Except for the vague impression of a heavily built, benignly gruff, occasionally encountered man with short silver hair, I cannot claim to remember my great-uncle Tom very well. Tom Royden was, I understand, an English country doctor of the old school with a lady friend down the road, a flourishing practice, a keen interest in songbirds, and a shrewd understanding of the practice of medicine that owed as much to common sense as to science. I can remember, just, being told of his death in 1966 (I was eight), and the flock of cheeping, singing, and trilling folk that moved into our house shortly thereafter.
Not so long later, four bulky, musty volumes turned up at home, each stamped with a different date from the first decade of the twentieth century, each smelling of sixty years. Battered and fine, their covers embossed with cowboys, Vikings, and other examples of the formidably tough, they had belonged to my great-uncle all his life. Now, I was informed, they were mine. They still are, artifacts of an era over long before I began, belongings of a man I never really knew, and, in some senses, an introduction to both. To read them was to be transported back from the Beatles on the transistor to Daisy Daisy Bell on the calliope, from phasers on the starship to battles on the veldt, to a time and a place that was no longer sepia, no longer then. To read them was to sit with young Tom turning those same pages on some long-forgotten Edwardian afternoon, and to wonder about the child that the old man had once been.
The four volumes in question were collections (“annuals”) of all the editions of the Boy’s Own Paper issued each week over the course of a given twelve months. Tom’s 1909 annual happened to cover the period from October 3, 1908 to September 25, 1909, but in reality it oozed the ideals, assumptions, and myths of any year plucked from the three or four decades in which imperial Britain slid from its Victorian apogee into an Indian summer of, perversely, even greater splendor. It was a period of rapid social change yet, all things considered, extraordinary social peace, a social peace of which the Boy’s Own Paper was both symptom and, in its own small way, architect.
“The prince of boys’ papers” (as the London Times once described it) was published by, of all people, the Religious Tract Society, an organization founded in 1799 to spread the word of the Lord amongst those with “little leisure and less inclination to peruse entire volumes.” The RTS soon expanded its activities to include the publication of materials designed to save souls overseas but never stopped keeping a sharp eye on those in peril back home. With Britain’s ever more literate population displaying a growing appetite for less than salubrious publications, there was much to look out for. Appalled by the public’s grimy tastes, the society’s committee met in 1878 to discuss “providing healthy boy literature to counteract the vastly increasing circulation of illustrated and other papers and tales of a bad tendency.”
The BOP (as it quickly came to be known) debuted on January 18 the following year. To guess that this worthy committee’s notion of “healthy boy literature” would be glum little pamphlets filled with clerical homilies, Gospel stories, and tales of biblical derring-do is to underestimate the subtlety of the Victorian mind. Despite a cover price (one penny) pitched low enough to put the new paper within the grasp of youngsters from almost all social classes, production values were high, complete with masthead designed by the conqueror (British, naturally) of the Matterhorn, Edward Whymper, and Latin motto: right from the beginning, the creators of the BOP were signaling that they took their paper—and its readers—seriously.
If the BOP’s packaging was good, so too, at their best, were its contents. These were crammed each week into sixteen densely printed pages (there was also a monthly edition which, like the annual, came with some extras) filled with a nicely chosen, well-illustrated blend of story-telling, practical advice, sports coverage, accounts of faraway lands, technological updates, sagas of self-improvement, competitions, puzzles, career opportunities, instructions on how to make various new-fangled devices at home, patriotic tidbits, and informative chat about hobbies, particularly the care and maintenance of pets: the first issue featured “My Monkeys and How I Manage Them” by Frank Buckland, M.A., a touch of Noah in a paper where most of the writing on pets was focused on Britain’s rather pedestrian domestic fauna. The origins of Tom’s aviary may well lie in the practical, unsentimental guide to rearing birds that was a regular feature of the BOP in his youth, and which (in the January 30, 1909 issue) included this typically hard-headed piece of advice for the owners of pigeon lofts: “Don’t keep wasters. Pigeon-pie is good.”
The challenge of the dreaded penny dreadfuls was met head-on. Amongst the stories serialized in the paper’s early editions were Nearly Eaten, Nearly Garrotted, and How I Lost My Finger, all by James Cox, R.N. (M.A., R.N.—at the BOP credentials counted). In the words of G. A. Hutchison, the paper’s founding genius and first managing editor, the BOP had to appeal to “boys not their grandmothers,” an attitude that helps explain a series of not notably grandmother-friendly articles from the 1880s dedicated to “peculiar punishments”:
It is singular that a Chinaman will prefer to die by crucifixion rather than beheading. He has the greatest horror of appearing in the next world without his head and therefore chooses a slow and lingering death rather than a quick one.
That’s the spirit.
But while, as legendary BOP contributor Dr. Gordon Stables, R.N., noted in October 1908, there was no “namby-pambiness” or “silly goody-goodiness” about the stories the paper ran, no “British boy ever found in [them] even the remotest suggestion to do that which was not right and gentlemanly,” reassuring words for the parents and schools whose approval underpinned the paper’s continued success. If the BOP had sermons to preach—it did, sometimes overtly, sometimes not—they were rooted in patriotism, decency, hard work, and fair play (the practice of clubbing seals was, noted the author of one 1887 tale, “too much like hitting a man when he is down”) rather than the peculiar intricacies of theology.
Despite the best efforts of some in the RTS (stoutly resisted by Hutchison), in the pages of the BOP, God was the God of that splendid nineteenth-century hymn, immortal, invisible, and wise, emphasis on the second adjective. He was there—around, reassuring, in charge, and basically British. There simply was no need to go on about Him. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise to find that of the two articles most directly regarding the church to be found in Tom Royden’s 1909 annual, one (from May 29) concerned the Rev. W. W. Beverage, “ministerial athlete” and unfortunately named temperance campaigner, and the other, “Athletic Parsons,” published the following week, hymned the sporting achievements of a series of sporting clergymen:
The number of parsons who take part in the first rank of games is not, of course, as large as that of those who have given up active participation after taking Holy Orders, but for all that there are some excellent representatives of muscular Christianity in the first flight of several games.
My suspicion is that young Tom will not have lingered too long over this revelation nor, for that matter, over other distinctly eat-your-greens pieces, including—hang onto your hat—a lengthy description (May 8, 1909) of what the London County Council (“a municipal mother of boys”) was doing for young people and, from August 7, 1909, “The Boyhood of Tennyson” (“his father had a delightful library”).
Mercifully, the corner of the BOP inhabited by sporting parsons, bountiful municipalities, and the doings of future poet laureates was a small one. The long-running serials, generally tales of adventure or public school, that constituted the paper’s mainstay were a source of far livelier entertainment. Tom will have begun 1909 with an issue (January 2) that included the fourteenth installment of both In the Heart of the Silent Sea (“The two boys, left unceremoniously by the screaming natives, had nothing for it but to follow in the wake of the fugitives”) and Rowland’s Fortune (“Having seen that two of the ruffians were dead, we returned to where the third lay. This was the fellow Don Carlos had beaten down with the flat of his sword”), as well as the first chapter of The Quenching of the Fiery Tide, a tale of ancient British fighting folk (“Conan, the exquisite, laughed scornfully”). The public schools were represented by The Bluffing of Mason (“Mason was a beast—everyone said so”), Mr. Lattimer’s Tax (“The two boys obeyed, one with a gleam of triumph breaking through a frown of concern; the other, pale and defiant”), and The Doctor’s Double: An Episode at Monkton School.
A large number of these once-ripping yarns now sag badly, and, as anyone who has waded through that fiery tide could tell you, others were not much good to begin with. But it’s impossible not to notice the sophistication of their grammar and vocabulary. The BOP may have had a tendency to patronize its audience, but it usually did so without talking down to them. It says a lot that amongst the writers who wrote for the BOP in its first three decades were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the BOP was “one of the first papers that grew tired of returning my MSS and published them instead”), Jules Verne, R. M. Ballantyne, and the great G. A. Henty, the author of a long sequence of novels (Wulf the Saxon, Under Drake’s Flag, The Young Carthaginian, and many, many others) often involving a enterprising young lad, stirring historical times, and a respectable amount of bloodshed.
The formula worked. Precise data are hard to come by, but the paper’s weekly readership probably peaked at around a million in the late 1880s, the highest level reached by any such publication. Thanks not least to competition from the likes of Chums and, later, The Captain, more up-market (and racier) ventures unburdened by the high-mindedness and rich-man-in-his-castle, poor-man-at-his-gate social inclusiveness that were key parts of the BOP’s ethos, the paper’s circulation fell sharply in the following decade, but it continued to boast a readership that ran easily into the hundreds of thousands and a significance in British life that was more than a matter of mere numbers. It had become, and was to remain, a national institution (a 1929 lunch to celebrate the BOP’s fiftieth anniversary was attended by both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition) and deservedly so.
Those who produced the paper clearly felt a genuine responsibility towards their readers, very few of whom would have had any chance to attend the Eton-and-Harrow surrogates where so many of the BOP’s school stories took place, settings that owed as much to the BOP’s ceaselessly aspirational creed as to snobbery. In part, these stories were, like today’s Gossip Girl, an opportunity for vicarious thrills in a privileged, inaccessible world, but, in part, they were also intended to train their readers how to behave like the public schoolboys they could never be. In similar vein, a recurrent theme that ran through stories both factual (“Boys Who Have Risen”; “Dunces Who Became Famous”; “From Wheelwright’s Bench to Academy: the story of George Tinworth’s boyhood”) and fictional (From Powder Monkey To Admiral; From Fisher Lad to Fleet Surgeon) published by the paper was that of the poor boy made good. Not everyone could become an admiral, or even a fleet surgeon, but the BOP would still do what it could to help its readers make something of themselves.
This may be the only charitable way to interpret the paper’s often shatteringly abrasive advice column, much of it written by that fierce foe of namby-pambiness, Dr. Stables, a Scottish “gentleman gypsy” and wildly prolific writer ( From Fisher Lad to Fleet Surgeon was one of his) who spent much of his time traveling the country in a purpose-built caravan accompanied by dog, parrot, coachman, and valet. A tartan-clad, fantastically bewhiskered, counter-intuitively married (he was a father of six) man, Stables was in his sixties by the time that Tom Royden was reading the BOP, but he cannot be said to have mellowed with age. His frequently questionable prescriptions (many of which can be found reprinted in Karl Sabbagh’s marvelous Your Case is Hopeless: Bracing Advice from the “Boy’s Own Paper”) placed heavy emphasis on the “cold tub” and the avoidance of a habit too ghastly to be referred to directly (readers’ letters themselves were rarely published) and little in the way of good cheer.
Even when the advice was sensible, the delivery tended to be brusque. In the March 6th, 1909 issue, G. F. D. (VITALITY) was told:
Don’t be a little fool. You are, I suppose, by this time in the hands of these quacks. Your money will go, and you’ll get worse.
But the Edwardian era was predominantly an age of optimism. Like the paper for which he wrote,Stables was no doom-and-gloom reactionary (well, not always). The previous week he had written how “the boy is improving vastly. The ordinary town lad is a gentleman compared to the boys we found in our streets in the early eighties.” Progress!
Those behind Tom Royden’s BOP were comfortable with change, but confident that it would be on the right lines and be able to coexist comfortably with the best of what had gone before. To read those issues from 1909 is to be struck by the strong sense of continuity they convey. The cover price (maintained with difficulty) was the same as it had been thirty years before, the editor Hutchison (“the experienced old captain,” in the words of one advertisement) was still at his post, and Stables was just one of a number of contributors who had been published there for decades.
Even the serials, rambling on for months (In the Heart of the Silent Sea sailed on for an exhausting thirty-three weeks) reflected this notion of permanence, a notion unsurprising in a paper published in the heart of an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set. This was the empire whose past, present, and glorious future permeated almost every issue Tom read that year, whether in poetry (“The Song of the Union Jack”; “Britannia Victrix”) or as a subtext (without much sub about it) of many of the serials or in reports from the imperial territories (“Romance of Surveying: Thrilling Stories Told by the Men Who Are Now Mapping Out Our Possessions”; “Birds’-Nesting in India”; “Rhodesia’s Thin Red Line”; “Our Somaliland Fleet”).
This was, the BOP made clear, a Boy’s Own Empire, one run by the sweet, just, boyish (the last a telling adjective in this connection) masters of George Santayana’s infinitely flattering description. The nation that built it was fair, benevolent, and, in all senses of the word, the best. When foreigners appear in Tom’s annuals, it is usually as objects of curiosity and genial, but unmistakable, disdain—an expression of a feeling of not necessarily unkindly superiority that sharpens noticeably when some of the subject peoples of the empire come into view. The BOP wins no prizes for cultural sensitivity, something that has earned it the not so genial disdain of generations of tut-tutting academic commentators with very little cultural sensitivity of their own.
Of the cataclysm that was to overturn this ordered world only a handful of years later, taking many of the BOP’s former readers with it, the only hint in the 1909 annual is this passage from a real-life account of a camping holiday in Germany by Algernon Blackwood, an author better known for stories of the supernatural than for his vacation reminiscences. On this occasion, however, the problems were caused not by ghosts, but by the Kaiser’s police:
On previous trips, when we camped too near the towns, die Polizei often came to ask us what our business was. Often, too, they were very disagreeable and troublesome, poking about in our tents, searching through our kit in the boat, evidently suspicious that we were spies of some kind.
To be sure, the BOP of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages was somewhat more militaristic in tone than it had been before, but it was so in a way that, more often than not, brings to mind Powell and Pressburger’s Colonel Blimp rather than anything more sinister. Its attitude was a manifestation of the blithe (over)confidence in British might that played such a role in the country’s fatal decision to go to war in August 1914. It was not an anticipation, eager or otherwise, of that conflict or the horrors it would bring.
The BOP made it through both world wars (although the weekly edition had been scrapped in 1913) before finally succumbing to changing tastes and publishers in 1967, just a year after Tom’s own death, to live on in memories that have grown only fonder. And not just memories. Academic disapproval now has to compete with not only indulgent nostalgia but also the implied compliment paid to the old paper—and its disgraceful archaic values—by the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys (2006), which is, in many respects, an affectionate updating of the BOP, a point underlined by the fact that the cover of the British first edition was designed to resemble one of the old annuals.
Even if we don’t cheat (and we shouldn’t—that wouldn’t be the BOP way) by counting this unexpected coda as some sort of resurrection, the length of the paper’s actual lifespan—nearly ninety years —remains a tremendous achievement. The BOP’s remarkable durability was a testimony to the strength of the culture from which it sprang, a testimony to the strength of its own distinctive vision, and also to the way that culture and paper merged within the minds of some sometimes equally remarkable readers. In the introduction to his book The Best of British Pluck—The Boy’s Own Paper Revisited (1976), the author Philip Warner recalled his time as a POW of the Japanese working on the Bangkok-Moulmein railway in 1943:
Food was inadequate and appalling; the work was … exhausting; the … guards seemed scarcely sane; malaria … and a host of other diseases were rife… . Men died with steady regularity. Around was the jungle, hot, oppressive, menacing. There was really no hope of survival… . I remember one day looking round at the scene and saying to myself: “What an extraordinary situation! It’s like some strange adventure in the Boy’s Own Paper.” Suddenly it was less real, more bearable: after all BOP characters lived to tell the tale. Fantasy perhaps, but in certain conditions illusion may be more genuine than reality.
That’s the spirit.
