FROM THE BEANO TO BUNTY - CHILDRENS COMICS IN THE 1970s

Remember the great feeling of going out to the corner shop with your pocket money, to buy your favourite comic - Maybe the paperboy/girl used to deliver it for you on their Raleigh Chopper bike.  Either way, back in the 1970s and with only 3 channels on UK television, us boys couldn’t wait to get a weekly fix of our comic heroes, such as Dennis the Menace, or maybe you preferred The Numskulls.

In the case of the girls, they were just as eager to get busy with the scissors, surgically cutting out the latest fashions from Bunty, carefully making sure not to snip off the little tabs at the edges, which were essential for stopping everything from falling off the cut-out doll figure.

This was an era still a million miles away from mobile phones, the internet or social media apps and therefore comics were an important and much loved part of our growing up years!  They provided entertainment, something to share and discuss with your friends and sometimes even a lifeline to obtaining advice on personal problems, especially in the case of Cathy & Claire’s problem page in Jackie!

  

I recall that when I was younger, my own favourites had been The Beano, The Dandy and Whizzer and Chips.

As I got older however, I was seduced by the racy machines and the promise of technological marvels to come, which were depicted in Speed and Power.

Added incentives were the free gifts and/or posters that regularly featured.  Almost every teenage girls bedroom would be adorned with highly prized posters of the likes of Donny Osmond, David Cassidy or The Bay City Rollers, obtained from the middle pages of Jackie or Look-In.

*** Have a look at this 1970s advert for Look-In magazine, from Youtube ***

      

Other items such as rings (given away by Twinkle), bracelets, make-up or hair accessories and even (flexi disc) records were an enticement for the girls, whist boys would be tormenting their elders with a Thunder Bang from that weeks Dandy or Beano.

    

In fact, we had an absolute plethora of comics to choose from, many of which had a special bumper annual edition to look forward to as well - Some of the other titles from that time not yet mentioned were:

Tiger

Lion 

The Victor

Cor

Topper

The Beezer

Marvel

Diana

Mandy

Misty

Tammy

Pippin

Donald and Mickey

*** What were your favourites from that time  ??? ***

SCHOOL OF DARKNESS & ON THE BUSES

I can’t quite believe that we are already into February 2016 as I write this article, it really doesn’t seem much more than a couple of weeks since we were busy celebrating Christmas and New Year! – Still at least February is the shortest month and before we know it the clocks will be going forward, meaning the longer, lighter days are just around the corner.

This in turn got me thinking back to the time when (during a government experiment to attempt to bring us more into line with much of mainland European time), the clocks were not actually adjusted and we all had to travel to school/work in the pitch blackness, during the cold winter mornings of the early 70s.  This all took place between March 1968 and October 1971 and I can still recall the utter shock to the system at having to leave the house en-route for school, in what seemed to me at the time to be the middle of the night! - Little did we know then however, that just a year or two later things would get even more interesting, as soaring oil prices coupled with industrial action by the miners and power workers, would lead to complete power blackouts (not to mention a baby boom) throughout the country.

There was a huge drive by schools at the time to get children to wear bright reflective armbands or waistcoats for safety – Obviously this just seems like normal, everyday road safety sense by today’s standards but back in the early 1970’s this was a new and somewhat strange concept to us kids of the time.

I still remember waiting half asleep at the bus stop in the dark then climbing onto a draughty double-decker bus, full of similarly dazed little faces all kitted out in varying degrees of fluorescent splendour, to undertake the journey.  As I recall it, nearly all double-decker buses in those days still had rear doorways only, which were completely open to the elements.  This was where the poor half frozen conductor used to stand on his platform whilst hanging onto a pole (just like in London Weekend Television Hit Comedy ‘On The Buses’, which ran until 1973) – You had to both climb aboard and alight the bus using the same door and naturally there was always quite a jostle to try and get as far up the aisle as possible, in order to avoid the freezing, Siberian vortex from the rear – No doubt a few of the better equipped children would have been kitted out with thick woollen balaclavas and gloves threaded by a length of elastic through their coat sleeves – Must have school wear accessories at the time : )

1970s KIDS ROAMED WILD AND FREE

Even younger kids in the 70’s actually went out by themselves, mostly on foot or pushbike to play with their friends and sometimes roaming far from home – (Somewhat unbelievably by today's norms, any arrangements to meet up were still achieved without the use of mobile phones or the Internet J)…For me during the endless summer holidays and at weekends this normally meant leaving the house straight after breakfast, with whatever pocket money I could scrape together to buy chips & pop for dinner and then not returning home until WELL past the time given to me by my mother for being back in.  ‘Playing out’ meant anything from football and the usual street games of the time (Tig, What Time is it Mr Wolf ?, British Bulldog etc)  to fearlessly climbing trees, playing soldiers in the woods (with very realistic looking toy guns) or trying to find ways of frightening the living daylights out of each other on dark foggy evenings when we were STILL allowed to play out without any adult supervision.

Having a bike (a 10-speed Racer or even a Raleigh Chopper if you were lucky) was essential for getting around and owning a Go-Cart, a Pogo Stick or a Spacehopper practically guaranteed that you would be popular.

PLAYGROUND HEALTH & SAFETY?

Health and safety in relation to kids playing out seemed largely unheard of (or just ignored) back in those days and some of the things we got up to would undoubtedly send shivers down the spines of many present day legislators.  I remember many of the playgrounds I visited having hard concrete or at best grass surfaces which used to get worn away and then compacted as hard as the concrete in summer months.  Even so, this still didn't stop us from trying to complete somersaults on the 'big' swings, or playing parachutes by launching ourselves into free fall after getting the swing to go as high as you dared.  Playground See-Saws and The Rocking Horse had their creaky, rusting fulcrum points or spring mechanisms open and accessible to little hands and feet (no doubt a cause of many crush injuries back in the day) !