Empire.

And it had all been done before by Dan Dare Pilot of the Future in the Eagle Comic.**

He is someone I have written about already, and in the pages of the Eagle you can see much of Britain’s post war history reproduced.  Space Fleet’s Uniforms are those of the RAF, the United Nations is the sovereign global authority and aliens are by and large friendly.

A few of course pose problems.  The Treens from Venus with their belief in pure science and their ruthless dictator are committed to planetary domination, but they are defeated and beaten fairly and squarely with Dan and his pals always playing the straight bat and never resorting to under hand methods.

It is a world I can still recognise from my childhood and one I can still relate to. So in that respect I guess I continue to live my childhood and a bit of my past as I boldly go where many have gone before me.

Pictures; from the Eagle Comic collection of Andrew Simpson

*Hobbs, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, 1650

**Dan Dare,
 http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Dan%20Dare

Comics of the 1950s Part Two

“No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet. But of the conceptions of the past we make a future.” Thomas Hobbs

Which is a pretty neat way of summing up how comics like the Eagle described the future.

 In their flagship story featuring Dan Dare Pilot of the Future were accounts of how the future would play out sometime in the 1990s.

The vision was bold enough and the art work by Frank Hampson and his team both innovative and quite stunning, but the technology belonged to the late 1940s and ‘50s. So state of the art spaceships were operated by leavers and dials and uniforms of Space Fleet resembled those of the British armed forces circa 1950.

This was a Solar System where cold cruel dictators existed but were no match for the values, pluck and determination of the united peoples’ of Earth, and once defeated they too came to adopt our values and worked together to build a peaceful future.

It was a vision arising directly from the turmoil of the Second World War and incorporated the ideals of the newly formed United Nations Organisation.

And the great problems from famine to other natural as well as human made disasters could be solved without  resort to war and conquest.

Not a bad vision for the future.

Picture; from the front of the Eagle February 11 1952

Comics of the 1950s Part One

I still read the comics of my youth.

To the despair and puzzlement of my partner I have sought out and bought entire sets of the comics and comic annual books.

It is partly nostalgia but also they are themselves a wonderful history lesson.
From Rupert the Bear and Swift, through the Lion and the Tiger, to the Eagle, I adore them all.

 But I guess it must be the Eagle which I continue to be drawn to. It came out in 1950 and ran for the next decade and a half.

It attracted some of the best comic artists of the period, and attempted to provide a mix of boyish entertainment with a touch of learning.

In its pages could be found Dan Dare Pilot of the Future, Luck of the Legion, and Riders of the Range, along with detailed cut away pictures of aircraft, ships and locomotives and biographies of the great, the good and the brave.

It had been predicated on the idea that in the early 1950s there was a need for a good quality comic which did not rely on gratuitous violence and sought to offer a positive view of the world.

So Dan Dare had a code of behaviour which meant he never relied on the bad methods of his enemies, always treated them fairly when they had been defeated and never went back on his word. Old fashioned perhaps but not I think a bad code to live by. Here too were the career paths of ordinary people from the postman to the nurse, from the milkman to the fire fighter.

And here we have an entry into that world of the 1950s. Along with adverts for jobs in the armed services there was information “To Youngster’s looking for an opportunity ... in Mining”, the “Sribbler Ball Point” pen for 2/9d or the “BSA Golden Wings” cycle.

Picture: from the front page of the Eagle February 7 1959

In celebration of the Eagle ………………

Now for no other reason than I was a loyal reader from 1958, here is part of the front page of the comic for May 30th, 1959.

I could say lots more, but over the years I have written in detail about what is still regarded as the best of its type, published in the 1950s.

That said I couldn't resist adding a second image from the story of Dan Dare for May 30th.

The Pilot of the Future and his colleagues had been kidnapped and were on the way to discover the fate of his father.

Location; 1959












Picture; The Eagle Comic, May 30th, 1959 Vol.10 No.22, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Bidding farewell to a clockwork Nokia

The future as seen in 1951

Now I went looking in my collection of Eagle comics today for an image of Dan Dare Pilot of the Future using a hand held communicator which was usually featured as a watch you could talk into.

I could of course have used one of the shots from Star Trek but the franchise quite rightly is very protective about its copyright and any way Dan Dare was a round in the 1950s when the idea of such devices was still reckoned to be either daft or so far into the future as to dismissed.

All of which is a lead into the fact that I have now become the owner of a smart phone.

For years I clung to my old clockwork Nokia and even had a flirtation with the ancient Nokia 3310 but in my heart of hearts I knew the future lay with something bright and new which would connect to the internet, let me wander across social networks and of course let me make a phone call.

To be fair my last Nokia would allow internet access but it seemed more effort to use it and it confused me.

So I stuck with a phone which just bounced if you dropped it, had a battery which lasted all day and played Snake.

A little bit of my future, 2015

But even dinosaur mobiles do not perform well after being through the washing machine on a 45 minute wash.

The bag of rice, and the gentle warm rays of an April day did nothing to bring it back to life and so I have joined Dan Dare, Captain Kirk and pretty much everyone on the planet and can now communicate in several different ways almost at the same time.

That said it remains a painful learning curve and one which continues to impress on me that I may not be that smart to operate a smart phone.

A sad fact illustrated by my discovery that having registered the sim I should turn the phone off and on again to become linked to my provider.  This I discovered only after a day of waiting.

And the point of the story?

Well I suppose it is that simple one that all technologies and message systems have their day.  I no longer listen to the wireless, await news delivered by the telegram and can only just remember a TV which had just two channels which changed by operating a dial on the set and offered no colour.

Pictures; detail from the Red Moon Mystery, Eagle Comic, October 5, 1951, Vol 2 Nu 26, and the Nokia Luminia 635 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Growing up in another time

I grew up in the 1950s. 

 That decade which is often described as grey and tired, exhausted after six years of war where the scars of that conflict were everywhere to be seen. There was rationing, as well as ugly bomb sites and that air of make and mend.

Maybe, but that is not what I remember. The bomb sites were my playground, I accepted that darned socks were part of the natural order of things and my family laughed as much as anyone’s.

Of course by the time I was five the worst of the austerity years were over, and that growing consumer prosperity was beginning to spread downwards.

And so Christmases in the 1950s were special in the way that just perhaps they aren’t any more. There were more things around but not the glut that bombards us all today. My father still made some of our toys out of wood on the kitchen table during the winter months in the run up to December.

This is not to sink into some rosy glow view of the past. We still had coal fires, there was ice on the inside of the windows in the coldest periods, and the one television channel closed ridiculously early.

But there was a mounting sense that things were on the move which would really burst forth a decade later. New spindly designed furniture, bright new colours and the beginnings of rock and roll. The television had begun to replace the radio as a focus for the family and yet we still put lit candles on the Christmas tree with a bizarre contraption consisting of a small metal cup and clamp.

Then when my own children came along in the 1980s I found myself trying to recreate the Christmas of the ‘50s. We played Monopoly, made jigsaw puzzles and even designed rocket ships out of cardboard.

You cannot go back in time but at least you can sometimes save a little bit of what was good.

Picture; from one of the early Eagle Annuals, which were bought for me each year. Sadly mine were all lost but I now have a collection of all of them again

Of heroes and villians and Captain Pugwash

I still read the comics of my youth.

 I guess it’s partly because they take you back to a safe comfortable past which was pretty much my experience of growing up in the 1950s.

But it is also that the best of these comics had good stories and above all wonderful art work which has stood the test of over sixty years.

And for me the comic that stands out above all the others is the Eagle and a little later its companion comics Girl, Swift and Robin.

At this point I do have to confess that as much as I thrilled to the stories of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, I was always drawn to the villains he encountered.

These he would always eventually defeat but do so playing a straight bat, never resorting to their low methods.  For to do so just made you like them.

They were a rare and exciting bunch, but for me it was always the Mekon and the Treens who caught my imagination.  They inhabited the northern hemisphere of Venus and under their cruel leader the Mekon had developed into a cold unemotional bunch which elevated science and logic to a supreme level, and were hell bent on dominating the Universe.

All of which is by way of a link to another blog, and another child hood figure. http://loiselden.com/2012/10/07/my-hero/

Tom the Cabin Boy was the long suffering and very wise hero in  Captain Pugwash which was one of the early animations shows on TV. 

Looking at the series again and reading Lois’s post is to be reminded of the gentle humour and delightful stories that made them so popular back then.

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20Eagle

Picture; from Marooned on Mercury, Eagle Vol3 No 13, July 4^th 1952 from the collection of Andrew Simpson